The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission is angry.
It is time for the Christian bashing to stop and for Christians to no longer be treated like second-class citizens.
Second-class citizens who are virtually the only people who can get elected to political office, who whine piteously if anyone fails to kneel before their sacraments, who also claim that this is a Christian nation, who use their faith to justify war, corruption, oppression, greed, and who use their privileged position to deny non-Christians basic rights. Yeah, right. They’re a gang of hypocritical thugs with a persecution complex. It it time for Christian bashing to increase, I should think.
Now they’ve compiled a top ten list of Christian bashing in America for 2008, and oh, it is a pathetic thing. It is largely a list of people who mocked Christian excess: first on the list is the Proposition 8 Musical, starring Jack Black as Jesus. Bill Maher gets mentioned twice. I am in there for throwing a cracker in the trash. A sports announcer used obscenities. Come on, where are the lions? There aren’t any.
Most ridiculous of all, they have to invent slurs. Apparently, Barack Obama’s very existence is an example of Christian bashing.
According to research into President Elect Obama’s own statements about faith, and an examination of Obama’s position on moral issues, CADC has determined that by any biblical and historic Christian standard, Barack Obama is not a Christian, although he claims he is a “devout Christian.”
That’s it. Because they’ve redefined Obama’s beliefs as non-Christian, the fact that he holds those beliefs constitutes a defamation of Christianity. Poor pitiful CADC.
Folks,
Facilis is either a #1 or a #175 depending on our mood:
Concerned troll is concerned.
I get your point, I just disagree with it.
facilisfallacious,Danth’s Law :
“If you have to insist that you’ve won an Internet argument, you’ve probably lost badly.”
Yes, you can always say “God did it”, but that doesn’t explain anything, that doesn’t predict anything.
If you call a dog’s tail a leg how many legs does a dog have?
Four. Calling it a leg doesn’t make it so.
Calling it “impossibility of the contrary” doesn’t make it so. Your “argument” was an argument from ignorance. Please look at #904.
No,people have provided you an evolutionary explanation to morality.
No, it doesn’t. If someone brings a counterexample to the table they don’t necessarily have to believe in the counterexample is true. This is just a pathetic dodge.
Those who don’t resort to solipsism know they exist. Cogito ergo sum
_ _ _ _
Here is someone (the inspiration for my pseudonym) explaining our side better than I can:
Knowledge and certainty aren’t one and the same. A recognition on the fallibility of knowledge has lead to the last few hundred years of progress. You aren’t deep, you aren’t clever, your arguments are a pathetic waste of time.
this is getting somewhat boring, but let’s try again:
science doesn’t deal in absolutes, but on account of the fact that it has indeed increased our knowledge about the world, has made accurate predictions of observations etc, we can safely say that science provides us with a consistent, useful (if you’re going to ask me how antibiotics or the internet are useful, i’ll stop being civil) and increasingly precise worldview. is this worldview reflecting of the true conditions of the universe? not with certainty, but for our intents and purposes, it does the best job at increasing useful knowledge of an internally consistent world we live in. so, to pretty much all of your stupid “do you know with certainty” and “how do you know” questions, I give the same answer, again: because it has shown itself to be so by the huge amount of non-contradictory, predictive, self-consistent and useful evidence that at least shows that science is a USEFUL way of knowing, and quite possibly is a window to the real universe.
now, to a couple of things that need to be addressed individually:
you only speak one language, and have no knowledge of linguistics, don’t you. otherwise you’d know that languages does not stay the same, and words in different languages don’t mean the same thing even when they describing the same physical object/phenomenon. i was not talking about a language, but about language as a mental ability; the ability to create symbols and abstractions. which is btw not exclusive to humans either, it has evlolved like everything else. no divine inspiration needed either.
it certainly is; however, not all morality is good, useful, or harmless to the society in which it exists. when morality stops evolving when a society does not, its morality no longer serves its original purpose of helping the society function well and survive.
I have committed none of the fallacies defined as naturalistic fallacies: I have neither claimed that what’s natural is always good, nor do I claim blindly that what’s pleasant is always good. however: “morals” are the perception of some things and actions as “good” or “bad”, and acting in accordance to the “good” and to minimize the “bad”. you claim that conscience (i.e. the ability to recognize morality and act according to it) come from God; this isn’t even consistent with your own religion, since according to Genesis, the knowledge of good and evil was actually given by the serpent
I claim that based on the humongous amount of consistent evidence available, conscience is an evolved quality that aides the survival of social animals. we’re such a social animal, thus we have a conscience. as such, things that are harmful to a society (or those controlling it) become the “bad”, and things that are harmless and even helpful to a society become the “good”;there’s no reason, evidence, or logical basis for assuming that morality is not linked to nature, but that’s not what the natural fallacy is. you just think so because you believe in such silly things as supernatural, pure, and universal standards, none of which seem to exist.
no, I’m saying that, until evidence to the contrary is presented, we seem to live in a universe in which induction is possible, useful, and has predictive power. it’s not the reason for why it works, it just a statement that it does. why should i discard something that seems to work, just because i don’t know how or why it works? nothing can be learned or achieved that way.
there’s no scientifically solid theory as to why it is possible, but i’ve already explained that I suspect that a non-consistent universe simply might not be able to bring forth intelligence, or even life. maybe consistency is a prerequisite for complexity?
go ahead then, jump off a bridge and defy gravity. I dare ya.
If you win*, you get a billion dollars and a Russian Mail Order Bride of your choice.
*winning here is defined as proving that your position is falsifiable yet correct.
blockquote fail!
Beliefs and logic are not the same thing there facilis, the whole point of the Sideshow Bob exercise was to show why your logic is bad. It’s a dodge to not address it.
Your logic is wrong, that’s all that matters. You seem to think it matters what people believe in, and with that you miss the whole point of the exercise.
Yay!!!
But the thing about presuppositionionalism is that God is proven by the impossibility of the contrary. So by nature it is not falsifiable
‘groan’
But the thing about presuppositionionalism is that God is proven by the impossibility of the contrary. So by nature it is not falsifiable
Yet he does not show that not having a deity is impossible. And he leaves himself wide open, yet again, to the question of which deity
This is just a fucking spiral..
God doesn’t exist. There is no evidence for and no need for god. Facilis, if you want to mental masturbate about your imaginary deity, take it somewhere else.
ah, but there is no impossibility to the nonexistence of god. just because you can’t wrap your head around the contrary, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. your argument from ignorance is worthless here. prove that god can’t not exist in a falsifiable manner, and you’ll convince all of us, thus winning the argument.
But the thing about
presuppositionionalismmy circular argument is thatGod is proven by the impossibility of the contraryI just can’t picture how reality could work any other way. So by nature it isnot falsifiablelogically worthless.There. Fixed that for ya.
Please provide your full name, address, and bank account number. Your Russian Bride will use this information to get the billion dollars out of Nigeria and directly to you.
But the “contrary” — logic and reason exist because they do, with no God necessary to “provide” them — has not been proven impossible.
It’s either false, or it’s not falsifiable at all, in which case it is vacuous.
In neither case is it proven true.
then how do you explain logic? ;)
Facilis’ argument is terrible. Mental masturbation, criticising the tools of knowing while sitting at the achievement of the inherent uncertainty. How can one truly know with certainty?
I’ve probably missed the party, but this has to be added:
Wrong, and getting wronger by the minute. The ‘thing’ about presuppositionalism is that, like any other unsupported assertion, we don’t have to accept it as valid simply because you assert it.
God is proven? How? We’ve pointed out (repeatedly) that even if we were to accept that there are the ‘rules’ of logic and reasoning you assert exist, you have made no argument for the cause of them being your god rather than Zeus, Ra or Sideshow Bob.
It’s completely falsifiable – as we’ve demonstrated over and over again. That you’ve got your fingers in your ears singing ‘la la la I am not listening’ doesn’t change that.
You’re going to need to find a better argument to cut-and-paste for next time.
facilisfallacious,For the last time,
NOOOOOOOO!
unexplained != impossible
argument from ignorance != impossibility of the contrary.
The incomprehensibly dense Facilis @1009:
Since gods/God don’t exist that would make your presuppositionalism pretty much a cold and dry pile of feces, wouldn’t it?
Great, Facilis, you know some of the history of the apologetics you’re parroting. Unfortunately, you don’t seem to realize that your mental wanking has been torn to shreds repeatedly or that your audience is not going to accept your presupposition of the Christian god or biblical revelation.
Sorry.
Logic needs no logic-giver, either it’s inherent in the universe in which case it requires no further explanation, or it’s not in the universe and is a human construct and again requires no further explanation. The only way his argument could possibly work is if the laws of logic were able to be changed, but that again would go against the explanation that facilis is positing.
One more thing is the absurdity of thinking that Jesus being a mangod comes down to a question on whether logic exists. Whether Jesus walked on this earth or not is a question for history. Whether he was really a mangod is a question for science. To say “Logic exists therefore Christ is god” is illogical in the highest degree.
It irks me that facilis will only engage on what others truly believe rather than following his logic on. It seems his game is one of elimination – knock down all other beliefs so his wins by default. It seems his proof of God is a proof by contradiction, something that won’t fly here. To take that argument and put it in another light:
Believer: I posit that God created life on this planet.
Sceptic: that’s absurd, there is no reason to suggest that the Judeo-Christian construct of God is responsible for life.
B: Then how did life begin?
S: I don’t know.
B: I have an explanation for life and you don’t, therefore God exists.
S: awww, fuck. *sceptic goes to church next week to confess his sins.*
No, it’s not. Proof by contradiction is actually pretty strong; for example, the proof that √2 is not the ratio of two whole numbers is a proof by contradiction. He is attempting a proof by “contradiction” (“impossibility of the contrary”, he writes repeatedly), but it’s actually the pathetic fallacy of the argument from ignorance (as per your example, in fact, and you may have just misremembered/mistyped the phrase).
yeah, what you said.
As unwittingly as ever, Facilis gives away the game with this:
But the thing about presuppositionionalism is that God is proven by the impossibility of the contrary. So by nature it is not falsifiable
If there is no way for an idea to be shown to be false, it is an idea not worthy of examination, an idea impervious to rational examination.
It seems to me that the big idea Facilis has consistently failed to advance is the notion of God as top-down designer, which Darwin so soundly showed was a superfluous notion. Nobody has written about this better than philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. I have tried to extract a bit of the pith of Dennett’s famous chapter 3 from his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, some of which can be read here.
Facilis the fallacious lacks the brevity of Huxley’s chewtoy, Soapy Sam Wilberforce, who, reading Darwin, decried the implications of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that disturbed him so:
Dennett reminds us that Darwin inverted the Cosmic Pyramid, which had placed God at the top of the cosmic dungheap, who had been believed to have inflicted Mind and Design and Order out of, and upon, Chaos and Nothingness. Dennett:
And, last excision from Dennett’s book (it’s better if you read at home from your dog-eared copy):
Ultimately, what Facilis is not likely to admit or understand, is that the useful ideas are all that matter to science, the ones that raise questions that raise further and more interesting questions. “God did it” is never more than an end to fruitful enquiry, an answer that need never actually address any question. “God did it” ignores the rules of any honest game, upending the board, sending the pieces flying, declaring victory, and demanding a prize.
pure win!
Seconded.
Ken Cope @1024, pure win.
Look up the naturalistic fallacy – Facilis
You look up the naturalistic fallacy, fuckwit. It was named by G.E. Moore, who noted in chapter 4 of Principia Ethica that it also applied to claims that what was good could be defined in terms of supernatural or metaphysical properties.
Hence it is you, fuckwit Facilis, who has repeatedly and grossly committed the naturalistic fallacy throughout your ludicrous rants.
Now, I know you are far too stupid to realise how stupid you are, or that your claims are shit, but surely by now even you must be convinced that you are not going to convince anyone else. So sod off, you unbelievably stupid, boorish, arrogant piece of shit.
Great summary by Ken Cope #1024. A third on the pure win.
Woot! I may already be a wiener!
@Alyson
My duty is to account for these things and I have shown all the things you are unable to account for.
Imagine a man drowning in water. He tries to escape from his grave by attempting to make a ladder out of water or a rope out of water to pull himself out but keeps failing. That is what I think of when I see the materialistic paradigm, man just the product of matter, change and natural processes , whose mind and thoughs are the product of change and natural processses ,tryt=ing to figure a world which is just the product of material ,chance and forces. How is knowledge possible? How is reason possible? How is it possible to attain truth? As I’ve shown here many atheists are stuck in this ditch. As Van Till once said ,”The only proof ou need for God is that you can’t prove anything without him”.
Facilis, you have no duty based upon the bible, because the bible is work of fiction. Nobody has proven that otherwise. (Presuming divinely inspired means nothing, just another delusion.) So you are imposing that duty upon yourself. What part of that are you having trouble with?
Your god is imaginary, existing only between your ears. Why must we share your delusions? The answer is we don’t.
Take your delusionsal god elsewhere. We have absolutely no interest in your delusions.
Fixed that for you. You’re welcome.
Imagine a man drowning in water. He tries to escape from his grave by attempting to make a ladder out of water or a rope out of water to pull himself out but keeps failing.
Sure, I can totally see that. I mean, I’ve been watching you all through this thread!
As I’ve shown here many atheists are stuck in this ditch.
*sporfle* You mean, you’re talking about US here?!
The irony! The projection! How they slay!
We are so lucky to have a righteous moron like Facilus around. We come from a culture take have no idea what the glory of the big sky daddy is like. We have barely ever heard of the name of Jesus Christ and the obvious glory inherant in the name. Faculis is the loyal servant making sure that we remember the source of all goodness.
Facilis,
just curious here :
Why wouldnt your omnipotent loving god save the poor sod from drowning?He a member of the wrong sect?God busy hauling storms at sinners?No god there in the first place?
How is knowledge possible?
Try growing a brain and exercising it.
How is reason possible?
Perhaps, after you grow a brain, and exercise it, you may learn some of the rudiments of reasoning, which include learning how to think for yourself.
How is it possible to attain truth?
Endeavor to be honest with yourself and others by not lying, by not representing the words of other authors as your own, and learn what people smarter than you (lucky you, that’s just about everybody!) have learned. You may not be able to “attain truth” but hey, it’s a journey, not a destination.
HTH,HAND, Facilis, you stupid, wanking, slagging, insipid, godbotting, dungeon-bound troll.
Janine @1034, We have barely ever heard of the name of Jesus Christ and the obvious glory inherant in the name.
Gosh golly gee yes. If it hadn’t been for godbots like Facilis, my atheism may have not have been able to encompass the complete set of imaginary gods, and I’d be busy rejecting only the Greek and Vedantic pantheons. Now I can disbelieve in Jesus Christ and the object of other Abrahamic faiths, which, having grown up and lived in California for over 50 years, I never would have encountered before. I’ve learned so much about that fictional character that I can tell Facilis to go Matthew 6:6 himself, before he winds up like that John 3:16 rainbow wig-wearing clown.
I’m kind of hoping some of the Norse gods are real, BTW. The origin of Sleipnir is kinda cool.
