For your information, "brick" was a figure of speech called simile in my sentence.

Simile is
"a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid (e.g. as brave as a lion )." - Oxford Dictionary.

They are. If they are not, I wouldn't have understood you. I did understand what you typed, so they are as real as bricks.

Every time words are spoken, written or typed out, they are real as bricks. Bricks that make up the sentences, which are propositions, statements or claims in the real world.For instance, God is great, or Oh my God, you took my money, but didn't let me win the lottery jackpot. Don't worry, God will save you. etc etc. These are the real life examples of solid manifestation and materialization and utilization of the words.

It depends on what the definition of God is.  If it were like me, my definition of God is, a word in English which spells GOD, and has many meanings and many types depending on what religion or concept it comes from. Hence it is quite straightforward to prove the existence of God under the definition.

Whenever I type G O D, a word God appears on the screen GOD.  Here is a God. Here is another God.

You are seeing two Gods on the screen.  An object can be said to exist when it is visible to the perceiver in space and time.  I am seeing the word God in the space where the monitor is located at this particular moment.

Therefore it is conclusively true that God exists.

If your definition of God is different from mine, you would have a different method of proof. Whatever the case, your mileage may vary.

There are three possibilities concerning the belief in God: true, false, indeterminate. Religion believes it is true. Atheism believes that it is false. Agnosticism is indeterminate.

Atheism is defined as a positive claim. It is agnosticism that refuses to make a claim. While agnosticism makes perfect sense, atheism doesn't.

If we look at the JTB account for knowledge, then knowledge is defined as a particular kind of belief:
 

I didn't combine anything at all. I just chose words to make up sentences. Anyway, it is not the same thing as seeing the images in your dreams.

We’re speaking about the medical procedure some people choose to terminate a viable pregnancy. You’re equating this with the natural and spontaneous death of a fetus.

Night - hi. Why did you say "organism"?

 note that the act of abortion itself, the act of killing this organism

The question is whether a miscarriage is the end of the short life of a person, or not. Why jump to asking for blame and “wrongness” without addressing the moving pieces of the argument.

that the act of abortion itself, the act of killing this organism,

Show me any definition that states otherwise.

Miscarriages are not the intentional killing of a human life, so no.

Combining image 1 and 2? doesn't make sense to me. How do you combine images? Combine something means mixing something. To mix something you must add 1 substance to the other substance, which is only possible with liquid or powder stuff.

If you put down image 1 to image 2, then image 2 will be invisible blocked by the image1. What is going on here?

You were talking about the images, but suddenly now you are talking a person called someone?

I don't. Do you? Why do you want to come up with a new image?

My one objection is that meat is flesh-as-food, flesh that we eat. I think we're in trouble when we start viewing other members of our species as food. But otherwise I fully agree.

note that the act of abortion itself, the act of killing this organism, is rarely mentioned in these discussions from an abortionist standpoint.

Interesting point. But if the images in dreams are from the memories, why some folks see images that they have never come across in their lives, or meet people they cannot recognise and never met, or go to the places they have never been in their whole lives before?

No. It depends on your standpoint on the status of a fetus. We are only charged with murder if we kill a human being. If a fetus is a human being, then it's murder.

I think consistency is important.

This demonstrates that rationality is not contingent on being correct or knowing the truth.

That's certainly true. But the reasoning you outline starts from "If someone has fired a gun, I might get shot, so I should hide", and then considers a range of possibilities around that. That's the starting-point. Factoring in my beliefs and knowledge amounts to factoring those possibilities in. It's still about the facts.

What do you mean? How did the marbles get into the jar? Isn't putting marbles into a jar an act of organizing them?

I must argue against that statement. Knowing truth is essential because things go very wrong when people act on incorrect ideas and bad information. Primitive people knew that problem well. They did not have bank cards to repair all the damage of bad decisions. And democracy, like scientific research, is people working together to get things right. True Aristotle made mistakes, and Greek logic defined by him was lacking. But the truth is, if we don't get things right, they can go very wrong. This is true in our private lives and public lives.

The argument from Aristotle is that a body is an organized existence, and an agent is required for any type of organization, as the organizer. Therefore the agent as organizer, is prior in time to the existence of the body. Of course abiogenesis is the basis for a denial of the secondary premise, but as the op points out, it's not a justified denial.

Is it rational to believe illnesses are caused by the gods? Is it rational to believe a god created man from mud?

Sound premise + valid argument = sound conclusion.

To say that the brain is still functional because there are, for example, cells that are still alive, or even that the brain is functioning at some level is misleading. We want to know how people have vivid experiences, including memories of what's happening around them in a state that wouldn't support these kinds of experiences given our current understanding. A case in point is Dr. Eban Alexander's experience when his brain was basically mush. Granted he's not dead and the brain is still functioning on some level, but at the level it is functioning he shouldn't be able to have these kinds of experiences or be able to recall his experiences. He shouldn't even be able to hallucinate. Many who answer this question are only speculating because we don't have the slightest idea how the brain would or could produce these experiences given its state. You're assuming that because the brain is still in some sense alive the experiences must be coming from that lower functioning state. There's no good evidence that that's the case.

