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@Alec
The government is objective and is therefore more likely to make a decision on the basis of logic and morality. They are also less likely to convict the wrong person. It is better if punishment is left to the government for felonies like murder.
I think you are mistaken about this. One source says there have been 164 "exonerations" since 1973. The Innocence Project has used DNA testing to prove that some people on death row could not be guilty of the murder that they were convicted for. There are too many innocent people executed for me to favor the death penalty.
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@keithprosser
Pathetic.
You don't have to leave Earth to experience the same awe you felt as a kid in church. Just get a neuroscientist to poke the right part of your brain and - viola! [sic] - instant awe experience.
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@keithprosser
You are right about the default state being stasis. I hadn't thought of that. Feser's argument implicitly denies that. (Change happens; we never see anything change without something else changing it; we can't have an infinite chain of changers; therefore, there must be an unchanged changer.)
I always approached it with the idea that literally everything has been in motion since the Big Bang. Yes, the BB is a mystery, but so is God, AND the BB is only one mystery. If you choose God, you end up with many mysteries (God, a supernatural world, many supernatural entities, etc.), so use Ockham's Razor and settle for one mystery.
Now, as you pointed out, I can say, "When has there ever been stasis?"
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@3RU7AL
Please explain why "An FM must be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and have personality".Why would anyone take this statement at face-value? WTF mate.
Feser gave his reasons:
“But the Unmoved Mover, as the source of all change, is the source of things coming to have the attributes they have. Hence He has these attributes eminently if not formally. That includes every power, so that He is all-powerful. It also includes the intellect and will that human beings possess . . . so that He must be said to have intellect and will, and thus personality, in an analogical sense. It must have them in the highest degree, lacking any limitations inherent in a material being. “Hence He not only has knowledge, but knowledge without limit, being all-knowing.” It has no negative features or defects. Those would be privations, absence of a positive attributes and the FM has all attributes fully actualized. All-good in an analogical sense.”
omnipotent: source of all change, of things have the attributes they have, including every power, in the highest degree
personality: must have intellect and will
omniscient: knowledge "in the highest degree"
omnibenevolent: good in the highest degree; can't be bad or evil because those are defined as lack of goodness.
It's all bs of course, but it fits together logically. He knows how to construct an argument.
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@3RU7AL
From an earlier post:
C.S. Lewis did it better. [LINK] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9fR1vSxNEQ
I don’t think so. Sounds like bs to me.
Parmenides explains this better. Congratulations, you have now disproved the concept of FREEWILL. [LINK] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNjmPyHIoOc
This speaker talks too fast for me.
WTF mate. Please expose your axioms. [LINK] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZMwKPmsbWE
This links to “The End of the World.” I don’t see the relevance.
Humans are defined by their limitations. If a god has no human limitations, then it is not "like a human" and cannot be said to have specifically human characteristics (like intellect and will and personality and gender). [LINK] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-gHgcmFB6Q
This links to a Rick & Morty Cartoon, “We need a hang glider.” I don’t see the relevance.
Unactualized actualizer. [LINK] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJDYPZYMt0Q
This link to Rationality Rules is relevant but includes unnecessary stuff that makes it tedious to listen to. I'm working on it.
Or ultimate observer. [LINK] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C5pq7W5yRM
This one, Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism, is interesting. I’m still studying it.
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@keithprosser
Fundamentally Feser/Aquinas is based on Aristotelian physics and so their arguments' defects are the defects of Aristolelian physics, in particular that a force is required for sustained motion, which we now know to be false.Once 1b ('Something must move them')is falsified the rest of the argument is rendered irrelevant.
Thank you, too. This is good stuff.
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@3RU7AL
Bravo! You have given me lots of things to study. Thank you.
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@3RU7AL
Feser’s / Aquinas’ arguments for an “unmoved mover.” (Last Superstition, pp. 95-99)
1. Feser deduces the existence of a First Mover (FM), because
a. Some things move.
b. Something must move them.
c. There cannot be an infinite regress of movers.
d. Therefore, there is a FM, whose existence does not need to be actualized by anything else.
2. A First Mover must be itself unmoved, unchanging, and unmovable.
a. If it was moving or changing, i.e., going from potential to actual, something outside it would have to be moving it. Then it would not be the first mover.
b. It must also be unmovable to avoid an infinite regress of movers. So the FM must be fully actualized, with no potential. Having no potentiality, it could not possibly move or change.
3. There can be only one FM.
a. If there were more than one being of pure actuality, there would have to be some way to distinguish between them; one would have to have some feature the other one lacked.
b. To lack a feature is to have an unrealized potentiality.
c. A purely actual being has no unrealized potentialities, by definition.