@Steve_C
The irony is that I have provided “evidence” , your ability to reason,but you deny it due to you presuppositions.
I used to argue evidence in the conventional sense with atheists (you can check my blog) but I discovered for some reason it never used to work. However soon I read Link this article and discovered why Christians cannot reason with atheists.
To quote the site
You see no amount evidence will ever convince the unbeliever of the truth of Christianity because Satan won’t let him. The unbeliever’s presuppositions are that of Satan.
You see. My point here is to point out how the unbeliever’s reason is corrupted and irrational. He cannot account for the laws of logic or mathematics or morality or induction or the uniformity of nature or science or knowledge or certainty. I think I have proven here.
The question is whether you should continue in willful suppression of truth and belief in your irrational corrupt reason or accept God as the source of reason.
But you haven’t. Indeed, by repeatedly refusing to engage the arguments that show that your reasoning is fallacious and that your knowledge of scripture is weak, the only thing that you’ve shown is that it is indeed you who are “stuck”.
Watch out for bears!
Um, guys? Should we stop poking the troll now?
Ah, forget that. This is way too much fun!
Man cannot know God, creation, or himself APART from God’s interpretation. Man, in his intellectual rebellion, allies himself with Satan’s interpretation (or worldview).
That shit is some comedy gold right there. *grabs popcorn*
Facilis,
reading your last post,im kinda tempted to go through the usual and call you out on your logical errors,refute your arguments yadayada….
But im curious…..
If you read your post 1039,isnt it striking even for you how many hoops you make yourself jump through to justify the existence of some imaginary being,together with his evil counterpart,kindof like Batman and Joker?
Why? What for?
What is scaring you so much about just dumping all this mythical stuff and living a life free of gods?
You’re an idiot babe
It’s a wonder you still know how to breath
@Ken Cope
Ultimate presuppositions aren’t falsifiable by nature. For example , what do you believe in? Empiricism, rationalism? What epistemology? Foundationalism, Evidentialism?
Show me how these are falsifiable and I will take your objection seriously. The difference is of course that I have chosen to align my presuppositions with those of God, while you have not. And I can account for everything I use , while you cannot.
Also I see you appeal to a scientific theory in your post. How do you account for induction, one of the underlying principles of science? (google hume’s problem of induction if you are unfamiliar)
Agreed. My favourite part of #1039 was:
Facilis, we salute you.
That makes as much sense as saying that by showing that babies exist, you’ve provided evidence that babies are brought by storks.
So you’re saying that Satan is stronger than God. Nice shooting of your own argument in the foot, there.
And neither can you “account” for them. You can only assert the fallacy of assuming the consequent.
But it is your reason that is irrational and corrupt, as has been repeatedly shown. Thus is it not you who are deluded by Satan, who has tricked you into thinking that he is God?
Should we stop poking the troll now?
I see nothing in Facilis’ future but a sinister little midget with a bucket and a mop. There is a reason PZ employs a dungeon (click on the tab marked “dungeon” at the top of every page!), and I rattled off a list of facilis infractions at the end of post 1036. Unless the new Scienceblogs upgrade no longer horks on threads that go over a thousand posts, it should be clear that Facilis is here only to waste our time and clog the servers. I just can’t believe he is such a fool.
Flies all green and buzzin’
In this dungeon of despair
Who are all these people
That is locked away down there
Are they crazy?
Are they sainted?
Are they zeroes someone painted?
Well it’s never been explained
Since at first it was created
But a dungeon like a sin
Requires nought but lockin’ in
Of everything that’s ever been
Look at her
Look at him
That’s what’s the deal we’re dealin in
That’s what’s the deal we’re dealin in
That’s what’s the deal we’re dealin in
That’s what’s the deal we’re dealin in
More fun with Facile the Fallacious!
You see no amount evidence will ever convince the
unbeliever of the truth of Christianity becauseSatanreligion won’t let him. Theunbeliever’s presuppositions are that ofSatanGod as the source of all things.AND…
You see. My point here is to point out how
the unbeliever’smy “reason” is corrupted and irrational.HeI cannotaccount forlearn the laws of logic or mathematics or morality or induction or understand theuniformityreality of nature or science or knowledge or certainty. I think I have proven here.The question is whether
you shouldI will continue in willful suppression of truth and belief inyourmy irrational corrupt “reason” oraccept God as the source of reasonconsider the idea that consciousness with intention and decision is not necessary to hold reality together.There. Better.
Nothing is scaring me. It is just that atheism is one big logical fallacy. Atheists claim they have logic and truth but they deny the very source of logic and truth and regularity in the world. Atheism doesn’t make logical sense.
No we don’t. Man is the source of all that. Period, end of story. No need for imaginary deities. What part of that are you having trouble with?
Facilis @ 1049,
I think if you look in the mirror and ask yourself what religion and your belief does for you that you think you cannot be without,then you might actually have a chance of escaping the trap.
You strike me as young,you still have time to live a decent life.
Right now,youre on course to wasting it.
He cannot account for the laws of logic or mathematics or morality or induction or the uniformity of nature or science or knowledge or certainty.
This sentence makes brain hurt.
Logic is a way of of organizing information.
Math is measurement of what is around us.
Morality is so malleable that it becomes difficult to establish unless one appeals to a higher power to arbitrarily set the guide lines.
Uniformity of nature? What the fuck is that?
Science is by definition uncertain.
Certainty? This person does not know what the fuck he is talking about.
(Her head is now banging on the wall next to her. Bloody Stupid Johnson makes more sense to her.)
Nothing is scaring me. It is just that atheism is one big logical fallacy. Atheists claim they have logic and truth but they deny the very source of logic and truth and regularity in the world. Atheism doesn’t make logical sense.
And the fucking spiral continues…
Before we have another merry-go-round, here is my summary.
Facilis: I posit god and give him all these attributes. Therefore god exists.
Pharyngula: All those attributes can be explained by man. No need to use god anywhere.
Facilis, is this accurate?
I think Facilis is so backed into his deluded corner that’s he’s barricaded himself in it. He’s built up so many defenses against reason that he’s twisted himself into thinking up is down.
It’s kinda sad.
Are you certain of this definition? How?
Knowledge requires certainty. Science attempt to discover knowledge. Of course we are not certain but we attempt to discover it.
Anyway why does everyone want to send me to the dungeon.I do not think I was in violation of any of the rules (except perhaps repetition because some people wouldn’t answer me)
And I’ve only quoted the bible in a couple posts where I was explaining my position. I think I’ve been polite
Clinteas is giving you the best advice you can get in #1051 Facilis.
Are you certain of this definition? How?
Because, shit for brains, if it was certain, there would be not need for experiments to be reproducible. I am not a scientist but I can understand this.
It’s the repetition that’s going to end up getting you there.
You make assertion after assertion. All of them are nonsense.
Address this. If there is no physical evidence for any gods. Shouldn’t atheism or at least agnosticism be the default position of everyone?
Pointing at concepts that man has created and then calling it evidence for any god, especially the god of the bible is silly.
Why can’t you see that?
More like-
Facilis- God is the necessary precondition for logic , reason , mathematical laws,morality uniformity of nature and certainty. I shall prove it by the impossibility of the contrary
Pharyngula- Well your argument is a fallacy although I have not explained why my standard of logic and reason necessarily applies to your argument(throw in insults and ad homs) somehow they also applied to dinosaurs,Well mathematics were invented by man, somehow they also applied to dinosaurs. You are immoral even thought I cannot explain why my standard of morality necessarily applies to you and I still think morality frequently changes with popular opinion. Induction works because I induced it (circular logic) and continue to induce it. And we cannot be certain of anything, however I am certain of the previous statement.
You’re STILL doing it.
All assertions without evidence. And you continue to ignore or try to understand any point anyone makes to you.
Knowledge requires certainty.
Umm…NO. If anything, certainty inhibits knowledge. Your posting is proof of that.
Science is uncertain in the sense that it is willing to have its conclusions proven wrong by further experimentation–in fact it is built for self-correction. Science is uncertain, furthermore, in that it is tolerant of ambiguity. This, most of all, seems to be one of the primary differences between you and us godless heathens. You are accustomed to thinking of the universe and all its participants as a product of an omniscient being’s creation, and you cannot imagine how it could exist any other way, so you bend all your arguments in the direction of God. Atheists, meanwhile, can picture the universe on another foundation, and if we can’t describe exactly how it came about, we’re willing to say, “We don’t know yet. Give it some time.” This is the attitude of science: if we don’t know it yet, we’ll probably figure it out eventually. But we won’t figure anything out simply by telling ourselves what we wanted to hear all along.
(except perhaps repetition because some people wouldn’t answer me)
We have answered your allegations, many times each, in terms that you refuse to grasp. Because you have locked yourself in a tower of Certainty which is impervious to genuine logic, there is no way that you are ever going to accept our responses as answers, even to the extent of recognizing that we’ve answered your assertions while you still disagree with us.
I think I’ve been polite
In terms strictly of your tone of voice, yes, I’ll grant that you’ve become more polite as we have gathered more enjoyment from watching you chase your own tail. However, your form of civility does not change the simple reality that your “reasoning” makes no sense. Toning down the sneering doesn’t really mean much if you then start accusing your opponents of being under the influence of Satan.
Facilis, you are presuming god exists, therefore god exists. Your words say that. Absolute circular reasoning on your part. That is massive total failure of logic. What part of that are you having trouble with? You just keep repeating a mantra over and over like it is all you have. That’s right, that is all the weak minded have.
Ooommmm. That one word contains just as much logic as your argument. And is much shorter.
I was just quoting the site. But there are those who acknowledge God as the source of reason and those who don’t.There is no in between or neutral ground. It’s as simple as that.
But there are those who acknowledge God as the source of reason and those who don’t.There is no in between or neutral ground. It’s as simple as that.
And there are those who use faith as a substitute for logic, and those who don’t. There is no in-between or neutral ground. (Actually, there probably is, but…) One of the most enduring ironies of your proselytizing to us is that you keep holding up the laws of logic as incontrovertible evidence of God, but I don’t think you’ve ever really grasped the mechanics of logic.
I was just quoting the site.
Don’t blame me. Stupid git.
Facilis, did it ever occur to you that the website might be lying? Something may sound good until put before skeptical people who see the flaws in the logic presented? You fell into that trap. The web site was wrong. Now, get yourself out of your metaphorical hole by pulling up your tents stakes and going away.
No, the Mollies are voted on by the community so it’s essentially a rather meaningless popularity contest for a bit of fun. If you comment a lot and your comments are sometimes funny or incisive, you stand a good chance. Unfortunately, your comments are consistently asinine, as funny as bowel cancer and as incisive as a spoon.
IMHO, the best argument against atheism stems from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. If, in the future, we have a single unified consistent mathematical theory of physics describing the universe (let’s call it a “grand unified theory” or GUT), we know that theory must be incomplete (in the mathematical sense) and proving its consistency necessarily must use mathematics outside the theory itself. Now, since these mathematical constructs are external to the GUT, they cannot possibly be amenable to substantiation by empirical evidence (since the appearance of any empirical phenomenon must, by definition, be covered by the GUT). Thus there are necessary mathematical constructs external to a consistent physical theory of the universe that cannot be empirically validated, which we may define as “God”. The problem with this, of course, is that such a “God” is just a handful of mathematical constructs, about which nothing is yet known, but the notion that these “extra bits” — an axiom or two, or a rule of inference — could be sentient, capable of emotion, have created the universe, or be in the sin-forgiving and afterlife business is quite absurd. Nevertheless, it provides a better starting point for wild extrapolation than an anthology of the creation myths and legends of semi-literate bronze-age nomadic goatherds, arbitrarily elevated over those of a thousand other ancient cultures.
Ultimate presuppositions aren’t falsifiable by nature. For example , what do you believe in? Empiricism, rationalism? What epistemology? Foundationalism, Evidentialism?
The junkie wants to know what kind of smack I’m shooting, since everybody must be just as strung out as he is. Sorry, asshole, I kicked that shit that’s fucking you up hard years ago.
I have appealed to science in my discussions with you, because it isn’t a presupposition or a belief, it’s a method, a process, in which anybody and everybody is welcome to participate, if they have the wits to do so. If a scientist learns something about the world, she knows that what she’s learned is only provisional, subject to testing and analysis and revision, even abandonment, in light of better information or a more complete explanation that sheds more understanding of whatever the evidence and observations reveal. Science works, bitch! If it finds incontrovertible evidence for the existence of Galactus and the Celestials, or Loki and Thor, or even Jesus fucking Christ, then I’ll give my provisional assent to the hypothesis that they weren’t pulled out of somebody’s fairy-tale-spinning ass, bearing in mind that there may be information not yet available that shows that there is a natural explanation for their appearance of supernatural power and origin. I’ll be suspicious, because, to quote whoever paraphrased Clarke, any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. All religion has been able to muster in the technology indistinguishable from magic bit is conjuring and charlatanry, a grift played on marks by parasitic worms like yourself, Facilis.
Show me how these are falsifiable and I will take your objection seriously.
Nice ploy to cover up the fact that you are not up to the task of taking my objection seriously because your mental faculties would embarrass a parrot. If a star that should have been occulted by the sun wasn’t visible at the edge of Sol’s disc during an eclipse, Einstein’s theory that gravity bent space through which light was passing in an otherwise straight line would have been falsified, but as the case turned out, it was instead validated. It was, in principle, falsifiable.
You have added no understanding of any phenomenon by pointing at it and ejaculating, “God did it!” except to get your messy memetic spoo all over the useful fruits of science, ruining it for the rest of us. You want to get out in front of the mathematicians and philosophers, the naturalists and astronomers and especially the biologists and claim that all of their hard work is proof of your little toxin package of holy spookery, so you can feast without having to expend any energy of your own. You’re about as welcome in a gathering of sane people as a blood-sucking tick.
The difference is of course that I have chosen to align my presuppositions with those of God, while you have not. And I can account for everything I use , while you cannot.
Moron. That makes as much sense to me as if you had said you chose to align yourself with Frodo and the hobbits. The claim that you have accounted for fuckall is merely evidence that you’re a delusional waste of time.
Also I see you appeal to a scientific theory in your post. How do you account for induction, one of the underlying principles of science? (google hume’s problem of induction if you are unfamiliar)
Fuck you. You don’t know squat about induction, as your use of it to assault and deny science reveals. Pray for revelation the next time you want a cure for Parkinson’s. If you could show me that religion is more than a con for grifters and a solace for the deluded, you would have in the course of this and other threads, but all you’ve done is caper like a fool, and not even a talented fool.
“Man, Woman, Child! All are up against the Wall of Science!”
OT but I have to ask, Emmet is there a cancer that is funny?But I like the line ‘funny as bowel cancer’. Have to save it for a rainy day.
Yet unbelievers became Christians, else Christianity would never have spread. Indeed, infants are unbelievers (in a sense, given that they do not know what it is that they are supposed to believe), and yet, some become believers, some become believers and then unbelievers, and a few remain unbelievers. What accounts for these differences?
Something that is particularly amusing is that in order to account for unbelievers not accepting that something that is unnecessary and unevidenced is required for there to be reason, you posit something else that is unnecessary and unevidenced.
