To be more precise I'm claiming that it has not been proven that a God would be bound by the rules of logic. — Jake

I think that's an excellent position. It was the position of Immanuel Kant, a devout theist who essentially said that we were incapable of doing any reasoning about God.

It does however mean that any statements of belief in the trinity, or indeed about any aspect of God whatsoever, must be acknowledged by those making them to be pure items of faith, not reasoned as they are so often presented to be.

Further, the statements are meaningless because statements about something are only meaningful if they have consequences, and consequences depend on logic, which we have just agreed may not be applicable.

So I think the welter of theological reasoning about the trinity and other items of dogma should be replaced by the following simple statement, by those that like the trinity idea :

'when I think of God I think of like a sort of three-fold thingy'

Now that's theology I can respect!

Yeah, I don't get the whole authenticity thing either. I've always thought Sartre was gratuitously judgemental about that waiter.

To the extent that authenticity means anything to me, it is relaxation, and it is a privilege rather than a virtue. It is the gift that very few people have of being able to just act without constantly judging themself or wondering what others think of them. It is something to aspire to in the same way as learning to meditate is something to aspire to - because the better we get at it the more content we will be and possibly the more pleasure we can give to others, like Baudrillard's naturally smiling waiter.

But it is no more something to criticise someone over for not having it than one should criticise someone who has never been able to learn to read.

The Argument From Evil, is, was, and has always been an atheistic argument against the existence of God. — Rank Amateur

It is often used by atheists. It is also used by theists that reject the notion of omnipotence, and I have witnessed such people making it. Are you saying that I misheard, or that they were lying when they said they were theists?

So the so-called 'problem of evil' is a purely Christian problem? — Pattern-chaser

It is a problem of any set of beliefs that asserts that its god is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. That includes the main branches of Christianity, but not all of them. I expect there are other religions that promote the same troublesome set of three beliefs, and they'll have the same problem.

As a point of clarity, the argument from evil, is an argument made by an atheist, as a proof God does not exist. — Rank Amateur

No. It is an argument by anybody that does not believe that there is a god that is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, that no being, created or uncreated, have all three of those properties. In no way does that require that the person making the argument is an atheist.

My choice is to drop the omnipotent bit, as it has enormous logical problems even before one gets to considering the problem of evil. A non-omnipotent god is far more lovable.

If you are grass, a rabbit is a curse inflicted by an Evil God.
If you are a wolf, rabbits are a gift from a Good God.

Is God only the God of Humans? — Pattern-chaser

If we are talking about the God of the Bible, which is the god that is almost always the one under discussion when this topic of theodicy comes up, then Yes, because the story of that god, and all the theories of its nature, is written by humans.

If we are talking about other concepts of God then No, but many, possibly most, other concepts of god don't have the same problem, because they do not assert omnipotence. So there is nothing that such concepts of god need to be defended against.

The god that forms part of my worldview from time to time is not the god of the bible. She is the god of all things, and she is not omnipotent. So the problem of evil does not arise.

I can do that too. I thought of salvaging the koan by changing it to the sound of one finger clicking. But then I found I can still make a very faint sound by striking the tip of my middle finger against the flesh of my palm. I wonder if that counts as clicking. I can make an even fainter sound by striking my ring finger. But my hearing is not acute enough to pick up the sound when I do it with my little or index finger or thumb.

However fancy the long arrangements of words the theologians come up with, they disappear in a puff of shame when watching a mother helplessly holding her infant that is dying a slow painful death from whooping cough.

To the extent that I understand your question - which is partially at best - No I don't.

you absolutely have no care for the sufferer who was raped and murdered, or sold into prostitution and then murdered. — Blue Lux

You had better stick to speaking for yourself. It only harms your case to make angry, erroneous assertions about what others feel or believe.

Humanity is an ideal. The reality is that the world is harsh and brutal. There is no room for idealism. If a person, by whatever means, commits and atrocity... They should therefore have no rights. — Blue Lux

We disagree fundamentally on that. There seems no more that can be said on either side in relation to that.