4. An FM must be immaterial.
“To be a material thing entails being changeable in various ways.”
5. An FM must be eternal.
Beginning or ceasing to exist would be an instance of change. It is outside time and space.
6. As “the common first member of all the various essentially ordered causal series that result in these instances of change, the Unmoved Mover is outside and distinct from them all, as that which sustains the entire world in motion from instant to instant.”
7. An FM must be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and have personality.
“But the Unmoved Mover, as the source of all change, is the source of things coming to have the attributes they have. Hence He has these attributes eminently if not formally. That includes every power, so that He is all-powerful. It also includes the intellect and will that human beings possess . . . so that He must be said to have intellect and will, and thus personality, in an analogical sense. It must have them in the highest degree, lacking any limitations inherent in a material being. “Hence He not only has knowledge, but knowledge without limit, being all-knowing.” It has no negative features or defects. Those would be privations, absence of a positive attributes and the FM has all attributes fully actualized. All-good in an analogical sense.”
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@3RU7AL
I won't watch the video. I will copy some arguments from Feser's books, which I think are hard to beat, and post them here.
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@disgusted
Sounds like a toast. If so, I'll raise a glass.So to a universe. So to gods.
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@keithprosser
Why is it unfortunate?Unfortunately, I agree.
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@keithprosser
re: everybody uses red.
okay... I'll switch to green.
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@keithprosser
Triangularity is a universal. It applies to many instances in the real world. In my view, triangularity as such does not exist except as a concept in a mind. It is a definition for triangles. If a shape meets the conditions of the definition, then it "has" triangularity. It really means nothing other than "this shape is a triangle because it satisfies the definitive requirements as set forth by the concept of triangularity."
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@keithprosser
Yes, and I am a conceptualist.
The examples I prefer to work with are the color red and numbers.
The way I see it, the color red is a purely perceptual artifact, available only to those entities (such as humans) with the ability to perceive the wavelength of light associated with the color red, and present what we call red to the perceiving entity. Thus, if no such entities exist, red ceases to exist. Of course the wavelength of light associated with red could continue to exist, but that is not the same thing.
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@3RU7AL
Feser is a considerably more sophisticated philosopher than Zacharias.
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@keithprosser
@3RU7AL
You just copy and paste the text you want to quote, then highlight it, then hit the " button right above the text entry field.
Thanks again.
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@keithprosser
Thanks. How do you get the blockquote from another post imbedded in a post. Do I need to use HTML?
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@3RU7AL
See my post to keithprosser at 9:51am.
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@keithprosser
“A conceptualist like Locke regards universal essences as entirely the product of the human mind. ‘... the essences of the species, distinguished by different names, are ... of man’s making’ ... But this sort of view is incoherent, and for reasons that also undermine the nominalist view that universals are mere artifacts of language. If we say that our concepts and general terms reflect nothing extra-mental or extra-linguistic, then we shall have to provide an account of how they are formed in a way that makes no reference to mind-independent and language-independent universal essences. But this is not possible."
Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, 45-48, 168-171, 211
Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics, 223, 225
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Tricksy indeed. The realists I run into are Aristotelians and scholastics of the Aquinas variety. Their arguments are mostly air-tight (they've been perfecting them for hundreds of years). I must find a way to deny their premises. It seems so obvious to me that their supernatural world and the inhabitants thereof are, um, @#$%!. But I need logic too.
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Etrnl Vw: I won't be shy after I get some interaction going. Today is the first interactions I have had.
keithprosser: I have no problem with 'none of your business' or apathy. I'm here mostly to learn. Like how to defend conceptualism from realist arguments.
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@EtrnlVw
Thank you. I'll try to stay polite. Sometimes I tit-for-tat but not always.
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I'm sure you all know that I am new here. I read some debates and votes and forum posts before starting myself to post. I just learned that no one else on this page has any profile info. Why is that?
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@keithprosser
I agree with you that "there is a language problem here."
One problem is that we sometimes use dark and darkness as nouns, when all we mean is that no light reaches there (where it's "dark").
Such words have their uses in thought and language, and so exist for us in our minds and our linguistic expressions and nowhere else.
This view is called conceptualism, and I am a conceptualist. Big deal, right?
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@keithprosser
As we use the term, darkness is a universal, created by human minds.
There exist real places which receive no light. We call them dark to differentiate them from other places that do receive light.
We also use the term darkness to refer to what those lightless places have in common.
Darkness itself does not exist outside human minds and human language.
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@Tradesecret
How would I argue against this?
I could say that Evil exists, and that Good is the absence of Evil. An all-powerful god created evil, so evil is the standard.
or,
If specifically the Christian god,
God said that he was responsible for evil (Isa. 45:7). So he is not perfectly good.
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