What accounts for there being no evidence for Satan? Or is it spirits all the way down for you?
@Steve_C
There is no neutral position. You either build your worldview on God’s truth or side with the enemy. I have chosen the first.
Wait a moment, here. Aren’t you the one claiming that there is indeed a definite standard of logic and reason in the first place, even if you are claiming that its foundation is what you call “God”?
Shouldn’t your own argument be consistent with that very standard?
No shit Facilis. Really?
I’m calling you an idiot now. You’re a fuckwitted godbot. Don’t try to justify your idiiotic reasoning anymore.
We get it. Nothing will come between you and God. Not even reality.
If holding theistic religion up to scientific scrutiny makes me the “enemy” to “God’s truth,” then, okay, I’ll be the enemy. The grass isn’t really greener, but the ground beneath it is so much firmer.
Much as I enjoy your claim that I have power over God, might I point out that if God created the universe to be rational and consistent, without Him needing to directly affect every single person’s epistemology Himself, it would appear exactly as atheists claim it does, that is, as though the universe were rational and consistent without needing any specific prior cause?
I hate to break it to you, Steve, but, when a person says that there is no “neutral position,” being either God versus “enemy,” they never bothered to justify anything to begin with.
Why is Facilis not in the dungeon?
facilis the child murderer worshiper,
So do you recognize that your argument was fallacious?
Also, saying “God is responsible for logic” begs the question what is responsible for God?
And, I might add, if God were indeed the foundation of reason, as you claim, why would He have created Me to hide this?
Is it not the most irrational thing imaginable, to be the very foundation of reason and then create something that hides the foundation of reason?
Didn’t He create you and Azazel to be the patrons of the scapegoats?
Creating You seemed like a good idea at the time…
I’m not saying that I was drunk, and I’m not saying that I was not.
Oh! I know!
“I move in mysterious ways.” That explains it!
I am beginning to think facilis is just a stupid parrot who hasn’t had an original thought in years. When in doubt parrot, quote, crib. Anything but think for himself. The for/against idiocy sealed it for me.
Spurge, PZ lets discussions of the existance of god continue. Facilis lost the discussion big time due to circular reasoning, and is now showing his “must convert us” attitude. If he continues, PZ will plonk him for proselytizing.
Sigh, I grow weary of facilis.
He continues to think that using fallacious reasoning and believing in answers that are quite clearly wrong is somehow better than just saying “I don’t know”. He seems to think knowledge is either completely certain or completely uncertain with no degrees in between. He is a child clinging to childish certainties unwilling to step into the grown up world of nuance and doubt.
Alyson, I like the cut of your
jibgrass. ;)Yes, and sockpuppets. And can-carriers. And so on.
And mysteries are neither logical nor rational, now are they?
Five days ago, over 300 posts ago, I asked Facilis the Fallacious to list these “absolute, invariant, universal, immaterial laws of logic and reason” he keeps babbling about. I was not the only one to ask this, nor was this the only time I did so. And yet every single time this question is asked, Facilis the Fallacious flees in abject terror (Again, note this is not the only question he runs away from). He cannot offer the slightest speck of evidence for his position, cannot even define his terms. He doesn’t dare try, because on some level he knows he’s full of shit. If he dared list these “absolute, invariant, universal, immaterial laws of logic and reason” it would be quickly obvious that they are nothing of the sort, and that his idiotic idolatrous worship of a book of mythology is totally incompatible with them. So he flees in terror from this question, every single time. And shows that he is a complete and total failure.
Fuck off, Facilis. You’re just a tedious troll with nothing to say.
There is no neutral position. You either build your worldview on God’s truth or side with the enemy. I have chosen the first. – Facilis
OK, let’s assume for a moment Facilis is right about this dichotomy (you do understand what a dichotomy is, Facilis?). Then if that unbelievably stupid and arrogant piece of shit Facilis is one of God’s chosen, I’ll go with the enemy! Who’s with me?
@Feynmaniac #1084:
Or, rather, either completely certain or completely invalid. And I quote, from #1056, “Knowledge requires certainty.” There’s no room for ambiguity there. When ambiguity isn’t tolerated, there’s no opportunity to learn anything new.
…after all, could Hell possibly be as bad as eternity spent in the company of Facilis?
Since Facilis probably isn’t Jewish, who are God’s chosen people, I suspect him being chosen is up for debate. But what else is new.
Needless to say I am with KnockGoats on this one. I agree with Mark Twain. Heaven is boring. Who would want to go there?
LOL! That would be hilarious. During his “duties” he managed to turn a bunch of atheists into satanists!
ok, this thread has officially jumped the shark, but I can’t resist a last post:
you’ve got that backwards. you’re giving us your presuppositions, which we don’t accept because of our evidence.
of course empiricism and evidential science are falsifiable! If all the physical evidence we found wouldn’t built up into a coherent, consistent, usefully explanatory and predictive worldview, the Scientific Method would be falsified and we’d have to use something else.
It’s like finding an unlabeled box full of puzzle-pieces. Seeing as we like a challenge, we’ve been looking through the box and trying to see if and how they fit together, and what the overall picture is. and lo and behold! the pieces fit together, and we’re seeing more and more of the image! But there could have been a different outcome: we could have tried and tried to fit the pieces together, only to realize that they’re extra pieces of many puzzle-sets, and therefore no picture will form. in that case, we’d have to find something else to play with :-p
yes we have; your reading comprehension sucks
yeah, and “dinosaurs” also existed long before the word “dinosaur” was invented by humans; things came in amounts before we invented numbers to count and label them; the universe had certain consistencies which existed before we invented logic and science to use and explain them. you’re stupid and incapable of separating things from the labels we give them
we’ve expained the first, and you’ve made the second one up. morals are not a democratic function, they’re a socio-biological function
liar; none of us said that, and I’ve explained this to you twice already. your reading comprehension still sucks.
I’ve repeatedly explained this as well: we cannot be fully certain of anything, not even of the fact that we cannot be fully certain of anything (maybe there’s things we got 100% right and could be certain of them, after all :-p ); the only things that doesn’t apply to are the things we as humans have made up. therefore, we can say with certainty that the Scientific Method allows for uncertainty and correction, because we designed it that way and as such can be certain of it.
conclusion: you’re a simpleton who can’t tell the difference between words and things, with severe reading comprehension issues and delusions of grandeur, thus being a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Let’s see:
Iron pentagram – check.
Black robes – check.
Upside-down cross – check.
Sacrificing knife – check – ouch that’s sharp!
Goat… goat… forgot to buy the sodding goat! Ah, here’s one I knocked earlier, that’ll have to do!
Now how does it go?
Amen, ever and ever for, glory the and, power the, kingdom the is thine for. Evil from us deliver but, temptation into not us lead and. Us against trespass who, them forgive we as, trespasses our us forgive and, bread daily our day this us give. Heaven in is it as earth in, done be will thy, come kingdom thy. Name thy be hallowed, heaven in art which, father our!
*cuts goat’s throat*
oh, I’m with that. I’ve decided a long time ago that if all the godbots go to heaven, I wanna be in hell with the smart people
Trespass/trespassers?!
It’s debts/debtor you blasphemer.
*cuts own throat* *gurgle* That’ll teach you!
;)
I’ve read all the posts added since I went to bed last night (my time) and facilis still hasn’t managed to justify the unsupported assertion that, even if we did accept that there is a being responsible for logic and reason, the being cannot be any god (or gods, or Sideshow Bob) other than his god.
So, until you can do that, facilis, you shouldn’t even bother trying to establish the validity of the rest of your argument.
Why does god like gibbering idiots?
What an absolute nugget facilis is.
Pharyngula – You have not explained why any of those need a higher power in order for those to exist, and there’s certainly no reason that the higher power should be the Jew Zombie who was really a god in manform who died on a cross for the sins of mankind 2000 years ago. You’ve just made the assertion that your deity is the necessary pre-condition without explaining why it has to be over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
You have not demonstrated a single thing, you’ve tried to play games of rhetorical nonsense, you’ve played off between God and nothing as opposed to the plethora of religious beliefs, yet at no stage have you shown why God has to be a necessary precondition for anything or why it has to be the Judeo-Christian construct. You’ve misrepresented science, you’ve misrepresented knowledge, and you somehow think that having certainty makes your position right… all this while typing on a computer and putting that information on a global communications network – the achievement of the scientific process that was born out of that inherent uncertainty.
Being certain in anything does not make you right, it means you are more likely to be wrong and refuse to move from that position out of stubbornness the certainty provides. It’s really pathetic.
@ Facilis #1072:
So not only do you have a false dichotomy there but the two positions which you pretend are the only options are both imaginary ones!
When someone gets round to that truth-table thing mentioned earlier, this ludicrous version of that logical fallacy probably deserves its own name too. Somewhere in between it and the normal type there could be the version where only one of the options (or fewer than all in a multiple choice extension) is fictitious.
Yikes, this thread is getting kinda long. Is it time to close it and create an open SIWOTI syndrome thread?
Because their funny?
What else am I going to do with My eternal existence, besides amuse Myself?
@ Janine #1098:
There isn’t any credible evidence that (any) god does, as such. It’s just another of the (sometimes inadvertent) assertions made by Facilis and other godbots when demanding to be special.
There’s the biblical precedent for children and the child-like being favoured. Although that’s contrasted by some of the Christian cults condemning them to hell.
So the only real evidence is for a subset of gibbering idiots tending to claim a god likes them. It probably is safer to regard the religious as special needs cases (original UK education sense, since they didn’t include provision for the genuinely gifted end of the spectrum) as a first approximation and then work out which ones could be allowed out in civilised company without much (real-world) supervision – as we already know their imaginary supervision doesn’t work on them.
God,
Even creator of heaven and earth has trouble with “their” and “they’re”!
Good grief. Ur doin’ it wrong.
Besides, what am I supposed to do with the spirit of a dead goat?
those never work; i suspect trolls and godbots think they’ve automatically won when the thread closes… or they’re confused about the concept of open discussion threads, I’m not sure
Any new thread should be titled “In which facilis can continue to perform a logical abortion”, if it were my blog that’s what I’d call it.
Damnit, of course #1104 should be:
Even the creator of heaven and earth has trouble with “their” and “they’re”!
I forgot an important law: during the course of correcting a grammatical or spelling error one will inevitably create an even greater grammatical or spelling error.
I was testing you, My child.
Or, um, it was Satan’s fault?
Yes, that’s it! Satan, Father of All That is Evil, tweaked the intertubes, as He is wont to do, changing My perfect words into imperfect ones!
PS: You left out a “the”, smarty pants. The Creator of heaven and earth, thank you very much!
PZ’s done it before once a thread got too long; it just depends on whether he feels it’s worth it just to keep hearing facilis bleat out the same pointless, invalid nonsense that we’ve already shot down – in at least three different ways – over and over again.
So, if the Bearded Overlord likes having him dance for our entertainment then he will make it happen.
Barbeque, duh.
According to the Thai, you were the one who invented cooking, after all.
Not too loud or you’ll get Stimpy back talking about how evolution violates information theory
No, that’s what you do with the body. What am I supposed to do with a noncorporeal goat spirit?
I guess I can chase it off to join God’s (and Ba’al’s, and Zeus’s, and Jove’s, and… well, you get the idea) enormous herd. He doesn’t know what to do with them either.
Actually, I put the spirits of all the dead shepherds in charge of them, technically to protect them from You (although in actuality they spend all their time feuding and stealing them from each other, which suffices to amuse Me).
Yes, I told them that You were trying to get My goats.
But Satan’s supposed to have a goatee beard not a goaty one. And even that was just kidding around.
Oh, Facilis…
Ken, what ever that link was, it is gone. Or was that your point?
It’s a brief audio clip from Time Bandits, David Warner, spoken to Benson, “…You are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence.”
I Googled it.
That is funny. But I am afraid you need a new clip. But I do like this one.
jadehawk @ 1093,
this thread has finally proven useful in some way,thanks for the interesting link to the Kruger-Dunning experiments !
I think the site dailywav.com has measures in place against hotlinking. A web server can examine the headers and see if there is an HTTP_REFERER , and take different actions depending on what that header is. I think in this instance, if it is a site not itself, it claims that the file is Gone.
However, I pressed “enter” in the address bar, and then it worked (because the HTTP_REFERER is blank when you do that).
your welcome, clinteas. though i gotta admit that i found out about them over here as well. The Rev linked to them on some other godbotted thread…
Over the years, I’ve had to repeatedly change what I have stored in my interesting link file for that one as the various original releases and copies of those originals (with broken images) have gradually become unobtainable. It took a while for it to be labelled with the researcher’s names like that. Previously it was just “Unskilled and Unaware of It” (web archive copy).
References (which I’d also kept) to it have generally survived better. Eg Zen Spider, in the Skeptic’s Dictionary at skepdic (under self-deception) and in an APA commentary.
Another copy-reference with a particularly relevant section on the 2nd page:
… apart for the author’s own naive over-confidence in the (unevidenced) ability to educate people out of it. Though it’s probably (in my anecdotal experience anyway) a lot easier to do when you have someone trapped in person and on their own than it is over the internet or among whole villages of idiots.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
– William Butler Yeats
“One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain’t nothing can beat teamwork.”
– Edward Abbey
*whispers*: Hey, did my goat-sacrifice work? Has Facilis really gone? Thanks, Satan old chum!
Twenty eight hours. But if you really want to continue with the Facilis experience, just go back to when he first entered the thread. Who would be able to tell the difference?
facilis does have his own blog so if you were feeling really masochistic* then you could go there and get him going again.
*If inviting a three-legged, blind, toothless chihuahua to nip at your heels is considered masochism, that is.
Nah, we don’t want to disturb him. We might get him into a position where he couldn’t parrot anything and his feeble little mind could freeze up.
You know, it might, just possibly, be possible to convince a presuppositionalist that his presupposition is mistaken. But I suspect that it would take a dialogue as wordy as one of Plato’s longer ones (and probably longer).
And if calling on Satan makes the presuppositionalist go away, well, “Hail Satan!”, say I.
I read through the Wiki article on the topic, and I may end up reading more about it from the references given, just so that I won’t be quite so gobsmacked when I see that sort of bafflegab again. But the entire business strikes me as declaring victory, and arguing from that.
“No, you see, I can’t be wrong, because I’ve already won. So it must be you who lost. And your worldview, despite appearing as though the issue of whether I’ve lost or won is undecided or even settled against me, in fact actually arises from the fact that I’ve already won.” (and so on and on… and on…)
Unintentional comedy from the article: “Clark suggested that the cosmological argument was not just unpersuasive but also logically invalid (because it begged the question)”
Says the guy whose entire argument is a question-begging argument-by-fiat.
Actually, I just went to facilis’ blog and it looks like he’s been too busy
plagiarisingboning up on presuppositionalism to spend any time writing anything of his own.Maybe next time he gets so excited about the idea of an ‘unassailable’ argument he should do some more research first. Funnily, what’s coming to mind at this point is the historical lesson of the Maginot Line.
Maybe facilis took our comments about being closer to converting to Satanism than Christianity seriously and decided he had done enough damage.
