To me the most damning thing about modern apologetics is that it exists. I'm an historian, and the word "apologist" is in my field regarded with a certain degree of sceptical distaste. It carries with it a tacit admission that the apologist has a particular idea in mind which they wish to defend. Whilst this is not inherently bad, and in some cases can be a good thing (sticking to your guns sometimes allows you to penetrate down to the truth), but quite often it means that they've developed some romanticised or personalised emotional attachment to a particular notion or idea. Which when trying to determine the truth of something, is inherently bad. If one feels the need to look over the many wars of conquest of Rome and try to seek justification for them all, then fine. Good luck. I hope you find something we missed. But if you then ignore all of the extant evidence indicating that quite a few of them were fought for politics, personal advancement, or just plain greed, then I'm going have to say you're full of shit. So when I hear that there's a bunch of people trying desperately to bend words into many convoluted shapes and screens for their god to either bend itself or hide behind, the very idea that that is necessary is an inherent indicator of potential nonsense.
Bingo. Apologetics is the opposite of scholarship because it begins with the conclusion and seeks/distorts evidence to support it. Please demonstrate that the god of the bible exists and that the bible is a reliable source of information. Just barely into genesis and it's time to close the book.
Anyone who wishes to defend something is an apologist. Atheists are apologists of atheism. Apologia, the original Greek word simply means to give a reasonable defense. Everyone does that. Christians, for example, are one of the groups in the world that actually use the word. You've simply attached your own stigma to the word. But the stigma doesn't matter, the actual definition is what matters.
@@War-Daddy no. What matters is how everyone regards the use of the term. Definitions don’t get you anywhere when you’re the only one in a crowd screaming out pages from the dictionary.
"C'mon, are you genuinely skeptical of everything that you taste, touch, see and hear, and experience?" I'm open to the possibility that any experience might be illusory, yes.
@@TMMx in the video you said science is just observations of phenomenon. But if we can’t trust our observation to be valid or true, then that makes knowledge impossible. Or at least that how it comes across to me
@@TMMx “beyond the senses” would insinuate that you can trust the senses, but didn’t you just say you can’t? So I think if we can’t trust senses to be 100% accurate, then we can’t have any knowledge at all, right?
Prepsuppositional apologetics is in direct contradiction with epistemology. The argument falls apart when you point out that the apologist does not trust his own judgement and only trusts the judgement of a higher being. In this sense, knowledge cannot be contrived and life becomes an autonomous and arguably meaningless existence. Ultimately, taking this position, a huge dilemma comes up with the fact that an apologist admits they don't trust their own judgement, yet they judge that there must necessarily be a god that exists and that all judgements should be contrived from that god, but how can you trust that judgement since you don't even trust your own judgement?! Presuppositional apologetics isn't intelligent, it's just hilarious.
Tom Anderson 81 Islam, Christianity, Judaism dont believe in empirical Gods. They are all adherents of Classical Theism. They all have their own their own dogmas that follow though.
I think the main issue when debating presuppostitionalists is the presupposition itself, which has the obvious drawback of effectively making any debate meaningless. For example: Syes' main premise is "You need God in order to know anything", which essentially means "I am right, you are wrong". If his opponent brings a good counter-argument, Sye can simply repeat his first premise and end the argument right there. The mere act of participating in a debate with a known presuppositionalist is essentially the same as allowing it. Allowing presuppositions creates a dilemma; if we allow any one side to adopt a presupposition as their main premise, we allow an unfair advantage, the extent of which renders the very debate futile. A similar, equally stupid situation appears if we allow both sides of the debate to employ contradictory propositions as presuppositions, since neither side would back down from their first premise, no matter what arguments they face. A debate is like a game of chess that can only provide an actual winner if both players abide by the same set of generic rules. But since most creationists realize that a fair fight is one they're almost guaranteed to lose, they're not likely to comply.
Isn't the presupposition argument begging the question? Since the arguer begins their first premise with what should be the conclusion of their final premise? It seems intellectually improper for someone to say that Logic, Math and God are basically the same thing, and by using Math or Logic to disprove God you prove God. This is arrogance and ignorance boarding upon the obscene.
"It really doesn't sound like you know what you're talking about." A lot of people have the misconception that science tries to find the truth of objective reality and find it strange that in reality science is only pragmatic and tries only to find ideas that seem to be able to predict experience. But do you think Hawking is misinformed about what science is?
The theory of evolution is the most applicable to the real world, because it predicts what we experience when we look at fossils and genetics better than any other theory.
It is *impossible* to doubt your own mind exists, because attempting to do so would be demonstrating that you have a mind. Logic itself is simply a description of valid and non-contradictory forms of thought. Physics is a description of uniformity of nature. We can trust our senses because not doing so would be self defeating. We can confirm things internally and externally. It's the theist who borrows from a secular philosophical perspective to observe the Bible and construct a belief set from this observation.
Sometimes we find ourselves thinking things that we later realize just don't match our experience. Since that's the case, I don't see how we can be sure that what we believe right now isn't something we will eventually realize doesn't describe experiences quite the way we thought they did. I believe what I believe right now because it seems to match my experiences. In the future I may have experiences that don't match those beliefs and I'll have to change what I believe.
You can't argue god into existence. It's existence or non-existence is independant of all pre-suppositional sophistry. I need evidence to believe in a god, not argument. So far I've seen no evidence.
frank theriault Explain to me exactly what "evidence" would be wholly removed from logic. Is that not the very picture of confirmation bias and subjectivity? Furthermore, charges of "sophistry" always much more justifiably fall on the heads of atheist rationale for logical reasons. Since logic always culminates in theism and not atheism, that just tells us that the atheist is only willing to use logic to the point before it culminates in theism and then argue in a circle till he's blue in the face. Sounds like intellectualism and scientism, but not logic nor truth. THAT sounds like sophistry to me. Plus the ever irrational TheMessianicManic did not even refute "presuppositional" apologetics in this video despite the fact that he called his video "Refuting Presuppositional Apologetics."
frank theriault Lol. How foolish, if you show me that you hate logic, as you have already suggested by your first comment, then that tells me that you don't even know how to discern what "evidence" is in any objective way. Why don't YOU offer your evidence AGAINST God, and let's see where the LOGIC of such a claim takes you ULTIMATELY.
TruthUnadulterated frank theriault Silence. Lol. This is how we show certain atheists for being all talk and intellectualism as a mask for their overly proud and emotional-based core.
TruthUnadulterated Yeah, silence. Because I was doing something called "making a living"... Look, I don't hate logic. It's great for deciding issues such as ethics or morality or philosophy. But if I want to decide if something exists I look for evidence. Which you, it seems, are unable to provide to support the existence of your god. Speaking of which, I don't have to disprove any god or gods. If you want to believe in the supernatural for any reason that's your business. Far be it from me to stand in the way of any comforting fantasies. But if I were to prove there's no god how could I do it unless I know which god I'm disproving? Care to elaborate?
I disagree with this being the line of reasoning you should follow with a presuppositionalist, because you're not calling them out on the biggest set of assumptions they make: 1. Insert some argument for some supernatural lawgiver 2. The law giver is a god 3. This god is singular. (Or a trinity, depending on who you ask) 4. This god is all powerful 5. This god is all knowing, all loving, all... everything, perfect in every way. Whatever perfect might mean 6. This god is a god we know and have talked to in the past. 7. This god is the christian god of the bible, specific to the church and belief system of the claimant. Disregard all other gods that fit into the above moulds, including all gods that are worshipped currently, were worshipped and have yet to be proposed. This presuppositionalist nonsense hopes to bamboozle you with point 1, and fails to address in any way the remaining assumptions, preying on the general cultural acceptance that talking of "god" assumes all of these, when it does not based on the definitions defined in 1.
"Rational debate would be impossible if laws of logic were descriptions, because the two opponents could simply pick different standards for reasoning." I've never been experienced being free to "pick" what does or does not make sense to me. The law of non-contradiction seems true because when I encounter contradictions, I can't make sense of them. The law describes a barrier to my understanding. Whether that barrier exists in my mind or is a property of the universe is not something I know.
