aleCcowaN
imperfecto del subjuntivo
"God's suicide" is exactly as meaningful as "Believe in God" and "God is a logical necessity", being the last one the weakest of the three, as it uses the substantive verb in English.
Merged A Proof of the Existence of God / Did Someone Create the Universe?
- Thread starter Buddha
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"God's suicide" is exactly as meaningful as "Believe in God" and "God is a logical necessity", being the last one the weakest of the three, as it uses the substantive verb in English.
aleCcowaN
imperfecto del subjuntivo
You can't even place your eyes on a short chunks of text and type them exactly as they are written without making lots of mistakes.
You never learn "Buddha", do you?
I know I've already commented on this, but he keeps doing it and it's fascinating to me:
"You should argue against me by quoting this specific book, which is absolute garbage because he's totally wrong."
What? It's amazing.
EDIT: yes, he also says that part isn't garbage. But he's still criticizing it and has called the author names and yet is specifically saying that's the part we should use to refute him - I can only assume he has a specific script in mind which is why he's not only demanding we respond with quotes but telling us what particular sources are allowed. Really he wants to do a Dialogues style thing.
"You should argue against me by quoting this specific book, which is absolute garbage because he's totally wrong."
What? It's amazing.
EDIT: yes, he also says that part isn't garbage. But he's still criticizing it and has called the author names and yet is specifically saying that's the part we should use to refute him - I can only assume he has a specific script in mind which is why he's not only demanding we respond with quotes but telling us what particular sources are allowed. Really he wants to do a Dialogues style thing.
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jrhowell
Muse
He seems to believe that all of the criticism of his "proof" stems from that book:
jrhowell
Muse
The lady doth protest too much, methinks
It does seem more and more that philosophical discussions on this board are poorly concealed attempts by people trying to get us to write their Philosopher Vs Philosopher self insert fan fiction for them.
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aleCcowaN
imperfecto del subjuntivo
jrhowell said:
"Buddha" is just a case of moulding what he tries to "prove" to the scattered chunks of theoretical knowledge he hasn't forgotten yet. Popper is up because he read it 6 months ago, not because any other reason.
Additionally he has puerilely mapped the path the "debate" must follow to reach each one of his "proofs" -in a sort of "stations of his cross"-. In this case the "trendy" scientific realism provides him with a background for him to abuse: that valid claims can be made about "unobservables" as if they were observables, that is, he is claiming his tomfoolery about "goddy", reincarnation and the like enjoy the same ontological status as quantum theory (and better standing than string theory, which he claimed he has destroyed after following a few extracurricular courses).
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Again I don't think Buddha understands that most everybody else in this thread is still waiting on their residual checks for their royalties for "Jabba and the Technicolor Bayesian Statistics: A TragiComedy in 3 Acts" project we were involved in, so again acting as unwilling participants in yet another author's piece of self insert fan fiction is not high on our list of priorities right now.
halleyscomet
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2012
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Are you trying to claim infinity only exists in mathematics?
That's a bald faced pack of lies and I think you know it.
Your response shows you are quite upset by the notion of god committing suicide. All you've done with the concept is prevaricate and wring your hands. If you were wearing pearls you'd be clutching them. Grow up, grab your smelling salts, and stop acting like a stereotype of an offended Victorian woman. Mythology is full of deities dying.
The line I quoted above may very well be the single stupidest claim I've ever read on this forum, and I participated in the discussion where a guy was insisting a light beam from a flashlight could conduct enough electricity to kill a man. The fact you used such an absurd argument shows how irrationally terrified you, or at least the character you are portraying, is of the concept. Your terror at the prospect of a deity that can die by its own hand does not render the concept impossible to express.
Your response smacks more of Orwellian doublethink than any functional system of philosophy.
Ain't it the truth!
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Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
sylvan8798
Master Poster
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- May 25, 2009
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- 2,847
Whoa! Are you saying your proof of God contains formulas? Let's have it! You can use ^ for superscript and _ for subscripts, so no excuses! (or are you referring to your evolutionary theory? - in which case nvm)
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Indeed, I suspect most of us here are familiar with the various ways of notating formulas in bare ASCII. Sheesh, I might even be able to eye-interpret TEX. And of course the editing pane has convenience icons for the markup. And those of us who don't mind typing markup codes as we go can say
HTML:
x[sub]0[/sub]Indeed, he wants to start threads on comparative philosophy, on paleontology, on evolutionary biology -- but for some reason he doesn't want to defend his proof for God. And that's understandable at a certain level; it's a blatantly unworkable proof that grossly misunderstands the philosophy on which it is allegedly based. That doesn't bother me per se. If I had a nickel for every design or hypothesis I've had that turned out to be wrong or impractical, I'd take that over my salary. What bothers me is the dishonest approach Buddha's taking in the aftermath. Rather than say, "Clearly my proof isn't convincing for reasons I understand, and truthfully I'd rather drop it and talk about something else," he's trying oh so hard instead to save face. He hasn't yet reached the maturity of erudition that realizes admitting an error makes you more credible than sticking to your guns once they've jammed.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Indeed, Jabba was the Richard Wagner of bad arguments. And frankly that's our fault in large measure. At other forums it took them far fewer pages to realize how full of crap he was. And of course it's now obvious how full of crap Buddha is. Maybe we can atone for our past indulgence and keep Buddha focused on the straight-and-narrow of defending his proof. I admit that's hard with something as fractally wrong as that.