I agree. However, what I'm saying is that much of my argument depends on what people are experiencing during their NDE/OBE. It's not dependent on some definition of death, whether that's clinical death or some other definition that claims that none of these people arereally dead because of how long, e.g., cells remain alive. Besides the descriptions of these experiences are that they are near-death experiences, not death experiences.

Most of what people tell us about their sensory experiences is trustworthy. If this wasn’t the case we would be reduced to silence. This doesn’t mean that we just accept everything people say, it just means that most of what people relay to us is reliable; and since it’s generally reliable along with our sensory experiences it’s a genuine epistemological category along with other ways of acquiring knowledge. This way of knowing is much more pervasive than even science. It doesn’t have the glamour of science or the creative power of science, at least seemingly so, but its power in our lives is undeniable.

One can always point to counter-examples where large groups of people believed X and their belief or beliefs turned out to be false. However, this does nothing to the argument that testimonial evidence or our sensory experiences are generally reliable, which is the bedrock of NDE testimonials. If such examples diminished the effectiveness of the general reliability of such justifications, then it would also diminish sciences’ ability to be an effective way of justifying their beliefs or theories because science depends on testimony, sensory experience (observation), mathematics, and logic to validate many of their experiments. If you removed sensory experiences from science, it would collapse.

My approach is simple, in that I’m applying Occam’s Razor to the evidence, i.e., the simplest explanation is probably the best explanation. This is how we approach most testimonial evidence in our lives. This is not to say that science isn’t helpful because it is, but that science is by its very nature materialistic, although that is slowly changing. Moreover, the tools of most scientists are not conducive to the study of consciousness because consciousness in my estimation is not materialistic, and this nonmaterialistic aspect can be understood with a simple understanding of our subjective experiences.

The truth of the matter is that for many materialists no amount of evidence would convince them because they’re so entrenched in their beliefs. This is also true of religious ideology; no amount of counterevidence would dissuade them because they’re so dogmatically entrenched in their beliefs. Nothing seems to falsify such beliefs, which is mostly the result of dogmatism. Dogmatism in many cases is the enemy of truth.

NDEs have the same structure that any veridical experience would have, i.e., they all show slightly different variations that fit the general structure of any veridical experience. This in itself isn’t strong evidence that the experiences are veridical, but it adds to the overall picture that the experiences are veridical. In other words, it’s exactly what you would expect from veridical experiences. Whereas in a hallucination, for example, you wouldn’t find the consistency of experience, nor the corroborative aspects (objective components) that you find in NDEs/OBEs.

Most people would consider sufficiently reliable the testimony of 10 or 20 people on most everyday events and would consider the need for science to verify such evidence as ridiculous. Of course, this depends on what people are claiming in their testimony. If 10 or 20 people are claiming they saw Bigfoot I’d be a bit skeptical, you’re going to need a lot more evidence than that, and you’re going to need much more corroboration along with bodies, bones, or other material evidence. The point is that different claims need more or less evidence depending on how much goes against what we normally experience. In the case of OBEs, we have millions of accounts, in a variety of settings, with thousands being corroborated, and the memories are as consistent or stronger than memories of other veridical experiences. These facts suggest that ordinary everyday citizens can, based on a cursory study of the testimony, conclude that OBEs do happen. I say that it’s enough evidence for people to claim that they know OBEs happen. I would further say that if you’ve had the experience, it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that the experience was veridical, i.e., that you know it’s veridical. Case in point Dr. Eban Alexander’s (neuroscientist) NDE given here:

To dismiss Dr. Alexander’s testimony, which in itself is very convincing, is to ignore very powerful experiences, that at the very least should be considered and studied with an open mind.

I'm not sure if you understood his argument. Your statement is not only wrong, but it doesn't address mine nor Singer's point.

I’m not an expert on living the atheist life, but I didn’t always believe in God. And it was liberating. But also seemed incapable of addressing the bigger questions that didn’t go away. If I stayed atheist, I wouldn’t have come back to seeking answers, and more to the point, wouldn’t be talking about it with anyone else.

That’s the illogical part to me. If three people agree there is no god, there is no objective truth, there is no access to reality as it must be for all, then they should also agree that they have no idea whether each of them mean or agreed on the same thing - collaboration in philosophy and ethics becomes pointless.

I think this proves we can prove a negative.— 180 Proof


It only proves this if you can definitively say that and where the missing item ought to be. Which is absurd. The only way you could say that would be if the missing item actually existed, then disappeared. You are conflating a "disappearing existent" with an unknown. Anything which is to whatever extent unknown can not be definitively identified sufficient to this putative "proof of non-existence." This is exactly what Dennett failed to appreciate.

I'll ask you one more time, what do you mean by complete brain death? I never use any such terms. When I speak of death, I mean clinical death, i.e., no measurable brain activity, no heartbeat, and no breathing. Are you disputing that there are any NDEs that occur when a person is pronounced clinically dead? If you want an e.g. of someone who had an NDE when there was no measurable brain activity then I would give the example of Pam's NDE out of Atlanta, GA