You're talking about our faculty of reason and its fallibility. I am talking about 'Reason' - she is the person, the god, whose prescriptions our facu...
Yes, I agree with all of that. I have not said otherwise. I think there are true propositions. I think no true proposition is also false. I think pres...
Yes, and I sought to address that point in my previous reply. I was not obliged to hook up to Mat in January, or to John in February, or to Mildred in...
But the rational intuition I was appealing to is about 'nothing', and it says that nothing comes from nothing. A mind that is empty of thoughts is not...
Well, social pressure is one thing, morality another. Let's say in January Mat needs the use of my kidneys for life otherwise he'll die. Well, I am no...
I do not follow you here - they retain all of their force. I think a sound argument establishes that its conclusion is certainly true. Something can b...
But you're begging the question against me. You're giving a descriptive interpretation, I'm giving an expressive one. So, you take the laws of logic t...
But as I've already argued, that's false by your own lights - God, having created time, would exist in it, yet God is uncaused. You could insist that ...
Then why did you mention Zen? If neither you nor I know anything about it, why mention it as if it had some importance? And why would I look it up on ...
It won't be uncaused - if there can be events that are uncaused, then we do not need to posit God, we can just say that some events just occur uncause...
Well, I agree that all of this necessity talk is by-the-by, interesting though it is, as we both accept that this argument's conclusion is true if the...
I am not in danger of forgetting this, but it is not the point I am making. I am denying that making sense of deductive arguments requires invoking ne...
That wasn't my point - I accept, of course, that arguments can be sound but not valid and valid but not sound, but my point was that we do not need th...
That's the conventional definition of a deductive argument, I grant you. And defined that way, I don't believe there are any deductively valid argumen...
Earlier I was speaking with the vulgar, so to speak. So yes, I have probably used terms like 'must' throughout up to now, but they were functioning ex...
Why are you listening to 'Zen' (whatever that is when it is at home) and not 'Reason'? Doesn't your reason - your faculty of reason - tell you that no...
I do not know what you mean. By a 'substance' I just mean a thing - something that has properties. But I don't know what you mean by 'gaps in cause an...
I do not think that's true. My standpoint is not vague. Nor am I using excessive terminology or using it oddly. By contrast, you are doing precisely t...
I do not think it is unavoidable - not at the moment - for we can just replace every 'must be' with 'is'. So, let's agree that all houses have foundat...
I think, perhaps, we are just using these terms differently. I would not use 'contingent' to mean that, for that rules out the possibility of determin...
This is a reply to the second half of your post as I thought my reply to the first part was perhaps getting too long. Because I do not want my view co...
Ah, I didn't do that - I didn't call it 'contingent' (that would be the point at which the conflation occurs - the conflation I was warning against). ...
I note too that you haven't answered my questions. So, again: when something happens, do you wonder what caused it? And again: can something come out ...
Er, no. But if my reason and the reason of others represents something to be the case, that is the best and only possible evidence we can ever have th...
Tell me, if there is nothing - absolutely nothing - can anything come out of it? Can something come out of nothing? And the reverse - can something th...
So when something happens, you don't wonder what caused it? It's a self-evident truth of reason that every event has a cause. It's why we have discipl...
No, if - if - time has been created, then its cause will be a substance, not an event. Why? Because events happen in time. But it is simply false that...
You're the one who brought God into this by identifying the first cause with God - and I questioned how you got to this conclusion. There are a variet...
Then you can't run the first cause argument. If every event if caused by a prior event, then you get an infinity of events. And if you're fine with th...
No, but you implied that if an act was obligatory, then we cannot say of it that it was good. For I said that doing something that averts a harm - whe...
As I said earlier, bringing in 'time' into this has simply muddied the water as this discussion is showing. The issue is to do with causation, not tim...
We know timeless causation exists, however, for how else was time created? So, timeless causation exists. We know that substance causation exists, for...
But your position contains a contradiction - you're saying causation requires time and in the same breath saying that it doesn't. Does it or doesn't i...
I do not see how you're not contradicting yourself. You think God created time, yes? (I agree - he did). But you also think causation requires time - ...
This doesn't address my point. Put all the fancy labels you like on things, and talk about spotlights to your heart's content, you're not addressing t...
That's false and it contradicts your own position. You think God created time - yes? Well, how did he do that if causation itself requires time (which...
I think slightly different concepts are being conflated. An act can promote a good outcome without being obligatory, and an act can be obligatory with...
Again, this simply doesn't make sense. You can't watch a film for the first time numerous times, can you? On your view you can. So much the worse for ...
That doesn't make sense - you're invoking time. You're getting too caught up in a metaphor. If time is cyclical, then the present moment is also a fut...
No, because we're positing a plethora of 'simple' substances. Simple substances exist by their nature and are not caused to exist. You must already ac...
'Substance causation' is causation by a substance - by a thing - rather than by an event, by a happening. Now, some think the idea of substance causat...
But 'God' with a capital G refers to a being who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. But anyway, if you think the god is just benevolent, it...
Saying physics investigates reality is like saying detectives investigate reality. What we're interested in is the fundamental nature of reality - wha...
How does it follow that it 'must' be an intelligence? It must be a simple thing that has the power of substance causation (substance causation being c...
Ah, I was not engaging in Avicenna scholarship so much as arguing that existing in a self-explanatory way does not seem to be equivalent to existing o...
I do not understand you or why you are weeping with laughter. Bakers, in their capacity as bakers, do not inquire into the fundamental nature of reali...
It seems to me that in the above 'necessary' and 'self-explanatory' are being conflated. I agree with Avicenna that all complex things require explana...
Not necessarily, but in the main - yes. Doing something that prevents harms is - often - good. Not always, but often. But it is one way - one way amon...
Philosophy - not physics - is the study of what's real. Saying that physicists do not worry about it is akin to saying bakers don't worry about it - y...
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