(June 22, 2015 at 2:51 am)robvalue Wrote: Erm... looks like one of Kalam's cousins. Baseless assertions designed to make a predrawn conclusion inevitable.
It is more than just baseless assertions, it involves possibly meaningless assertions, or at least nebulous assertions, i.e., assertions whose meanings are unclear and are not properly defined.
I am not sure I would call it a "cousin" of a cosmological argument, but since that must be metaphorical, I am not going to argue with you on that. It is, if anything, more silly than a cosmological argument.
You can almost just judge the level of silliness of an argument for the existence of god by when the argument was first put forth. The more recent, the more silly, because in olden times they put forth the best things they could come up with. So new things tend to be less and less intellectually respectable when it comes to this topic, because they are dealing with ideas that are selected from the dregs, as it were.
(June 22, 2015 at 2:51 am)robvalue Wrote: Most sceptics are methodological naturalists, I would think. (I'd be interested to know if I'm wrong on that.) So they don't deny the existence of the supernatural on principle, just that if it exists, it is beyond our ability to investigate.
I would not say that supernatural things might exist. I am not at all certain that "supernatural" is meaningful. So I would require a definition given (and the definition must contain something positive, not simply defined as "something not natural"), before I would be willing to assert that such things (if the term properly refers to things) might exist.
(June 22, 2015 at 2:51 am)robvalue Wrote: And something supernatural is a far fling from a god, which again isn't someone's favourite storybook character by default. So like the Kalam, it needs non sequiturs to reach the conclusion.
I didn't read it all in detail so apologies if I misinterpreted.
Good god, it would be a waste of your time to read it, unless you have a particular interest in reading gibberish.
If someone wishes to argue here based on it, you still won't need to read it, as you can just read whatever nonsense someone types here and object to that. But if you like reading crap that is put forth to try to prove that there is a god, go ahead and read it, and you will see the level of drivel that religious "intellectuals" write.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.