aaa
9d ago
I'm not going to make a comprehensive argument for the existence of God
Fair enough, I therefore remain convinced that you would not be able to starting from that definition of initial state.
You brought up Feser earlier, I wonder what you've read of him. Five Proofs of the Existence of God provides five chapter-length proofs
This one. He has both problems: he relies on a rejection of actual infinites and also on a (non-)definition of causation that does not have referents.
aaa
10d ago
Ok, now formulate the rest of the argument using this definition of initial condition.
aaa
12d ago
What is finite here? The number of robots and the lenght of time can all be infinite. You are objecting to "initial condition?"
Correct, you are implying that there is a beginning and the past isn't infinite.
aaa
12d ago
By saying "If there is an infinite line of robots that all have an initial condition" you have introduced finiteness as an assumption, what classical theism does with this type of arguments is attempt to prove that this finiteness is logically necessary. The reason this worked in the past, but doesn't now, is because actual infinities were believed to be paradoxical.
aaa
12d ago
To turn the tables, imagine if George Soros died
IMO there is a very important difference between someone dying (in an accident, of natural causes) and someone being murdered. In the second case you are walking a fine line between criticizing someone who died (ok) and celebrating political assassination (not ok).
That said my rules > your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly, as always. Until cancellation is taken off the table as a viable weapon the equilibrium is always going to end up being that if you can use it you use it.
aaa
13d ago
I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser
Crazy that this explanation is being resuscitated. The first trip was on june 6th for d-day, to france. The second one on june 12th, to italy for g7. He returned to the US on the 15th of june. The debate was on june 27th, 12 days later. Nobody has 12 days of jet lag.
aaa
13d ago
So: infinite robots with hands down, some point on the line something outside the line of robots intervenes to make a robot raise their hands. We know this thing cannot be a robot with its hands down.
Yes, this is another way things could be. But it doesn't get you anywhere with your argument because it isn't logically necessary.
aaa
13d ago
If the circle is infinite then it's a line. On this infinite line of robots either no robots have their hands raised or at any point in time an infinite number of robots on the left has their hands raised. No, I'm not convinced that your argument for the necessity of a starting point is correct, it's simply a problem with dealing with infinites.
But suppose your argument is correct and there must be a starting point. Lets examine the consequences. The line-of-robots-world you describe is fully deterministic so we can reverse the arrow of time. In the reverse-time-line-of-robots-world a robot lowers their hands if the robot to the right lowered their hands, that means there must be a first robot to lower hands therefore the line-of-robots-world has an end, we already proved that it had a beginning, and thus the line-of-robot-worlds can not be infinite.
aaa
14d ago
I'm not familiar with hol4 but wikipedia says it's strategy game set during World War 2. Bella Ciao is an antifascist World War 2 song, is it being used in a neutral non-antifascist context in hol4?
aaa
14d ago
"Ciao Bella" can be a number of things, but one of them is a HoI4 meme.
"Bella Ciao" is an italian antifascist song.
aaa
14d ago
The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.
If you think that this materially changes anything I said then I don't know how to reach you
I think it does change things because every time I've heard that argument it ends with "and that's why god needs to exist here and now" and you don't get there with energy transfers because once the energy is transferred the source doesn't need to continue existing.
But there would be a reason why it's in one pattern instead of another. And mentioning light is actually more relevant to my argument! Because light is outside the infinite mirrors. There could be infinite mirrors and no face because no light! The infinity of the mirrors does not create an image.
I really don't know what you are even saying at this point. Usually these arguments are trying to prove the existence of god through a logical impossibility (i.e. non-existence of god is logically impossible thus god exists). I don't think there's anything logically impossible in the existence of an arbitrary arrangement of light, it doesn't need a cause.
aaa
16d ago
The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.
To expand on this. I know how Feser's argument typically goes and typically at some point you would say "no the first cause can't be the big bang because it needs to be present here and now". Boiling water (or energy transfers in general) are not good examples of this because you can remove the fire and the boiling will continue, you can interrupt the causal chain at various points without interrupting the consequences. That's my problem, I don't think that causation exists in the way that the argument needs it to exist.
aaa
16d ago
No, I'm not. Unless you hold to a later Mark date than most scholars today. And many scholars belive Mark was Jewish, such as William Arnal and Julie Galambush who are hardly Christian Fundamentalists.
Mark is far removed from the events that he's narrating, either in time or in space or both. The belief that he was jewish is a minority position. Unfortunately like many things plagued by apologetics you can't even tell when some people are just mistaken or deliberately lying.
Right now I do not have boiling water. If I were to fill a pot with water and put it on a stove and turn it on and heat made the water boil, all that chain of events was required to make the water boil. It's also clear that there was something about that chain of events that caused the water to boil, when otherwise the water would have stayed in my pipes without boiling. The heat of the stove had the causal power to change the water from liquid to gas.
The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.
