Are there any Latin scholars out there that know how one would say in Latin 'Thinking is happening, therefore something exists', with sufficient precision to capture the important differences between that and 'I think therefore I am'?

I don't understand what you are talking about. If the church concluded that the scientific account prevailed then they are not claiming a miracle, so there's nothing to discuss. It's only if the evidence appears to contradict established science that the possibility of a miracle would even be entertained.

Don't put words in my mouth. There is no logical objection to the possibility that a spiritual experience may be accompanied by a miraculous cure. The spiritual experience is personal and cannot be objectively verified, and to insist that it be so is scientism. In contrast, a cure that contradicts current science can be objectively verified and to demand scientific evidence is simply good scientific practice, regardless of one's theological position.

Don't try to muddy the waters by conflating (1) a demand for evidence to support a claim that a cure contradicts current science, with (2) a demand for evidence of a spiritual experience.

Furthermore, I think you're illustrating what I describe as 'scientism' - that only scientific accounts have credence, that religious authorities can't have. — Wayfarer

That's not the way the word 'scientism' is used. 'Scientism' occurs when someone demands that non-scientific claims, such as claims about spiritual experiences, meet scientific standards. If, as you appear to be suggesting, the Vatican is claiming that phenomena occurred that contradict current science - which is a far stronger claim than just that it is not explained by current science - then they are making a claim about science, and it is not scientism to require that claims about science meet scientific standards.

and my point is that it would be inappropriate for any non-RC to place any credence on what the Vatican deems to be the case, unless that deeming has been subject to impartial peer review. Submitting the cases to a reputable, impartial journal would achieve that. Bringing doctors into the Vatican to give an opinion does not. There are millions of doctors around the world. One can find a doctor to say anything one wants if one looks hard enough. Just look at the ones that say immunisation is dangerous.

If it wants to make claims about scientific phenomena, which is what you appear to be suggesting, then yes - if it wants those claims to be taken seriously by non-RCs.

Which of them have been accepted by peer-reviewed scientific journals?

But the kind of phenomena that are being discussed in these cases are not simply 'unexplained' - there's more to it than that. — Wayfarer

What more is there to it, and how does that extra feature lend support to belief in the efficacy of supplicatory prayer?

The article I referred to is about a medical specialist who was called in to adjudicate whether a particular case could be accounted for scientifically. — Wayfarer

That it cannot be accounted for scientifically is no evidence for it being a miracle. The number of unexplained phenomena scientists observe is much greater than the number of explained phenomena. That's why they still have jobs - to search for explanations.

There is even a word for this in medicine - idiopathic - which means 'we currently have no idea why this happens'. I have an idiopathic arthritic condition, but I don't attribute it to supernatural beings, good bad or indifferent.

So you would put Catholicism generally in the same box? — Wayfarer

Sorry, I just noticed this comment, which is quite distinct to the one to which I just responded. I definitely would not put Catholicism generally in that box. It's the institution that I object to. There are some Catholics that I greatly admire, including their spiritual dimension.

One you would be familiar with, being Australian, is Kristina Kenneally. I was rather anti-her while she was NSW Premier, because of the shadow of implied association with the Terrigal mafia. But I have been enormously impressed by what she has said, written and done since then. She is a devout Catholic and yet one of the most trenchant critics of the institution of the RC church, including, but by no means limited to, its opposition to female empowerment and family planning.

Another is the gay RC priest James Allison. I heard a podcast discussion with him on Encounter on Radio National a few years ago and was mightily impressed by his candour, eloquence and the warmth of his spiritual worldview. What amazes me is that he hasn't been excommunicated or at least defrocked.

You think they all must be false as a matter of principle? — Wayfarer

No, I think they are mistaken because:
(1) the claims are of exactly the kind one would expect if they were mistaken, ie never anything that directly contravenes science, like regrowing a leg; and
(2) they mock and insult all those people that have sincerely prayed for healing and have not received it - not what one would expect from a good God.

This is not a matter of pro vs anti religion. It's a matter of genuine spirituality vs witch-doctory. People who shackle their faith to such claims, rather than to personal spiritual experience, are making a profound mistake.

The miraculous is not necessarily the outlandish. — Wayfarer

Sure, but in the case of the Vatican's so-called miracles, they are never outlandish. They are all easily encompassed within the very wide area of things we do not understand about the human body. How strange of God to always avoid doing a miracle in an area where we understand the body very well - such as an inability to regrow legs.

