Very intellectually satisfying! What philosophers and/or theologians do you know of who have wrestled with the infinite regress issue? Thomas Aquinas I think.
The teleological argument seems way more flawed to me than the other arguments. Human' ability to classify things into designed vs. natural is more of an intuition and limited by experience. We tell if something is designed just by comparing it with things we've seen before. And if we are presented with something beyond our experience, we simply won't be able to tell. I've heard about jokes like many decades ago, when people in some distant isolated region (and had zero idea about modern society or industry) saw a tractor for the first time, they thought it's some sort of animal (i.e., natural) and tried to feed it grass. And a stronger example would be that for almost everything creationists have used an examples of "irreducible complexity" are actually reducible (like eyes), and people have found out continuous evidence of how these things evolved from simple to complex over time. And human have a lot of such abilities that we exercise everyday as intuitions but don't really have a good reason to explain why (besides experience). A typical example is language - a native speaker can tell if a sentence makes sense or not by instinct, but a learner needs to look up a whole ton of grammars and still often fails. Such abilities are probably just a basic functionality of our brains -- a neural network classifier that can somehow do the work after being trained with an enormous amount of data, just like the artificial neural networks (aka AI) that people are currently building. To me, it is extremely risky to base an argument on such unsolid intuitions. Any experience-based assumption must be very carefully examined before use, and to me, this designed vs. natural classification would be easily rejected. But on the other hand, it's totally possible that the examination of experience-based assumptions require even more experience, and people did not have enough experience to reject it at Paley's time. That's probably how the human knowledge progresses.
Dear My Sanders, Thank you for uploading these lectures. I'm learning a lot. I think the way we know a clock is designed is because of it being assembled/"the way its put together" from the parts it has. Lets say there are 35 parts that make a watch. If we put all of the parts next to each other they will never be a watch or become a watch. But only when some external "designer" or entity takes the parts and assembles them then only can it be a watch. As for the integrity of parts. Then integrity needs to be defined. Which can be defined for the sand lines on the beach. I saw you reply to the Islamic Version of the Cosmological Argument in one of the other comments on the video. God has to be beyond time and space. That is how God has been defined since time immemorial. That is why we human beings cannot fathom what God is. Even who God is. It's because of our own limitations. The only aspect of God we can know through reason is His being the Creator. As for the others, He would have to tell us Himself. For that Revelation will have to guide. Looking forward to your views.
As someone who is agnostic but leaned more towards theism, this hit the nails of why theism sounds more reasonable. The world just being without purpose or by chance doesn't sound right.
What I believe is it is true what you are saying, everybody actually is a agnostic leaning to theism at most, at least in an early phase of their life but when not liking the religion around them they choose atheism. This is actually what happened in Europe since renaissance but I see it differently in our Islamic world. Personally I was on a path to atheism before few years because I didn’t understand Islam, say, and didn’t like it. Now having read more about islam and learned more about life in non fictional or non utopian eyes I liked it and regained faith. What I see is that Islam is the best thing happened for humanity and even if it was something non divine and a false religion I will still follow it as a philosophy or life style.
Well sir, in Islam we have a different version of the 2nd draft of the CA: not everything does needs a cause but everything happens (or every event) needs a cause so every created thing need a cause and it goes back to the first cause, God the creator. And because god is not something that happens or happened and is not linked to an event then the conclusion doesn’t contradict the assumption.
That does seem to me to be a possible response to the line of argument you're responding to. In the lecture, I tried to indicate a similar but slightly different kind of response by suggesting the possibility that God stood outside the whole sequence of events, creating the entire sequence without occupying a place within the sequence. God is then a causer, but not as a member of the series of happenings itself. It seemed to me (at least when I made that video) that this response might be a bit stronger than the one you suggest, since yours doesn't fully remove God from the chain of happenings, but instead places God in a unique position in that series: as Aristotle suggested (you have good company), God is an "uncaused causer". On the version I suggested in the lecture, God is no part of the sequence of worldly causes at all. I'm not sure how to fully understand either of these possibilities, but they're certainly interesting. I'm also not sure how strong an explanation of the world this gives, since one replaces one's wonder about why the universe is there with an explanation that postulates something else (God) that itself has no explanation.
26:23 but the "certainty" of the "a priori" may be contested as for Anselms sample .. ? what am I missing here ?
Very intellectually satisfying! What philosophers and/or theologians do you know of who have wrestled with the infinite regress issue? Thomas Aquinas I think.