I am not arguing that there is something logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors. The argument is, even with an infinite series of mirrors there would be no face if there was nothing imparting an image of a face.
The face is irrelevant? It's just light in some arbitrary pattern being reflected, are you saying that you can imagine infinite mirrors but not infinite light? That you can only imagine light in a pattern if there is something giving it that pattern (but the same isn't true of the atoms of mirrors)?
Yes! The thing impossible isn't the speed of the atom, but the fact that the atom exists at all.
An infinite series of mirrors can exist but not a single atom? I'm not following. I don't find this persuasive at all, I think there's nothing impossible in imagining an universe comprised of a single atom.
aaa
16d ago
Original gMark ended mid-sentence, which seems to me to indicate it was not finished because the author or scribe was interrupted
The endings of manuscripts get lost, it's quite common. What this means in this particular case has been debated for centuries with different scholars arguing for various interpretations (including the long ending being the original intended ending). Jumping directly to "the scribe was interrupted mid sentence" is quite the stretch.
aaa
16d ago
Are you getting that from Ehrman or somewhere else?
I'm getting it from reading the thing.
Even with a "late" gMark date of 73ish, the author would have been in the temple as all male Jews
The author of Mark wasn't a jew. What kind of line of argumentation is this? I'm bringing this as proof that the authors are far removed from the events and your response is "well, under the assumption that they are not far removed from the events this is impossible". You are making my point.
The historical investigation has the fatal flaw of needing to presuppose that nothing supernatural happened. If you approach without that presupposition, then the evidence points elsewhere.
A prediction coming true is not supernatural, people predict things all the time. The problem is that correct predictions only become relevant after they become true. Suppose Mark was writing in the 50s, some guy said "the temple is going to be destroyed" 20+ years ago and it never happened, are you going to bring that up? And it's not just the prediction, it's how it's treated. You wouldn't write the parable of the fig tree if the destruction of the temple hadn't already happened: the jews have already failed to deliver and god has already punished them.
Yeah, and then Paul died. He died during Nero's reign, in AD 64/65. He arrived in Rome in AD 60. Acts ends saying, "He spent two years in Rome preaching." Then there is a gap of another couple years, and then Paul died. If Paul died before Acts was written, Luke would have included Paul's dramatic death. He did not, because Paul's dramatic death didn't happen for another two years.
Or possibly because Paul dramatic death hadn't been invented yet. You are trusting sources written hundreds of years after the fact on this, farther from the facts than the most pessimistic estimates of acts. The ending of acts is truncated whichever way you look at it. Supposed it really was written while Paul was still in Rome you wouldn't say "it preached in rome for two years" you would also say "and he's still there" or "and he's now moved to spain" or "and then they arrested him again a second time".
This is just silly. If for the sake of argument we allowed that there could be an infinitely long hierarchical series— D actualized by C, which is in turn actualized by B, which is in turn actualized by A, and so on in infinity, there would still have to be a source of causal power outside the series to impart causal power to the whole
What's causal power. Make me an example of causation. Feser makes arguments like this and I'm convinced that his idea of causation doesn't exist outside of his brain.
Consider a mirror which reflects the image of a face present in another mirror, which in turn reflects the image of a face present in another, and so on ad infinitum. Even if we allowed that there could be such a series of mirrors, there would still have to be something outside this infinite series— the face itself—which could impart the content of the image without having to derive it. What there could not be is only mirror images and never any actual face.
LIght travels at finite speed so at most there would have had to be, at some point, a face. But I don't think this is the case, I think there's actually nothing logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors you are tricking your brain into thinking there is because the brain thinks in aristotelian terms, with efficient and final causes, but those things don't exist. Suppose the universe was nothing but a single atom travelling forever at constant speed, is that impossible? Our brain wants to say no because everything that we experience moving is moved by something but actually there's nothing logically impossible in it. If the universe was nothing but an infinite series of mirrors reflecting a face infinitely in both directions that's just how it would be.
aaa
16d ago
You have to have the credit card (one factor) or the credit card and the ccv (two factors) the smartphone app connected to the bank account (one factor) and the pin number (one factor).
aaa
18d ago
I wonder what we believe today that those in the future will find laughable.
PS. I don't think those arguments were laughable btw, I probably would have been convinced by them.
aaa
18d ago
If you checked out of scholarship in the 80s, I can see why you would think so. That is a less defensible sentiment today. Fifty years ago, people got away with saying that King David is a myth, now we have his coins
Cute, however the world is not 6000 years old, Moses is a probably a fictional character and certainly not the author of the Deuteronomy, there was no widespread captivity in Egypt, etc etc
To the Christian claims, the important thing to get historically accurate is the Gospels, and the Gospels were written in the genre of Ancient Biography. They at least tried to get it right, and there is increasing evidence that they were written early and by eyewitnesses..
That where one scholar is going but not where scholarship in general is going, that would be the other direction. And no eyewitnessess, whoever wrote the cleansing of the temple probably didn't even have a passing familiarity with the temple, for example.
