The Modal Ontological Argument - Without Modal Logic

[MindForgedManacle]

really, lets put that to the test. let cause=C and effect=E. for every C the result is E, and i think we can agree with this.

No, as there are numerous quantum effects without any apparent cause including, but not limited to, photon decay, radioactive decay and virtual particle pair production.

if we were to say X exists without C, effectively this is saying C=nothing. thus given C=nothing, E=X which of course is logically absurd. i'm not abusing impersice language, i'm showing logical equivalence. if something has no value then its value is nothing. if something has no mass its mass is nothing. if something has no cause its cause is nothing. just like the associative property in math, you can switch words around and it still means the same thing.
and BTW, the way you worded it is wrong. it isn't to say something exists but had no cause, but it's to say something's existence came out of nothing (ex nihilo). and if something came from nothing, then nothing caused something, but of course that's logically absurd.

Yes, you are clearly abusing language. If something has no mass (such as photons), their mass is not "nothing", it's an inapplicable property to it as it's mass-less. The equivalent of what you're doing is when the naive claim evolution is teleological because it's "guiding" species towards survival or something like that.

And you're doing exactly what people like Lawrence Krauss do and treating something as nothing. You are wrong, something without a cause cannot have been caused BY nothing, because then you're treating nothing as a thing. Again, a non-idiotic rendering is simply that it "wasn't caused to exist by anything", not a literal reading of "nothing caused it to exist".

if that were true then they would also reject the principles of science since all of science is based on the PSR. the laws of thermodynamics would be false. matter can be created or destroyed... spontaneously... for no reason... energy can go from higher entropy to lower entropy... spontaneously... for no reason... you see the problem here? rejecting the PSR undermines all of science.

And there're those naive and completely false proclamations again. Yes, science accepts the PSR as a methodological practice, not as an ontological truth (following fro, David Hume, who did likewise and rejected it as an ontological truth). Methodology =/= ontology. Science also takes on methodological naturalism, and yet science doesn't necessarily preclude God's existence. By your own idiocy, you must now admit that to be a theist you must reject all of science because one can never know if there are any natural events that have natural causes rather than cleverly hidden supernatural ones behind everything. Oh, and there goes the methodological assumption of the Uniformity of Nature.... you get the point. These things are PRAGMATIC, but trying to make strong claims about metaphysics takes something more than pragmatism, otherwise David Hume's Problem of Induction would have been defeated.

plus, it seems rather odd that there would be a large amount of philosophers claiming the PSR is not necessarily true since as far as i know, there hasn't been a single successful attempt at showing it is in fact possible for something to exist without cause. to claim such a thing is possible is a baseless assertion and an unreasonable one at that. one that you certainly can't prove so why should anyone be compelled to believe that what you can't prove?

Well, let's start with Stanford shall we?:

The Principle of Sufficient Reason is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a reason or cause.

[...]

The Principle seems at first sight to have strong intuitive appeal - we always ask for explanations - yet it is taken by many to be too bold and expensive due to the radical implications it seems to yield. Among the alledged consequences are: the Identity of Indiscernibles, necessitarianism, the existence of a self-necessitated Being (i.e, God), and strict naturalism.

[...]

One of the most interesting questions regarding the PSR is why to accept it at all. Insofar as the PSR stipulates that all facts must be explainable, it seems that the PSR itself demands an explanation just as much. Several modern philosophers attempted to provide a proof for the PSR, though so far these attemps have been mostly unsuccessful. Another important problem related to the PSR is the possibility of self-explanatory facts and self-caused entities; particularly, one may wonder how these are distinguished from unexplainable, brute facts and uncaused entities.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/

Rasetsu is right, you don't know shit.

I'll get to the rest in a couple of hours, when the real shits & giggles will begin.

Edit: Screw it, I'll do it now before I get too tired for the evening.

so you're saying Stanford is wrong... because it hasn't been shown a particle can move faster than the speed of light, physically or mathematically, it is not necessarily metaphysically possible. Stanford is wrong... and i should take your word for it...