Or maybe he’s typing “how to convert atheists” in search engines and hitting every apologetics site he can find for some sort rebuttal to our criticisms. His constant use of the argument “you assume induction to prove induction”, despite the fact that nobody has made that claim, suggests he has already been doing that.
Maybe, but I doubt facilis is such a presuppositionalist. Just looking at his dreadful blog and his shitty arguments here shows how far he is willing to rationalize. Even if you did convince him he’d probably just find another apologetics philosophy to subscribe to. There’s no shortage .
Besides, once you’ve defended the murder of 42 children where can you really go?
I better claim my Russian bride now because of the poor performance given by the participants in this thread.
Let us look at my challenges.
1)First I asked you to account for laws of logic and reason. In response several people tried to call my argument fallacious. However by calling me fallacious they are affirming a standard of logic and reason that necessarily applies to my argument. Some have made vague statements like “humans invented logic” but they never elaborate. Does this mean logic is arbitrary? Could humans have invented different laws? And this does not explain why it necessarily applies to my argument.
@JadeHawk
This is exactly what i was saying however some atheists here just don’t happen to get it.What metaphysically underpins these laws that make the universe behave consistently and why do these laws also govern our thinking , and how can you KNOW these laws?
2)I asked people to account for the laws of mathematics. I received similar responses to the above question
3) I asked people to account for the laws of morality. when people call me immoral, they are appealing to a standard of morality that necessarily applies to me. I asked them to account for this standard. Similarly they were unable to acccount. Jadehawk appealed to evolutionary theory to derive morality. However this is a naturalistic fallacy. Evolution is an explaination of natural process that happens (common descent with modification, involving mutations and natural selection…etc). It is not a description of what “ought” to be , like moral laws. By appealing to natural processes you are committing a naturalistic fallacy. Also there are mo reasons this standard should necessarily apply to me.
Some appealed to cultural conventions. However does this mean morality is arbitrary? Also this standard does not necessarily apply to me, bnecause people are not obligated to follow culturall conventions.
4) I asked how knowledge was possible within atheism. There are different categories of beliefs. there are epistemically unjustified (or irrational beliefs), epistemically justified (or rational beliefs) and epistemically certain beliefs (or knowledge). I maintained that Knowledge is epistemically certain by definition. I also maintained that the only way to have certainty was to either have absolute knowledge, or receive revelation from someone who did have absolute knowledge. The responses were hilarious.I ended up getting responses like this.
People aren’t certain, and they aren’t certain that they aren’t certain. Atheists *sigh*
@Jadehawk
How are you certain of this?
5) I talked about Hume’s problem of induction. as I predicted, atheists here were unable to provide any kind of rational justification for induction or solve Hume’s problem. Seeing as induction is one of the underlying principles of science, atheists should either start denying science or admit they are stealing intellectual capital from the Christian worldview (I believe PZ also made a post offering a beer to anyone who could solve Hume’s problem of induction- so if you do solve it you get to refute me and have a beer).
@Jadehawk
But how can you KNOW this as an atheist. I KNOW this because I have a revelation from a being that has absolute knowledge. How can you KNOW this?
You had already aligned yourself with Satan and his irrationality when you decided to deny God as the source of logic and reason.
I already know all the criticisms.
I just got into it.
Of course rational argument won’t be convincing to you, because you are an atheists. I already pointed out in post 1039 why atheists can’t be convinced by those kinds of rational or evidential arguments.
Once atheists have decided morality is arbitrary , I really don’t think they have much of an argument against that event.
…and how can I KNOW that what you say about having a revelation is true? How can I KNOW that there is a being with infinite knowledge?
I’ve been reading this thread for days now and while the intellectual musings about Kant and Hume and the like go far above my head (blame my CA state education) I still see no evidence of gods that is plain enough for me to see.
facilis,
So you recognize that your argument was fallacious? Specifically, the fallacy of argument from ignorance.
Funny, coming making the vague statement “God invented logic” but never elaborating on it. Project much?
Saying it doesn’t make it so.
It’s called being an adult. If you wish to remain an intellectual infant and cling to childish certainties, go ahead.
#1039,
Yes, facilis, the only reason you are losing is because of Satan. You tell yourself that. He also hid those dinosaur bones to confuse you.
You can’t use science to disprove God’s truth any more than you can disprove the existence of PZ Myers by posting here. The fact that you are posting at this site PZ created proves the existence of PZ. The very fact that God created a regular universe amenable to scientific discovery and knowledge is why we can use science.
Facilis the fallacious is back. Still as stupid as ever. Still the same circular argument as before, as if repeating stupidity makes it intelligent.
Your god doesn’t exist, so there is no absolute logic. What an asshole.
Facilis, one point your are absolutely missing. Your presumption is that you are right until we prove you wrong. However for the best and only argument we will consider, the presumption is that you are wrong until you prove yourself right. So the total burden of proof is upon you. This means you have to define your terms, your postulate, and show your logic in detail. Until you do this you are wrong.
Oh, look. It’s Facilis, the fallacious fuckwit, back with a fresh steaming pile of turds for us all to admire. As the character Brutha laments in Sir Pterry’s Small Gods, “How can people talk like that? Acting as if they’re glad they don’t know things! Finding out more and more things they don’t know! It’s like children proudly coming to show you a full potty!”
Facilis Arrested On Charges Of Torturing Logic
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN – The blogger known as ‘facilis’ is being held in captivity on charges of violating the Geneva Conventions by torturing Logic.
“It was a horrible, degrading experience,” Logic said. ” He put me in circular positions and abused me endlessly. I just wanted to die at one point.”
“I hope he is locked away where he can do no harm to any abstract concepts.”
Phone calls made to facilis’ basement room in his parent’s home went unanswered.
The White House quickly defended facilis’ actions. “Facilis did not torture Logic,” explained White House press secretary Dana Perino. “What he used was called ‘advanced reasoning techniques’.”
Last month the Supreme Court threw out the Bush Administration’s case that abstract concepts do not fall under the Geneva Convention. This holds special interest to Evidence and Human Rights, both of whom have alleged of being held and tortured by order of the Bush Administration.
Maybe we should call Poe. No one can be this dense, and repetitive,
No, it doesn’t. Not properly. Not on its own. Someone could have invented the persona of PZ and be pretending to speak for him while also having their own real identity. That sort of thing happens all the time, especially in religion! The priest pretends to speak on behalf of a god or to have stuff written by that god or have divine revelation from that god. The priest also attributes various natural happenings to that god.
Some scummy religious people wrote a book and dishonestly attributed it to Antony Flew. As it happens there really is an Antony Flew, but not an Antony Flew who wrote that book and holds those views. There have been lots of people called Jesus but there’s no credible evidence of any of them matching the claims made for a certain specific and famous Jesus.
The virtual world of the internet is still a lot better than the wholly imaginary world of the religious though. A lot of the people actually are who they say they are, even though there are some who aren’t.
What “proves” the existence of PZ is the falsifiably testable stuff – the real-world evidence of him: his body, his family, his job, his tax return, his presence at pub-meets and film showings such that even his detractors recognise him to turn him away. Although, on those grounds, they might not be believing in the existence of Richard Dawkins!
Maybe we should call Poe.
Alas, I fear it’s pure, concentrated stupidity.
Steve_C, he’s a godbot. They are that dense and repetititive. He thought he had the ultimate argument to make atheists believe in god. He just can’t see why it fails, because his background in critical thinking is so poor. In his mind, he should have converted the whole blog by now. Yet he’s in this old thread making the same old circular arguments that we all jump on as fallacious.
I know I know. It’s just sooo… pathetic. Feel sorry for the guy.
Facilis Arrested On Charges Of Torturing Logic
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN – (Update) Logic, still recovering from the horrendous unprovoked assault by that fan of feeding children to she-bears and notorious science-denialist Facilis the Fallacious, Logic defended scientific induction from an undisclosed, secret location:
In particular, the purpose of a large part of religion is preventing the marks from finding out they’ve been scammed. They have to be carefully retarded (mentally, educationally, morally and emotionally) and insulated against being able to recognise it for what it is.
It’s the main flaw in that optimistic view that “you have to educate them in order to help them become competent” (quoted from one of the links I gave earlier). The writer wasn’t expecting it to be an actively opposed education roll (gaming ref.!).
Normally, people might question their impulses (or voices in their head) – but not if they’ve been led to believe they’re divinely externally inspired and beyond question. Normally, people might wonder why their arguments aren’t working against the best people and question the veracity of those arguments (especially if they are vaguely aware they don’t understand them themselves) – but not if they’ve been led to believe that the best people are possessed by demons/satan and that the dodgy arguments are divine ones which are beyond question (and that evidence and self-honesty are unimportant things).
Religion (after millennia of evolution) has evolved quite a lot of immune defences against reason/logic, truth/evidence, honesty and rationality. It appeals to the basest instincts of laziness, greed and fear to protect itself.
facilis,
You know, once you start saying that your opponents are under Satan’s influence you have lost the debate. Well, actually facilis lost a few days ago, but still it’s desperate maneuver.
Facilis is, of course, quite wrong — Tom Bombadil is the ground of epistemology, the source of all logic and reason, the necessary prerequisite for the laws of nature. Anyone who denies this has already aligned himself with Sauron and his irrationality. The revelation of Tom Bombadil’s perfect nature is in The Silmarillion for anyone who cares to read it.
Posted by: Facilis Author Profile Page | January 16, 2009 10:36 AM
You can’t use science to disprove God’s truth any more than you can disprove the existence of PZ Myers by posting here. The fact that you are posting at this site PZ created proves the existence of PZ. The very fact that God created a regular universe amenable to scientific discovery and knowledge is why we can use science.
You know who I feel sorry for? Seriously. Facilis’ brain. The poor thing never stood a chance. Heard of foot binding? Facilis’ brain went through brain binding. At a young age, the brain was tightly wrapped and broken. Take a look, the frontal lobe is snuggled up next to the cerebellum.
Such a barbaric practice. What type of people condones such a crippling action? What can we do now to help alleviate the suffering of Facilis’ brain? I am afraid that this is beyond me.
So, Facilis The Fallacious, still incapable of defining your terms? Still can’t list these “laws” you babble about? Still too terrified of the question to even acknowledge it’s been asked?
Yep, Facilis is still a worthless waste of bandwidth, a tedious troll, a god-besotted moron without the slightest speck of evidence. Totally incapable of anything approaching rational thought.
*sigh* Please learn the difference between knowledge and certainty, and please learn to distinguish what humans say they are certain on and what is certainly true. We can be certain on things that are wrong, but being certain on something we cannot even possibly know (like what is beyond the universe) does not make it more correct simply because you can say it’s true with absolute certainty.
You are wrong [sic]fail, and your word games won’t cut it here. Absolute certainty in a proposition doesn’t make the proposition any more correct, and taking a position of certainty without knowing just increases the likelihood that you are wrong. Get off your philosophical bent and show some evidence that your assertions are anything more than pissing in the wind.
Wow, all that time and that was the best you can come up with? You must be really pissed at the guy who you
have plagiarised repeatedlyare learning from for his inability to give you anything decent tostealuse.Like I said before, you’re going to have to find another argument; this one’s done for. It is, as they say, an ex-argument.
And,
facilisfail-at-this, on top of all the other re-refutations of your non-argument you still haven’t accounted for the grounds on which you can make the definite claim that it’s your god (presumably Yahweh) and not Zeus, Ra or Sideshow Bob who is responsible for logic and rationality.no it isn’t. using terms you don’t understand is a no-no. bad facilis, no russian bride!
that should have gone with the last post, but i clicked post too soon:
let me explain once more: there is no “ought” that goes beyond the usefulness to a particular society. the imperative to follow morals is evolutionary, the decision of what is moral and what isn’t is a social development (not a democratic choice!), but there’s no universal “ought” outside of what human societies make it.
How can [sic]fail be so naïve when it comes to science involving ethics and morality? The science behind it all is well-established, and there is plenty of study on animal behaviour to see how it relates to humans. Putting fingers in ones ears and closing ones eyes does not make for a persuasive argument, [sic]fail’s argument from personal incredulity is nothing short of pathetic. [sic]fail, you don’t know, you can’t even pretend to know, your ignorance that is displayed post after post is astounding.
At least pick up a copy of Michael Shermer – The Science Of Good & Evil before trying to make an argument about morality. Shermer lays out the case of the hows and whys good and evil, explaining from an evolutionary context how it all works. If you are more visually inclined, I recommend watching the Dawkins’ doco “Nice Guys Finish First” where he talks about the role of game theory in understanding behaviour. The doco is on google video so really there’s no excuse bar bandwidth not to watch.
There’s no excuse for ignorance, and there’s even less excuse when you argue from it. Please gain some knowledge before talking, because talking in certainties without knowledge is showing how truly stupid you are. Get a clue!
J@1157,
It seems you are arguing for the “blank slate”, which Pinker criticises, an extreme cultural relativism and human moldability or crushability. There are many nearly univeral oughts identified in cultural anthropology. Perhaps what you mean is there are no absolute oughts? Humans do have a nature which results in some patterns in the cultures they create. While not directly on point, you might find this interesting:
http://www.booktv.org/watch.aspx?ProgramId=FV-2858
I’m thinking the reason he’s so confused about this whole “morals and evolution” thing is that he can’t wrap his head around the fact that there aren’t any physically real “oughts”. He doesn’t understand that there isn’t a particular way things HAVE to be. things simply are what they are, and they can’t (at the moment) be anything else. that is not to say that they couldn’t have been different, but that’s just not how it turned out.
so, for him the fact that the universe is stable is an “ought”, not just the way things turned out; for him, the fact that people are social animals and as such have evolved to cooperate is an “ought”, not the way things turned out to be. basically, he commits a reverse is-ought fallacy. and as such, he is incapable of understanding that there’s no necessity for a reason for things to be as they are.
*facepalm*
here’s a suggestion. don’t assume you understand a debate by reading the last post.
fucking hell… one moron accuses me of the naturalistic fallacy, another accuses me of “tabula rasa”
*headdesk**headdesk**headdesk*
africangenesis
Interesting qualifications, and rather non-committal. You do know this supports Jadehawk, right?
Jadehawk wrote “[…]
but there’s no universal “ought” outside of what human societies make it”. Perhaps :)
Excuse me, but you believe in a God who pretended to sacrifice Himself to Himself in order to save His Creation from Himself… you think sending bears to murder children is moral… you claim to be able to show the “impossibility of the contrary” of God being the foundation of reason, and then fail to do anything of the sort, but claim victory anyway…
And you think we are irrational?
If there is such a thing as a spirit of irrationality, no matter what its name is, it is you who are deluded by it.
Facilis has also tried to take on Aron Ra at YouTube. It can at Aron Ra’s 14th Foundational Falsehood Of Creationism pt 2.
There’s no shortage of morons and not much of a limit on the errors they can produce. So you’d better get some padding fitted, because you might end up with quite a set of matching morons and bruises.
The Lords Of Chaos perhaps.