But compassion for whom? The perpetrator or the victims? — Marchesk

Compassion is empathising with and seeking to end or ameliorate the suffering of others. The time to apply compassion to a victim is before they are harmed, to prevent the harm. If they survive the harm it is to help them heal. Once they are killed it is too late.

But that's not true, because there is a concept of the victims having justice. — Marchesk

I acknowledge that forms part of the arguments of the less belligerent advocates of capital punishment - the ones that don't keep referring to child rapists. But most arguments for capital punishment that I encounter are of the latter kind, and are deeply rooted in a desire to harm.

I don't accept the justice-based arguments because I value compassion over justice, and also because, as Socrates pointed out so long ago, nobody seems to be able to agree on what justice is.

well what if someone raped a child and then murdered them? — Blue Lux

No, not then. Neither for Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot or Fred and Mary West.

Such arguments are based purely on a lust for revenge, and giving in to that lust strips us of all that is good in our humanity.

I can see from your posts above that you hold the views you wrote very strongly, and I am unlikely to persuade you. It seems there are many in the USA, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and the Philippines that feel that way. I am fortunate to live in what I consider to be a more free and enlightened country, where the majority do not feel that way. It is not an overwhelming majority, and it is always possible for the lust for revenge to gather popular momentum, especially in this time of populist demagogues. All I can do is hope that doesn't happen here, and put in my arguments when I can to try to stop that happening.

I read the McDonnell and Abbott paper and was impressed by Cover's switching strategy, which is better than my proposed strategy of picking a threshold and then switching when the observed amount is below that (My strategy is covered as case (iii) on p3316).

Cover's very clever (IMHO) strategy is to randomise the decision to switch, as a Bernoulli RV with probability p that is a monotonic decreasing function of the observed amount Y. Whereas the threshold strategy will deliver positive expected gains for some distributions of X and zero expected gains otherwise, the Cover strategy delivers a positive expected gain for every possible distribution of X.

I do enjoy a clever idea, and that idea of making the decision to switch itself a random variable strikes me as very clever indeed. I especially like the fact that it delivers expected gains even with no knowledge whatsoever about the possible distribution of X, and even if X is a fixed amount (a 'point distribution'.

It sounds like the initial idea was from TM Cover at Stanford, in this 1996 paper, but I've only read the later paper, by McDonnell and Abbott.

What Sapientia said!

The main reason the death penalty is so barbaric, and so dehumanising of the society that conducts it, is that it is done in cold blood, against a helpless, powerless individual. How anybody could think that killing somebody in those circumstance is comparable to what happens in self-defence, or even in any situation where the victim is armed and dangerous, is beyond me.

Thus.
I am alone. — Blue Lux

Does believing that make you happy, or in some other way bring you fulfilment? If so, by all means follow that path, and you need no help from anybody here.

If, on the other hand, believing that worries you, makes you anxious, sad, or vaguely feeling that you're missing something, throw it away ('consign it to the flames', as Saint David would say). You can see from the responses that plenty of philosophical people get along just fine without believing such things, and are all the better off for it.

I think the suggested moral framework, like many moral frameworks, can be accommodated within the broad church of Consequentialism. It distinguishes itself from another variant of consequentialism - utilitarianism, with its various subdivisions (eg hedonic vs preference, negative-only vs two-sided) - by focusing on quantity rather than quality of life of the chosen subset of life forms - 'our kind'.

I can imagine such an approach would be appealing to some, while to others it may be repellant (especially to antinatalists!). Certainly some interpretations of Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism seem to take an approach similar to that, with their condemnation of actions that reduce the likelihood of procreation. Another moral theory that seems to have a similar focus - despite being very uneasy bedfellows with the two religions named - is Ayn Rand's Objectivism, which appears to take as axiomatic that survival is the highest good.

because all our scientific theories have a limited domain of applicability (for fundamental physics it is mostly the energy scale; our current theories are low-energy effective field theories). — SophistiCat

I would be interested to hear more about this. I'm having trouble relating it to a statement that says something about the constants.