Am I the only person amused by the fact that wearing a black hat in front of a black background gives the impression that the top portion of your head is missing? Great video, as always. :-)
Which one is it? Do you claim you can be certain or not? -What is absolute to you? -What is your standard of truth? -What "comes along" to "dispel" certainties? Truth? -Are you certain about being uncertain?
"How do you know your logic (reasoning) is valid?" Because it gives me EXPLANATORY and PREDICTIVE powers. And also because I have converging data sets (i.e. multiple senses and other people arriving at the same conclusions.
Make sure you add that you are absolutely certain you exist (even if we live in a simulation you still experience existence). Sociopathic presuppositional con-men get stopped in their tracks by the self-authenticating Primacy of Existence. Models that have explanatory and predictive capabilities based on converging data sets reproduce existence most successfully. The axiomatic Primacy of Existence accounts for knowledge and our survival shows that our reasoning about what we know is valid. And just like that presuppositional apologetics is over before it began.
Also concerning absolutes, I am absolutely certain that I am not omniscient (all knowing). Because if I was omniscient I would know I was omniscient. As I do not know that I am, by definition, I can be absolutely certain I am not omniscient.
To hold *any* meaningful thoughts, let alone discussion, you must first presuppose your ability to reason. To even assume the existence of a god, you must *first* presuppose this, without which any notion of such god is meaningless.
I'm not entirely certain what you mean. If the origin of the human mind is entirely natural, then evolution provides a perfectly sufficient explanation for where it came from. Heck, I'd argue it provides a better explanation, as it also helps explain why our intuitions break down so catastrophically when we leave the realm of moderate sizes and speeds. If your issue is that it doesn't 100% *prove* the starting presupposition, then tough. The only way to do so would require starting *without* the presupposition of reason, which would render any attempt at proving *anything* meaningless. So if this was your issue than I disagree, Christian presuppositions *cannot* account for it. No presuppositions that start here (which happens to be every possible presupposition I can imagine) can. At best it can provide total *belief* in such, but such a belief could not be sensibly defended. I'll assume you're not just taking issue with approaches or worldviews that leave room for uncertainty, so I'm afraid I really need you to elaborate on your contention.
A) How do you know that what you experience is true to it's nature so that you may compare to what you remember? Also, how do you know that your memory contains truth; meaning true knowledge? B)How do you know that other people valid senses and therefore true knowledge? C)How do you know the information you have is true, meaning not incorrect, and how do you know that the test results you are gathering are being received through your senses with 100% confirmed validity?
That depends on how define the "self". If you define the self as that which experiences things, then even if those experiences are illusions, the self must exist simply because if it didn't, there wouldn't any experiences at all, not even illusory ones.
Crikey. The laws of physics -- or nature in general -- constitute observable and consistent ways the stuff in material reality behaves and interacts. They are not separate entities of any kind, certainly not abstract pre-existing statutes.. It is the same flawed logic as insisting the mind is more than, and separate from, the summation of what the brain does interacting with reality.
I don't know that they are rules though. They seem to work on my experience now, but I don't know whether they still will tomorrow. I may be mistaken about whether logic (or what I think is logic) really governs my experience.
You don't sell faith; nor could it be bought. Ephesians 2:8-9 "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." Jeremiah 29:13 Titus 3:5
+Casey Dunks +Blake R This is how TMM leads his life, that is, irrationally and inconsistently because he has no choice as a self-described atheist. Yet *no matter what* he refuses to question his atheism. This is how the proud hearts of all who call themselves atheists are exposed. He condemns himself. Consequently if he should stand before God to make his case, he will have none, because he would have to rely on logic as an _a priori_ guarantee of any case he might make, which of course entails the existence of God from the outset. It's sad, really. Yet look at how many of his subscribers have gobbled up his bad thinking anyway judging by the thumbs-up to thumbs down ratio. Wow!
+Blake R If truth is a label we apply to statements that accurately correspond to reality, then to deny truth would be to deny the notion that one could make statements that accurately correspond to reality. The guy in this video didn't say anything about whether it's possible to make statements that are true, so could you clarify what you mean when you say that he denied truth? I think what you meant to say is that he denied that people can be absolutely certain of what is true. That would only be a contradiction IF he was claiming to be absolutely certain that absolute certainty is unattainable. Since he didn't claim certainty about anything, I don't think there was any contradiction.
Did you use your theological worldview in order to be able to trust your brain? Or did you trust your brain in order to obtain your theological worldview? In the former...how does one have a worldview prior to trusting their brain? You couldn't have a worldview without trusting your brain. In the latter...how does one trust their brain in order to gain a correct worldview? You claim you can't trust your brain to gain a worldview. So how do you as a presupp overcome these problems?
That depends on whether there is an objective reality that exists independent of my subjective experience and whether my subjective experience is a part of it, so I don't know and I don't know how I could determine.
The laws of logic simply describe what we find we can think or can't think. Whether my thoughts reflect any underlying reality is not something I know. When I use logic, all I'm doing is staying inside the boundaries of what makes sense to me. I'm not assuming any kind of transcendent truth.
I know we are, and we are all sinners. Thank the lord for scripture, his word. So that we can use his teachings to live like him so that we are never forsaken with the help of the Holy Spirit, a part of God in which guides us to him and gives us our conviction.
If the deity listens to prayers and "sometimes" acts upon them, then when you tested that hypothesis, sometimes the prayer would come true and sometimes the prayer would not. But even if there is no deity, sometimes you'll get what you pray for and sometimes you won't. Unless the deity was at least to some degree predictable in its behaviour, its existence would be indistinguishable from its non-existence, and hence, useless.
In most cases, the question of whether reality exists is of no practical consequence and can be safely ignored, but I wouldn't say it's useless. I think it's good to keep it in the back of your mind to keep you from becoming dogmatic about any particular belief.
Prediction is important component to the scientific method, but not all there is. The conceptual model, or mechanism is an integral part of theory. Ultimately, theory is what allows for prediction but also provides a format for iterative refinement through new types of testing. The goal is that theory provides accurate prediction because the conceptual model is inherently correct (even if incomplete). Otherwise, theory would be mostly sets of good fit statistical models - which they never are.
It's easily tested. When you speak or type words in statements, you are operating based on a universal, metaphysical standard, because in statements you either affirm or deny propositions, which is in itself an appeal to universal logic. Do you understand? An example of this is when you make any statement, any, you are by such appealing to the Laws of Logic, like the Law of Non-Contradiction (look it up or read the definition I provided).
"We are all born knowing God; yet many deny him." You are choosing to deny him. "God will never forsake us because he loves us. He will always give the opportunity to learn his word and to know christ. It is up to that person when the opportunity arises if they want to choose sin or him." You are choosing to refuse his grace.
"I know I am certain because to know anything you must start with God. " Why start with the Christian god and not with Allah, or Vishnu? "God's word and what he reveals to us innately, revelation, is true because he is omniscient." Yeah, but how do you tell the difference between that which is revealed by god and that which just looks like it is revealed by god?
So, tell me, how do you "know" or determine what reality actually is such that your senses or thoughts/models are infallible? Do you use fallible sensory inputs/modalities? Fallible computational systems such as brains? Do you rely on other fallible systems to provide you with infallible information, such as other humans?
Hello TMM I am wondering what source you used to say that science is based on Phenomenological Epistemology. I would like to use that source in a video. Thank you.
In the first chapter of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking said that a scientific theory “is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean).” Like phenomenology, science brackets out the question of whether its observations or models thereof have any noumenal reality.
Like I said, our senses can be mistaken sometimes, but just because they are mistaken sometimes that does not mean they are mistaken all the time. We all experience a moral duty, you feel this at times when you encounter a situation and you feel obligated to do the right thing. There is a right way and a wrong way, and we have all chosen the wrong way before, but we have chosen the right way as well.
"We all experience a moral duty". Well first that depends on how you're defining morals and morality, and second I'm fairly confident that neither psychopaths nor sociopaths experience this concept.