It depends on exactly how the the individual who wrote the article is couching what he means by metaphysically possible. If they include finite extensions of phenomenon (in this case, motion) which is already know is metaphysically possible themselves then, as I said before, I'm willing to consider the a reasonable example of metaphysical possibility.

i really don't know what you're talking about. there's nothing to misunderstand about axiom S5. it is an axiom to reduce redundancy. necessarily necessary=necessary. possibly possible=possible. necessarily possible=possible. possibly necessary=necessary. there's nothing controversial about it and it doesn't even get into metaphysics. the part of the MOA that gets into metaphysics are the definitions of the modal terms.
possible-true in at least one possible world.
necessary-true in all possible worlds
contingent-true in at least one possible world and false in at least one possible world.
impossible-not true in any possible world.
and BTW, these modal definitions aren't disputed either. they are standard in the use of all modal logic.

I know you don't know what I'm talking about, that was exactly my point. The part of the MOA that gets into metaphysics is trying to establish the actual existence of God by reference to the concept of God and via the possible worlds concept. I did NOT say S5 itself gets into metaphysics, I said it CANNOT be used to do so in any useful way.

wait, so do you agree with Stanford or not? you haven't made that clear.

I'll repeat: perhaps. Clear? Clear.

logical coherence. it's not hard to analyze one thing and see if it is free of contradictions. if you're gonna claim you can't possibly know if one thing is free of contradiction, then you might as well claim there's no way to know if an argument is valid. i'm sure there are plenty of arguments you've made you think are valid, but apparently there's no way you can know that.

And how do you know if something is coherent? This is the 3rd time I've driven you hear to this claim. You know if something is coherent epistemically. That is, you analyze the concept, based on what you know, and see if any contradictions are found. But are you seriously going to claim that the mere fact that you, at one point in time and with a limited and altering mental capacity, have concretely established the metaphysical possibility of something via S5?
Further, quit with this retarded crap of trying to extend my critique of your absurd usage of S5 to metaphysics to all of logic. That is a straw man and shows you REALLY have no clue what you're doing here.

then all your arguments are likewise vacuous because there's no way to know if they're valid. self refutation detected.

Do all my arguments you axiom S5, much less S5 to say something about metaphysics? Idiocy from "Rational" AKD detected.

so because Kant was wrong about some things, he's wrong about this... you're a smart guy perhaps I'll let you tell me what fallacy that is.

Do you even follow the conversation you twat?

not even Kant would agree with you there. he gives distinction between a priori and a posteriori and both are said to prove metaphysical possibility or necessity. you're making your own baseless assertions.

To which I said:

Yes and Kant turns out to have been wrong on a number of things. For one thing, Kant though (if I remember correctly) that Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics were metaphysically necessary, but nowadays we know that is completely false.

The reason I brought it up is because they were relevant things relating to metaphysical necessity that Kant thought he'd succeed

[MindForgedManacle]

Bleh, got interrupted with a bunch of crap. I'll finish up later tonight or tomorrow.

[Angrboda]

Maybe you should re-read the definition of coplanar

yes, 3 points are always coplanar. however, in the example you gave the lines (though they aren't technically lines) do not remain in the same plane. they curve outside the plane of the three points. because the lines curve they are not line segments, and because they curve outside the plane of the 3 points they are not coplanar either.

There are geometric spaces in which the sides of a triangle are coplanar yet the sum of the angles is greater or lesser than 180 degrees. I can't tell what you're responding to because in addition to a lengthy point by point reply, you screwed up the quote tags so badly it's impossible to follow who said what.

Oh, and if you're going to cite Kant as an authority, it's inappropriate to then claim that you don't have to provide a valid citation. That's just ass, and puts you back in the position of having your entire argument rest on a bare assertion, which invalidates the entire argument.