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Goodbye Jesus

I Had A Thought About Miracles And I Want Some Comments


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ETA: Animals are not "intelligent" (oh, shit, here we go again), but their amazingly efficient instincts can appear as intelligence to anthropomorphic human observers. (Please do not respond with all the amazingly intelligent things you have seen your dog or cat do; it was not intelligence, reasoning, or "thinking" beyond the instinctive response or adaptation to stimuli. Read "the whale hunting tread" for answers.)

 

None of this is to imply that human intelligence is anything more than a unique form of evolution in our species.

You forgot to put this in your post: IMO

 

:P

Ah, no. As controlled experiments, empirical observations, and biology demonstrate.

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I said nothing about logical validity. I said invalidate the premise. The augment is logically valid, i.e. it is a valid syllogism. The question we are debating is whether the premises are true. You stated premise 1) was false because morals were subjective to God(because He has a mind), you are just asserting the second horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma(morality is arbitrarily commanded by God), of which the resolution is the same. God is good. It would only be relative if God were arbitrary. He is not.

 

Now you object to claiming God is Good because you think it is equivalent to saying God can violate the law of non-contradiction. This does not follow. Stating a property of God does not violate any contradiction. You may disagree God is good, but my saying so is not a contradiction. If your disagreement is simply in whether God is good or not then you have not dis-proven the argument or the premise. You have just disagreed with a premise. Simple disagreement is nothing more then disagreement. It is not a logical defeater.

 

The goal of the Euthyphro Dilemma is to place the theist in a true logical dilemma, i.e. forced logically to accept something about God they may do not like. This is not the case because as long as the possibility of a third choice exists there is no dilemma. From a logical standpoint it does not matter whether we agree on which choice is true, as long as a third choice exists there is not dilemma.

 

Baldly asserting there is no problem does not make it so.

 

The statement "god is good" is nothing more than rhetorical nonsense. It does not actually MEAN anything to me. Good is a word that WE define as having a specific meaning.

 

Also I did not claim the statement "god is good" was a contradiction in and of itself. Try reading my post for a change.

 

Anyway, all you are doing is repackaging an argument that C.S. Lewis made in Mere Christianity. I have read the argument before, but you are not reading my argument, you are so stuck on your narrow understanding of euthyphro's dilemma that you have not noticed your argument does not even APPLY to what I am saying.

 

My point is that you are incorrectly using the word objective. It does not matter if god arbitrarily chooses moral values or not (the problem as euthyphro puts it) the problem is that for something to be "objective" it needs to exist independent of a mind. You have yet to show that morality exists independent of a mind, and all your argument does is move things from one subject (US) to another one (GOD). Even if god never changes his mind on ANYTHING it would not get rid of the logical contradiction in your argument.

 

Positing that God ( a personal being ) is the source of ANYTHING objective is a logical contradiction because the definition of objective is precludes it EVER coming from a being.

 

 

Bifurcation fallacy. There is more than two possibilities in a discussion of ethics. This is a typical bullshit apologist maneuver, you act as if the only two possibilities is that either god created morality OR morality is simply left to the whim of the individual.

No, I'm suggesting morality stems from what God is, not that He created morality. You seemed to be very preoccupied with the Euthyphro Dilemma. I would suggest you read some of the detailed responses to this dilemma even if you disagree with them.

 

Do you even read or do you just shout Euthphro every few sentences and hope it sticks. This statement had NOTHING to do with Euthyphro at all.

 

My problem is that YOU are asserting a false dilemma. There is more than just these two options.

 

You are commiting the genetic fallacy. My claim of the objectivity of moral valus can not be defeated by simply describing how you think we apprehended these values. This is commiting the Genetic_fallacy

 

First off, Don't lecture me on logic, you would not know logic if it bit you in the ass.

 

Second you are misapplying the genetic fallacy, because in this case the process that caused morals to exist is necessary to any rational explanation of why they are useful/necessary.

 

This is also a typical bullshit maneuver by apologists, you read a few books on logic and think you are an expert but you tend to over apply logical fallacies because you do not have a good understanding of how they work, and when it is proper to apply them.

 

I realize that there is a difference between the origin of something and its value, but in this case they happen to be closely connected. Anyway, I am not talking about how we "apprehended" the values, but how we "created" them.

 

It would be extremely unlikely for all humans to decide that what Hitler was doing was because it would be counter intuitive to those ends. Moreover, taking those to be the ends or morality/ethics we can objectively say he was wrong because his actions no longer meet the end goals of morality.