I think the underlying issue is that we've put all this in a box, marked 'religion', and declared our attitude towards it, and we don't at all want to contemplate the possibility of opening it again. — Wayfarer

I don't know who this 'we' is. Presumably you speak for yourself, but for who else? Not me. The trouble with miracle claims is not that they are in a box marked religion but in a box marked quackery. They belong with the carnival snake-oil salesmen of the 19th century, for the reasons so eloquently described by BC, amongst others. For me, the box marked religion is a 'good' box and deals with spirituality - which may or may not include a sense of the divine, not with rent-seeking petitions to a supernatural mafia boss.

What I believe happened in these situations is unexplained healing which has occurred periodically in cases where saints were not involved. — Bitter Crank

Indeed. When the RC church is able to produce a case where an amputee has regrown a leg after prayers on their behalf, there will be reason for non-RC people to take these claims of miraculous healing seriously.

That was a very eloquent post, by the way.

It's interesting to see where this discussion has gone. It's wandered about in an unpredictable way - which is not at all a bad thing.

I'm still stuck on trying to interpret the title - 'Religion will win in the end'. Since religion is an activity, I can't see what it would mean for it to win, or for it to lose. Is it like at the end of a day in the Test Match where the upper hand has changed several times and there have been some spectacular displays of skill and athleticism, and Richie Benaud says 'The game of cricket was the winner on the day'?

PS I hope I didn't offend any anti-religious cricketers or cricket-hating monks by comparing cricket to religion. I think they're both great. It's the governing bodies I have a problem with. Damn that ICC.

I suppose one could hypothesise that, if mind-independent moral facts existed, they would have causal powers that - through some mysterious, currently unknown and undetectable, process - cause most people to feel those facts as part of their personal morality. The people that didn't feel those facts in their morality would be like that because of faulty reception apparatus, which could be objectively assessed by dissection of their brain and comparison with a non-faulty brain.

In such a scenario, there would be some sort of Morality Field that transmitted through the aether like EM waves. A universe with no absolute morality would have no such field. One could imagine a clever enough scientist inventing a sophisticated detector to detect the Morality Waves.

Such a universe would be verifiably different from one in which there was no Morality Field, given a Morality Wave detector. People might act the same way in both universes, but in one they'd be doing it because of Morality Waves received and in the other they'd be doing it because of their genes and early upbringing. The detector could tell us which world was which.

That's a horribly materialist hypothesis, which makes me break out in a rash, since I am generally non-Materialist. But it is at least plausible.

That doesn't help, unless you are prepared to say that Albert, who was most recently measured as 1770.1mm tall is 'tall relative to' Gunther, who was most recently measured as 1770.0mm tall, which would be inconsistent with how the word is used.

If we don't adopt that departure from normal language use, we have to accept that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for being 'tall relative to Gunther'. We would all agree that Laxmi, who was most recently measured as 1450mm tall, is not tall relative to Gunther, and that Song Mi, who was most recently measured as 2137mm tall, is tall relative to Gunther, but for people who were last measured with heights in the range of say 1720mm to 1820mm there is a fuzzy boundary, where no agreement could be reached as to whether the person is tall relative to Gunther.

That reply is a statement of the anti-natalist position. I am very familiar with the position and have seen it discussed often enough that I have no need to see a reprise of it. Nor I think do most other regular posters on such a forum.

My point was about what sort of ethical premise one needs to adopt in order to provide grounding for such a position, and that there are problems with Premise 1 as stated. I also indicated in my post alternative premises you could use to ground your position.

Thus the condition is both sufficient and necessary for the conclusion. — Samuel Lacrampe

It is not sufficient. I don't know anybody that would describe a 1.51m human as 'tall'.

I think it would help to read up on the meaning of 'necessary and sufficient'. The wiki article is not bad.

True. That was a careless misuse of the term 'tautology'

1 Do not harm others — Andrew4Handel

There is a great deal of philosophical discussion - some of it quite interesting - about the interpretation and implication of a premise like this in the case of beings that do not exist at the time of the action in question - 'future beings' or 'contingent future beings'. Peter Singer has an extended discussion of it in his book Practical Ethics - the chapter on killing animals.

There are various directions one can take with this, and some of them lead to some bizarre-seeming conclusions - eg in some cases that we should all have as many children as possible.

A way to avoid the reference to currently-nonexistent 'others' is to rephrase the premise as something like 'do not perform an action that you expect to increase the amount of net harm in the world'. Strong anti-natalists like Benatar would insist on removing the word 'net' from that sentence.