Now I don’t know what Jadehawk’s intention was, but I want to distinguish this comment in regard to universal morality. The key difference between a blank slate argument and an argument against universal morality is that morality need not be in every person to be free from a blank slate. Morality memes can be different in different areas just as different genes suit different environments. Thus people living in Finland would be subject to different pressures and a morality for that society would adjust based on those compared to a tribe in South America.
By all accounts we are hard-wired for certain behavioural presuppositions, and that can be accounted for through evolution as we can see these same hard-wired behavioural patterns present in other social creatures. But by no means can we call these behaviours universal as we can’t seem to get a universal consensus on what does constitute morality either within a culture or between cultures.
oh hahahaha, a lamb to the slaughter.
I’ve learned more about Dante (in Aron Ra’s comments he goes by
facilisdescenus, which links to the same blog he references here) than I want to. He claims to be 20. He’s got a good head-start on the hypocrisy, as judged by this gem:
it’s not the abundance of morons, it’s that they are capable of accusing me of two diametrically opposed and contradictory fallacies for the same set of statements
I half expected the blog to implode in a matter-antimatter reaction after that one.
or is that explode…? I need to brush up on my Trek science, methinks.
Hard to say, Jadehawk. A transporter accident might explain it adequately.
Whereas, absurd though it is, that’s not so surprising for me. I’ve seen it too many times before. It’s more the sort of thing I’d expect from those kinds of people. (Including, of course, the fact that most of them don’t even know the proper meanings of any buzzwords they parrot at you in accusation.)
StarTrek does both matter+anti-matter explosions and the occasional implosion. It can even fracture time into lots of itty bitty bubbles. It’s not constrained by reality (or science).
well, it’s never happened to me personally before. It indeed felt the way I’d imagine a transporter accident might feel :-p
…or a rip in the time-space-continuum
Jadehawk, It is this text that suggested the “blank slate” at the cultural or herd level at least:
“3)the evolutionary reason for “morals” is the improved survival of the herd, i.e. society; therefore, the rules that make a society flourish ARE its morals; whether they are or should be optimal to your or mine understanding of what is moral is a different and more complex question”
It suggests some sort of group selection without a genetic basis. Of course, what holds a society together may be mere techniques such as terror, which if explicitly considered or acknowledged might be immoral even within that societies standards. Consider the lower crime rates within totalitarian societies, which might be due to the summary and arbitrary exercise of power, even though the society claims to have procedural justice and rights. So are the “morals” the cultural values, or the techniques of the minority in the oligarchy?
I’d dispute that crime rates were genuinely lower. They’re more likely merely to be reportedly lower, while specifically excluding all the crimes of the state against individuals. Even non-totalitarian governments routinely makes themselves immune from prosecution for their crimes. Diplomatic immunity’s a standard clause too. There are lots of double-standards in societies which allow you to separate what the society really regards as moral compared with what the privileged few are merely getting away with doing (despite people knowing it’s wrong).
@Jadehawk . Please read up on ethics and what the is-ought problem is. It is clear you don’t know what it is.
Facilis,
I think Jadehawk is the one who knows what she is talking about here…Id tread crefully !
Then again,youve already made a complete ass of yourself anyway a long time ago….
How can you KNOW the purpose of logic?
Wait you just said that logic guided your observations. Are you just using circular logic by using logcial observations to prove logic. another thing, you appeal to induction when making such a generalisation. How do you account for induction?
I claim it on the basis of my revelation from God. If you have some sort of objective revelation from Sideshow bob I can examine, we can compare claims and see whose revelation can account for the absolute immaterial ,universal and invariant laws of mathematics and logic.
I was pointing out how AronRa quote-mined St Eusibus and mis-attributed the quote of st. Jerome he put there. i didn’t like that.
(I’m sure you guys wish I pulled by transcendental argument on him)
Facilis the fallacious is back with his failed arguments. He has nothing. His god doesn’t exist. That must be the starting point for any proof of god. God doesn’t exist. He just doesn’t get it. God never had a chance with Facilis the Fallacious and his logic.
‘
Call the logic cops! Major logic crime being committed.
Facilis. Quit asking questions. You are the one trying to prove something, therefore we ask the question. Lay out your definition of the terms, your postulates, and then lay out the logic to get you through to the end.
What you have now is this: I presume god exists, therefor god exists. If you can’t see the failed logic in that argument, you need another 10 years of schooling just to be able to ask why that is wrong.
Facilis:
You can’t use science to disprove God’s truth any more than you can disprove the existence of PZ Myers by posting here… The very fact that God created a regular universe amenable to scientific discovery and knowledge is why we can use science.
Surely there’s a problem with this reasoning? The problem with using the nature of the universe itself as evidence for God’s existence is that, since we can’t perceive anything outside our own universe, we don’t have any other universes with which to compare it. Thus, if God exists, we don’t know what a universe without a God would look like; conversely, if God doesn’t exist, we don’t know what a universe with a God would look like. So, as I understand it, you’re assuming what you need to prove – namely, that God exists, and that our universe would be different if there were not a God.
I claim it on the basis of my revelation from God. If you have some sort of objective revelation from Sideshow bob I can examine, we can compare claims and see whose revelation can account for the absolute immaterial ,universal and invariant laws of mathematics and logic.
As far as I know, no one genuinely claims to have received a revelation from Sideshow Bob. But there are numerous people who have claimed to have received revelations from Allah, and the Hindu gods, and the Native American spirits, and a host of other gods and supernatural beings – not just the Judeo-Christian God. These religions can’t all be right, since their beliefs are mutually contradictory. Yet they all adduce, as evidence, the testimony of people who’ve received revelations and visions – which makes these rather useless as evidence.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not discounting the possible reality of spiritual visions and revelations. But I’m pointing out that, if they are real, then people clearly perceive them through the prism of their own pre-existing religious and spiritual beliefs – so Catholics see visions of the Virgin Mary, Hindus of the Hindu gods, and so on. Which means that, if there is a real God or divine force behind them, we don’t know anything about Him or what He wants – thus you can’t easily use them as evidence to support a particular set of religious beliefs.
It doesn’t look like anyone here is about to come up with any new arguments. But in case you eventually get around to accounting for stuff, and you don’t feel like speaking to me you can check any presuppositionalist blog (like this blog. Sye TenB in particular who comments a lot on that blog is very experienced with debating atheists and skeptics on the radio and in text using the Van Tillian method and is planning to write a book on the subject.
Watch this debate. It is over 1000 posts of sye pwning numerous atheists at once with the transcendental argument.Its awesome. I hope you can excuse me for being a bit amateurish in my approach.
The debate is in the comments here(http://debunkingatheists.blogspot.com/2008/12/battle-of-wits.html) and here (http://debunkingatheists.blogspot.com/2009/01/josh-responds-to-sye.html).
(Somehow my html links didn’t work in the last post)
Facilis, you never had an argument you could win with. It was always:
I posit god exists
Therefor god exits
Nothing more. If your premise is wrong, as it is (god doesn’t exist), then the conclusion is wrong.
You had nothing, and still have nothing except your delusions. We know that, and we will not follow your tortured and deluded logic elsewhere.
You won nothing except being in the running for the biggest crackpot the year award. Unfortunately for you, there are real crackpots worse than you who post here too.
You certainly haven’t, Facilis. All I’ve seen from you is begging the question and evading questions that’re too hard. Your arguments come down to “God created logic therefore it’s logical for God to exist.” You’ve yet to show how “Sideshow Bob invented logic therefore it’s necessary for Sideshow Bob to exist” isn’t equally true.
There are those of us who aren’t up on presuppositional logic. However, many of us can recognize a logical fallacy, especially when you reiterate it many, many times.
Facilis the Failure @1179 gave it his Pee Wee Herman “I know you are, but what am I?” all, in response to my post @1148. Fallacious took the bait, going all John Cleese in The Argument Clinic Sketch with the points made, as I hoped he would. I tried to make it obvious that I was not only stealing, and running with, Feynmaniac’s terrific headline earlier (because the sincerest form of flattery is theft), I made it pretty obvious that I was cutting and pasting a big block of text. If you mouse over my name in that post, you’ll see that instead of the URL for my own site that I usually post, I placed the URL for the source of the article I cribbed on scientific induction.
Facilis doesn’t like what the Catholic Encyclopedia has to say about logic–he thinks they’re doing it wrong.
Fallacious doesn’t like induction, but if you’ll follow my link and look at the article and those related, one can see that Catholic logicians do not share our Fallacious little friend’s eagerness to dispense with induction:
If those Catholics deny God as the source of logic and reason and God’s revelation, I will freely admit that they are doing it wrong and have fallen prey to lies.
(His site also seems to support my assertion that knowledge requires certitude)
Oh and let me point out that catholics can account for some of the things (knowledge ,uniformity of nature, induction) that I asked ken to account for. He is stealing from the Christian worldview because he cannot live consistently with atheism.
@ Facilis
When will you address the issues Nerd brought up in post #1183?
Until you do that there is no reason for anyone to do anything but insult you.
Stop wasting everyone’s time.
Stop asking questions and start answering them.
Put up or shut up.
Facilis, liar and bullshitter. Still failing introduction to logic. Don’t worry, maybe in another 15 years or so you will actually be able to put a coherent logical argument together that might impress us. But you still won’t be able to prove god, since he doesn’t exist. At best, you can simple say he isn’t ruled out. And by Occam’s razor, non-existence wins.
If those Catholics deny God as the source of logic and reason and God’s revelation, I will freely admit that they are doing it wrong and have fallen prey to lies. (His site also seems to support my assertion that knowledge requires certitude)
Logic is logic no matter whether a Catholic or an atheist is employing it. I successfully demonstrated more dishonesty from facilis, who claims that only theists can use logic right, despite being unable to employ it himself–he takes issue with logic when he thinks I’m the source of the claims, but changes his tune when he finds out the text to which he objected comes from Catholics. Using logic for proofs of god adds nothing to our understanding of the world; methodological naturalism does fine without religious premises, which are both irrelevant and otiose.
Perhaps some day Facilis will learn how to elevate his claims from the realm of discourse, and support his conclusions with evidence, but as facilis has yet to avail himself of ample opportunity, I trust nobody is holding their breath.
Thus spake Facilis the hallucinating loon:
You still haven’t defined what you mean by “accounting” or provided the slightest justification, much less a convincing demonstration, that the “laws of logic” (which you haven’t defined either) require such an “accounting”. Instead, you’ve asserted by fiat repeatedly, as if the weight of an argument were enhanced by repetition, that the “laws of logic” (undefined) require “accounting” (undefined) as if it were a meaningful premise and, further, as if it were some kind of universally accepted axiom. I simply deny this premise as being vacuous gobbledegook, no more meaningful than “snurflegarb requires frobnication”.
Nerd,
Now, now, to be fair Nerd he didn’t just use circular reasoning. He also offered a fallacious Argument from Ignorance :
1. Let P= “God created logic”
2. Assume not P
3. No one can explain where logic comes from
4. Therefore P
I can’t be bothered to read this whole thread, so I’ll post this just incase nobody else has.
Logic actually presupposes the non-existence of god, and unless the presuppositionalist can refute this argument, TAG is obviously false:
Here Martin defends this argument against the objections of John M. Frame. In my opinion, Martin is successful.
I haven’t really done any logical/mathematical proofs since my undergraduate days (math minor, one class short of a double major). So I will bow to anyone with greater expertise (I’m learning a lot reading you guys/gals). But if I can pick his argument apart, it doesn’t say much for his logic.
I give Ken Cope a salute for his trapping of FtF. (Salute)
I’m saluting you right back, N of R; you’re working in science while I’m just cheerleading. I started taking a 4 unit university symbolic logic course last semester, partly to satisfy the quantitative reasoning transfer requirement (I’d like to teach classical and 3D animation and game development in public schools, not just private ones, so I hope to complete my BA while still in my early 50s), but because better symbolizing leads to better problem-solving and simulation; it’s also fun and challenging. Requiring far too much of my time, with heavy loads in 9 other units, and 2 young children, I took the class as preview so I can be a few weeks ahead this semester, and move over to SFSU in the Fall. I already know how to fail at logic; Facilis has never even bothered to try to succeed. None of what I’ve learned in that class was as useful as the standard baloney detection kit from Demon Haunted World. Facilis is just a bag of wind trying to extinguish science’s guttering candle, blaming the darkness on demons.
You’ll have to expand on what this revelation was, and how you KNOW that it was from God, and how you KNOW that it was God who gave the revelation, and how you KNOW the revelation was true…
Otherwise your claim has no validity whatsoever.
Especially since you fail at logic anyway.
Actually, Christianity stole from the pagan worldview, which is obviously true because pagan philosophy predated Christianity. So it is Christians who are the worldview thieves, because they could not live consistently with Christianity.
Good grief, man! The presuppositionalists were Presbyterians, which is to say Calvinists!
Of course they’re not going to agree with Catholics on fine points of theology! They’re both nuts, but they’re nuts in completely different directions!¹ It’s like expecting Lilliputians and Blefuscudians to agree on which end of an egg is correct to crack!
_________________________________
1: Except when they’re nuts in the exact same direction, of course.
*sigh* it’s like trying to argue with the TV.
you know neither what the naturalistic fallacy is, nor what the is-ought fallacy is. stop using term you do not understand. at no point have I claimed that natural = good, only that the ability to distinguish between good and bad is an evolutionary necessity; nor have i said at any point that things ought to be as they are. rather, that some things simply are the way the are, and there is no particular way that they “ought” to be. the is-ought fallacy applies to arguments from tradition, not to natural states outside the human realm
i suggest you work on your reading comprehension skills so that nuanced argument becomes understandable to you. until then, you’ll just continue making an ass of yourself
oh, and it would also help your understanding of the is-ought fallacy if you’d get it into that thick head of yours that you’re the only one assuming that there is a way the universe “ought” to be.
Does Facilis have the record yet for largest number of stupid posts or is it still held by Kenny?
@Facilis #1186
This argument shows the bankruptcy of Sye T’s and Facilis’ VanTillian presuppositionalism.
He can’t back up his claim to “universal unchanging laws of logic” because presuppositionalists don’t use them. They “presuppose” their conclusion. Discussion with a VanTillian like Sye or Facilis is impossible. If there demonstrably are “universal unchanging laws of logic”, then apologists could formally demonstrate them and everyone could use them.
In other words, Facilis, where is your full, formal explication of the Universal, Unchanging Laws of Logic with their rules for inference. Until then, you’ve got bupkis.
Of course, just as no hypothetical syllogism from any atheist could ever be valid.
Hey, look! Revelation from God!
And lo, I did pray unto the almighty God, who knoweth all things, and can do all things, and I asked the LORD, “Oh God, who knoweth all things, doth Facilis speak sooth, or doth he pull that which is false from out of his fundament?” And the LORD did answer me: “Hearken unto me! I speak justified truth unto you when I say, Facilis hath no knowledge of Me or My works. Indeed, Facilis knoweth not true from false, and knoweth not that he knoweth not. He is a fool and a liar, and is like unto the sewage farm, full of stinking shit. So say I, the almighty and eternal LORD, who knoweth all things!”
Well, looks like that settles that.
Of course. Catholics aren’t the right sort of theists. The only right sort of theists are those who think exactly like facilis.
