(March 13, 2016 at 1:20 am)Irrational Wrote:(March 12, 2016 at 11:58 pm)TheMuslim Wrote: I think it's saying that aggregates or groups are not actual entities in and of themselves. For example, "a dozen cars" is not an actual entity apart from its individual constituents. Aggregates or groups are just a concepts or names that refer to a number of actual individual units.
Ok, but can finite entities not be part of an infinite reality?
Please elaborate. Are you asking if finite entities like galaxies can be part of an infinite set of universes? Sure they can, why not. But I don't see how this would lead to a problem in the argument if that's what you're trying to say. As explained before, the argument doesn't take aggregates or groups (whether they have a finite or infinite number of constituents) as actual realities (I take your "Ok" as a sign that you've understood this).
Quote:Ok, but none of that or anything else you've said so far explains why you should be able to "argue" your god into existence. Argument is not how things are proven to exist. Evidence is how things are proven to exist. Arguments are not evidence. How do you demonstrate that Allah exists?
Sorry, I knew I should've included more in my original post. Although it is named "Proof of the Veracious", the distinguishing feature about this "argument" is that it isn't technically an argument. It is simply a way of drawing one's attention towards something that was already there. The "argument" does not use any premises - it is based on the very first and primary proposition of human knowledge (i.e. "There is a reality")! The author of the book says on pages 183-184: "The demonstration of the veracious, in fact, does not intend to prove a reality, which is unknown and must be proved in a discursive fashion. It proves the primariness (al‑awwaliyya) of human knowledge with respect to a proposition, which narrates the eternal necessity of the Entity. If the demonstration were designed to prove a reality that has eternal necessity, its conclusion would not be the first ontological proposition, because every demonstration proceeds from certain premises to a conclusion, and given that the premises are antecedent (muqaddam) to the conclusion, the premises—the truth of which substantiate the existence of the Deity—would be propositional premises for the conclusion."
Even if this was not the case, I'm sorry to say that I would still disagree with you. I do not think that empirical evidence or sense perception is the only thing that allows us to know reality. Principles like the law of non-contradiction, mathematical laws, and law of causality are not based on empirical evidence or sense perception (although experiments and sense perception tend to agree with them). I don't believe that 2 +2 = 4 because I have tons of empirical evidence and repeated experimental results that confirm this, and nor do I believe in the principle of causality simply because I observe that causes exist in the natural world. It's actually the other way around; scientific theories based on experimentation depend upon the principle of causality (so how can they be the ones that prove it?). Please read: http://thereligionofreason.blogspot.com/...ality.html
I fear that this might turn into a wholly different discussion if we continue to fight down this route. So I guess it would be better to just ignore the last paragraph.
Quote:Also, why should I care? You haven't addressed that.
Let's just say that "discovering" an infinitely conscious, infinitely knowledgeable, and omnipresent deity upon which the entire universe depends gives me the same (or more) amount of thrill that a scientist gets when he discovers a new kind of celestial object billions of lightyears away. And I'm here on Atheist Forums just to make sure that such a deity exists. Good enough?