A refutation can also explain why an argument does not prove what it sets out to prove. I don't see how anyone has proven that we do or even can know anything to be absolutely, objectively true.
I think it is true that I'm having an experience. I don't know if it is an illusory experience, and hallucinatory one, or a real one, but I don't know how to doubt that it is one that I am having. However, since that truth is one that, as far as I can tell, only applies to my subjective experience, I don't see it as an objective truth.
I'd say most efforts to refute presuppositionalists are waaaaay to over-engeneered (virtual reality and what not). It's much simpler. Presupositionalists don't even understand (well, they don't really understand a thing, but anyway) they are cornering themselves - I don't need to prove, I know anything beyond "I think, therefore I exist", where they need to prove: 1) world outside my mind exists, 2) they exist in this world, 3) there is a god or the God in this world, 4) they have received a revelation from this god, 5) the revelation is true and not a lie. As far as I understand, this video kinda says the same - we don't know, and we don't need to.
Did not know that :) I was merely talking about that the simple fact is it takes time for our cells to react to stimuli, process, etc. It takes time for our neurons to fire, and time for them to recover. During all of this, we "miss" many photons, vibrations, etc. because these all can happen at rates quicker than processing at time asynchronous to our processing rate.
I cannot determine if my whole life is not a hallucination, or if I am in the Matrix, or anything like that. The thing is, assuming that I have been hallucinating (or in the Matrix), how would I ever be able to tell that the hallucination is over or that I have left the Matrix, especially if all I have known was the hallucination/Matrix? What if I would just enter another hallucinatory state, another part of the Matrix or even a different Matrix?
"you accept the possibility of knowing things" No, I neither accept nor reject that possibility. "With out knowledge you cannot even begin to reason" I don't see why that's the case. I can make deductions about ideas that are complete fictions. Maybe you mean that by using reason I'm assuming that my reasoning is valid. But if by "valid" you mean true for everyone or true outside of my own mind, then I do not assume that. Maybe everyone but me finds my ideas nonsensical, I just don't know.
I have knowledge of things considered to be right or wrong, I also have knowledge of the concept of punishment. My defaults are based on an infallible system? Not sure if it is infallible, how do you know it is infallible? If it is an infallible system, does that make me "god" (whatever that is)?
The one used by biologists who study speciation: a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring, (which is also the way the bible defines a "kind").
All I know is what I think, and what appears to me. Whether my thoughts are right or what appears to be the case actually is the case is not something I know or claim to know.
I'm not saying anything is right or wrong. I'm saying that there are ideas that so far have seemed to work, and ideas that have not seemed to work. We don't care about whether anything is "true" beyond that. When I take scientific ideas and use them to predict future experiences they seem to predict them correctly. That's all we care about. Whether these ideas are "right" by any other standard is irrelevant.
So, is your standard of truth this algebraic formula. Well with "unknown object", what is it's purpose? How is that applied as an analogy? I'm very curious.
Another note...even if we cannot account for the grounding of our knowledge/reasoning it does not mean our knowledge/reasoning is not grounded and does not work. False dichotomy is what presup is, as well as slipping in missing/implicit premises. If we do not think we can ground our knowledge/reasoning in "god" for the reasons we give, we also do not think you can use "god" for the same reasons we give.
Premise 1 of the Modal Perfect Argument: "If a property is a ‘great-making property,’ its negation is a ‘lesser-making property.’" If there is one Maximally Great Being, then that entails that every other being by definition not maximally great. Therefore God would have to give his testimony to imperfect beings by default since every other being is imperfect and God is perfect.
That is not what I said. I said "with out God you can't make sense of anything." Do you not need truth (which is absolute)? Then how do you make sense of all words that have the same meaning as they did yesterday? God is omniscient and we are all born knowing him, and therefore we are without excuse. We do not need to know everything to know God because he has instilled that knowledge within us. Without God you cannot explain your existence truthfully, but rather refute reality.
One of the observations I can have is "In general, people do not being hurt. I do not like being hurt." I expect them to understand this and not attempt to cause me harm and they expect the same of me. There is also a human-made system dealing with addressing these "wrongs" and assigning punishment, which reduces likelihood of people choosing to do "wrong".
Never claimed that my perceptions are "reality", but my perceptions allow me to model whatever "reality" is to the best of my biology's ability such that I can act, make predictions, etc about whatever "reality" is.
I claim that we experience God through many avenues, and one of them is by our experience of objective moral values and duties. There are only so many characters allowed at one time, but I can show you how the only ontological foundation for objective values/duties must be God. A duty is something owed, a duty is an obligation. All over the globe humans experience a universal duty to do the right thing and when we do what is objectively right we are following God.
Rational debate is only possible insofar as those debating agree on logical foundations. Sometimes they don't. If one person agrees with Aristotelean logic, they may make deductions contrary to those made by a person who subscribes to Boolean logic. Unless one person can convince the other that their preferred logical system better describes experience, the two reach an impasse in their debate.
For example the efficacy of prayer on medical patients has been tested many times and has been found to be even less effective than placebo. The belief held by the church in Galileo's day said the sun revolved around the Earth. That's an idea that just doesn't work to explain what we see. Young earth creationists say that all the different kinds of animals were created simultaneously, but that doesn't work as an explanation for why animals look more alike deeper in the fossil record.
PART 2 Objective moral values & duties must be ontologically grounded in a metaphysically necessary being for 2 reasons: 1. Values like "fairness, generosity, love" are intrinsic only to persons not to things. Therefore what Plato called The Good must be a personally embodied Good. 2. Duties are intrinsic only to persons.To have a duty is something owed, an obligation & therefore the notion of a moral duty arises from the notion of a command from a personal being like a moral law giver.
because zac, simply stated occams razor disallows an entity that cannot be falsifiable and more simply reason is the faculty ( domain) that allows us to either prove that the methodology of science works...
Acanthostega has large morphological gaps with the digits of everything, apart from Tulerpeton, Densignathus, Ichthyostega, Panderichthys, Tulerpeton, Anne Bolyn and Gemma Arterton. Five digits doesn't seem to have been standardized until the Carboniferous.
A) Because reality works with my memories and experiences B) Because reality works with their memories and experiences C) In this reality, the information I am receiving via sensory input is correct because I can compare it to other's inputs too. If this is the matrix, then the matrix is our reality and it is real as far as reality is concerned. Now if you want absolute knowledge, nobody has that, including you.
If you could be wrong about some things you could be wrong about everything. Therefore you could know nothing. -Do you "know" you can't claim knowledge? -How can you be certain if you don't claim knowledge, or that you know anything? -How do you know what's stored in your brain is valid if you are not certain because you know nothing? It's crazy right, yeah makes no sense.
How do you calculate the probability? Where do you get that from? It exists, but it doesn't exist? If it doesn't have an effect, where do you get the notion that it exists?
Scientific methodological scrutiny uses a theory to make a prediction, then it runs a test to see if the prediction comes true. For evolution, people will look at fossils and conclude that certain animals share a particular ancestry, then they test whether their genes also show that same ancestry, and they do. Thousands of similar tests have been done on evolution, and evolutionary predictions overwhelmingly turn out to be correct.
I have made no objective claims and have only described subjective experiences. I have only ever expressed opinions. I have asserted nothing as objective fact. Why should I determine to pursue truth if I'm not convinced objective truth is even knowable?
Marie, I think you are being a little silly with this question. Do you think my senses and reasoning are NOT good enough to survive/promote my survival such that I am dead right now or died a while ago from failure of my senses or reasoning?
"I realize now that your video is of no value to anyone but you, as u admite" It also seems to be of value to the 275 people who thumbed it up. It seems as though it works for them as well as it works for me. "you only mean it as an uncertain opinion" I mean it as a tested and corroborated way of looking at things. In other words, it works. "you can't tell me what I know" I can still tell you what I think you know, and why I think it.
What makes you think that's not enough information? Humans have more complex nervous systems than any other organism, but that doesn't mean that our physiology is more complex overall.