The trouble with the rephrase though is that one ends up with what looks like a basic statement of utilitarianism, so it seems one has not made any progress in identifying the consequences of one's ethical premise.

TGW is correct. A tautology is a statement that remains true regardless of what interpretation we put on any of the non-logical words in it.

Thus 'if X is a bachelor then X is a man' is not a tautology because if we interpret 'bachelor' to mean 'dog' and 'man' to mean 'cat', it is false. Note that the words 'if' and 'then' are logical words so we are not allowed to change their meaning.

TGW gave an example of a tautology, which is an implicative statement where the antecedent and consequent are the same. For instance:

'if X is a bachelor then X is a bachelor'

is a tautology, because whatever we interpret 'bachelor' to mean, it remains true.

We don't even need the whole sentence. The second part 'I am' is a tautology.

I am no Latin scholar but I note that the Latin original 'cogito ergo sum' contains no pronouns. Literally it seems to say something like 'thinks therefore exists'. Usually, as in other pronoun-drop languages like Italian, a pronoun is implied. But just because a pronoun is usually implied in a sentence with this type of grammatic structure, does not mean it is always implied. Just because the sentence would seem to make sense with the pronoun inserted (in Italian the 'I' pronoun would be Io. I don't know what it would be in Latin), that doesn't mean that Descartes intended to imply one. Perhaps it was intended for there to be no pronoun, implied or otherwise, and - in a pronoun-drop language - one cannot distinguish between a sentence in which an implied pronoun was intended and one in which it was not.

If Descartes did not mean to imply a pronoun, we could expand on the statement to be something like
'thinking is happening, therefore existence is happening'
This form of the statement does not necessitate the existence of a stable self, which would please Buddhist philosophers and David Hume.

And that brings us to Ross Douthat's point about those who are willing to welcome Islam with open arms, but who won't contemplate the possibility that their values ought to be respected. Why? Because all values, or even the absence of values, are a matter of individual opinion. — Wayfarer

I don't know what that fellow is on about, if what he says matches your paraphrase. I don't know anybody welcoming Islam with open arms, any more than they are welcoming Hinduism or capitalism with open arms when we admit refugees that have those characteristics. It is people, not beliefs, towards which we feel compassion.

Nor do I find the comment about moral relativism relevant. Only a Normative Moral Relativist would say that we should respect all moral beliefs, no matter how different from our own, and no matter how repugnant to us. The Normative Moral Relativist is a mythical creature that, in my experience, lives only in the fevered minds of those that believe that Divine Command Ethics is the only possible sort of Ethics.

The only moral relativists that exist in anything other than tiny fringe minorities maybe in some obscure corners of some campuses, and that are meaningful enough to distinguish, are Meta-Ethical Moral Relativists. We Meta-Ethical Moral Relativists are as ready as anybody else to decry repugnant practices of people of different cultures. But it is the practices, not the superficial labels, that one decries.

I suspect your opinion-piece writer doesn't know the difference between the two.

With a fuzzy boundary of category C we can identify necessary conditions for C ( in the above example: measured height > 1.5 metres) and we can identify sufficient conditions for C ( in the above example: measured height > 2.0 metres) , but we cannot identify necessary and sufficient conditions for C, which is what an essence is understood to be.

There will always be theists and atheists. The reason there appear to be almost no atheists prior to the nineteenth century is that in most societies of that time public admission of one's atheism was tantamount to suicide.

Hence the apparently high levels of religiosity pre 19th C are a distortion caused by state enforcement of religion. Similarly the apparently high levels of atheism in the Soviet Union were a distortion caused by the reverse phenomenon.

I expect that, in the absence of coercion, the religious will be religious and the non-religious won't. Because of the natural wide variation in human psychologies, I expect neither group would drop below 25% of the population, and the split would vary within that range according to fashion and circumstance.

No worries, let's move on. I think you were asking something about whether I think banning internet pornography and gay marriage would be a reasonable price to pay to get terrorists to stop their violence.

Personally, I do not think it would be reasonable. Firstly, I don't think it would work. I don't think those issues have much at all to do with the motivations of terrorists.

Secondly, if we agree to remove some of our freedoms for the sake of one group of people that threaten violence, it won't be long before the next group lines up to back their demands with actual or threatened violence.

It's like paying ransoms to kidnappers. However tempting it may be to do it, it's really bad policy to do so.