I don't understand how this is relevant. By admitting it was unlikely you are admitting it is possible. In any case where it is possible we would have a world where everyone thought He was moral, and I claim that even in this case His actions are heinously immoral.

 

Yes, Yes, you clearly do not understand very much, we are all aware of this. You didn't read the second sentence did you? See, if we can agree that morality has certain goals we can find certain ways of behaving which "objectively" lead to those results better than others.

If any of those goals include "survival of the human race" or "a stable society" then Hitler was wrong. Indeed if we look at Hitlers goals he DID think those were good goals, so even by his own standards his actions were incorrect, he just did not think them through logically. unsuppring since by most accounts he was almost insane.

 

Also when I say unlikely, I mean impossible unless we (all of humanity) completely changed our goals to include a desire for our own extinction. While I cannot totally rule out that possibility, I think you can see why I am not terribly worried about that state coming to pass.

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ETA: Animals are not "intelligent" (oh, shit, here we go again), but their amazingly efficient instincts can appear as intelligence to anthropomorphic human observers. (Please do not respond with all the amazingly intelligent things you have seen your dog or cat do; it was not intelligence, reasoning, or "thinking" beyond the instinctive response or adaptation to stimuli. Read "the whale hunting tread" for answers.)

 

None of this is to imply that human intelligence is anything more than a unique form of evolution in our species.

You forgot to put this in your post: IMO

 

:P

Ah, no. As controlled experiments, empirical observations, and biology demonstrate.

Alrighty then! NOT! :D

 

Anyway, just messin' with ya and poking everyone I can today and your name popped up next.

 

So here ya go: :poke:

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How did we get from a discussion about miracles to a discussion about animal intelligence?

 

I think animal intelligence is a near miracle.

 

How's that for a tie in? :shrug:

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ETA: Animals are not "intelligent" (oh, shit, here we go again), but their amazingly efficient instincts can appear as intelligence to anthropomorphic human observers. (Please do not respond with all the amazingly intelligent things you have seen your dog or cat do; it was not intelligence, reasoning, or "thinking" beyond the instinctive response or adaptation to stimuli. Read "the whale hunting tread" for answers.)

 

None of this is to imply that human intelligence is anything more than a unique form of evolution in our species.

You forgot to put this in your post: IMO

 

:P

Ah, no. As controlled experiments, empirical observations, and biology demonstrate.

Alrighty then! NOT! :D

 

Anyway, just messin' with ya and poking everyone I can today and your name popped up next.

 

So here ya go: :poke:

Some people are just evil. :pureevil:

 

:P

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How did we get from a discussion about miracles to a discussion about animal intelligence?

 

I think animal intelligence is a near miracle.

 

How's that for a tie in? :shrug:

Shhhhh....there's a snake in the grass.

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You will get many answers from materialists who will assume a prior no supernatural and therefore any explanation no matter how absurd is more plausible then a resurrection.

 

This is pretty smug, but I expect no less. Given 0 evidence of the supernatural and common knowledge of the natural, of course the natural makes a better case here.

 

They are so vested in the non-existence of the supernatural they can not possibly allow for its existence

 

Let's try this:

 

They are so vested in the non-existence of invisible elephants they can not possibly allow for their existence.

 

See how absurd that is?

So they buy into mass hysteria theories and such.

 

Surely you jest. Yeah, atheists are typically frothing at the mouth, jingoistic, adherents of pseudoscience, and have an overall simplistic world view. No, scratch that, that sounds much more like another group.

 

In a nutshell the idea is that there is probabilistic evidence that one can bring to bear as well as testimonial evidence.

 

Your post just gets dimmer and dimmer. Even OJ's jury wouldn't buy the kind of evidence you have for the resurrection were it given a nominal cross examination.

 

Likewise, any evidence that the supernatural exists increases the likelihood of the resurrection because it no longer is a question

 

And what evidence would that be? Unsupported claims that 500 witnesses once existed. :lmao:

 

For someone who seems relatively well educated you sure have some mushy thinking patterns. I'm guessing you do alright when you are pondering subjects outside your preconceptions.

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You will get many answers from materialists who will assume a prior no supernatural and therefore any explanation no matter how absurd is more plausible then a resurrection.

 

This is pretty smug, but I expect no less. Given 0 evidence of the supernatural and common knowledge of the natural, of course the natural makes a better case here.

 

They are so vested in the non-existence of the supernatural they can not possibly allow for its existence

 

Let's try this:

 

They are so vested in the non-existence of invisible elephants they can not possibly allow for their existence.