Great insight. Hopefully most will notice the circular reasoning that presupposition apologetics are using in their argument. I agree that skepticism is necessary but skepticism can go too far as noted in your slight Freudian slip (at approx 1:53). Skeptics don't "assert" any law. Actually skepticism doesn't assert anything as it is an argument from doubt. If you are asserting a law of physics you are being an empiricist. It would of been better if you had said that "when skeptics "point" to the law of physics...." Don't fool skeptics into believing that have more power that they already have. The regress argument is already tough enough to deal with.
"if your senses are invalid then what you perceive may not be reality therefore your own perception falls out of congruence with the collection of "I"" If my own perception falls out such that I cannot trust the self-perception of "I", then there is no "I". Since I just used a bunch of self-referential terms in that sentence alone, if one was wrong, then there is a contradiction, since "I" already includes the presupposition " I exist" within it.
"It's not me who is claiming based off of my judgement that scripture is correct" If you're not making a judgment than how do you know it's true? "I don't know everything" So how can you be sure you know anything, like whether you're accepting a real god? "I can't have a basis of truth to compare" Then you have no way of knowing anything you believe is true.
"to reason is to think by forming a statement on the basis of statements already KNOWN." You can also form a statement based on what is merely supposed.
I, by default, accept what my senses inform my brain about reality. I am not a proponent of radical skepticism or solipsism. The default is that I am not in a Matrix, hallucination or anything else like that because there is no way for me to tell as I would have to know or determine what the "real" reality would be. Just because I can mentally masturbate about such concepts does not give them any weight.
"you have given up the gift of knowledge" I'm not sure I ever had it to give up in the first place. "My world view offers truth to that one reality." Even if god does exist, and does give you the truth, how can you, as a fallible being, be certain that what you believe really comes from god? Lots of people believe in untrue things that they think have been revealed to them by god. How can you be certain you're not one of them?
I'm a thelogical non-cognitivist. I'm not convinced the idea of god even makes any sense. There are a lot of things about the biblical god that I really don't understand and I don't see why I should be expected to believe in something if I don't have any understanding of what it is I'm supposed to believe in.
In order to do anything I only need to appeal to rules that seem to apply to my experiences. I see no reason to assume that those rules apply to some objective reality beyond those experiences. I appeal to the laws of logic, but not because I think they govern objective reality. I appeal to them because they seem to govern my subjective experience.
There's only one person suggesting that inheritance comes from some kind of field and that's Rupert Sheldrake. He has done no experiments testing this and none of his ideas are considered even remotely scientific by anyone but him and people who don't know how science works.
The way I presented the coin flip and card demonstration is to show you how something that looks practically "impossible" becomes 100% always inevitable simply by linking the events together with rules about what you keep and what you throw out. Hence, evolution is not just chance or accidents. The rules of Natural Selection drive the process, not the random mutations. The random mutations are like the deck of cards, and Natural Selection are the rules about what to keep and redraw.
Our standard of truth is "I", our own individual selves, plus the convergence of other "I"s such that where we are in agreement, then we are justified to each other, where we are not, then all we have is our own self-justification.
"If so then why make knowledge claims about "fictions."" Saying that my thoughts and experiences may be illusory is the same thing as saying that they may be fictions. "Deductions are conclusions of truth" Only if the conclusions are, in fact, true.
///even if those experiences are illusions, the self must exist simply because if it didn't, there wouldn't any experiences at all, not even illusory ones./// Experiences and illusions can exist apart from your existence. You can't prove you exist based on the assumption you exist.
"You don't even Have 10's the 1st 400 million years" I'm not sure what "10s" represent in this analogy. "You can't follow every creature or ANY Creature back through ALL the Layers" That's because when layers form, they erode a little bit before the next layer forms on top. It's not because there are sudden discontinuities in biological change. "why is it EVERY Creatures Found 1st in the most evolved state" They're not. Sometimes prior fossils are found before later ones.
Contradiction #4. Rules are by definition objective. To appeal to something is to refer to an object. If you appeal to the Laws of Logic, then you are no longer resting on subjectivity.
It's wrong because it hurts more people than it helps. The initial quote of mine that you used there was in the context of your situation, with "nobody looking" I felt no need to jump to the aid of people. In a situation in which people are in clear and present danger and I am in possession of a way to stop it, (which the second quote is referencing) then I would attempt to save people, because it is beneficial to many people to do so (and not detrimental to me).
"People mistakenly choose to believe in other religions or no religions because maybe they were born in the middle east or in a non christian home; but God will never forsake us because he loves us. He will always give the opportunity to learn his word and to know christ. It is up to that person when the opportunity arises if they want to choose sin or him." I really appreciate you responding to my comments and being respectful towards me.I'll pray that one day you'll accept God into your heart
I accept that I cannot always achieve cognitive closure. I merely stop when I hit a "wall", such as an infinite regress or infinite empty loop. My default is that without additional information forthcoming it is absurd to continue since I would just be repeating the same exact loop or regress. I do not put "god" of the gaps in anything. Assuming that some kind of "grounding" is necessary for my reasoning to function, it does not stand that "god" (undefined/incoherent) will suffice.
Even if revelation from god is not fallible, the people who have to discern the true revelations from ideas that just look like true revelations are fallible. Sometimes they become convinced that a false revelation is a true one. How do you know that what you think is a true revelation isn't really a false one?
My existence and knowledge thereof, and all that entails, is sufficient grounds for truth. I do not need to know of someone else's existence in order to know of my own. I cannot know someone else exists before I know that I exist as the "I" assumes my own existence ("I exist" would be consider an analytic statement as "I" implies the existence of myself, and therefore "I exist" is a tautology)
If people really do believe that god exists but deny that they believe, they are already knowingly contradicting themselves. If they are willing to abandon logic by contradicting themselves, why would you expect a logical argument to persuade them?
Fundamentally, the problem is also "What is knowledge?" Knowledge, it seems to me, to fundamentally be personal subjective. My brain draws upon its stored sense data and processing capabilities in order to predict and act in a dynamic reality. My knowledge is that data. I can attempt to communicate my data to another brain (person) and they can do the same to mine. If understood, the communicated data is now mine to draw upon, incorporated into my knowledge base.
One final note. I think alot of the problems with claims of absolute truth come from the observations about how our reality seems to work. The Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle prevents us from having absolute precision in regards to a particle's momentum and position. We are permanently unable to perceive all aspects of reality at infinite speed...therefore we are forever missing information. All we have is our limited senses and relatively slow processing speed.
To me the most damning thing about modern apologetics is that it exists.
I'm an historian, and the word "apologist" is in my field regarded with a certain degree of sceptical distaste. It carries with it a tacit admission that the apologist has a particular idea in mind which they wish to defend. Whilst this is not inherently bad, and in some cases can be a good thing (sticking to your guns sometimes allows you to penetrate down to the truth), but quite often it means that they've developed some romanticised or personalised emotional attachment to a particular notion or idea. Which when trying to determine the truth of something, is inherently bad.
If one feels the need to look over the many wars of conquest of Rome and try to seek justification for them all, then fine. Good luck. I hope you find something we missed. But if you then ignore all of the extant evidence indicating that quite a few of them were fought for politics, personal advancement, or just plain greed, then I'm going have to say you're full of shit.
So when I hear that there's a bunch of people trying desperately to bend words into many convoluted shapes and screens for their god to either bend itself or hide behind, the very idea that that is necessary is an inherent indicator of potential nonsense.
Bingo. Apologetics is the opposite of scholarship because it begins with the conclusion and seeks/distorts evidence to support it. Please demonstrate that the god of the bible exists and that the bible is a reliable source of information. Just barely into genesis and it's time to close the book.
Apologia is reason. So reason is distasteful? Think about that then delete all your reasons for arguing against it.
@@dianasaur2131 Apologia isn't reason. It's excuse-making
Anyone who wishes to defend something is an apologist. Atheists are apologists of atheism. Apologia, the original Greek word simply means to give a reasonable defense. Everyone does that. Christians, for example, are one of the groups in the world that actually use the word. You've simply attached your own stigma to the word. But the stigma doesn't matter, the actual definition is what matters.