So his sole logical authority is…. himself.
Yet again Facilis the Fallacious drops by to fling shit in every direction without bothering to define his terms. Once again he proves he is too terrified of this question that he cannot even aknowledge its existence.
However the atheist cannot account for the laws of logic in his worldview so he must steal intellectual capital from the Christian worldview.
By what standard of morality do ou think I was dishonest. And how does this standard NECESSARILY apply to me?
No I said atheists deny God as the source of logic and reason but still steal from the christian worldview when they use logic.
How do you KNOW this?
Are you CERTAIN?
I have proven this by the impossibility of the contrary. No other worldview can account for the laws of logic.
Facilis, you have nothing new. Same old shit. And I mean shit. Go away. You lost days ago.
@Facilis
Do you say shit like this to people in real life?
If so do they punch you in the face?
For example.
A normal person: This sandwich taste great.
Facilis: How do you KNOW it tastes great?
A normal person: *punches facilis in the face*
No, you haven’t proven it. You’ve asserted it numerous times and used circular reasoning when attempting to justify your assertions. But actual proof has been sorely lacking.
Your proof is and always has been either “God invented logic so therefore God invented logic” or “I claim it on the basis of my revelation from God.” As I said, bald assertions with not a single iota of proof.
Facilis, your mind in running in a circle. You think you have the ultimate argument to win over atheists. You present it to atheists. They find huge deficiencies in your argument starting with the premises. But you keep thinking have the ultimate argument, so your present it again and again. It gets laughed at and rebutted time and time again. We will go in circles until either PZ bans you for stupidity (very close I think), or you acknowledge our rebuttals of your premises and retreat, for say five years, to change your logic.
@phantomreader
I’ve provided definitions of my terms before
post 559
I’ve also given examples such as the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction. I don’t see why you are complaining (aside from your inability to account for logic and reason within your worldview.)
Facilis presented an argument?
When?
All he’s done is say “God = Logic” and has been having snitty fits ever since we’ve asked him “why?”
See what I mean? Thales, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Solon of Athens, Hui Shi, Gongsung Long, Chandrakirti, Dogen… they all stole their intellectual capital from Christians!
So Facilis, did Aquinas steal it back from Aristotle?
Facilis the Fallacious Fool. You have asserted much, but presented no rational argument. Why are you being so obtuse? Either you are that stupid, or you can’t acknowledge that you are wrong. Guess what? It is one or the other. Decide which it is.
The last time you presented your “proof” in post 559, it was shot down with the observation that the same thing can be said about Zeus, Odin and Vishnu. You’ve yet to show how Zeus isn’t the necessary precondition for logic.
Only when I’m debating atheists. Most of my friends are theists who can account for knowlege and the existence of absolute, invariant ,universal , immaterial entities.
Stanton, Facilis the Fallacious Fool thinks he has an argument. Learned people know better. He’s tenacious, like Stevie on the anti-AGW thread. Neither can acknowledge they are wrong.
Asking for an “account for” of “justification of” the laws of logic puts the person in a self-refuting position, since the laws of logic must first be assumed in order to accept and understand what it means to account for, or justify, anything. This is sometimes called ‘The Fallacy of the Stolen Concept,’ in that someone is claiming to question or reject something which he needs to accept in order to question it.
Ironically, this is what presuppositionalists claim that atheists are doing. But atheists are not questioning the laws of logic. Nor are the presuppositionalists: they are only pretending that the laws of logic should be questioned, in the atheist’s world view, because, without God, nothing can be certain.
But analytical truths like the laws of logic can always be considered certain, because they’re necessary relationships. They’re self-evident truths in abstracted systems with no ambiguity. It’s only empirical claims that will lack 100% certainty — and this is true with, or without, God. In order for the theist to claim to be able to be 100% of any empirical claim (including ‘God exists’), they must claim to actually be God. Which they generally don’t.
So they try to get their by twisting logic, and employing a fallacy. We can answer the demand to “justify logic” by pointing out it’s not a reasonable question. It may look like a reasonable question on the surface, but it’s self-refuting nonsense. And appeals to special revelation don’t somehow rescue it.
I can’t believe this thread is still going. Sorry if my post here has already been said elsewhere (which it probably has.) Haven’t read the whole thing.
Still the FOOL. Yawn. Go away, you are boring and stupid.
I don’t try to win over atheists. Only God and his Holy spirit can change the hearts of the unregenerate sinner. I only present the truth and show the superiority of the Christian worldview.
I have exposed atheism as denying the necessary precondition for logic ,reason and science.
Don’t forget to hi-five the mirror on the way out.
facilius #1218 wrote:
This is interesting. You seem to be claiming here that the laws of logic are entities — substances, beings, or things which exist — and that God is an entity, just like the laws of logic. Or, perhaps, like numbers.
I think you’re reifying abstractions. The laws of logic are simply symbolic descriptions of relationships. If God is real the way the laws of logic are “real,” then you’re not going to be able to talk about God as a person, or spiritual being, or anything. It’s going to turn into a metaphorical placeholder for existence.
Nobody can make sense of the Law of Non-Contradiction getting angry, or the number 5 choosing to create friends for it to love. Be very careful of making category mistakes like that. If this is where your argument goes, God is going to get very silly.
Facilis, you have proved nothing. You failed big time. Your god doesn’t exist. Never did, never will. Time for you to either put up a much better argument that you have so far, or shut up. But that takes balls, which you don’t have.
if this thread was supposed to be an example of the “superiority” of the Christian worldview, I better start deconverting all my friends before they die of brain-rot :-/
Facilis has declared victory and slouched off into the sunset, hopefully never to be seen again.
Dungeon time.
Patricia OM #1233 wrote:
No, I really hope PZ doesn’t put Facilis in the dungeon, and I don’t understand someone wanting him there. He’s not trolling, he’s putting forth arguments, and he’s being remarkably polite in the face of overwhelming numbers. Like it or not, presuppositionalism is one form of apologetics, and it’s not a bad idea to know something about it.
He’s also generating a lot of discussion and debate on a pretty old post. If people don’t enjoy that, or at least find his topic interesting, then what are we all doing down here, in a thread that’s almost 2 weeks old and over 1200 comments? It isn’t blocking the internet.
Personally, I get no satisfaction from seeing someone ‘thrown in the dungeon’ if I think he’s something more than a troll. Facilis is playing TAG, and doing a fine job with his end, considering how flawed the argument is. Everyone has their taste, and what doesn’t interest me interests others, and vice versa.
And I sure as hell don’t need PZ to “save me” from the horrible horrors of having to deal with SIWOTI Syndrome by keeping me safe from temptation.
I like temptation.
Anyone that deluded and repetitive as no business posting here.
You see the thing is, absolute,invariant,universal, immaterial laws make sense under theism, because there is a absolute , universal, invariant, immaterial God as the foundation of reason , that can make these truths known to us.
These things are inconsistent with naturalism.We compare worldview to see which can rovide a rational justification for logic.
oh, for fuck’s sake.
Steve_C #1235
His argument is one being made by some major theologians, and he wouldn’t be so repetitive if he wasn’t being asked the same things by so many people, for so long.
Sorry, but I still don’t get it. When one of the threads starts to bore or annoy me, I leave. Others are presumably being entertained, or enlightened, or enriched, or enchanted — or they’d leave, too. We don’t need a nanny policeman to make sure we aren’t wasting our time. We can figure that out, and police ourselves.
He’s
nottrolling, he’s [not] putting forth arguments, and he’s being remarkablypolite[repetitious] in the face of overwhelming numbers.Far be it from me to dare to revise a post by Sastra, but that needed fixing.
Anybody claiming the turf of logic ought to be able to demonstrate the most elementary grasp of it, but Facilis is arguing only in the sense of mere contradiction, bereft of reason, pining for rationality, pushing up the fallacies. The only reason to send Facilis to the dungeon is for his own protection. Leaving him here to look even more relentlessly clueless is not doing him or his position any favors.
Facilis #1236 wrote:
What you’re calling “absolute, invariant, immaterial laws” are not prescriptive laws, but analytic abstractions describing necessary relationships. They’re not mysterious “entities” floating around in some Platonic Realm of Forms. So they make perfect sense under naturalism. So your argument fails.
Asking for “rational justification” for logic is circular. Bottom line, logical relationships are self-evident. You cannot provide anything more foundational than what is self-evident, or reduce it any further. We don’t need Special Revelation to recognize that A=A, or 1+1 = 2. So that is a fail, also.
Ken Cope #1239 wrote:
Shhh …. he’s about to crack… any moment now … really …
Facilis, being polite:
Why should he bother to post here, since by his definitions, Facilis will never be able to convince anybody who doesn’t already reject reason?
Exactly.
When people change their minds, it’s often because they recognize that there’s a conflict in what they believe, or what they value. Facilis is trying to show the atheists that there is a contradiction in what they believe.
But it works both ways. You’ve just pointed out one contradiction in what Facilis believes. If becoming convinced that God exists is not a rational process, but a mystical conversion, then apologists forming elaborate arguments designed to persuade the atheist that there are internal contradictions in Naturalism have run right into an internal contradiction themselves.
A theist who is very sensitive to the importance of consistency in world view, is in trouble.
Shhh …. he’s about to crack… any moment now … really …
Not the comfy chair?
How, then, did Aristotle, who died in 322 BC, devise the laws of logic that he did? The logic embraced by Christian thinkers until the mid 19th century was Aristotelian, when the modern revolution in logic theory began based on the Enlightenment. Next you’ll be claiming the Bertrand Russell was a Christian.
Your “definitions” are pathetic to the point of being risible. You still haven’t justified your fundamental premise, nor said which logic you mean when you say “the laws of logic” — classical? constructive? modal? temporal? categorical? rewriting? finitary? propositional? predicate? first-order? higher-order? — there are dozens and dozens of logics of overlapping kinds.
And you’ve been told, time and again, that LEM and PBC are rejected in constructivist/intuitionist logic, so where does that leave your, much cherished and touted “law of non-contradiction”? Certainly not absolute, invariant, or universal.
They probably think they’ll get brownie points from God for being “friends” with a retard.
And you embarrass yourself and your worldview by parading your ignorance. You should heed the advice of St. Augustine quoted earlier.
But what metaphysically underpins these laws under naturalism? what makes them hold true? And how under atheism can we have knowledge of universals, Sastra?
The only way to have knowledge of universals is to actually have universal knowledge (i.e. be God) or have revelation from a being with universal knowledge. Neither of these options are open to the atheist. How can the atheist make claims about universals?
Quick question. Are the laws of logic arbitrary? If I posited another standard of logic how would you know if it was false?
@ Sastra #1240:
You say that so casually, presumably quite unaware of the hideous amount of contrived formal mathematics which eventually got attached to proving the counting numbers! Mind you, any “special revelations” involved were all entirely human-to-human ones. Like finding out that whole new branches of geometry in mathematics opened up if one didn’t accept the last and suspiciously unconnected axiom/postulate of Euclid.
None of which saves Facilis from his self-refuting (and long ago refuted) nonsense though.
If I posited another standard of logic how would you know if it was false?
But Facilis does employ another standard of logic, i.e., logic in the not mode.
Here’s an analogy. When the board is set for chess, one way to lose the game is to move the pieces as if it were checkers or, in keeping with the strategies Facilis employs, tic-tac-toe.
There is no such thing as the laws of logic. There are many logics and each has its own axioms, rules of inference, etc. One could invent a logic with arbitrary laws, but it would be unlikely to be useful or to meet the criteria that logics are expected to fulfil in order to be considered logics.
There is no “standard of logic”. Logics are evaluated according to certain criteria such as completeness, consistency, soundness, and decidability — they either have these formally-defined properties or they don’t. A logic itself cannot be “false” any more than a car can be “false”, it can only meet, or fail to meet, the criteria that it is intended to meet.
Facilis #1246 wrote:
The laws of logic are underpinned by necessary relationships in patterns. They hold true in analytical, abstract systems, because we define the systems, and describe them in a language without ambiguity. If A is not Not-A, then A is not Not-A. Understanding this “universal” doesn’t require any knowledge of the entire universe. It’s not that kind of “universal,” like claiming there are stars all over or something.
Whether the laws of logic also hold true when applied to specific objects or relationships in the universe is a different matter — one that requires empirical investigation. We can’t have certainty for empirical, evidential, claims. What is A, and what is not-A, is not always going to be clear in a fuzzy world.
No, the laws of logic are, by their very nature, necessary, not arbitrary. The word “arbitrary” only has meaning when contrasted with what is necessary. “Arbitrary logic” is an oxymoron.
As for other standards of logic, I’m not sure. I think that if the proposed system of logic lead to internal contradictions, then it would be either false, or incomplete. But I know that mathematical systems often have this problem, so I’m not going to try to rule on that.
Jebus, Facilis is still not making any points, but also still here. Guess what Facilis, we will never expect your flawed premise. It makes no sense. The first flaw in it is that god doesn’t exist. It goes downhill from there.
You already did (albeit in the sense of it being “logic” only in your own imagination – and that of the fellow fool whom you’re plagiarising) and we already showed you how we knew it was false! Eg for myself, that was in #683 and #844 and various other posts.
The key to (most of) us recognising that you’re wrong is in the way you continually contradict and refute yourself with your “logic” (and that you usually aren’t even capable of recognising the fact). Genuine logic doesn’t bite itself or fall apart that way.
Can you first demonstrate how God is the be-all and end-all of logic?
No-one expects the
Spanish Inquisitionfoolishness of Facilis!I think you must have meant “accept” though.
No, that’s inconsistency, not incompleteness; and you can’t say that a logic is “false” any more than you can say that a card game is “queen of diamonds”.
</pedant>
Before even that, facilis needs to define what he means by “logic” (including examples*) – because so far all his (non-)attempts have been abject failures.
* Ideally this would be to demonstrate he knows what he’s talking about rather than just parroting buzzwords he’s come across elsewhere. However, judging by his previous failures, in reality it will just be demonstrating that he doesn’t and he is, respectively.
facilis, Sideshow Bobs tells me (apparently I’m his chosen one) he created the universal laws of logic and reason. He makes no other claims to be responsible for anything else.
You wanted a revelation; you have one. Now you can justify why your claim is any more valid than mine.
Emmet OM #1255 wrote:
You’re probably right here: as you can tell, I’m not well versed in formal logic.
However, as I understand it, Facilis’ argument is not one that relies on the fine technical points of various systems of logic. It uses what can be called “common sense” logic, because it’s part of an apologetic that appeals to the ordinary believer. So I’m arguing at that level.
I’m making SEF, and you, and others wince, probably. But I think Facilis’ argument fails at a basic level.
However the atheist cannot account for the laws of logic in his worldview so he must steal intellectual capital from the Christian worldview.
Actually, the Christian cannot account for the laws of logic in his worldview so he must steal intellectual capital from the non-Christian worldview.
And I have exposed presuppositionalist Christians as being thieves and liars.
Wrong. Absolute, invariant, universal, immaterial laws make sense under atheism, because there is no absolute, universal, invariant, immaterial God as the foundation of reason that can make these truths known to us. These things are consistent with naturalism.