 

See how absurd that is?

Which is precisely why FeetOfClay has steadfastly refused to provide explicit examples of supernatural phenomena.

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I'm not sure you understand. I'm not claiming objective morality needs to exist in order for us to have a stable moral platform. I'm claiming that objective moral values exist because deep down we all know that certain a morality exists independent of how many people may claim something is not immoral

 

In other words you are claiming something which you have no evidence and indeed to never COLLECT evidence for because you cannot possibly attest to what everyone in the world knows "deep down"

 

Indeed I do not know what you seem to think is such common knowledge.

 

Yes there are certain precept which I doubt I will ever change my opinion on, but we as humans agree on them because of a communality of experience, not because some supernatural being inserted the ideas. Even look at murder, I eat meat and have no problem with killing animals to get that meat, I do not value Cows, Chickens ect. beyond the fact that they are tasty :HaHa: Some people think that killing other animals for food is murder because we could easily survive by being vegetarians, but even then do we not have to kill another life form in order to live ourselves?

 

The reason we do not feel guilty is because we, in our own minds, value OUR right to exist, over that of the plant or animal that we eat to continue living ourselves. We all evolved from the same source did we not? The choice to value myself over those other lifeforms is entirely subjective. I choose my existence because I am ME not because I can claim to be objectively right.

 

Perhaps cattle see cattle farms like we see the Holocaust, to the extent that they understand those things, which may be debatable of course. The point is that no matter how GOOD you see yourself, you could easily be viewed as evil incarnate by someone or something else.

 

The closest we could ever hope for too objective is that ALL humans agree on a standard. Though even that is pretty unlikely.

 

 

Animals exhibit functional behavior. I agree our behavior including moral behaviors can serve a purpose. Demonstrating that animals have a certain behavior is not the same as demonstrating these animals attach moral significance to that behavior.

 

We attach significance BECAUSE of the purpose it serves. And we cannot conclusively prove that no animals attach significance to their behavior. We can't prove they do either, but that really is not the point.

 

No, you just rewrapped the Euthyphro Dilemma.

 

No, I didn't, and even if I had your answer to Euthyphro's dilemma is to posit some made up category which is vague and logically non-descriptive, but that is what you get when you take your arguments from C.S. Lewis, he was a good writer but a poor philosopher.

 

 

Good does not exist simply because God thinks something good. God is good. Again, refer to the Euthyphro Dilemma.

 

Restating a nonsensical mantra does not make it more true. Again, WHO DEFINES THE WORD "GOOD." I need a defnintion in order for the statement "god is good" to contain any meaning, and Euthpyhro's dilemma does not hang on the nature of god, but on the definition of words. I am getting the sense that you really do not understand the dilemma at all.

 

I can not get my self to accept that there are not truly things that are immoral. I would hold that the Holocaust was wrong even if everyone in the world said it was right.

So would I, and yet I still believe ethics are subjective.

Then you are thinking self contradictory thoughts. Either what Hitler did was objectively wrong or it was not. I believe it was objectively wrong in any possible world.

 

Read you words, "I would hold" is a precursor to a claim about your personal beliefs.

 

If you bothered to understand my position at all you would understand why I have no problem telling other people what I think of their actions even without supernatural license to do so.

 

Again, I will point out that while I hold that ethics are subjective, I do not treat subjectivity is such a narrow way as you do, you argue as if a subjectivist must believe that everyone else's values are equally good because it is all up to personal whim. They aren't and it isn't.

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I'm not sure you understand. I'm not claiming objective morality needs to exist in order for us to have a stable moral platform. I'm claiming that objective moral values exist because deep down we all know that certain a morality exists independent of how many people may claim something is not immoral.

Who knows what lurks in the heart of men..? Apparently, you do. Really this "deep down we all know" shit has got to stop. What kind of argument is that? You're basically calling anyone who disagrees a liar (either to you or to themselves).

 

By what criteria do you KNOW this to be true? Your book tells you?

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Who knows what lurks in the heart of men..? Apparently, you do. Really this "deep down we all know" shit has got to stop. What kind of argument is that? You're basically calling anyone who disagrees a liar (either to you or to themselves).

 

By what criteria do you KNOW this to be true? Your book tells you?

I thought this was pretty good.

 

Yeah, I try to bear in mind that people do in fact have different understandings. People literally see things differently and they also reason in a unique fashion. Hell, a person can even disagree with themself. So it may be that even as individuals we utilize more than one understanding. :shrug:

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Ah, no. As controlled experiments, empirical observations, and biology demonstrate.