@@War-Daddy no. What matters is how everyone regards the use of the term. Definitions don’t get you anywhere when you’re the only one in a crowd screaming out pages from the dictionary.
"Knowledge assumes truth, and Truth assumes God!"
That may be, but I assume neither knowledge nor truth.
It's like such theist and skeptic are talking totally across purposes.
Without the "like".
TMM is that true?
@@jerikiahunter4697 I suspect so, but I don't assume so.
TMM is that true also? If so, by what presuppositions? If not, why did you presuppose that?
@@jerikiahunter4697 I presuppose nothing. Every statement I make is mere suspicion, including this statement.
"C'mon, are you genuinely skeptical of everything that you taste, touch, see and hear, and experience?"
I'm open to the possibility that any experience might be illusory, yes.
How are you able to trust your brain to interpret your experiences accurately as truth?
@@nemochuggles I don't believe I can trust it.
@@TMMx in the video you said science is just observations of phenomenon. But if we can’t trust our observation to be valid or true, then that makes knowledge impossible. Or at least that how it comes across to me
@@nemochuggles I suspect it is, in fact, the case that knowledge of reality beyond the senses is impossible.
@@TMMx “beyond the senses” would insinuate that you can trust the senses, but didn’t you just say you can’t? So I think if we can’t trust senses to be 100% accurate, then we can’t have any knowledge at all, right?
Prepsuppositional apologetics is in direct contradiction with epistemology. The argument falls apart when you point out that the apologist does not trust his own judgement and only trusts the judgement of a higher being. In this sense, knowledge cannot be contrived and life becomes an autonomous and arguably meaningless existence. Ultimately, taking this position, a huge dilemma comes up with the fact that an apologist admits they don't trust their own judgement, yet they judge that there must necessarily be a god that exists and that all judgements should be contrived from that god, but how can you trust that judgement since you don't even trust your own judgement?! Presuppositional apologetics isn't intelligent, it's just hilarious.
Will Truth/Deceit You have missed the point. Nobody said you can’t necessarily make a judgement.
Alex Rothwell
That is *IF.*
Keyword *IF*
How do you know that the god you believe in (I will say most likely the Bible god) even made this universe?
Tom Anderson 81 Classical Theism
John Landon Miller
What about it?
Tom Anderson 81 Islam, Christianity, Judaism dont believe in empirical Gods. They are all adherents of Classical Theism. They all have their own their own dogmas that follow though.
I think the main issue when debating presuppostitionalists is the presupposition itself, which has the obvious drawback of effectively making any debate meaningless.
For example: Syes' main premise is "You need God in order to know anything", which essentially means "I am right, you are wrong". If his opponent brings a good counter-argument, Sye can simply repeat his first premise and end the argument right there.
The mere act of participating in a debate with a known presuppositionalist is essentially the same as allowing it. Allowing presuppositions creates a dilemma; if we allow any one side to adopt a presupposition as their main premise, we allow an unfair advantage, the extent of which renders the very debate futile.
A similar, equally stupid situation appears if we allow both sides of the debate to employ contradictory propositions as presuppositions, since neither side would back down from their first premise, no matter what arguments they face.
A debate is like a game of chess that can only provide an actual winner if both players abide by the same set of generic rules. But since most creationists realize that a fair fight is one they're almost guaranteed to lose, they're not likely to comply.
Isn't the presupposition argument begging the question? Since the arguer begins their first premise with what should be the conclusion of their final premise? It seems intellectually improper for someone to say that Logic, Math and God are basically the same thing, and by using Math or Logic to disprove God you prove God. This is arrogance and ignorance boarding upon the obscene.
Richard Munoz, exactly. Presupposition starts from the premise, "God exists" to prove that "God exists."
Only _bordering_ on the obscene? 😋
Nah, it is a legal citizen of Obscene.
X is the necessary precondition of Y
Y Exists
Therefore X is true.
Logic, math and God are all transcendental.
"It really doesn't sound like you know what you're talking about."
A lot of people have the misconception that science tries to find the truth of objective reality and find it strange that in reality science is only pragmatic and tries only to find ideas that seem to be able to predict experience. But do you think Hawking is misinformed about what science is?
The theory of evolution is the most applicable to the real world, because it predicts what we experience when we look at fossils and genetics better than any other theory.
It is *impossible* to doubt your own mind exists, because attempting to do so would be demonstrating that you have a mind. Logic itself is simply a description of valid and non-contradictory forms of thought. Physics is a description of uniformity of nature. We can trust our senses because not doing so would be self defeating. We can confirm things internally and externally. It's the theist who borrows from a secular philosophical perspective to observe the Bible and construct a belief set from this observation.
Sometimes we find ourselves thinking things that we later realize just don't match our experience. Since that's the case, I don't see how we can be sure that what we believe right now isn't something we will eventually realize doesn't describe experiences quite the way we thought they did. I believe what I believe right now because it seems to match my experiences. In the future I may have experiences that don't match those beliefs and I'll have to change what I believe.
You can't argue god into existence. It's existence or non-existence is independant of all pre-suppositional sophistry.
I need evidence to believe in a god, not argument. So far I've seen no evidence.
frank theriault Explain to me exactly what "evidence" would be wholly removed from logic. Is that not the very picture of confirmation bias and subjectivity? Furthermore, charges of "sophistry" always much more justifiably fall on the heads of atheist rationale for logical reasons. Since logic always culminates in theism and not atheism, that just tells us that the atheist is only willing to use logic to the point before it culminates in theism and then argue in a circle till he's blue in the face. Sounds like intellectualism and scientism, but not logic nor truth. THAT sounds like sophistry to me. Plus the ever irrational TheMessianicManic did not even refute "presuppositional" apologetics in this video despite the fact that he called his video "Refuting Presuppositional Apologetics."
TruthUnadulterated I'm not going to argue with you. Bring on you're evidence. Then I'll decide if it's good enough.
No word games. Evidence. Simple.
frank theriault Lol. How foolish, if you show me that you hate logic, as you have already suggested by your first comment, then that tells me that you don't even know how to discern what "evidence" is in any objective way. Why don't YOU offer your evidence AGAINST God, and let's see where the LOGIC of such a claim takes you ULTIMATELY.
TruthUnadulterated frank theriault Silence. Lol. This is how we show certain atheists for being all talk and intellectualism as a mask for their overly proud and emotional-based core.
TruthUnadulterated Yeah, silence. Because I was doing something called "making a living"...
Look, I don't hate logic. It's great for deciding issues such as ethics or morality or philosophy. But if I want to decide if something exists I look for evidence. Which you, it seems, are unable to provide to support the existence of your god.
Speaking of which, I don't have to disprove any god or gods. If you want to believe in the supernatural for any reason that's your business. Far be it from me to stand in the way of any comforting fantasies.
But if I were to prove there's no god how could I do it unless I know which god I'm disproving? Care to elaborate?
Thank you for telling me what my own conscience is saying. Clearly you know my conscience better than I do.
I disagree with this being the line of reasoning you should follow with a presuppositionalist, because you're not calling them out on the biggest set of assumptions they make:
1. Insert some argument for some supernatural lawgiver
2. The law giver is a god
3. This god is singular. (Or a trinity, depending on who you ask)
4. This god is all powerful
5. This god is all knowing, all loving, all... everything, perfect in every way. Whatever perfect might mean
6. This god is a god we know and have talked to in the past.
7. This god is the christian god of the bible, specific to the church and belief system of the claimant. Disregard all other gods that fit into the above moulds, including all gods that are worshipped currently, were worshipped and have yet to be proposed.
This presuppositionalist nonsense hopes to bamboozle you with point 1, and fails to address in any way the remaining assumptions, preying on the general cultural acceptance that talking of "god" assumes all of these, when it does not based on the definitions defined in 1.
"Rational debate would be impossible if laws of logic were descriptions, because the two opponents could simply pick different standards for reasoning."
I've never been experienced being free to "pick" what does or does not make sense to me. The law of non-contradiction seems true because when I encounter contradictions, I can't make sense of them. The law describes a barrier to my understanding. Whether that barrier exists in my mind or is a property of the universe is not something I know.