I'm no fan of the internet porn industry. I suspect a significant proportion of what it produces is exploitative and harmful. But if we close down that freedom of expression, what's next? I think advertising alcohol, gambling and junk food does far more harm than porn, and we're not banning that.

I'm not saying we should have no censorship, but I think we need to set a high bar for it. From my viewpoint, items that cleared the bar (ie qualified for censorship) would be gratuitously violent or undeniably exploitative.

I feel as though it was an umbrella term created to strawman all American and European ideas into being considered "bad" or "wrong". — SleepingAwake

I don't think Western is necessarily intended as pejorative. In the minds of some shallow thinkers it is, but not generally. Consider for instance Bertrand Russell's 'History of Western Philosophy' which is still, despite its flaws, regarded as one of the best, most approachable descriptions of the Western philosophical tradition. Russell certainly did not mean Western in a pejorative way. He was very respectful of the achievements of Western culture. 'Western' is just an easy way to distinguish it from the other two large, influential cultures and philosophical streams the Earth has seen, which are Chinese and Indian.

By the way, I would include Middle Eastern culture and philosophy in 'Western' because after all the dominant religion of Europe and America is a Middle-Eastern religion. The European-native religions were actually things like Norse Gods and Druidism.

It was a rhetorical question, not a policy proposal. It is along the lines: the West requires and expects that Muslims consider revising the aspects of their scripture that support holy war and killing of infidels so as to better conform to the requirements of a pluralistic, global culture - that they abandon the concept of 'religiously-sanctioned violence'. — Wayfarer

That is not what you said. You did not mention scripture. You asked whether gay-marriage-opposing Muslims would abandon their support for terrorism if the West abandoned support for gay marriage.

Will you stop beating your wife if I agree with your view that Christianity is just lovely?

In no way did he say or imply that he was talking about all Muslims. — Thorongil

I suggest you read more carefully. I did not say it did. But the post implies that any Muslim that is opposed to pornography and gay marriage supports terrorism.

When a Christian or atheist is opposed to gay marriage, the worst that is said about them is that they're a bigot. But according to said post, if they're a Muslim and are opposed to gay marriage they must be a terrorism supporter. The Pope - wrongly, in my opinion - is opposed to gay marriage. I have not heard anybody imply he supports terrorism.

The whole thing can be fixed by putting the word 'terrorist' after the word 'Muslim' in the first sentence. The absence of that extra word is damning.

I wrote out an answer to this and then my jaw dropped when I realised the implication of your first two sentences in that post - what it implies about Muslims in general. No doubt it was just a mistake, arising from typing on auto-pilot, and does not in any way reflect what you believe. I suggest you fix it before we go on.

How will terrorism bring down the west? — VagabondSpectre

Terrorism can bring down the West not by military action but by making the West betray its values in the name of the so-called 'war against terror'. The fall will not be military but moral, and is well underway.

To that end, the most powerful ally the terrorists have is the current American president and his ilk. Those that pile in behind, howling for discrimination against domestic Muslims are - without realising it - providing the best collaboration service that Daesh could wish for.

Fortunately, some Western leaders are prepared to take a tough stand against the jihadi fifth-columnists like Trump. Foremost amongst these are Merkel and Trudeau.

Is your proposal then that, whenever the UN declares Genocide to have occurred in a region, you want the US government to do whatever is necessary to prevent that, including invading and attempting to install a new government if no other way appears likely to achieve that?

That's a perfectly good debate topic, with credible cases to be made on both sides and, even better, there is no need to mention Islam, as the issue is responses to genocide, not Islam.

If that is your main concern, I think a productive and interesting discussion could be had about it, with lower stress levels than this one seems to have. It would suit a new thread, as this one appears to be about Islam. I'd be an interested reader of, and probable participant in, such a thread.

I mentioned that Western governments should shut down mosques that breed terrorists, try those suspected of plotting terrorist activities for treason, and force the Gulf Arab states to take more refugees. — Thorongil

That's reverting to action to prevent domestic terrorism incidents, which I have indicated - without rebuttal - is an insignificant issue in public policy terms.

Let's concentrate the discussion on action against activities of terrorists in places where terrorism is a significant problem, like Syria. Western governments cannot close down the mosques there. What action would you like taken, and what is the threshold criterion that must be met for such action, so that we can work out what other countries it should be applied to?

Without clear criteria, such a policy has no defence against the accusation that it is simply anti-Muslim. You mentioned genocide earlier. You could pick a particular definition of genocide and use that as the centre of a criterion. I am interested to see what that criterion will be, and whether it also mandates US military intervention in those non-Islamic trouble spots I mentioned.