GR and QM both have limited domains of applicability. QM doesn't work in the presence of very strong gravitational fields and GR doesn't work on a very small scale, so there is an overlap region where the two contradict one another. But I can't see any way of going from that to saying something about limits for what the constants could be. Different constants may make that overlap region larger or smaller, but that seems to me to just tell us something about the approximate nature of our current theories, rather than something fundamental about the universe. That doubt seems to parallel the point you make about EFTs being contingent on a particular form of the laws.

Yes they are unique, but the genius of mammalian brains is that they can disregard the unimportant and focus on the important. Someone started a thread the other day about the amazing observation (no sarcasm intended, it IS amazing!) that, while no two apples are unique, we nearly always successfully recognise an apple as an apple.

It is thus with speech too. Although each speech act is unique, in most situations, given a little bit of context, and occasionally even without context, we can make a confident estimate of the intended meaning.

But when we are given a speech act with no context, that has no clear meaning, that skill cannot be applied. So we search for context to try to find a meaning.

A beautiful example of this is Citizen Kane, where the speech act 'Rosebud' keeps occurring throughout the film and only at the very end do we discover the meaning of the speech act (which I won't reveal in order not to spoil it for those that haven't seen it. I'll just say that it's definitely not what one would have guessed).

There are many other examples in murder mysteries, where the detective puzzles over the dying words or writing of the victim, trying to find enough context to enable them to use the speech act to lead them to the murderer (da Vinci Code, A Study in Scarlet, a French TV episode I saw about trying to decode the dying words of somebody that had been pushed off a cliff).

I'm a big fan of philosophy of language, but only as long as it focuses on how and why people use speech acts. Once it gets to looking at word sequences with no human in sight, I think it has lost its way.

Yet, what do you mean applying the word " context" — Number2018

You are right that we can never get a perfectly accurate sense of the meaning of a speech act without knowing all possible context, which would involve being the person that makes the speech act. Even that is sometimes not enough, as I often find myself saying things that I did not expect, and I don't know why I said them, let alone what they meant, if anything.

For most speech acts, the context of knowing the events in a short period before the act, in the immediate vicinity, is sufficient. In the examples I gave, the context I provided in a short paragraph was sufficient to understand the significance of each act to a satisfactory level.

An example where much greater context is needed to sufficiently understand meaning would be a bitter argument between people that have been married to each other for many years. In that context, every word and phrase can be loaded with subtext that would be completely lost on an observer, even if they witnessed the whole conversation. That's another situation in which each party will say things whose meaning is buried in their subconscious, and was not intentional.

I suppose I'm saying that I absolutely agree that some generalisation is unavoidable. But that generalisation is done when one feels pretty confident of what was meant. For the sentence 'I would like to buy an Oyster card with a ten pound balance please' I feel confident I know what the meaning is, and am happy to generalise. But if told that some person unknown, in some unknown time and place said 'I speak', I would have no idea and would reply 'I don't understand that. Tell me more.'

I think that's the difference between us. I don't believe that analysing sequences of words devoid of context can deliver any useful insights.

Maurizio Lazzarato in his book "Signs and Machines" wrote: " In fact, " I speak" cannot be a performative since the result of the utterance is mere information from which no obligation follows.
It institutes no "right", no convention, no role, no distribution of powers. Even if it accomplishes what it states, it is never dales not a performative". " I speak" is an utterance that communicates something but it does not act on the "other"." Can we consider "I speak" as having just simple communicative function? — Number2018

That's a brilliant example of how crucial context and tone are to the function and meaning of a speech act. 'I speak' be anything from a Dadaist's deliberate inanity to to an announcement of a life-changing development to a risky political declaration.

