>>you arrogant snot.
>
>
>Can you not do that? Please?
>I'm quite aware of the possibility that tone or intention can
>get lost in translation by way of caps or exclamation points
>(like "your a cut and paster!!"), or even just the intensity
>of demonstration or debate (like relentlessly going at
>someone's fallacy or assumption or whatever)... but so far as
>I know (and I'm open to correction on this), I'm not swearing
>and name-calling, am I? I don't know why you do this.

Well, as far as the cursing goes, fuck off. We're on okayplayer. My cursing is hardly outside of the general idiom here. But you'll at least be happy to learn that when I called you an "arrogant snot," the choice of that last word followed a certain amount of self-censorship.

As for the name-calling, this behavior is not generally justifiable even on okayplayer, but in this case, I'm doing it for a reason. When I say "get the fuck over yourself," or, "you arrogant snot," or, "get the fuck over yourself you arrogant snot," I'm calling you out on the fact that you are not approaching this discussion with the humility it deserves. You have repeatedly claimed that a rational justification exists for Christianity, I've even seen you specifically refer to yourself as a philosopher. So when you bring up issues related to the justification of Christian faith, it is natural for us to treat such discussion as a rational debate. However in the practice of the discussion, it is clear that all of your appeals to "logic" and "rationalism" are nothing more than a poorly developed facade.

More concretely: you are not here to debate, you are here to reveal what you consider to be absolute truth. This is not the behavior of a philosopher, it is the behavior of a missionary, a propagandist. If you were to admit that you are here to describe your own deeply held personal feelings of faith, everything would be alright. You would make your posts, and I and others would say to ourselves "whatever, dude's a nut" and move on to some other thread. But you seem to realize the weakness in this state of affairs, and adopt the trappings of rational debate. This seems to class up your point of view, as long as nobody notices that you are not paying the fair price for these trappings.

If you are having a rational discussion, you must be willing to admit at all stages that your point of view might be completely unjustified. The goal is not to reveal truths, it's to present your understanding of the situation. At most you can hope that your understanding is more compelling than whatever alternatives are presented.

So it seems we can view your behavior in either of two ways:

You are a dishonest propagandist, appealing to rationality only when it supports your thesis, and evading rationality when it does not (something I've seen you do a few times in this thread, by the way).

Or we can give you the benefit of the doubt, as I have, and view your behavior as that of someone who really does want to rationally debate, who thinks he's proven to himself that any rational debate must lead to the acceptance of Christianity, and when things aren't going his way, chalks it up to his opponent's inability to understand the argument. In other words, an arrogant shit.




>I just don't think the swearing and just general belligerence
>is called for. We're all adults here right? We can argue
>rigourously and even joke (again, we should be careful, as
>it's hard to "come across" in text) and we can do all of this
>without sayin' stuff like "get the f___ over yourself" and
>"you arrogant little snot".

I think you mean to use the word "vigorously," not "rigorously." We're hardly being rigorous here.



>anyway...

anyway...


>>> Goodness is the very nature of God.

>>Oh, so goodness is not defined by God's fiat,
>
>No, by God's nature. God's commands flow naturally from
>who/what God is.

The issue is how goodness is defined, not where it "flows" from. If it is defined without even implicit reference to God, then God is no longer seed of all creation. If it is defined simply to "be" that which flows from God (the view which you seem to hold), then you have two problems, the statement "God is good" becomes a tautology, and you must also be careful not to simply define "evil" as the set-theoretic complement of "goodness," or else, again, if there is such a thing as "evil," God is again not the seed of all creation. Such a careful construction of evil seems to be a major focus the sermon you've given us in post 211. But even if your construction holds any water (and I intend to express a couple of doubts), the tautology remains.

>>it's defined by
>>man's fiat!
>
>
>No, but it will continue to look that way as long as you
>remain under the assumption that no human could possibly know
>any truth about God. So I understand why you think that.

There you go again, pretending to know what I'm thinking. You arrogant shit.






>>However, you give us an opportunity to ask
>>why, if goodness (and therefore God, according to your
>>definition) is "chronologically prior" to evil, and God is
>>taken to be all-powerful, why did He allow evil to come into
>>being?
>
>That seems to be the "question of questions" doesn't it?

Well, I actually don't think so anymore. I, in a moment of complete stupidity, raised one of the famous silly, childish questions, and you seem to be giving me the standard answer. That is, as I understand, that God, despite being all-powerful (whatever that means) has given mankind the capability of free will. With this capability comes a certain creative ownership over our own decisions. In this sense it is possibile to say that certain (at least intellectual) structures were created by man and not by God. One can then take this viewpoint and say that evil was a creation of man, and that for God to stop it, while it was indeed within His power, would have required the placement of further limits upon our free will.







>So the problem is not just "pain".
>The problem is "a loving God, and pain".
>
>This, in fact, is the only "strong" argument for atheism.

There you go again, "knowing" the "truth." You arrogant, whatever...