Am I the only person amused by the fact that wearing a black hat in front of a black background gives the impression that the top portion of your head is missing?
Great video, as always. :-)
6 years late but that's so true! If yoi search "The top ten lies by christianity styx" you'll find an even funnier version of that.
Which one is it? Do you claim you can be certain or not?
-What is absolute to you?
-What is your standard of truth?
-What "comes along" to "dispel" certainties? Truth?
-Are you certain about being uncertain?
"How do you know your logic (reasoning) is valid?"
Because it gives me EXPLANATORY and PREDICTIVE powers. And also because I have converging data sets (i.e. multiple senses and other people arriving at the same conclusions.
Make sure you add that you are absolutely certain you exist (even if we live in a simulation you still experience existence). Sociopathic presuppositional con-men get stopped in their tracks by the self-authenticating Primacy of Existence. Models that have explanatory and predictive capabilities based on converging data sets reproduce existence most successfully. The axiomatic Primacy of Existence accounts for knowledge and our survival shows that our reasoning about what we know is valid. And just like that presuppositional apologetics is over before it began.
Also concerning absolutes, I am absolutely certain that I am not omniscient (all knowing). Because if I was omniscient I would know I was omniscient. As I do not know that I am, by definition, I can be absolutely certain I am not omniscient.
Kyle Cooksey but .... By arguing those things you are assuming your brain has the ability to reason, which is the very point at hand.
To hold *any* meaningful thoughts, let alone discussion, you must first presuppose your ability to reason. To even assume the existence of a god, you must *first* presuppose this, without which any notion of such god is meaningless.
I'm not entirely certain what you mean.
If the origin of the human mind is entirely natural, then evolution provides a perfectly sufficient explanation for where it came from. Heck, I'd argue it provides a better explanation, as it also helps explain why our intuitions break down so catastrophically when we leave the realm of moderate sizes and speeds.
If your issue is that it doesn't 100% *prove* the starting presupposition, then tough. The only way to do so would require starting *without* the presupposition of reason, which would render any attempt at proving *anything* meaningless. So if this was your issue than I disagree, Christian presuppositions *cannot* account for it. No presuppositions that start here (which happens to be every possible presupposition I can imagine) can. At best it can provide total *belief* in such, but such a belief could not be sensibly defended.
I'll assume you're not just taking issue with approaches or worldviews that leave room for uncertainty, so I'm afraid I really need you to elaborate on your contention.
A) How do you know that what you experience is true to it's nature so that you may compare to what you remember? Also, how do you know that your memory contains truth; meaning true knowledge?
B)How do you know that other people valid senses and therefore true knowledge?
C)How do you know the information you have is true, meaning not incorrect, and how do you know that the test results you are gathering are being received through your senses with 100% confirmed validity?
Keep fighting the good fight.
That depends on how define the "self". If you define the self as that which experiences things, then even if those experiences are illusions, the self must exist simply because if it didn't, there wouldn't any experiences at all, not even illusory ones.
Crikey. The laws of physics -- or nature in general -- constitute observable and consistent ways the stuff in material reality behaves and interacts. They are not separate entities of any kind, certainly not abstract pre-existing statutes.. It is the same flawed logic as insisting the mind is more than, and separate from, the summation of what the brain does interacting with reality.
I don't know that they are rules though. They seem to work on my experience now, but I don't know whether they still will tomorrow. I may be mistaken about whether logic (or what I think is logic) really governs my experience.
You should realize that you didn’t actually refute the presuppositions argument correct?
ah yes, the presuppositions argument
You don't sell faith; nor could it be bought.
Ephesians 2:8-9 "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast."
Jeremiah 29:13
Titus 3:5
Asserting truth claims in order to deny truth? Too funny!
+Blake R Yeah that was my biggest issue as well. How are you going to deny presupposition by using presupposition? like wtf...
+Casey Dunks +Blake R This is how TMM leads his life, that is, irrationally and inconsistently because he has no choice as a self-described atheist. Yet *no matter what* he refuses to question his atheism. This is how the proud hearts of all who call themselves atheists are exposed. He condemns himself. Consequently if he should stand before God to make his case, he will have none, because he would have to rely on logic as an _a priori_ guarantee of any case he might make, which of course entails the existence of God from the outset. It's sad, really. Yet look at how many of his subscribers have gobbled up his bad thinking anyway judging by the thumbs-up to thumbs down ratio. Wow!
+Blake R If truth is a label we apply to statements that accurately correspond to reality, then to deny truth would be to deny the notion that one could make statements that accurately correspond to reality. The guy in this video didn't say anything about whether it's possible to make statements that are true, so could you clarify what you mean when you say that he denied truth? I think what you meant to say is that he denied that people can be absolutely certain of what is true. That would only be a contradiction IF he was claiming to be absolutely certain that absolute certainty is unattainable. Since he didn't claim certainty about anything, I don't think there was any contradiction.
+Life for Christ Great point. It's nice to see Christians policing their own.
Did you use your theological worldview in order to be able to trust your brain? Or did you trust your brain in order to obtain your theological worldview?
In the former...how does one have a worldview prior to trusting their brain? You couldn't have a worldview without trusting your brain.
In the latter...how does one trust their brain in order to gain a correct worldview? You claim you can't trust your brain to gain a worldview.
So how do you as a presupp overcome these problems?
That depends on whether there is an objective reality that exists independent of my subjective experience and whether my subjective experience is a part of it, so I don't know and I don't know how I could determine.
The laws of logic simply describe what we find we can think or can't think. Whether my thoughts reflect any underlying reality is not something I know. When I use logic, all I'm doing is staying inside the boundaries of what makes sense to me. I'm not assuming any kind of transcendent truth.
I know we are, and we are all sinners. Thank the lord for scripture, his word. So that we can use his teachings to live like him so that we are never forsaken with the help of the Holy Spirit, a part of God in which guides us to him and gives us our conviction.
If the deity listens to prayers and "sometimes" acts upon them, then when you tested that hypothesis, sometimes the prayer would come true and sometimes the prayer would not. But even if there is no deity, sometimes you'll get what you pray for and sometimes you won't. Unless the deity was at least to some degree predictable in its behaviour, its existence would be indistinguishable from its non-existence, and hence, useless.
In most cases, the question of whether reality exists is of no practical consequence and can be safely ignored, but I wouldn't say it's useless. I think it's good to keep it in the back of your mind to keep you from becoming dogmatic about any particular belief.
Prediction is important component to the scientific method, but not all there is. The conceptual model, or mechanism is an integral part of theory. Ultimately, theory is what allows for prediction but also provides a format for iterative refinement through new types of testing. The goal is that theory provides accurate prediction because the conceptual model is inherently correct (even if incomplete). Otherwise, theory would be mostly sets of good fit statistical models - which they never are.
It's easily tested. When you speak or type words in statements, you are operating based on a universal, metaphysical standard, because in statements you either affirm or deny propositions, which is in itself an appeal to universal logic. Do you understand? An example of this is when you make any statement, any, you are by such appealing to the Laws of Logic, like the Law of Non-Contradiction (look it up or read the definition I provided).
A refutation is only an explanation of why one finds an argument unconvincing.
Which of the 14 definitions of species do you prefer?
"We are all born knowing God; yet many deny him."
You are choosing to deny him.
"God will never forsake us because he loves us. He will always give the opportunity to learn his word and to know christ. It is up to that person when the opportunity arises if they want to choose sin or him."
You are choosing to refuse his grace.
"I know I am certain because to know anything you must start with God. "
Why start with the Christian god and not with Allah, or Vishnu?
"God's word and what he reveals to us innately, revelation, is true because he is omniscient."
Yeah, but how do you tell the difference between that which is revealed by god and that which just looks like it is revealed by god?
So, tell me, how do you "know" or determine what reality actually is such that your senses or thoughts/models are infallible? Do you use fallible sensory inputs/modalities? Fallible computational systems such as brains? Do you rely on other fallible systems to provide you with infallible information, such as other humans?