Scenario 1:
Plantation in Virginia, 1850. Slave owner has been shouting at the slaves 'You will speak only when I ask you to, and you will answer every question with "Sir"'.
A slave steps forward and loudly proclaims

'I speak'.

Scenario 2:
Jess has been mute for two years, following a brain injury. She has just had surgery hoping to rectify some of her problems. She awakes in the recovery room, looks at her father and says in a quiet voice, with tears in her eyes:

'I speak'.

Scenario 3:
A self-help group of people with anger management problems has been discussing what strategies they have been trying to help prevent anger arising or boiling over into violence. Raju says he counts to ten. Fiona says she digs her nails into her palm. Ping says he imagines a majestic mountain with beautiful glaciers. Brunhilde says:

'I speak'.

Short version: the meaning of speech acts cannot be sensibly analysed without context.

Show me another complex system where you believe chance was more probable than design — Rank Amateur

I don't know what you mean by 'chance was more probable than design', but there are plenty of systems with simple or disorganised inputs that have complex, organised-seeming outputs. Three examples that pop to mind are Conway's game of Life, Mandelbrot sets and interference patterns. I have recently been playing around with continuous endomorphisms of the number plane and found a very simple function that, to my surprise and delight, gave a lovely flower pattern as output. I have attached it below. The alternating red and blue lines are the transformed images of concentric circles.

Which is the point. You don’t have an issue with FTA because of the issue of probability, you have an issue with FTA, because you have an issue with any answer that allows for a supernatural designer. — Rank Amateur

Making presumptive, and completely wrong, assumptions like that reveals the emptiness of your argument.

I am completely open to theism, and have no objection to designer-based spiritualities. My only objection is to when people who, because they lack faith in the designer-based spirituality to which they try to adhere, make up silly arguments to try to prove to themselves that it's the right one.

I respect faith. I don't respect faux logic.

What I think we loose sight of, is that science doesn’t explain them; they are simply given. So if there is another level of explanation, then, whatever it might be, it isn’t scientific — Wayfarer

There is currently no scientific explanation, but it is entirely conceivable that there may be one day. A new, falsifiable, more fundamental theory may be developed that, amongst other things, mandates that the value of the constants must be exactly what they are.

Then we can just ask - but why is the universe described by that theory and not some other? But that challenge can be made to any explanation, be it scientific, philosophical, religious or something else. All an explanation does is explain a phenomenon in terms of some other phenomenon - which can be observed or just hypothesised - that is, ideally, easier to believe, or already believed. For any explanation we can always ask 'but why?', and children often do.

It occurred to me that the fatal flaw in the fine tuning argument is right there buried in its name.

Where does the term 'fine tuning' come from? It comes from high quality old fashioned radio sets, that had both a Tuning and a Fine Tuning knob. Turning the Tuning knob as much as possible - say a range of three complete turns - would cover the whole range of frequencies the radio was capable of tuning. For the Fine Tuning knob, the full range of turns - say three again - would cover a small fraction of the frequency range, say only 5% of the range, thereby allowing more accurate tuning to a frequency than was possible with the Tuning knob.

What makes the Fine Tuning knob fine is the ratio of its range to that of the Tuning knob, 5% in the above example.

To apply this concept to fundamental constants, we need to divide the inner range - the range in which the constant allows life to develop, by the total range. But unlike in a radio receiver, we don't have a finite total range, so there's nothing to divide by. So it's meaningless to say the constant is 'fine tuned' because it must be fine tuned in comparison to something (eg the other knob) and there's nothing to compare it to.

If you want to feel spiritual, go look at the stars on a clear night. — Marchesk

If that works for you, good on you. For other people, going to church, temple or synagogue might work better in which case, good on them as well.

To quote St. Paul "If Christ has not risen, your faith is in vain." — Marchesk

That's one of many points on which Paul and I differ radically. I reject that statement utterly.

Personally I'm a fan of St Thomas - the patron saint of scientists and sceptics.