Which no Christian has ever demonstrated.
Which no Christian has ever demonstrated.
We can infer a provisional knowledge of universals from the provisional impossibility of the contrary.
So when we take a postulate, A=A, and observe that the contradiction, A≠A, does not make sense.
If you have a counter-proof of A not equaling itself being true, demonstrate it.
You are correct. (Why do I always see those mistakes after hitting post. *headdesk*)
It’s really sad, there’s been almost 100 posts since my last foray into this thread and [sic]fail still hasn’t said anything of worth. [sic]fail, show that the laws of logic are transcendental, don’t just merely assert it. Show why they need a god, and why that god has to be the Jew Zombie. Asserting it over and over is not an argument, and you aren’t being clever asking “how do you KNOW this?” Face it [sic]fail, you aren’t going to convince anyone here until you can answer why and how logic needs a logic giver and why that logic giver is the Judeo-Christian construct of God.
Quite the pathetic one facilis is
facilis – something for you need to remember:
ASSERTION ≠ EVIDENCE
It’s kind of important.
Thus spake Sastra:
I’m neither a logician nor a philosopher, but I know one thing: our brains are woolly and imperfect instruments, and “common sense logic” — as used by Facilis, antivaxers, 9/11 troofers, and UFO nuts — is a poor tool for deciding truth and falsehood. This is precisely the reason why the scientific method is so incredibly valuable and useful: because it allows us to reliably generate new knowledge in spite of the woolly-ass way that our brains work.
I think you’re being extraordinarily and unnecessarily generous in saying that his argument “fails at a basic level”. It doesn’t even reach a basic level: with apologies to Pauli, he’s “not even wrong”.
By way of analogy: Facilis goes to a casino, and sits at the blackjack table. He announces that there are “absolute, invariant, and universal rules of the card game”. “Which card game”, the other players ask, “Blackjack? Poker? Bridge?”. “The card game is played with red and black cards and some pretty coloured ones”, he indignantly insists. Bemused, the other patrons tell him that there are many different card games and ask him for one of his rules. “A jack is worth more than a five!”, he proudly announces. “Not in the game of twenty-five”, one of them says. He goes on, “The card game is still played with 52 cards!”, to which another replies, “many are, but not all: canasta is played with 108 cards.”
Someone taught Facilis to play snap, so now he thinks he can “play the card game” in a casino. Pharyngula might only be poker night in PZ’s place, but you don’t need to be at the high-stakes table in Monte Carlo to see that Facilis is laughably ignorant of cards.
He doesn’t want to play poker or blackjack. He doesn’t want to learn how. All he wants to do is stand at the table shouting “snap” and gleefully declaring himself the winner of every hand that’s dealt.
Some of the players think it’s amusing; some of the players think it’s annoying; but it’s only a matter of time before the pit boss boots him out.
I just don’t know how he can think that answering any question with “how do you know this?” is a suitable reply. Especially when he is positing the unknowable as an answer. [sic]fail doesn’t know that god exists, [sic]fail cannot know that god exists, [sic]fail is making assertion after assertion and thinking that he’s clever for doing so.
Science works on degrees of certainty, it does not work in absolutes. But in the 400 or so years of the scientific method, society has advanced far more than the rest of human history combined. That says something about the nature of certainty in the unknowable. God is a non-answer and positing a deity as an answer has not worked for anything in the past. As soon as we embraced the fallibility of knowledge, we progressed. Why the fuck would we then go back to absolute certainty for a worldview? [sic]fail here is doing nothing more than mental masturbation, promoting a worldview without merit. When religion has the track record that science has in terms of prediction, then it might be worth a shot. Until such time, it fails even the most basic test of falsifiability.
That was by far the most powerful moment of the show, and for a series packed with profound insight and key moments that’s saying something! Fantastic series, a landmark of television.
It doesn’t get any better.
Emmet, #1264
Good analogy. In between receiving my revelations from Sideshow Bob I’ve been trying to come up with a good parallel to illustrate just how foolish it is for facilis to argue a presuppositionalist position with atheists.
On that: I guess that, in a way, it’s an okay argument – if you’re arguing with other Christians. Christians aren’t going to doubt the assertion that, if there are ‘laws’ as facilis describes, they come from God; ergo their responses can’t totally undermine it in the way ours do.
No doubt this sort of thing provides countless hours of competitive sophistry and intellectual tapdancing from practitioners of the different subclasses of apologetic ooga-booga. But to anyone who doesn’t begin the argument agreeing that God is real and responsible for the creation of the universe then it’s a complete non-event.
Because we can not only reject the assertion that the rules are divinely inspired but also the assertion that, even if they are divinely inspired, there’s no more validity to the claim that it was Yahweh than there is to the claim it was Sideshow Bob, we can kick him in the crotch with both feet at the same time.
Yes, but only for the exercise, for it matters not whether the kick is aimed at the crotch, or the boot to the head–Facilis offers only a target-free zone; nothing of any substance with which to connect.
#1236
No, they don’t. They only make sense for atheism and for the sort of deism where the god is outside the universe setting it up like a clockwork toy. Theists require their god to be personally intervening to tinker and fulfil their wishes (hence praying etc at all). Which means the laws can’t be absolute, invariant and universal if the god gets to break them.
You still haven’t addressed my previous point (in #844) about the stupidity of you including “immaterial” in there.
A mere assertion from you for which you have provided no evidence at all, let alone enough evidence to distinguish which god.
And yet, as mentioned before, you (and other theists around here) are the ones most evidently lacking in any such knowledge and ability while many of the atheists have and display it in abundance. By your worldview, given the claims you’ve made about a Satan, logic would have to have been the invention of a Satan (more powerful than your god) and only bestowed on the ones you claim to be his people.
Of course, since you’re pretty much stark staring bonkers, it doesn’t really matter that you can’t follow your own claims to their logical conclusion. Those of us who are sane, atheistic and much more proficient at logic than you, don’t believe in Satan any more than in your god or anyone else’s gods.
Untrue. They’re completely consistent with naturalism. They’re fairly essential to it. We wouldn’t be able to work out via science how things worked if they didn’t work. If gods and demons really kept interfering by causing stuff to be non-absolute, non-invariant and non-universal (in ways other than that which revealed further aspects of natural laws), we’d know they were there. They don’t, so we can be almost certain they aren’t. While they don’t, they definitely don’t matter (more like the original Buddhist view of deities having their own affairs which were nothing to do with humans).
Naturalism wins and supernaturalism loses every time.
@ Emmet #1255:
I disagree with you there. I think the nature of the definition of logic is such that something is not logic if it displays such inconsistency and, further, that a legitimate way of expressing that (at least in normal language) would be to call it false. Another, more recent, way of doing it would be to use scare-quotes to talk about the false form, eg Facilis’ “logic”.
In a meta discussion of hypothetical logics, being tested for their actual logic via self-consistency and consistency with reality (or some subset of it), one could have situations where:
If logic F is true, then X would be the case. But (on observation) since X is not the case, logic F is false (is a false logic, is not logical etc).
@ Emmet #1263:
Whereas, I see Facilis more as an example of fractal failure – being wrong at every possible level of examination (from the most general overview down to as detailed a view of his nonsense as one cares to get).
Speaking of logic, I’ve pointed presupps to this post
by MarkCC before.
Exactly, and it’s surprising that facilis is attacking naturalism given he’s using a computer. The triumph of the scientific method and all he can do with it is repeat “How do you KNOW?” over and over. Naturalism and the scientific method have brought us medicine, electricity, moving vast distances, climate control, centralised food distribution, bigger crop yields, put men into space and deep underwater, etc. All triumphs of an uncertainty. Naturalism has such a good track record that it’s embarrassing to watch [sic]fail attack for the sake of a failed ideology.
I’m not a logician, but I’d tend to agree that, informally and usually at least, a consistency proof is so fundamental that, after the basic logics, you simply assume or gloss over it when you’re studying a new logic for the first time. You could, with some terminological contortion, simply define a logic such that it is termed something else prior to a consistency proof, but it’s not something I’ve ever seen. Indeed, AFAICT, there is no widely accepted definition of what a logic is. The only thing I’ve ever seen that directly addresses that question is Mossakowski et al’‘s 2005 What is a Logic? where they argue that a logic is an equivalence class of (Goguen-Burstall) institutions. It’s not something I’ve followed up on, there may be other stuff out there, and I don’t claim to understand much of it, but, even in that paper, where the notion of a logic is rigourously defined, I’m pretty sure that consistency is not entailed by the definition (in other words, the definition admits logics that are not consistent); rather, consistency is a notion “on top” that applies specifically to theories, not logics. I don’t know for certain, but I think it is most likely possible in principle to have inconsistent logics even if we usually deal with consistent ones. I’ve little doubt that somebody, somewhere, has a PhD in inconsistent logics. I don’t want to sound over-confident of my position: I’m not a logician and I remain open to correction.
Ugh, no. I disagree. I think it’s a gross abuse of terminology, and I’ve never heard anyone say that a logic is “false”. To my ear, it sounds like “chess is win” or “poker is four of clubs”, but there are so many grammatical heresies (e.g. “… happened on accident” and “I should of done…”) that are acceptable somewhere in the English-speaking world that it might be perfectly acceptable where you are. I can’t argue that, so I’ll take your word for it but, just so you know: I think it’s an abomination!
:o)
I noticed PZ said something in a recent post.
You see atheists are like the patient in that story
As you see no amount of medical evidence could convince the deluded patient he was not dead because of his presuppositions. In the same way, one will not be able to convince an atheist throught rational arguments and evdence because of his presuppositions. Even if I did succeed in converting him, he would hold his reason as a higher authority than God and would be engaging in idolatry.
The Christian’s presupposition is that God is the source of logic and reason. The atheist’s presupposition is Satan’s lie that God is not the source of logic and reason.
We both have our presuppositions , but the thing is to see which can account for induction, knowledge, logic , reason. I must show the atheist that his autonomous reasoning cannot account for it and get him to accept theonomous reasoning before he converts. Of course if I show the atheist that his autonomous reasoning is wrong and he wants to continue in sinful rebellion against God , there is nothing I can do.
@Wowbagger
Unless you can produce some sort of objective revelation that all of us here at pharyngula can read for ourselves and examine to support your claims of subjective revelation, I would suggest both you and sideshow Bob consult some mental health professional.
@Emmet
I am proposing a new system of logic. the new principal axiom is “everything emmmet says is wrong”.Do I win the debate? Is this a valid system of logic? If so by what universal standard of logic can you say I am wrong?
Facilis, you are total failure at logic. You have nothing to show us. Your god doesn’t exist, so that explains your total failure. And you will fail each time you try because your god doesn’t exist. PZ will ban you for stupidity and godbotting (amounts to the same thing in your case) if you make a nuisance of yourself. Bring it on, as you have already lost because you are such a dumb shit. If you were smart, you would go and stay away.
Well geez, now you not only have to prove that God exists, but Satan as well. You got your work cut out for you.
Just as no amount of reasoned argument and rational evidence can convince you that you are wrong because of your presuppositions.
Which is exactly as self-contradictory and delusional as an obviously living man having the “presupposition” that he is dead.
The atheist’s presupposition is the simple rational truth that God cannot be the source of logic and reason.
You’ve seen the rational arguments; you’ve seen the arguments from scripture; you see them all, and yet scream out that, no, you’re still right for no other reason that you’ve “presupposed” that you’re right.
I suppose it makes you feel good to do so. Well, masturbate away.
You have not accounted for anything.
Which no presuppositionalist has done, and you certainly have not done.
This is one of the few correct things you’ve said in your flood of deluded assertions.
Only the theistic worldview can account for science and knowledge and induction that were used to make this computer. Naturalism cannot account for it and is so self-defeating.
I feel much the same way when atheists try to attack God by using the logic and reason he gave them.
Are you admitting atheists cannot make knowledge claims?
NaturalismGod and the scientific method (that God gave us) have brought us medicine, electricity, moving vast distances, climate control, centralised food distribution, bigger crop yields, put men into space and deep underwater, etc. All triumphs of an epsitemicuncertainty (given to men by God). Naturalism has such agoodbad track record (as it is unable to account for logic and reason )that it’s embarrassing to watch facilis attack it. [Everybody knows Naturalism is] a failed ideology.Don’t worry. Fixed it!!
Facilis, your god doesn’t exist. What part of that statement do you have trouble with? The concept of god is needed for nothing in the world. You are just delusional to think otherwise. Take your faith home and leave it there. Your god only exists between your ears.
I admit that I’ve come in late to the argument, but basically Facilis’ argument is that he’s postulated all these big things like universal truth and logic and induction and what have you, and is blithely asserting that some entity for which there’s no evidence must be behind it all because that entity just HAS to be behind it all. Did I leave anything out?
Fucking hell Facilis. At least try your crap in another topic.
This one is painful to come back to. Especially when it’s the same shit over and over.
Rey, you got it. He’s trying to prove god by positing god in his suppositions. We saw the fatal fallacy in his logic, but he fails to see the same. I think PZ is going to have to eventually plonk him, since he is too stupid to go away on his own.
Through God’s common Grace.
The only thing you missed is that the entity just happens to be his version of god/jesus.
Facilis, your god doesn’t exist, so Aristotle did it on his own. But then, you knew that. Quit with the god delusions. It just makes you look stupid.
F:
And yet another repetition of your mantra.
Saying God accounts for those adds nothing but an unnecessary (useless) and unsupportable presupposition; this is evident since reason etc. existed long before monotheism.
Reason tells me that accounting for something does not mean proposing an imaginary, non-explanatory cause for that something.
Examples:
Do you account for why some children are born deformed by saying “because of God”?
Do you account for why the sky seems blue by saying “because of God”?
Do you account for why there are atheists by saying “because of God”?
Yet you claim to account for logic, reason etc by by saying “because of God” :)
It’s a vacuous accounting in every case.
the scientific method (that God gave us)
Look, pissant, it’s too late in our acquaintance for you to start NOW, trying to win us over with jokes. But I’ll grant you, that’s a good one.
@facilis
Unless you can produce some sort of objective revelation that all of us here at pharyngula can read for ourselves and examine to support your claims of subjective revelation, I would suggest
bothyou,sideshow BobYahweh and Jesus consult some mental health professional.You really don’t get it, do you? Anything you can use to justify your claim can be used by me to justify mine. How is your bible any more an ‘objective revelation able to support a claim of subjective revelation’ than anything I say Sideshow Bob’s revealed to me?
Short answer: it isn’t. Ergo, my claims are are no less valid than yours; you can’t dimiss them simply because you don’t like them. You’re like a kid playing make-believe who demands he’s the only one who’s allowed to have pretend laser guns and that everyone else can only have pretend bows-and-arrows.
So, with that in mind, here is the Undisputed and Completely True Revelation of Sideshow Bob™:
‘I, Sideshow Bob, am responsible for the laws of logic and rationality. It is also important to note that I do not consider it rational, logical or – most significantly – just to send bears to kill people, no matter how offended my prophet may get from being insulted’
While I’d love nothing more than to have bears tear apart the people that piss me off, Sideshow Bob is a far more just and loving deity than your god.