Hello TMM I am wondering what source you used to say that science is based on Phenomenological Epistemology. I would like to use that source in a video. Thank you.
In the first chapter of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking said that a scientific theory “is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean).” Like phenomenology, science brackets out the question of whether its observations or models thereof have any noumenal reality.
@@TMMx Thank you for the source I will make use of it in a coming video. Cheers.
Like I said, our senses can be mistaken sometimes, but just because they are mistaken sometimes that does not mean they are mistaken all the time. We all experience a moral duty, you feel this at times when you encounter a situation and you feel obligated to do the right thing. There is a right way and a wrong way, and we have all chosen the wrong way before, but we have chosen the right way as well.
"We all experience a moral duty". Well first that depends on how you're defining morals and morality, and second I'm fairly confident that neither psychopaths nor sociopaths experience this concept.
A refutation can also explain why an argument does not prove what it sets out to prove. I don't see how anyone has proven that we do or even can know anything to be absolutely, objectively true.
I think it is true that I'm having an experience. I don't know if it is an illusory experience, and hallucinatory one, or a real one, but I don't know how to doubt that it is one that I am having. However, since that truth is one that, as far as I can tell, only applies to my subjective experience, I don't see it as an objective truth.
I'd say most efforts to refute presuppositionalists are waaaaay to over-engeneered (virtual reality and what not).
It's much simpler. Presupositionalists don't even understand (well, they don't really understand a thing, but anyway) they are cornering themselves - I don't need to prove, I know anything beyond "I think, therefore I exist", where they need to prove:
1) world outside my mind exists,
2) they exist in this world,
3) there is a god or the God in this world,
4) they have received a revelation from this god,
5) the revelation is true and not a lie.
As far as I understand, this video kinda says the same - we don't know, and we don't need to.
Did not know that :) I was merely talking about that the simple fact is it takes time for our cells to react to stimuli, process, etc. It takes time for our neurons to fire, and time for them to recover. During all of this, we "miss" many photons, vibrations, etc. because these all can happen at rates quicker than processing at time asynchronous to our processing rate.
I cannot determine if my whole life is not a hallucination, or if I am in the Matrix, or anything like that. The thing is, assuming that I have been hallucinating (or in the Matrix), how would I ever be able to tell that the hallucination is over or that I have left the Matrix, especially if all I have known was the hallucination/Matrix? What if I would just enter another hallucinatory state, another part of the Matrix or even a different Matrix?
"you accept the possibility of knowing things"
No, I neither accept nor reject that possibility.
"With out knowledge you cannot even begin to reason"
I don't see why that's the case. I can make deductions about ideas that are complete fictions. Maybe you mean that by using reason I'm assuming that my reasoning is valid. But if by "valid" you mean true for everyone or true outside of my own mind, then I do not assume that. Maybe everyone but me finds my ideas nonsensical, I just don't know.
I have knowledge of things considered to be right or wrong, I also have knowledge of the concept of punishment. My defaults are based on an infallible system? Not sure if it is infallible, how do you know it is infallible? If it is an infallible system, does that make me "god" (whatever that is)?
The one used by biologists who study speciation: a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring, (which is also the way the bible defines a "kind").
All I know is what I think, and what appears to me. Whether my thoughts are right or what appears to be the case actually is the case is not something I know or claim to know.
I'm not saying anything is right or wrong. I'm saying that there are ideas that so far have seemed to work, and ideas that have not seemed to work. We don't care about whether anything is "true" beyond that. When I take scientific ideas and use them to predict future experiences they seem to predict them correctly. That's all we care about. Whether these ideas are "right" by any other standard is irrelevant.
So, is your standard of truth this algebraic formula.
Well with "unknown object", what is it's purpose? How is that applied as an analogy? I'm very curious.
Another note...even if we cannot account for the grounding of our knowledge/reasoning it does not mean our knowledge/reasoning is not grounded and does not work. False dichotomy is what presup is, as well as slipping in missing/implicit premises. If we do not think we can ground our knowledge/reasoning in "god" for the reasons we give, we also do not think you can use "god" for the same reasons we give.
Premise 1 of the Modal Perfect Argument: "If a property is a ‘great-making property,’ its negation is a ‘lesser-making property.’" If there is one Maximally Great Being, then that entails that every other being by definition not maximally great. Therefore God would have to give his testimony to imperfect beings by default since every other being is imperfect and God is perfect.
That is not what I said. I said "with out God you can't make sense of anything."
Do you not need truth (which is absolute)? Then how do you make sense of all words that have the same meaning as they did yesterday?
God is omniscient and we are all born knowing him, and therefore we are without excuse. We do not need to know everything to know God because he has instilled that knowledge within us. Without God you cannot explain your existence truthfully, but rather refute reality.
One of the observations I can have is "In general, people do not being hurt. I do not like being hurt." I expect them to understand this and not attempt to cause me harm and they expect the same of me. There is also a human-made system dealing with addressing these "wrongs" and assigning punishment, which reduces likelihood of people choosing to do "wrong".
Never claimed that my perceptions are "reality", but my perceptions allow me to model whatever "reality" is to the best of my biology's ability such that I can act, make predictions, etc about whatever "reality" is.
I claim that we experience God through many avenues, and one of them is by our experience of objective moral values and duties. There are only so many characters allowed at one time, but I can show you how the only ontological foundation for objective values/duties must be God. A duty is something owed, a duty is an obligation. All over the globe humans experience a universal duty to do the right thing and when we do what is objectively right we are following God.
Having to twist logic to prove a deity exists simply proves to me that there is no god.
Rational debate is only possible insofar as those debating agree on logical foundations. Sometimes they don't. If one person agrees with Aristotelean logic, they may make deductions contrary to those made by a person who subscribes to Boolean logic. Unless one person can convince the other that their preferred logical system better describes experience, the two reach an impasse in their debate.
For example the efficacy of prayer on medical patients has been tested many times and has been found to be even less effective than placebo. The belief held by the church in Galileo's day said the sun revolved around the Earth. That's an idea that just doesn't work to explain what we see. Young earth creationists say that all the different kinds of animals were created simultaneously, but that doesn't work as an explanation for why animals look more alike deeper in the fossil record.
PART 2
Objective moral values & duties must be ontologically grounded in a metaphysically necessary being for 2 reasons:
1. Values like "fairness, generosity, love" are intrinsic only to persons not to things. Therefore what Plato called The Good must be a personally embodied Good.
2. Duties are intrinsic only to persons.To have a duty is something owed, an obligation & therefore the notion of a moral duty arises from the notion of a command from a personal being like a moral law giver.
because zac, simply stated occams razor disallows an entity that cannot be falsifiable and more simply reason is the faculty ( domain) that allows us to either prove that the methodology of science works...
I only use them insofar as they describe subjective experience. How is a description of subjective experience objective?
Acanthostega has large morphological gaps with the digits of everything, apart from Tulerpeton, Densignathus, Ichthyostega, Panderichthys, Tulerpeton, Anne Bolyn and Gemma Arterton. Five digits doesn't seem to have been standardized until the Carboniferous.
A) Because reality works with my memories and experiences
B) Because reality works with their memories and experiences
C) In this reality, the information I am receiving via sensory input is correct because I can compare it to other's inputs too.
If this is the matrix, then the matrix is our reality and it is real as far as reality is concerned.
Now if you want absolute knowledge, nobody has that, including you.
If you could be wrong about some things you could be wrong about everything. Therefore you could know nothing.
-Do you "know" you can't claim knowledge?
-How can you be certain if you don't claim knowledge, or that you know anything?
-How do you know what's stored in your brain is valid if you are not certain because you know nothing?
It's crazy right, yeah makes no sense.
How can we be sure we are in fact making sense of anything rather than just being under the impression that we are?
How do you calculate the probability?
Where do you get that from?
It exists, but it doesn't exist? If it doesn't have an effect, where do you get the notion that it exists?
Scientific methodological scrutiny uses a theory to make a prediction, then it runs a test to see if the prediction comes true. For evolution, people will look at fossils and conclude that certain animals share a particular ancestry, then they test whether their genes also show that same ancestry, and they do. Thousands of similar tests have been done on evolution, and evolutionary predictions overwhelmingly turn out to be correct.