>(When Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summa Theologica, he wrote
>4,000 pages of carefully reasoned argumentation, always trying
>to be utterly fair to his opponent by listing all possible
>objections an opponent could offer on every one of thousands
>of questions addressed. "Three" is the minumum number of
>objections that he offers to each of his arguments. In other
>words, he is rigorous. Every article in the book has at least
>THREE objections to it, except the most important article in
>the whole book... the first one: "The Existence of God".
>Aquinas can find only TWO arguments against the existence of
>God in the entire history of human thought. One of these
>arguments doesn't even claim to be an argument, for if it did,
>it would be fallacious, an "Ignoratio Elenchi" ("Science can't
>prove that there is a God, so there's not"). Obvioulsy that
>would not prove that there is not one.)

Well, it depends on how we view experience. If one only sees it as a tool to communicate a Platonic ideal, something that exists, um, objectively, regardless of experience, and then uses the word "reality" to refer to that ideal, then I agree with you.

If instead, one takes the more streamlined viewpoint that the word "reality" refers only to experience itself, the view that moot seems to be taking, and that I tend to prefer, then indeed God only exists to the extent that He can be experienced. If He is not experienced, then by definition, He does not exist.


>The only argument that even CLAIMS to prove that there is no
>God is the one we are discussing on this board: The Problem
>of Pain (suffering, evil, etc.).


>I - All Powerful (omnipotence)
>What does it mean when we say that God is "all-powerful"?
>
>Omnipotence is the power to do "all that is possible", but not
>to do the "intrinsically impossible".

The problem is that you must then make a listing of what is "intrinsically impossible." In what follows, you and Lewis construct examples using word games. You build up actions which appear to be self-contradictory, and appeal to logic to do the work of limiting His abilities. Trouble is, God doesn't have to answer to your silly logic, I presume you view logic itself as God's creation. It isn't clear that anything is "intrinsically impossible" in this way to a God who is also capable of choosing which of the many mathematically consistent logical systems to make relevant to the problem at hand. That's a mouthful...I'll discuss this in the context of your example of walking through a wall.

>Lewis says...
>"You may attribute miracles to God, but not nonsense. There
>is no limit to His power. But if you choose to say 'God can
>give his creatures free will, and simultaneously withhold free
>will from them" you've not said anything about God at all.
>Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire
>meaning simply because we add to them two other words, 'God
>can'. "

Well, "He" does withhold a certain amount of free will from us. I can't travel to the moon and back instantaneously, for instance. Lewis's statement seems entirely ill-conceived here. This is actually, in my view, an important criticism of this argument. We clearly have only a limited amount of free will. Why doesn't God limit it in such a manner as to remove the possibility of evil, but leave us with whatever free will remains? Perhaps this would be impossible, but I would like to see an argument.

But still, that's not the issue which interests me the most at the moment. This issue is more easily illustrated by your example --

>For instance, If you or I could do miracles, we could walk
>through a wall. However, even if we could do miracles, we
>could not both "walk through a wall" and "not walk through a
>wall" at the same time.
>That's a meaningless combination of words. It's nonsense.

Actually, it's not nonsense. Or rather, it's only nonsense because you are assuming it to be so when you choose to work with a bivalent logic system. In the world of physics, for instance, it is entirely possible for a particle to pass through a wall as it is not passing through that wall. This state of affairs is referred to as "quantum entanglement" and it has been confirmed not only by theoretical arguments but also through repeated experimental verification. As well as we know anything in science, we know that the quantum state of any system does not precisely conform to a classical logic. There are two standard ways of dealing with this state of affairs.

1.) The standard view among practical physicists is that the world which we experience is not related to any objective reality, that our own personal, subjective analysis of experience is the only thing which provides any structure to the world. My guess is that you disagree with this viewpoint, in which case you'll be happy to learn that I do as well.

2.) That a logic does apply to objects in a "real" world, but it is simply not a classical logic. By a "classical" logic, I mean a system built on the standard nontrivial arithmetic over Z_2. By Z_2, I mean a set with only two elements, in math they're usually called 0 and 1, in other logical applications they're more commonly referred to as "false" and "true."

In fact, mathematically, one can build consistent arithmetics on sets which contain more elements than 0 and 1 (in fact, the most famous arithmetic is over the "real numbers," a continuum of elements). If we translate our terms from those of mathematics to those of logic, we obtain a consistent logical system in which statements can take on more values than simply truth and falsehood.

Physicists have developed a few such nonclassical logics, which they have come to call "quantum logics," for use when describing physical systems.

So now the question is available to us: if the nature of God can be discussed rationally, what kind of logic should the debate follow? The type of contradictions which you and Lewis are dealing with are inherently connected to classical logic, and they do not seem to follow under less specific assumptions.

>So if God chose to give us free choice, He could not at the
>same time take it away and force us to choose Him. It's one
>or the other.

One or the other. Exactly. Why should we assume this?

>He either creates beings like the plants and
>animals, innocent, and incapable of sin (because they have no
>choice) or else he creates beings like us (or the angles)

Angles? dictionary.com: "A Germanic people that migrated to England from southern Jutland in the 5th century A.D., founded the kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia, and Mercia, and together with the Jutes and Saxons formed the Anglo-Saxon peoples."

Just playin'.

>who
>have the freedom of choice. And if they have the freedom of
>choice then they have the freedom of choice, dig?

You're offended by my use of curse words, I'm offended by your use of the word "dig."

>The freedom
>of choice means that you can choose God, but also that you can
>choose against God.

I'm tempted to start arguing with you about abortion policy here. But I don't think we can handle the distraction.