Experience and knowledge must simply be presupposed in any system and cannot themselves be explained. — Janus

I hope not.

I'd be interested in seeing an essay comparing and contrasting Marcel'sBeing-in-Situation, Heidegger's Being-in-the-World, and Sartre's Being always in a situation.

Triumph of Christianity

A very interesting and easy read.

On Reading Marcel for the first time in 30 years.
I bought a copy of Gabriel Marcel’s The Existential Background of Human Dignity at a used-book store and have started reading it. I don’t remember if The Mystery of Being was this frustrating to read or not (I last read it over 30 years ago), but this “stream-of-consciousness“ style is frustrating, at times even infuriating, in a philosophical work. If this was a student’s paper I was grading, I’d have to say he had no idea what a coherent paragraph looked like.

And it's has the advantage of being short.

it makes more sense to think of God as the only unconceivable being. — The Curiorist

If God is "unconceivable" or "inconceivable", that seems to be good reason for saying there is no God.

I think that the cross-cultural similarities in reports of mystical experiences give us prima facie (and only prima facie) evidence of a dimension of reality that transcends the world of our senses. Let me recommend an examination of that claim: The Evidential Force of Religious Experience

Mystical experience cannot provide such a testing ground, because mystical experiences tell us nothing solid about metaphysics, about reality and lest of all about any purported "higher reality". — Janus

I think that this is a too pessimistic evaluation of the epistemic force of mystical experiences.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Aquinas didn't say an infinite regress was impossible? I thought he actually specifically said that it could not be shown through philosophical argument that the universe came into being due to God's creative act, and that this was a faith-based claim. — darthbarracuda

You are not wrong. He wanted to claim that Aristotle, who did not believe the universe was created, was rational and, in fact, represented the best that reason could provide. We "know" that the world was created, not because it is the rational position, but because of revelation, as recorded in Scripture.

By its very definition, existence must have a beginning and an end — The Curiorist

No, it does not. The chain of causes reaches back in time to the Big Bang. Now if cosmologists are right in thinking that there WAS something before the Big Bang, be it another universe, or parts of a larger multiuniverse, or whatever, then it is conceivable that the temporal chain of cause-effect has no beginning. Interesting that Edward Feser, whose Five Proofs of the Existence of God has been the topic of several threads here, accepts that the causal chain can go back infinitely in time. His arguments are quite different.

Bertrand Russell once quipped, "Science is what we know; philosophy is what we don't know." While I know that this is not only inadequate, but misleading, I think it's funny as a response to the question.

The best example that I know of on this issue is the question whether the fact that Heidegger was a Nazi (for a time) permanently "taints" his work. There is quite the disagreement in the philosophical community about this.

Do you not agree that there can be MIS-interpretations of a thinker's work? If not, why not? If so, what makes an interpretation mistaken?

That's not an interpretation of his work, that's a statement about the man himself. It seems to me that you're having difficulty separating a person them-self, from a person's work — Bacchus

No, it was offered by the student as an interpretation of Nietzsche's "Death of God" speech in The Gay Science.

There cannot be an infinite regress of existence — The Curiorist

I deny your premise!

that doesn't mean that my interpretation, or your interpretation is not just as right to and for me. — Bacchus

No, but some interpretations are better than others. For example, someone, on a FB philosophy group, claimed that Nietzsche believed in God, but was critical of the churches. There are some interpretations that are mis-interpretations.

Maybe a diagram would be easier....

+ | -

vs

+| ------------------------------------------------------------------ — apokrisis

Nope, doesn't help.

Is the meaning that one derives from a work of philosophy invalid if it differs from the meaning that the man who wrote that work derived from it? — Bacchus

Depends on whether you can give an argument about why the author is mistaken about the meaning of what he wrote.

to do philosophy really well you have to be able to write clearly and precisely. — Sam26

I wish all philosophers would agree with this.

This use of 'soul', both by Plato and by Chalmers, makes it synonymous to 'mind;, it is what unifies, or "contains" the mental states that constitute the self. As such, then I can agree that there is a soul, but question whether the soul survives the death of the body. But as neuroscience progresses, the (at least) dependency of mental states on electro-chemical activity in the brain suggesting that once the brain dies, so to does the soul, 'soul' seems to have taken on a meaning of something separate from the mind, something that will survive the death of the brain/mind. This separation of mind from soul is what I question. It is this idea of the soul that is vague and such that I see no evidence to suppose that it exists.

You make a distinction between Christians and Theists that I don't recognize. On my understanding Christians are Theists.