I thought you were not going to discuss this.

 

And my view, the opposite one, is based on what I've read in scientific journals, not just anecdotal stories.

 

So we can just leave it at that. You've read your journals and concluded one side, and I've read mine and come to my conclusion. I guess it all depends on what a person define as intelligence.

 

Here are some references for anyone else interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_intelligence

http://www.animalcognition.net/home.html

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Bonobo chimps and dolphin are the only animals other than man known to have sex for pleasure and not strictly procreation.

How does the dolphin even get to the chimp? Is there a YouTube video of this?

 

mwc

:lmao:

Actually, mwc, the chimp "rides" the dolphin. :D

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This is all very similar to the supernatural debate. OC says the supernatural exists and therefore God exists. But I don't see any evidence of the supernatural. Then he says objective morality exists because God exists, and also that objective morality exists therefore God exists because objective good is = to God. To continue the circle of illogic, the supernatural is good.

 

So we have the supernatural, defined as something that occurs despite being physically impossible, unpredictable but still detectable. God is given the same attributes. SN = G (Supernatural equals God)

 

Then we have objective morality, an assertion that 'deep down' we all have morals that agree. Whatever anyone thinks of when they think of murder, they think it is bad (although the definition of murder is subjective in various cultures, places, times and individuals). For objective morality to exist there needs to be a standard outside humanity to measure against and this is called God.

 

In both cases the proof for God is simply taking abstract concepts that don't make sense without God and acting like they are then proof of God. Its very very silly.

 

Even if it weren't all nonsense, I still don't see how either definition-proof is evidence of the Christian God specifically.

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This is all very similar to the supernatural debate. OC says the supernatural exists and therefore God exists. But I don't see any evidence of the supernatural. Then he says objective morality exists because God exists, and also that objective morality exists therefore God exists because objective good is = to God. To continue the circle of illogic, the supernatural is good.

 

So we have the supernatural, defined as something that occurs despite being physically impossible, unpredictable but still detectable. God is given the same attributes. SN = G (Supernatural equals God)

 

Then we have objective morality, an assertion that 'deep down' we all have morals that agree. Whatever anyone thinks of when they think of murder, they think it is bad (although the definition of murder is subjective in various cultures, places, times and individuals). For objective morality to exist there needs to be a standard outside humanity to measure against and this is called God.

 

In both cases the proof for God is simply taking abstract concepts that don't make sense without God and acting like they are then proof of God. Its very very silly.

 

Even if it weren't all nonsense, I still don't see how either definition-proof is evidence of the Christian God specifically.

Very nice post. Each side of the debate will likely leave the debate convinced that they have presented a logical, coherent and irrefutable argument for their side, but I can't see that the burden of proof has been met for the extraordinary claims presented.

 

The supernatural is still defined in terms with no meaning, God as presented in the omni variety is still self-contradictory, morality is still a culturally based phenomenon with lowest common denominator values somewhere "deep down", and the statistical evaluation of miracles depends on the evidence which is inadequate to support any particular claim - and no specific claims of miracles have been presented. IOW, the "probablistic" evidence is based in the reliability of the testimonial evidence since there is no empirical evidence.

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Which is precisely why FeetOfClay has steadfastly refused to provide explicit examples of supernatural phenomena.

 

:lmao: FeetOfClay

So how shall we divide and conquer? I'll take the Little Toe Kingdom. I heard the Munchkins live there, and the Munchkin women are small but hot!

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Which is precisely why FeetOfClay has steadfastly refused to provide explicit examples of supernatural phenomena.

 

:lmao: FeetOfClay

So how shall we divide and conquer? I'll take the Little Toe Kingdom. I heard the Munchkins live there, and the Munchkin women are small but hot!

Holy midget fetish, Batman!

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Midnight-mindwanderings, I think that post is an excellent Cliff Note summary. :thanks:

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Which is precisely why FeetOfClay has steadfastly refused to provide explicit examples of supernatural phenomena.

 

:lmao: FeetOfClay

So how shall we divide and conquer? I'll take the Little Toe Kingdom. I heard the Munchkins live there, and the Munchkin women are small but hot!

Holy midget fetish, Batman!

 

It's probably because I like those little Filipina women. They are soo cute.

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It's probably because I like those little Filipina women. They are soo cute.

The ones I've known were cute, intelligent, and vicious.

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It's probably because I like those little Filipina women. They are soo cute.

The ones I've known were cute, intelligent, and vicious.

 

What, they don't get along with long-nosed canos? :HaHa:

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