I have made no objective claims and have only described subjective experiences. I have only ever expressed opinions. I have asserted nothing as objective fact.
Why should I determine to pursue truth if I'm not convinced objective truth is even knowable?
Marie, I think you are being a little silly with this question. Do you think my senses and reasoning are NOT good enough to survive/promote my survival such that I am dead right now or died a while ago from failure of my senses or reasoning?
"I realize now that your video is of no value to anyone but you, as u admite"
It also seems to be of value to the 275 people who thumbed it up. It seems as though it works for them as well as it works for me.
"you only mean it as an uncertain opinion"
I mean it as a tested and corroborated way of looking at things. In other words, it works.
"you can't tell me what I know"
I can still tell you what I think you know, and why I think it.
What I mean is, how can we be sure we do, in fact, make sense of anything? What if everything we think is nonsense, and we just don't realize it?
What makes you think that's not enough information? Humans have more complex nervous systems than any other organism, but that doesn't mean that our physiology is more complex overall.
Great insight. Hopefully most will notice the circular reasoning that presupposition apologetics are using in their argument. I agree that skepticism is necessary but skepticism can go too far as noted in your slight Freudian slip (at approx 1:53). Skeptics don't "assert" any law. Actually skepticism doesn't assert anything as it is an argument from doubt. If you are asserting a law of physics you are being an empiricist. It would of been better if you had said that "when skeptics "point" to the law of physics...." Don't fool skeptics into believing that have more power that they already have. The regress argument is already tough enough to deal with.
Because you're salvation is worth more than any inconvenience or any doubt.
"if your senses are invalid then what you perceive may not be reality therefore your own perception falls out of congruence with the collection of "I"" If my own perception falls out such that I cannot trust the self-perception of "I", then there is no "I". Since I just used a bunch of self-referential terms in that sentence alone, if one was wrong, then there is a contradiction, since "I" already includes the presupposition " I exist" within it.
"It's not me who is claiming based off of my judgement that scripture is correct"
If you're not making a judgment than how do you know it's true?
"I don't know everything"
So how can you be sure you know anything, like whether you're accepting a real god?
"I can't have a basis of truth to compare"
Then you have no way of knowing anything you believe is true.
"to reason is to think by forming a statement on the basis of statements already KNOWN."
You can also form a statement based on what is merely supposed.
I, by default, accept what my senses inform my brain about reality. I am not a proponent of radical skepticism or solipsism. The default is that I am not in a Matrix, hallucination or anything else like that because there is no way for me to tell as I would have to know or determine what the "real" reality would be. Just because I can mentally masturbate about such concepts does not give them any weight.
Cutting out the natural pauses between phrases makes your arguments more difficult to follow, although admittedly it makes the video look more hip.
"you have given up the gift of knowledge"
I'm not sure I ever had it to give up in the first place.
"My world view offers truth to that one reality."
Even if god does exist, and does give you the truth, how can you, as a fallible being, be certain that what you believe really comes from god? Lots of people believe in untrue things that they think have been revealed to them by god. How can you be certain you're not one of them?
I'm a thelogical non-cognitivist. I'm not convinced the idea of god even makes any sense. There are a lot of things about the biblical god that I really don't understand and I don't see why I should be expected to believe in something if I don't have any understanding of what it is I'm supposed to believe in.
In order to do anything I only need to appeal to rules that seem to apply to my experiences. I see no reason to assume that those rules apply to some objective reality beyond those experiences. I appeal to the laws of logic, but not because I think they govern objective reality. I appeal to them because they seem to govern my subjective experience.
There's only one person suggesting that inheritance comes from some kind of field and that's Rupert Sheldrake. He has done no experiments testing this and none of his ideas are considered even remotely scientific by anyone but him and people who don't know how science works.
The way I presented the coin flip and card demonstration is to show you how something that looks practically "impossible" becomes 100% always inevitable simply by linking the events together with rules about what you keep and what you throw out. Hence, evolution is not just chance or accidents. The rules of Natural Selection drive the process, not the random mutations. The random mutations are like the deck of cards, and Natural Selection are the rules about what to keep and redraw.
Alright. So let's attempt to agree on something: are all fields of science predicated on phenomenological epistemology or not? (This will clarify)
Our standard of truth is "I", our own individual selves, plus the convergence of other "I"s such that where we are in agreement, then we are justified to each other, where we are not, then all we have is our own self-justification.
"If so then why make knowledge claims about "fictions.""
Saying that my thoughts and experiences may be illusory is the same thing as saying that they may be fictions.
"Deductions are conclusions of truth"
Only if the conclusions are, in fact, true.
///even if those experiences are illusions, the self must exist simply because if it didn't, there wouldn't any experiences at all, not even illusory ones.///
Experiences and illusions can exist apart from your existence.
You can't prove you exist based on the assumption you exist.
"You don't even Have 10's the 1st 400 million years"
I'm not sure what "10s" represent in this analogy.
"You can't follow every creature or ANY Creature back through ALL the Layers"
That's because when layers form, they erode a little bit before the next layer forms on top. It's not because there are sudden discontinuities in biological change.
"why is it EVERY Creatures Found 1st in the most evolved state"
They're not. Sometimes prior fossils are found before later ones.
Contradiction #4. Rules are by definition objective. To appeal to something is to refer to an object. If you appeal to the Laws of Logic, then you are no longer resting on subjectivity.
Until a Christian can show me how their brains are somehow infallible, I feel entirely justified in saying that they are no less fallible than I am.
It's wrong because it hurts more people than it helps. The initial quote of mine that you used there was in the context of your situation, with "nobody looking" I felt no need to jump to the aid of people. In a situation in which people are in clear and present danger and I am in possession of a way to stop it, (which the second quote is referencing) then I would attempt to save people, because it is beneficial to many people to do so (and not detrimental to me).
"People mistakenly choose to believe in other religions or no religions because maybe they were born in the middle east or in a non christian home; but God will never forsake us because he loves us. He will always give the opportunity to learn his word and to know christ. It is up to that person when the opportunity arises if they want to choose sin or him."
I really appreciate you responding to my comments and being respectful towards me.I'll pray that one day you'll accept God into your heart
I accept that I cannot always achieve cognitive closure. I merely stop when I hit a "wall", such as an infinite regress or infinite empty loop. My default is that without additional information forthcoming it is absurd to continue since I would just be repeating the same exact loop or regress. I do not put "god" of the gaps in anything. Assuming that some kind of "grounding" is necessary for my reasoning to function, it does not stand that "god" (undefined/incoherent) will suffice.
Even if revelation from god is not fallible, the people who have to discern the true revelations from ideas that just look like true revelations are fallible. Sometimes they become convinced that a false revelation is a true one. How do you know that what you think is a true revelation isn't really a false one?
My existence and knowledge thereof, and all that entails, is sufficient grounds for truth. I do not need to know of someone else's existence in order to know of my own. I cannot know someone else exists before I know that I exist as the "I" assumes my own existence ("I exist" would be consider an analytic statement as "I" implies the existence of myself, and therefore "I exist" is a tautology)
If people really do believe that god exists but deny that they believe, they are already knowingly contradicting themselves. If they are willing to abandon logic by contradicting themselves, why would you expect a logical argument to persuade them?
Fundamentally, the problem is also "What is knowledge?" Knowledge, it seems to me, to fundamentally be personal subjective. My brain draws upon its stored sense data and processing capabilities in order to predict and act in a dynamic reality. My knowledge is that data. I can attempt to communicate my data to another brain (person) and they can do the same to mine. If understood, the communicated data is now mine to draw upon, incorporated into my knowledge base.
One final note. I think alot of the problems with claims of absolute truth come from the observations about how our reality seems to work. The Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle prevents us from having absolute precision in regards to a particle's momentum and position. We are permanently unable to perceive all aspects of reality at infinite speed...therefore we are forever missing information. All we have is our limited senses and relatively slow processing speed.