So, examine away.
*head desk* *head desk* *head desk*
He will never get it and doesn’t want to.
Facilis,
Alright then, what is the source of God?
God can’t be the author of logic and reason, since without logic you can’t say anything about god that is true. Therefore truth and falsehood come before god. I pointed this out before but Fallacycilis just ignores this disproof.
Slightly OT, but I notice the new software appears to be handling the long thread better than the old one. Now, IE6 at work on the other hand….memory problems up the wazoo.
Not according to the 1 Corinthians 1:21. You contradict the bible, thus refuting your own argument.
However, your presupposition contains the multiple logical fallacies of assuming your conclusion, and bare assertion, and false dilemma, and negative proof (and probably more if I had more time to analyse it further).
Since your argument’s premises are logical fallacies, it is thus self-refuting.
Oh, and then you go on to commit Ignoratio elenchi .
Yeah,
facilisfail-at-this does seem to spend a great deal of time with his fingers in his ears, determined to keep out anything that doesn’t fit with his very limited theory. But, like I mentioned before, he’s obviously getting more material from someone.Pity it’s as flawed as everything else he’s written.
@Sastra
Are you saying logic exists because we defined that way?
Facilis, your god doesn’t exist. Period. End of story. So logic is a human construct. What part of that do you have trouble with? You seem remarkably dense. And you expect do anything here?
@wowbagger
My objective revelation is here
http://net.bible.org/
And of course, it is obvious that you just typed that. I do not waste my time trying to disprove subjective revelations or else I would have to spend all my time in the mental hospital.
He’s beginning to sound like a disease (after all that mutation) rather than just a simpleton.
Ah, quoting a book that is proven fiction. Just the way an idiot proves his point. Facilis, your god doesn’t exist, the bible is a work of fiction, and you are a batshit stupid delusional person. All we need to know.
I fail to see god’s name on any patents or listed as author of any papers.
facilisfail-at-this wrote:Of course I just wrote it. How, exactly, does that invalidate it? People wrote the bible based on what they claim is a revelation from God; I wrote mine based on what I claim is a revelation from Sideshow Bob. What’s the difference?
You do know what ‘objective’ means, don’t you?
Implying that you already spend some time in the mental hospital? Well, that would explain a lot.
But here’s something you still haven’t managed to grasp, even after all the posts on the topic: all revelations are subjective. You might have a point if all religions, independent of each other, posited an identical god. But they don’t. There are as many (if not more) distinct, unique gods as there have been distinct cultural groups.
There are more than 38,000 varieties of Chrisitianty alone. How does your ‘objective’ revelation account for that?
Seriously? The Bible? Weaksauce on a failburger.
That “revelation” is not yours; you did not experience it directly. Indeed, you just contradicted part of it above @#1287!
And of course, it’s exactly as “objective” as the Revelation of Sideshow Bob (blessed be his delightful singing voice).
As Sastra pointed out any argument that seeks to “explain logic” is circular. In order to “explain” you need rules of reasoning, i.e logic.
Facilis,
How do you account for the fact that your “objective revelation” contains several contractions? For example, Genesis 1 says humans came after animal while Genesis 2 says first it was Adam, then animals, than Eve.
And why does the bible keep repeating the same stories over and over with different details? What’s with these doublets, and triplets? This redundancy and self-contradiction hardly seems like the work of someone responsible for logic.
F:
Yes.
From my link @1273:
— begin quote —
Logic, in the sense that we generally talk about it, isn’t really one thing. Logic is a name for the general family of formal proof systems with inference rules. There are many logics, and a statement that is a valid inference (is logical) in one system may not be valid in another. […]
So what is a logic? A typical formulation would be that a logic is a formal symbolic system which consists of:
* A way of writing a set of statements (the syntax of the logic); and
* A system of rules for performing mechanical inferences over those statements. […]
Given the right set of premises, you can prove almost any statement; given a choice of both logics and premises, you can prove absolutely any statement.
— end quote —
OK – that’s a sure sign this thread’s far too long. Can’t you hear my laptop screaming? Have mercy.
Do you think PZ would start us a new thread titled ‘place to go to take turns kicking
facilis’fail-at-this‘s stupid presuppositionalist-nonsense-touting ass around’?Wowbagger,
That would be fun! Of course, all of the arguments against facilis have been made, made well, and made repeatedly. So could be boring…
or could go off on interesting tangents…
Crapshoot.
SC,
Yes, that’s true. But I dislike the idea of letting him think he’s won by stopping the refutations. Plus I’m enjoying my newfound status as the One True Prophet of the Church of Sideshow Bob, and am so very glad it was Him that chose me and not Prom Night Artie Ziff, a miniature of whom also adorns my desk…
I’ll agree this thread is getting too long. Either open a new thread or plonk Facilis. I think stupidity would reign over several threads as Facilis is not very bright, but is very stubborn. So I slightly favor the plonk. My two e-centiducats.
Hey, Nerd, Feynsteinmaniac, has Facilis demonstrated how God = logic yet?
No, he’s just trying to justify his continued irrational posts here. Like we think his opinion is anything other than something to be mocked. Reminds me of Silver Fox in that stupidity.
PZ, I beseech you to close this thread. It only lives because of the facile one.
Think of the poor abused laptops!
I agree with closing the thread, but not plonking facilis.
His quantum stupidity provides a small amount entertainment for those of us who haven’t encountered presuppositionalist ‘arguments’ before. And he’s on another thread at the moment trying to explain how modern genocide and slavery is bad but the genocide and slavery his god commands isn’t.
It’s a laugh riot!
Not only laptops, my poor vintage Dell (2000 or 2001, IE6, 512 MB RAM) at work had a memory fault trying to open a Pharyngula thread today. I had 32 windows open before I could get the browser shut down.
Nerd, why are you using such outdated equipment? I mean, to hear our good friends the denialists talk about it, everyone like you who’s employed by ‘Big Science’ is corrupt and raking in the thousands of dollars of hush money to lie about climate change.
I know you’ve got to keep the Redhead happy by buying her pretty things, but surely you could spare some of your ill-gotten, AGW-faking bucks on some new hardware?
Wowbagger, I’m just rolling in the dough from the AGW payoffs, as you can tell from my hardware. :-) My newest car is 10 years old, my home computer is almost 8 years old (heavily upgraded though, running Mac OSX 10.5 easily). I recently had to replace a microwave after 28.5 years of service. But, zero debts other than the mortgage on the house.
The Redhead has me well trained. She buys what she wants, within limits, and I pay for it.
What are you talking about? The computer is a product of purely naturalistic achievement, naturalism can account for it because it only exists because of naturalism. You keep saying God gives the laws of logic but you haven’t gone beyond assertion. Saying God made the laws of logic is like saying God made humans out of clay – just asserting it doesn’t make it so and continuing to assert is like asking why we don’t see monkeys turning into men. Actually learn about the universe and stop with your philosophical masturbation. The only person who is impressed with your work is you.
If you want to prove that God is the giver of logic, then you need to show that God exists. Show evidence damn it, your continued assertions are growing tiresome.
Firstly, anyone can make knowledge claims. Theist or atheist, in the modern sense of the world knowledge or the certain sense you are using. You don’t need a deity in order to speak with certainty, and I know plenty of atheists who do work in such certainties (ironically they are all philosophers.) Me on the other hand, I don’t pretend to be absolutely certain because I do get things wrong and a certain mindset closes me off to the possibility of fallibility. I like the fact that I could be wrong, that knowledge is tentative and I’m fallible.
As for the scientific method, it was a man-made enterprise. Why is it that the holy books ascribed to God are not only devoid of science, but scientifically wrong on basic facts? Surely if the Judeo-Christian construct of God was the God of science then the population of Jews should have lived in a techocracy and been the dominant tribe of the middle east. Instead in ancient times it was the Greeks and Egyptians who ruled the world in knowledge and technology. Then after those empires were destroyed, we look to the golden age of Islam for importing the knowledge of the Greeks, Egyptians and Hindus into Europe. It’s only after the enlightenment that Christian Europe came into it’s own in terms of knowledge; deriving the knowledge ascertained by ancient civilisations and furthering it.
There’s simply no case that knowledge or the pursuit of it is the gift of the Judeo-Christian God. Rather it was the endeavour of men in many cultures to know, to understand the world around them. You belittle the achievements of your fellow man.
hehe, how pathetic. It accounts for logic and reason fine, you asserting it doesn’t is like asserting that evolution didn’t happen and concluding that only the bible can account for life. Face it [sic]fail, you don’t have a platform to stand on. Science works, excluding the supernatural from the equation works, science is a candle in the dark in a demon haunted world. If you want to attribute that to God, that’s your prerogative. But don’t pretend that an ideology that excludes the supernatural can only be the gift of the supernatural and argue as such. It only serves to show that you are wearing very thick Jesus glasses.
It seems his argument simply is that atheists cannot account for it therefore it must have been the Jew Zombie. And he hasn’t shown why naturalism cannot account for it, he’s just repeated his mantra and any time someone questions him on it he responds (with what he must think is a work of intellectual genius) “how do you KNOW?”
Ah, heads I win, tails you lose.
The thing is to see which can account? Awfully convenient for Fallacious, who couldn’t string 3 premises together in an effort to offer evidence for any of them; it’s our problem that we don’t just bend over and acknowledge the righteousness of the child-murdering psychotic that Fallacious worships.
Fallacious parrots pre-packaged presuppositionalism in an incompetent effort to weasel out of making even a token attempt to offer, in the words quoted by Fallacious from PZ, “a single scrap of the kind of rational evidence for a god that would convince a rational human being of normal or better intelligence,” because all of his offerings, so far, consist of bad form, bad content, or, as exemplified uniformly by the Fallacious Freak Show that we can’t tear our eyes away from, both.
When Fallacious nearly approximates the form of an argument, it reeks in its combination of bad form, and bad content:
All logical arguments are a creation of the Christian God.
This argument is a creation of the Christian God.
Therefore, this argument is a logical argument.
At the very least, its form is as invalid (and in the same way) as this one:
All arguments that refute Facilis are a creation of Satan.
This argument is a creation of Satan.
Therefore, this argument refutes Facilis.
So far, the only thing that Fallacious has shown is that theonomous reasoning, whatever the FCC that’s supposed to be, is clearly reasoning in the “not” mode.
It’s been fun, but those are all the talking points from the last conference call I was on with Satan.
In fact, there’s a crapload of quotes in both the old and new testaments, plus the behaviours and attitudes of the assorted churches over the years, which indicate that the Judeo-Christian god and those who claim to know what he demands of humanity are firmly against knowledge and the pursuit of it.
Right from the start – Adam & Eve were punished for seeking knowledge. It’s been the metaphor for religion from the very start: unless you have the church’s permission, you aren’t to learn anything other than what they want you to; if you do, you’ll be punished.
Presuppositionalism is self-defeating.
1.) If God is freely responsible for the laws of logic, then he could have made them other than they are.
2.) Therefore, He could have made the law of noncontradiction false.
3.) Therefore, He could have made it to be true both that God exists — and that He does not, and that the laws of logic depend upon Him — and that they do not.
4.) But that entails that it is possible for God not to have existed, and for the laws of logic not to have depended upon Him.
5.) But if the laws of logic depend upon God, then they must do so necessarily.
6.) Conclusion: the laws of logic can’t depend upon God.
Beautifully argued, but you know he’s going to claim that I make that look reasonable, and you’re really “stealing intellectual capital from Christianity”, blah blah blah…
I note that he persists in his amusing blasphemy that I am stronger than God.
Well, maybe I’m just letting You win. For now. But just you wait!
You know, I’m fairly familiar with the bible, and I am pretty sure that nowhere within it is it claimed that I am the source of all reason and logic, nor that I am the source of all objective morality.
Presuppositionalists seem to like John 1. Of course, the fact that John did not mean “logic” when he wrote “logos” appears to escape them, as does logic itself.
I mean, really, [disobedience → sin → death → sacrifice self to You → resurrection → salvation] does not exactly flow from the first-order predicate calculus.
Really? Hold on, let me check.
¬∀xP(x)⇔∃x¬P(x)
¬∃xP(x)⇔∀x¬P(x)
∀x∀yP(x,y)⇔∀y∀xP(x,y)
∃x∃yP(x,y)⇔∃y∃xP(x,y)
∀xP(x)∧∀xQ(x)⇔∀x(P(x)∧Q(x))
∃xP(x)∨∃xQ(x)⇔∃x(P(x)∨Q(x))
P∧∃xQ(x)⇔∃x(P∧Q(x)) (where x must not occur free in P)
P∨∀xQ(x)⇔∀x(P∨Q(x)) (where x must not occur free in P)
Huh. Looks like you may have a point there…
Stanton,
Are you thinking about my cousin “Feinstein maniac” who has a crush on Democratic senator Dianne Feinstien? I’m named after this guy (a good way to remember is Feynmaniac sounds like “fine maniac”, not a coincidence).
As for facilis, I don’t think he deserves to be plonked just yet (he needs a warning however). His ‘logic=God’ arguments have failed and seem to be an insult to both logic and God. Quite frankly when I read his “reasoning” I’m just reminded about how strong the ability to rationalize is in human beings.
facilis,
Your arguments have failed and you are just repeating them over and over. Come up with something else. Here’s a suggestion. A universe with: (1) an regularly intervening God, would surely look different than (2) a universe without such a being. So, it stands to reason if we lived in (1) there would be physical evidence not present in (2). Show us physical evidence we live in (1).
Also, I would like to remind you that our host has stated the following:
Insipidity – “Being “tedious, repetitive, and completely boring; putting the blogger to sleep by going on and on about the same thing all the time”
Stupidity
Wanking– “Making self-congratulary comments intended only to give an impression of your importance or intelligence”
are high crimes here. Please keep that in mind.
Kel,
I’m sorry Kel but when it comes to being wrong and fallible facilis has you beat.
Something which I don’t mind losing, though it is very frustrating that facilis just can’t see how pathetic his arguments look to anyone who isn’t him.
Kel 953, thank you.
Owlmirror 959, that really is funny.
Are you guys going to close this thread? I have been gone too long then. I have been reading some stuff, but I’m not done yet. If you guys leave, maybe let me know where you go. Oh, and I’m not old. I’m 30, been married 2 and a half years, planning on having a baby as soon as we get insurance.
I can’t discount a Creator just because it might complicate things. It seems to me that things get more complicated the more we know, every answer just opens more questions.
Scientifically, to address the idea of a Creator, we would need to have already taken all the previous steps until we get to that point. Like-we could not address the idea of a cell before we know about what they make up, or something like that.
If someone decides to go through the journey of questions and problems step by step and wait to believe that a Creator exists until they reach that point of the journey, then that is obviously there decision.
I guess I just have had good results from believing in God. I guess I believe in God because faith makes sense to me, and I’m better off, I believe everyone would be.
The issue of closing this thread is due to size, it’s not to stifle conversation. Usually when one thread is closed another is open so that the conversation can continue. A large thread slows down the server.
Ok. It is getting kinda slow. I thought it was just my computer.
To bad you weren’t higher…