All attempts to date the Gospel after AD 70 rely in the logic of, "Well, we know Jesus wasn't God, so He can't have predicted the fall of the Temple ahead of time
It doesn't matter when the prediction was made, it's that predictions only become relevant after they become true, it wouldn't have been written about. But beyond that it's how it's treated, as inevitable rather than a menace. And beyond that it's the lack of references to the gospels from other sources, consider how many times the authentic letters of Paul could have quoted Jesus from the gospels but didn't. That means they were written after.
The Gospels tell their readers to do things at the Temple, and that is a weird prescription if the Temple is already destroyed
The offering to the Temple was a big part of jewish religion, rabbis continued to debate the proper temple practices for centuries after the temple was destroyed under the assumption that it would soon be rebuilt. It is no surprise that christians, which at that point were a jewish sect, would do the same.
Acts leads up the climatic trial of Paul in Rome but doesn't cover it, which would seem to indicate that it was completed before his execution. And look here, and look there, at all these weird coincidences that only make sense if they were written in the 50s and 60s
You should re-read the last chapter of Acts:
Brothers, I was arrested in Jerusalem and handed over to the Roman government, even though I had done nothing against our people or the customs of our ancestors. 18The Romans tried me and wanted to release me, because they found no cause for the death sentence. 19But when the Jewish leaders protested the decision, I felt it necessary to appeal to Caesar, even though I had no desire to press charges against my own people. (...) 30For the next two years, Paul lived in Rome at his own expense. He welcomed all who visited him, 31boldly proclaiming the Kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ. And no one tried to stop him.
Which proof do you think relies on actual infinity being logically contradictory?
All versions of the cosmological argument and all of the five ways of St. Thomas.
Cosmological argument does not require the universe to had had a beginning
Irrelevant.
aaa
18d ago
I'd like to push back on the idea that crossing ecclesiastical authority risked death. I feel like that's a model of the Middle Ages that is more conceived on 18th century propaganda instead of the actual historical record. Even when the Papal States had an executioner, he was part of the civil courts, not the ecclesiastical courts. He executed thieves and assassins, not heretics. Ecclesiastical courts were not allowed to kill anyone at all, and there is good reason for that. That's not to say they were infallible bastions of perfect goodness and mercy, but they aren't the opposite either. They were courts.
This is disingenuous. Yes, the church generally didn't execute heretics however heresy was also a secular crime everywhere. This is like saying that judges never imprison anyone because they don't personally run prisons.
The Medieval mind was as convinced about the truth of Christianity as we are about the roundness of the Earth. Those with the intelligence to prove it made sure that this important knowledge was accessible to all. And I believe they did prove the existence of God and that there is more proof today than there was in the past. And that anyone smart enough who goes through 4-6 years of specialized education and spiritual formation (that is very hard to get these days) will agree, if we could just get them to take the opportunity cost to get there.
The standards of "truthness" in a manuscript society, pre-enlightenment society were just very different from our own, it was underpinned by authority. When books were very expensive you had to believe that if something was copied by everyone it was good and that the objection that you found had been addressed by someone somewhere, you had to be the one that was equivocated but you had no way to verify it.
Plenty of falsehoods that could be trivially proven false proliferated. The most important textbook of the middle ages, the etymologies of st. isidor, told you that diamonds were made soft by goat blood and garlic demagnetized magnets, mathematicians studied and believed the aristotelian cosmology despite it being incompatible with the ptolemaic model which they also knew and employed day to day or, for that matter, didn't match geographical knowledge (see for example Alighieri's Questio de Aqua et Terra) or even phisicians who believed in the existence of a rete mirabilis in humans and a spermatic duct connecting the brain to the penis (as Galen said, sperm is stored in the brain) despite presiding over cadaver dissections that had no such things.
I don't think you could convince many people today with medieval arguments because they went like this:
- It is true because every civilized society believes it or is muslim, a chistian heresy (i.e. argument from universal assent). This wasn't true back then, they just didn't know about china, and it isn't true today.
- It is true because the bible, the best historical record through eyewitness account that we have, says it is. This was true back then but now we know the bible is trash when it comes to historical accuracy.
- It is true because [various arguments from classical theology]. Most of these don't hold because we proved actual infinity isn't logically contradictory.
aaa
20d ago
The "snowflake" insult conservatives used around 2012 for woke people complaining about representation of blacks or gays in movies
That's not what "snowlake" was making fun of, it was making fun of people who easily claimed offenses (at "microaggressions", "cultural appropriation" the word "retard" etc) and asked for "trigger warning".
aaa
21d ago
I actually meant "Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania" (Antman and the Wasp would be the second of the trilogy and came out in 2018). It's one of those movies where the putative male lead in an action movie is in actuality sidelined by the strong female costar, think Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (which also came out in 2023 and also flopped and it's probably a better entry from this list than Antman).
It's fairly common for indian and chinese hiring managers to only ever hire connationals.
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