The teleological argument seems way more flawed to me than the other arguments. Human' ability to classify things into designed vs. natural is more of an intuition and limited by experience. We tell if something is designed just by comparing it with things we've seen before. And if we are presented with something beyond our experience, we simply won't be able to tell. I've heard about jokes like many decades ago, when people in some distant isolated region (and had zero idea about modern society or industry) saw a tractor for the first time, they thought it's some sort of animal (i.e., natural) and tried to feed it grass. And a stronger example would be that for almost everything creationists have used an examples of "irreducible complexity" are actually reducible (like eyes), and people have found out continuous evidence of how these things evolved from simple to complex over time.
And human have a lot of such abilities that we exercise everyday as intuitions but don't really have a good reason to explain why (besides experience). A typical example is language - a native speaker can tell if a sentence makes sense or not by instinct, but a learner needs to look up a whole ton of grammars and still often fails. Such abilities are probably just a basic functionality of our brains -- a neural network classifier that can somehow do the work after being trained with an enormous amount of data, just like the artificial neural networks (aka AI) that people are currently building.
To me, it is extremely risky to base an argument on such unsolid intuitions. Any experience-based assumption must be very carefully examined before use, and to me, this designed vs. natural classification would be easily rejected. But on the other hand, it's totally possible that the examination of experience-based assumptions require even more experience, and people did not have enough experience to reject it at Paley's time. That's probably how the human knowledge progresses.
Dear My Sanders,
Thank you for uploading these lectures. I'm learning a lot.
I think the way we know a clock is designed is because of it being assembled/"the way its put together" from the parts it has. Lets say there are 35 parts that make a watch. If we put all of the parts next to each other they will never be a watch or become a watch. But only when some external "designer" or entity takes the parts and assembles them then only can it be a watch.
As for the integrity of parts. Then integrity needs to be defined. Which can be defined for the sand lines on the beach.
I saw you reply to the Islamic Version of the Cosmological Argument in one of the other comments on the video. God has to be beyond time and space. That is how God has been defined since time immemorial. That is why we human beings cannot fathom what God is. Even who God is. It's because of our own limitations. The only aspect of God we can know through reason is His being the Creator. As for the others, He would have to tell us Himself. For that Revelation will have to guide.
Looking forward to your views.
As someone who is agnostic but leaned more towards theism, this hit the nails of why theism sounds more reasonable. The world just being without purpose or by chance doesn't sound right.
What I believe is it is true what you are saying, everybody actually is a agnostic leaning to theism at most, at least in an early phase of their life but when not liking the religion around them they choose atheism. This is actually what happened in Europe since renaissance but I see it differently in our Islamic world. Personally I was on a path to atheism before few years because I didn’t understand Islam, say, and didn’t like it. Now having read more about islam and learned more about life in non fictional or non utopian eyes I liked it and regained faith. What I see is that Islam is the best thing happened for humanity and even if it was something non divine and a false religion I will still follow it as a philosophy or life style.
@@oqoqay4787 "philosophy or life style."
Could you explain?
@@Dosadniste2000 th-cam.com/video/tY2njfpWC8g/w-d-xo.html -Introduction to Philosophy Lecture(1) By Mr.Sanders
@@tomatoinexile2901 which minute?
Well sir, in Islam we have a different version of the 2nd draft of the CA: not everything does needs a cause but everything happens (or every event) needs a cause so every created thing need a cause and it goes back to the first cause, God the creator. And because god is not something that happens or happened and is not linked to an event then the conclusion doesn’t contradict the assumption.
That does seem to me to be a possible response to the line of argument you're responding to. In the lecture, I tried to indicate a similar but slightly different kind of response by suggesting the possibility that God stood outside the whole sequence of events, creating the entire sequence without occupying a place within the sequence. God is then a causer, but not as a member of the series of happenings itself. It seemed to me (at least when I made that video) that this response might be a bit stronger than the one you suggest, since yours doesn't fully remove God from the chain of happenings, but instead places God in a unique position in that series: as Aristotle suggested (you have good company), God is an "uncaused causer". On the version I suggested in the lecture, God is no part of the sequence of worldly causes at all. I'm not sure how to fully understand either of these possibilities, but they're certainly interesting. I'm also not sure how strong an explanation of the world this gives, since one replaces one's wonder about why the universe is there with an explanation that postulates something else (God) that itself has no explanation.