"Modern science gives no indication whatever of the existence of the soul or mind as an entity; indeed the reasons for disbelieving in the soul are very much of the same kind as the reasons for disbelieving in matter. I think the opponents of materialism have always been actuated by two main desires: the first to prove that the mind is immortal, and the second to prove that the ultimate power in the universe is mental rather than physical. In both these respects, I think the materialists were in the right."
―Bertrand Russell, What Is The Soul? (1928)

reducible to what? I am really not understanding the way that term, and its opposite, is being used in this discussion.

Again, there are two fundamental questions that are not being addressed, or at least, not to my satisfaction: (1) What is the "soul"? and (2) why even believe that there is such a thing?

1) Soul is irreducible — bahman

I don't know what this means. Why accept that there is such a thing as a soul, in the first place?

How, then, did the concept of heresy fit into your narrative. It seems to me any variation from the orthodox dogma was labeled "heresy" and ostracized.

The articles of faith are not important fundament ontological, epistemological, or even moral principles, they are more like objects of distraction. Unity is provided by a common diversion, instead of agreement on fundamental principles, thus allowing free thought in relation to fundamental principles. — Metaphysician Undercover

This sounds to me like revisionist history. In other words, this may be what believers of today want to believe, given multi-culturalism, global village, etc. It may well be part of a progressive religious world-view, but I don't think, viz. I am not convinced, the Church Fathers would agree. There is a reason why the concept of orthodoxy developed, and it had nothing to do with allowing any "freedom of thought".

they are the author's personal account of some events which they claim actually happened which demonstrate the existence of their deity. So, they are evidence, just not particularly good evidence. — JustSomeGuy

Now we get closer to what I think is the only plausible reason, though still weak, for believing there is a deity: religious experience.

Actually, it's not so much a fallacy as simply denying the premise. But, of course, whether there is any reason to affirm or deny God's existence is a different question, but one I think more interesting than whether some one person IS God. But then, I tike to sometimes throw a turd into the soup.

Actually, this entire discussion is moot. There is no God.

That is always said with the apparent conviction that none of the religious literature of the Judeo-Christian tradition actually constitutes evidence. I mean, it is simply swept off the table with the gesture of it 'not being empirical science', as though it is thereby settled that nothing in it ever happened, that the whole corpus is simply the superstitious accretions of the pre-scientific mentality. Never mind that it is read out at weddings and funerals, and that billions of people still live by it; there's no 'evidence'. — Wayfarer

If the Scriptures are to count as evidence, then what about the Qu'ran, the Gita, the Upanishads, the Sutras, etc. It seems to me that citing Scripture as evidence for the existence of the divine puts the cart before the horse.

Also, it sounds as if you are hinting at an "Argument from Consensus", suggesting that "billions of people still live by it" provides evidence that the divine is real.

I know you've heard this all before, but I am wondering about your take on these two points.

What else would proof be if not a piece or multiple pieces of evidence? — JustSomeGuy

Exactly, thus the scare-quotes. So now, the question about religious faith is, "Where's the evidence?" IOW, you don't have to "prove" the existence of God, just show me some evidence.

The belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is a very rational one, yet we have no proof that it will. Proof is not a requirement for rationality. — JustSomeGuy

But evidence is. Evidence need not be, and indeed with regard to empirical knowledge, cannot be, "proof".

So, faith, by that definition, is irrational — TheMadFool

By that definition. But faith, in its ordinary sense meaning "trust", can be "well founded" or "baseless". A spouse who has faith in their partner need not be irrational in that faith. Having faith in the American judicial system may or may not be irrational, depending on circumstances.

What Aristotle demonstrated is that "continuous change" is incompatible with the logical principles of what is and what is not, being and not being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Where does Aristotle do this?

human existence could be described as a metaphysical mystery

For him it is. See his two volume work, The Mystery of Being. Despite being 2 volumes, it is a fast read, as far as philosophy goes.

Are you implying that the passage quoted is "lacking in sincerity or meaningful content"?

but, exploring human existence is more important and interesting

And the nature of "human existence" is not a metaphysical problem?

R. M. Hare, a non-cognitivist (non-objectivist) moral philosopher, recognized that there was a difference between expressions of emotion and moral utterances, between "I don't like liver" and "murder is wrong", and agreed that Emotivism is unable to account for the normative force of moral claims. He articulated the view, which became to be called Prescriptivism, that moral claims have an imperative, or prescriptive, element. To say that murder is wrong says both "I disapprove of murder" AND "Do thou likewise!"

Regarding Emotivism, which is being expressed by some of these responses, there seems to me to be a crucial difference between "I don't like liver" or "Boo, Liver!", on the one hand, and "Torturing children for fun is wrong", on the other.

The problem, then, is how are we to think and talk about God? I am reminded of the early Wittgentstein's

That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.

Boy, Christians would not like that.

Then you might enjoy Bart Ehrman book Lost Christianities. Here is a you-tube interview with him. Ehrman on Lost Christianities