Philosophy Now Forum

Belinda wrote: ↑Thu Oct 16, 2025 6:28 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Oct 16, 2025 6:23 pm

Belinda wrote: ↑Thu Oct 16, 2025 5:57 pm
I think you are mistaking quoting which is allowable, with plagiarism which is pretending to be the originator of the material.Chat does not pretend to be the originator of the material , but is the tool which collects the material requested by the user.

Don't be silly. "Quoting" is done by "citing," which means acknowledging the source, so the source can be checked. ChatGPT mashes things, without citations, and then presents them as if they were fact. And I note you ignore ChatGPT's admission of outright fabrication and production of false information, references and statistics. Any academic who did these things, and was caught, would be censured or fired. Somebody who knows how real academics work knows all this, too.

ChatGPT says ChatGPT lies and falsifies. That's such a circular admission it cannot be untrue. For if it were, ChatGPT would just be lying again...this time, lying about its own unreliability.

That is why , like you do when you read the bibliography at the end of a book, you should ask ChatGPT to reveal its sources.

Concerning your last paragraph, Immanuel, if ChatGPT got a bad reputation for consistently lying or hallucinating this would be bad for business.

Goff’s claim that life after death and a cosmic purpose are ‘a reasonable hope’ does not therefore stand up.

God’s performance in this world does not give me confidence as to the quality of the next one.

After all, we cannot imagine that, in creating the world as we know it, he wasn’t trying hard enough or was deciding not to exercise the powers that would be necessary to create an afterlife – an afterlife, incidentally, not available to someone like me, whose gaps in understanding do not seem to be shaped to accommodate a god.

A limited God who has the power to create a universe, but who is unable to protect its most innocent inhabitants from suffering that’s ended only by death, cannot be relied upon to deliver on the promise of an eternal life of unalloyed joy.

iambiguous wrote: ↑Wed Oct 22, 2025 8:46 pm Excusing God
Raymond Tallis highlights the problem of evil.

Goff’s claim that life after death and a cosmic purpose are ‘a reasonable hope’ does not therefore stand up.

Tell that to the approximately 2.6 billion Christians around the globe. Those folks either convinced by others or by themselves that a God, the God, their God is the one and the only truly divine path to moral commandments, immortality and salvation. Trying to grapple with God and religion philosophically is just not going to appeal to many of them. They have faith in God. That comforts and consoles them. Really comforts and consoles them.    

God’s performance in this world does not give me confidence as to the quality of the next one.

Again, though, with so much at stake, it's not the quality of the next one that counts so much as the fact that it doesn't all end in oblivion. 

After all, we cannot imagine that, in creating the world as we know it, he wasn’t trying hard enough or was deciding not to exercise the powers that would be necessary to create an afterlife – an afterlife, incidentally, not available to someone like me, whose gaps in understanding do not seem to be shaped to accommodate a god.

And around and around and around we all go speculating about life and death. In particular, the part where we grapple with connecting the dots between them. For some, of course, the gaps here will be considerably longer than for others.  

A limited God who has the power to create a universe, but who is unable to protect its most innocent inhabitants from suffering that’s ended only by death, cannot be relied upon to deliver on the promise of an eternal life of unalloyed joy.

Unless, of course, in ways that no "mere mortal" can possibly grasp, He does work in mysterious ways.