I wouldn't call the arguments on either side disingenuous as that word has an implication of dishonesty about it and I don't think either side is being dishonest.

Personally I am conflicted about the multiverse notion. I feel that it may well be true, not because of the FTA but rather because I just wonder - if there's one spacetime, why shouldn't there be more? Yet I hate the idea of an infinite collection of spacetimes because that might mean that in some of them, all the worst things imaginable happen and the suffering is indescribable.

My approach is that I think consciousness is primary and that what we think of as matter and energy, physics in general, is derivative from consciousness. This is the opposite from Materialists, who think it's the other way around. But both are hypotheses and I can't imagine either being provable or disprovable.

I'm not keen on the multiverse defence against the FTA, although I suspect I don't view it as negatively as you. My problem with it is that (1) I am afraid of multiverses and (2) it is unnecessary because the real counter to FTA, as Sophisticat has indicated above, is that it cannot be formally stated because there is no basis on which to estimate probabilities.

I would answer 1 in 6, but that just means that that's what I'd use in calculations about what to bet, in most situations. It's not a truth claim. It's not a fact. It's an assumption I make to help in decision-making.

What intrigues me about these attempted arguments for God is what a complete deficiency of faith they demonstrate in those that make them. If one truly has faith in one's beliefs, one doesn't need to make arguments for them. One can be convinced of God by direct experience of Her. If one has had such experience, why waste time on petty, questionable arguments that pale into total insignificance in comparison?

But when the argument is made professionally, this point is supported and its basis is completely consistent with current scientific knowledge. If you can't accept that, google is your friend. — Rank Amateur

This statement seems to say 'what I said is correct, even though it doesn't sound right, and if you search the internet you will see why it's right'.

I'm sure you'll understand why nobody would take such a proposition seriously. I'm guessing that's not exactly what you meant. Perhaps you can restate it if that's the case, so we can understand what it did mean.

I propose the probability of rolling a 1 on a fair 6 sided dice is one chance in 6 is a true statement. — Rank Amateur

Most people, not being trained in Kolmogorov's formulation of probability theory would agree with you. But the more one learns about the foundation of probability theory, the more one realises that every statement about probabilities is based on a model, and is not truth-apt. Even if one accepted it as truth-apt and true, one would be going a lot further out on a limb to say it was a fact, which implies it is directly observable. How could we ever directly observe that the probability is one in six? We'd have to roll the dice infinitely many times and, even then, we could only make a statement about the probability that the probability was 1 in 6.

It is just an observation on some verifiable truths.

1. embodied sentient beings like us exist.
2. There is a significant number of physical criteria necessary for 1 to exist
many of these criteria need to be within small tolerances for 1 to exist
3. In the realm of possible options, there is an incredibly low probability
all of these conditions will exist. — Rank Amateur

No. Item 1 is an observation.
For the sake of argument let's provisionally agree that the claim in 2 is justifiable.
But 3 is a claim about probability, with no support at all. As has been shown above, we can put whatever probability we like on the conditions obtaining, and each probability has as much support as any other, which is none at all.

More generally, statements about probabilities are never observable facts. They are based on a model, and models are interpretations, not facts.

I agree.

I followed the link that Rank Amateur gave to the Robin Collins argument but it fell at the first hurdle, comparing the FTA to our finding a high-tech domed structure on Mars. That demonstrates he's missing the point so badly that I could not read any further.

We have seen a large number of examples of uninhabited landscapes - in deserts and under oceans on Earth, on the Moon, on Mars where the Rovers have been, and on other planets and their moons through telescopes on passing spacecraft. That experience gives us strong empirical evidence that sophisticated domed structures do not arise without being constructed by intelligent beings.

Compare that to the FTA and our spacetime. Our sample size is one! And in every element in our sample, intelligent life has arisen. So if we want to throw observation-based probabilistic arguments about (which I would not!) the observationally-supported hypothesis is that there is a 100% probability that a spacetime will contain intelligent life.