Either your position is changing, from a focus on Western victims of violence to a focus on victims in places like Syria, or it has been like that all along but that was not clear. Let's assume the latter. That position is prima facie more reasonable to me than one about heightening domestic anti-terrorist activities. But the practical and definitional problems are immense.

What would you like to be sufficient conditions for the US to intervene militarily in another country, and what form would you like that intervention to take? How does this apply to countries like North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe and Congo?

We've already covered this. That is a difference. But it doesn't provide any support for your assertion that Western governments are not doing enough to fight terrorism. Public policy, in this area, is about minimising harm. The intent behind the cause of harm is only relevant insofar as it feeds through to the amount of harm caused.

If you want to argue that more money and loss of freedom should be committed to anti-terrorist activities than at present, you need to demonstrate the public policy benefit of that, and why it would reduce harm more than spending the same amount on other more pressing issues like road deaths, public health or gun control.

If you did, I didn't see it. If you think it was so great, reproduce it here. Otherwise all you have is 'I've got a really great argument against this, which I'm not going to show you'.

Read what I've said. It's not hard. — Thorongil

Read the rebuttals from myself and WhiskeyWhiskers. That's not hard either.

But solving "road deaths, inadequate-health-system-related deaths, or poverty-related deaths," is simple, right? — Thorongil

If we spent on those problems a quarter of the money and removal of personal freedom involved in the 'war against terror' we would reduce the annual death toll by a large multiple of the annual death toll in Western countries from terrorist acts.

eg road deaths - lower speed limits, mandate collision avoidance systems in all cars, introduce vulnerable road user laws like in Europe, require driver re-licensing at least triennially, make activities like mobile phone use while driving result in immediate loss of licence.

But no, we couldn't do that could we, because being allowed to drive your own car however you want is the American dream.

I gave you the reason. — Thorongil

My recollection is that you made some statement purported to be a reason, it was challenged and shown to be no reason at all, and you didn't even attempt rebut that challenge. It was too many pages ago to find, but if you want to do that and try to recycle it, go for it.

PS Some stats about road deaths, from here.
The US has 34,064 road deaths per annum (What's the US annual death toll from terrorism again?)
There are various measures of the rate, taking into account the population size. In all of them the US rate is far more than in other Western countries. How many of those 34,064 deaths could be saved by even a minor tightening of US laws, which are much more lax than in other Western countries?
The most favourable measure to the US is deaths per billion km travelled. But comparing that to two other Western countries that have large distances to travel - Canada and Australia - we see the rate is US 7.1 Canada 6.2 Australia 5.2. Australia has far tougher road laws than the US, although weaker than in Europe. If the US changed its laws to get its death rate down to that of Australia, it would save 9,115 lives per year. That's more than four and a half 9/11s.

How can one be satisfied with the thought of one's own impending death without referring to the individual's after death experience? — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm afraid I cannot tell you how it happens. I can only observe that it does. In my case I was disturbed by the notion of death for the first forty years or so of my life, then one day I found that I wasn't. There are all sorts of factors that I can think of that may have been relevant: reading Buddhist and Hindu writings, reading Epicurus and the Stoics, taking up bike riding in a busy, non-bike-friendly city where I feel my life is in danger every day, my children getting old enough that I no longer felt my death would create major financial and logistical stress for them and my partner, ceasing to believe in Hell. But it's all guesswork. All I know is that something changed so that I no longer fear it, and that I do not believe in individual survival after death. Indeed, I feared death the most when I believed in post-death survival - because of that RC Hell thing y'know.

Your writing reminds me of a novella by Tolstoy that I have been meaning to read. What's its name again .... does a bit of Googling ..... ah, yes 'The death of Ivan Ilyich'. Apparently it's about a rich, powerful man who becomes fatally injured as a result of a silly domestic mishap, and who cannot come to terms with his impending death. I had to avert my eyes from the end of the wiki article about it, so as not to spoil the surprise about whether he does eventually come to terms with it.

It's considered a masterpiece. Let's read it. Here's a free e-book of an English translation.

I agree that there is no absolute distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. I like the co-arising perspective!

I think there is a useful practical distinction though. Saying that something is objectively the case is just saying that nearly everybody would agree that it is the case. That deals with the notion that it is objective that there are two mangos on the table, but that it is subjective that Justin Bieber's 'Baby, Baby, Baby' is a great song.