RC:
This is my final response to your cavilling about God here. Henry's right: this thread was started by him, for the topic above. I am going to honour his wishes and revert to that here. Here, this discussion amounts to a mere "red herring," and I will jump at no more here.
Nevertheless, lest you think I had any fear of answering, or that your devastating rebuffs had magnificently "struck me into dumbness," (to quote the Bard), I shall give you one final answer below. It shall have to suffice for you.
RCSaunders wrote: ↑Mon Jan 31, 2022 5:31 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jan 31, 2022 12:35 am
RCSaunders wrote: ↑Sun Jan 30, 2022 10:56 pm
No! "We," don't. That's your false premise based on nothing but your own superstitious belief.
No, it's based on the impossbility of an infinitely regressing chain of causes -- a mathematical certainty that requires no reference to belief in anthing but maths.
More reification! "Maths," can only describe countable or measurable attributes of things that actually exist. There are no, "maths," except as concepts in human minds. You really have a problem with floating abstractions.
You're incorrect.
Mathematical properties never purport to exist in a nominal way...they exist as adjectives. And to complain that you can find no concrete "red" or absolute "blue" does not count as any argument against colours; for they, too, are adjectival, not nominal.
But adjectivally, mathematical quantities are very real. A "two" may never exist on its own, but "two sheep," "two aqualungs," and "two jelly beans" all genuinely share the adjectival reality of "two-ness."
And better still, numbers are remarkably concrete as adjectives. "Redness" and "blueness" admit of degrees and shades. But 2 is two. And 2+2 will always equal 4, no matter what anybody says.
So it's no case of "reification." A "reification" is something that becomes only apparently objective as a result of a process like longevity or general acceptance. But 2 is II, is two, is deux, is dos, is **. And no skepticism on your side changes that.
So a proof against the idea of an infinite regression of causes that appeals strictly to the absolute regularities of mathematics, is indeed a powerful one. In fact, I would suggest it has no rational objection to it.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Jan 30, 2022 9:03 pm
The second law of thermodynamics is actually an additional reason for believing in a Uncaused Cause.
That is your mistaken mystical view of the nature of cause (as if it were something that made things be or happen).
I said no such thing. What I said was...
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Jan 30, 2022 9:03 pm
For it shows that at one time, there had to be a singular, massive infusion of order into the universe ...
And you tried the very lame reply,
More reification! "Order," is not a, "something." You don't know what order is.
If it were true that you could not know what "order" is, then you could not say there was any such thing as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. For that law is a claim about "entropy," and "entropy" means,
" lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder." (Oxford)
So your appeal to the Second Law of Thermodynamics would sum up as,
"A law we don't know the meaning of says something against Theism..." Not a great argument, I think we can both see.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Jan 30, 2022 9:03 pm
The state of the universe cannot, in that sense, be "perpetual," simply because the universe is a contingent ...
What you mean by, "universe," is obscure. It usually means, "
all there is," in which case it could not possibly be contingent on anything else, because there could not be anything else.
I'm referring not to the expansive definition, but to the common one: the realm of the physical.
And your critique is that since God exists within the universe, He, like anything else, would have to be a caused being. But the fallacy is in the premise: God -- even considered just as a concept in which IC believes but RC does not -- denies that God is a piece of furniture within the universe defined as the material-physical realm.
If one understands the term "God" to refer to "The Supreme Being" and "The Creator of the Universe," then one is already positing the existence of a Being beyond and transcending
the physical-material universe.
The important point is simply this: there is no aspect
of the concept (I'm not requiring you to believe in it, here, just to consider it as a concept) that makes the idea that "God has to have a cause" logical. It's clearly a demand that is not required by the concept itself, and in fact, which the concept itself denies.
Anyone who understands, therefore, what is meant by "God" does not think of some contingent being bound within the confines of time and space, or beholden to the regularities of a merely physical-material universe -- a universe which all Theists believe He created in the first place.
But, having answered your off-topic stuff now, I'm going to go back to the matter of the "wrongness" of slavery. (Further discussion of God should be referred to the appropriate thread, not here, as Henry has rightly pointed out.)
Have you got anything interesting on that?