The argument is just a re-heated version of Paley's 'watch on the heath' argument. All that's been changed is that the heath becomes a planet and the watch becomes a dome. Has Collins never even bothered to read any of the critiques of Paley's argument? Does he really think that just giving the two key objects different names will somehow resurrect a dead argument?

From that abominable start, does it get any better? Are there any pages that are less naive and worth reading?

I think the language game perspective doesn't concern itself with truth but with consequences. So truth is relevant to the language game only when it has consequences. For example, if Jeet says to me 'the cat is on the mat', and I go and look and it's not there, and I am suspicious that Jeet, who I know hates the cat, might have harmed it, I might say 'It's not there. You lied! What have you done with the cat?' I have accused her of saying something that she knew to be untrue, and that has consequences for us. If it turns out that she has harmed the cat, I might give her an eviction notice from the house if it is within my power to do that.

My understanding of the language game paradigm - at least as presented by Wittgenstein - is that it's highly pragmatic and focused on the relationship between speech acts and consequent actions, which may be further speech acts or other sorts of acts.

Looking at 'the cat is on the mat' in that light, I think the language game theorist would be interested in what I would do if somebody said that to me. I might go and look for the cat at the place where I had last seen the mat. If it was there, I might then chase it away, or stroke it, depending on how I felt about the cat. If it wasn't there I might go back to the first person and say 'It's not there any more. When did you see it there?' - another speech act. These are the acts that might arise consequent on the speech act 'the cat is on the mat', given the way we play the language game.

This even applies to ranges rather than just single points.

If W is the width of the range of parameter p within which life is possible, then no matter how large W is (eg anywhere between 10^(-googol) and 10^(+googol), which is an inconceivably wide range ), we can show that the probability of the constant falling within that range is less than any given tiny number epsilon, no matter how small, simply by hypothesising that p has a uniform distribution on the interval [0, 2W/epsilon].

So no matter how wide the range of life-permitting values, somebody that wants to argue that they are fine-tuned is able to do that.

:lol:

According to the post counter, this will be the 999th post in this thread.

I'm rooting* for it to hit the big 1K, as it has been a most interesting discussion when tempers have stayed within bounds.

* As an Australian resident, I need to point out that I am using the American sense of this word, which is 'hoping for the best for'. In Australia 'rooting' means 'having sex with', which is not what I am doing in relation to this thread.

XPian — Bitter Crank

What an erudite abbreviation! It was only yesterday that I first heard an explanation of the chi-rho symbol, on this In Our Time podcast about the emperor Constantine. After 50+ years of either being a Christian or being surrounded by them, I finally learned the meaning of that chi-rho symbol.

I suppose the Roman form is XR, because the greek rho corresponds to the roman letter R.

It's just a catch-all anachronistic term with which Francophones refers to Protestants of all shapes and colours. — Akanthinos

I inferred - correctly, as it turns out - that that's what you meant, and my response was in relation to that meaning of the term. I am not any sort of Christian now, much more inclined to Eastern mysticism, although I am sympathetic to love-based versions of Christianity.

From "Decalogue is Jewish not Christian" to "Catholicism isn't Christian" to "True Christians aren't Catholics". — Akanthinos

We are still at cross-purposes. You are interpreting my statement that the Ten Commandments are not Christian as meaning that one cannot be Christian and believe they still apply, whereas what I mean is that being Christian does not mean one has to believe the 10 Comms still apply.

There are many things that some Christians do - such as believing in the Real Presence, believing in the sacrament of absolution, talking in tongues, believing that we should not accept blood transfusions, believing that the holy day should still be Saturday, believing that the book of Mormon is another instalment of divine scripture - that are not an essential part of being a Christian.

Since I am not a Christian, it is not an act of disparagement, for me to say that a practice is not Christian. Chauvinism is being prejudiced against those outside one's own club, and I am no longer in that club.