Originally posted by seer
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Apologetics 301 Guidelines
If you think this is the area where you tell everyone you are sorry for eating their lunch out of the fridge, it probably isn't the place for you
This forum is open discussion between atheists and all theists to defend and debate their views on religion or non-religion. Please respect that this is a Christian-owned forum and refrain from gratuitous blasphemy. VERY wide leeway is given in range of expression and allowable behavior as compared to other areas of the forum, and moderation is not overly involved unless necessary. Please keep this in mind. Atheists who wish to interact with theists in a way that does not seek to undermine theistic faith may participate in the World Religions Department. Non-debate question and answers and mild and less confrontational discussions can take place in General Theistics.
Forum Rules: Here
This forum is open discussion between atheists and all theists to defend and debate their views on religion or non-religion. Please respect that this is a Christian-owned forum and refrain from gratuitous blasphemy. VERY wide leeway is given in range of expression and allowable behavior as compared to other areas of the forum, and moderation is not overly involved unless necessary. Please keep this in mind. Atheists who wish to interact with theists in a way that does not seek to undermine theistic faith may participate in the World Religions Department. Non-debate question and answers and mild and less confrontational discussions can take place in General Theistics.
Forum Rules: Here
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Underlying Presuppositions
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Jorge: Functional Complex Information is INFORMATION that is complex and functional.
MM: First of all, the Bible is a fixed document.
MM on covid-19: We're talking about an illness with a better than 99.9% rate of survival.
seer: I believe that so called 'compassion' [for starving Palestinian kids] maybe a cover for anti Semitism, ...
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Originally posted by Sparko View PostI guess that is why theists outnumber atheists by over 10 to 1.Jorge: Functional Complex Information is INFORMATION that is complex and functional.
MM: First of all, the Bible is a fixed document.
MM on covid-19: We're talking about an illness with a better than 99.9% rate of survival.
seer: I believe that so called 'compassion' [for starving Palestinian kids] maybe a cover for anti Semitism, ...
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Originally posted by Roy View PostSince you don't believe your own argument, and science is moving towards rejecting it too, I won't waste any time on it.
Brain imaging spots our abstract choices before we do:
When it comes to making decisions, it seems that the conscious mind is the last to knowhttps://www.newscientist.com/article...-before-we-do/
https://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/Last edited by seer; 02-09-2018, 01:13 PM.Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s
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Originally posted by Sparko View PostI guess that is why theists outnumber atheists by over 10 to 1.Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s
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Originally posted by Cerebrum123 View PostActually, I think there is one attack that could be used on Solipsism from a presuppositional angle. If you can't even live as if your views are true, then why should we expect them to actually be true? The fact that it is unlivable, and no one holds to it ought to be a defeater for it as is anyway.
Though then again us Christians can't exactly lay claim to an ability to live according to the moral edicts of God in any consistent way either. So I'm not sure what is proved exactly.
Solipsism would still be perfectly self-consistent.
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Originally posted by Sparko View PostPeople believed many false things throughout history: The earth is flat, the sun goes around the earth, You could transmute lead into gold, disease was caused by bad air and humors, aether, spontaneous generation, evolution.
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Originally posted by carpedm9587 View PostEvolution doesn't "care" about anything. However, as I noted, if our perception/reasoning does not align with reality, our probability of survival is diminished. This is what Plantinga ignores. A brain/reasoning process that does not reflect reality, does not perceive and/or reason accurately, exposes us to dangers in a way that accurate perceptions/reasoning do not. Unless you want to suggest that someone with a distorted perception of reality or reasoning is better able to survive daily exposure to cliffs, stairs, roads, carnivors, judge the speed of oncoming objects, reason to the cause/effect results of grabbing a knife by the blade, pointing a gun at one's own head, or drinking/eating any number of poisonous things, etc. Because accurate perception/reasoning increases odds of survival - natural selection will tend to select those that perceive and reason accurately. Since those ar ethe same functions that we use to form beliefs, they then have the same impact there. Plantinga ignores this reality to make his argument.
I've yet to see someone develop it. Its a bit more challenging I think if you wanna put it down with the analytical precision that Plantinga put his arguments in.
But I think you're missing the point. It is exactly this you need to answer: What is the value of our beliefs being truthy? You're casually dismissing the point that someone might be functionally insane. He believes the tiger is a friend, and his way of showing friendship is by running towards it. Certainly in this case, the functionally insane man, has his insanity help him survive.
I, like you, speculate that maybe its the ability to keep on generating right reactions that require a tighter coupling between belief and action, and the ability of those beliefs to generate other expectations and ideas and theories which help you survive. But I've struggled a lot with showing it.
So until such an answer exists I think Plantinga's argument is quite an interesting challenge to naturalists. I've only seen arm-waving criticisms of it so far.Last edited by Leonhard; 02-09-2018, 02:25 PM.
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Originally posted by seer View PostLook at it this way, most animals survive just fine without beliefs of any kind.
So much is a fact, unless you want to deny evolution of course.
And if epiphenomenalism is true, which is now widely accepted, beliefs play NO CAUSAL role in your choices or decisions. Those are biologically predetermined.
Most animals are conscious in one way or another. An ape, or a dog, are just as aware as you are of their surroundings. They're not as intelligent, and they certainly don't have our ability to think in abstract terms.
The question is why? It takes a lot of energy for a brain to maintain such a state. This means there must be something this contributes to the survival of the organism, or it would most certainly have been atrophied away by natural selection. But they are in every appropriate sense of the word 'aware'. Some of them are even 'self-aware'.
Its something I've wondered about a lot, though I don't have the answers yet. It does appear to serve some task of sorts in the brain. Its not just a whistle noise of electrical activity the brain is making. And there's a lot of discussion about what the experiments that demonstrate that you've decided on something before you become aware of that decision means.
There's definitely no consensus on this yet seer.
To quote Patricia Churchland:Last edited by Leonhard; 02-09-2018, 02:29 PM.
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Originally posted by Leonhard View PostThis is a very weak response. The history of humanity has been one of us surviving by our ingenuity, tool-making ability, weather reading, and development of agricultural technology. We survived a set of climate changes, adapting each time, not by evolution, but because we were intelligent enough. Could we have survived if we were simple strong, had claws, and filled a particular ecological niche? Maybe, but we didn't. Our ancestors survived for hundreds of thousands of years in changing environments due to their wit.
You're quote mining Patricia Churchland here. She is not talking about epiphenomenalism, and she is in fact not an epiphenomenalist at all.Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s
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Originally posted by Leonhard View PostThere was never any evidence for spontaneous generation.
In contrast almost no scientific field, with perhaps pure physics, has as well-developed a body of evidence as the Theory of Evolution.
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Originally posted by seer View PostLeonhard even tool making does not require beliefs.
Mental powers of these kinds simply don't exist to the same degree in any animal. And us having these powers was instrumental in our survival.
Really? I was just reading an article by her today - she certainly does not believe in free will. She is an eliminative materialist, which I think clearly leads to epiphenomenalism, how could it not?
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