Indeed I am sort of amazing and in no small part humbled by how effective of a strategy being totally and completely wrong about everything is. When you don't have even the beginnings of a correct spark of some idea anywhere in an argument it is near impossible to get a firm foothold on it enough to refute it.
As I said you can call a potato a fruit or say 2+2=5 and I can refute you. When you say 2+2 equals a potato I got nothing.
As I said you can call a potato a fruit or say 2+2=5 and I can refute you. When you say 2+2 equals a potato I got nothing.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Yes, and he's already cast us collectively in the role of Simplicio. Now he's growing impatient because he wants to move on to blocking the scenes and we haven't learned our lines yet. Most fringe claimants seem to operate this way. They want to guide the discussion toward rebuttals they've prepared for and avoid the ones they know from experience will stump them. They come up with all kinds of excuses to avoid the responses that don't fit their script. "Not enough time, I have to go to the beach" or "You're not being nice to me, so I'm going to avoid you." Or, if this rings a bell: "I have a patented debate style we're all going to follow."
I find this remarkably dishonest because this dynamic arises only if the claimant is fairly certain his proof will fail on its face. He's deliberately proffering a proof he knows cannot hold. I can't see this as anything other than an attempt to deceive people who won't know better. This is why I'm a skeptic. Skeptics are the consumer advocates in the marketplace of ideas.
I don't think so. I think aleCcowaN below has more accurately summarized the argument.
Buddha seems to have taken the bifurcated approach to Popper that I omitted from my quote of SOdhner above. More broadly, I think Buddha wants us to respond in the words of a philosopher -- any philosopher -- so long as we follow his distractive lead. He'll "school" us on Popper if he thinks we're invoking Popper. He'll "school" us on Kuhn if we might invoke Kuhn. He's trying to tell us all we're responding (or should, or maybe not) according to scientific realism, even though I highly doubt that's true or a conscious pursuit. All that pigeonholing happens only so he can transform the thread into a battle of "-isms" he thinks he can do better at than defending a comically bad proof for God. He can't make headway fixing his proof, so he figures he can score brownie points by making his critics look ignorant on irrelevant topics. "See! They don't understand all these obscure '-isms' that I do, therefore they can't know that my proof is wrong."
Yes. He can't fix the obvious problems with is proof so he's hoping he can tap-dance through enough poorly-apprehended philosophy to create the illusion for some imaginary third party (or by gaslighting, for his critics) that he's a genius and his critics are all unlearned laymen and therefore his proof should be given the benefit of some sort of doubt. Ceteris paribus, the proof by the Really Smart Religious Guy is more likely to be true than the refutation from Benighted Knee-Jerker Skeptics. Except, of course, that there's not much doubt. His proof fails for obvious, easily-seen reasons.
And that's part of the equation too. Most fringe claimants want to believe that if their proof must fail, it can only fail for highly sophisticated, highly abstruse ways that require any critics to first demonstrate a high degree of esoteric understanding to even qualify for the debate. ("I'll only debate people who are as smart as I," is the gist of how Buddha put it.) Since most casual readers -- the intended audience for such proofs -- can't or won't do that, Buddha seems to win by default. It's a different flavor of the same Kool-Aid Jabba served up by hiding his begged questions in statistics he thought few would understand, and rigging Effective Debate™ to wallow in irrelevant details that will never be agreed upon. It presents the semblance of an argument that a lay audience might accept simply because it's impressive-looking and because its proponent seems to be showing up his critics with a "disciplined" manner and what seems like superior knowledge that the audience otherwise finds inscrutable. If the claimant can maintain this sort of Debate Theater, he can avoid concession indefinitely.
Instead most of their proofs fail for very simple reasons. Buddha's proof is obviously wrong from the simple perspective of categorical logic, which he then went on to defend with another exercise in poorly reasoned syllogisms. No matter how much he wants to think that the only problems in his proof could be found only by high-concept debates in philosophy, the real problems it has are far more fundamental and take far less cabalistic education to ferret out.
Another term in the equation is when the claimant really can't get the esoteric knowledge right either. Jabba was a self-taught statistician who refused to accept that one of his errors was in misunderstanding statistics. A year or so ago there was a self-taught physicist who claimed Apollo re-entry wouldn't work, and refused to accept that the problem in his proof was the result of his ignorance of the relevant engineering and principles he simply didn't know existed. Here we have a self-taught philosopher/theologian who refuses to accept that he doesn't understand the principles of philosophy. He invokes Karl Popper's earliest works (probably, as you suggest, because it's really the only book he's ever read) and then proceeds to completely misunderstand the demarcation principle, one of that author's key concepts. From that we get the axiom "Unfalsifiable claims are false," upon which he predicates the rejection of the first two cases in his incomplete, contrived trilemma. He can't even reconcile his invocation with Popper's later works such as Conjectures and Refutations in which he walks back some of the stuff he wrote in the 1930s, or with The Myth of Framework published in modern times, in which Popper writes scathingly about just the sort of sectarian approach Buddha is taking.
So yes, even if we indulge him and follow him on his journey through the fields he's just discovering, he gets it wrong there too. This is "fractal" wrongness -- wrong on whatever level you choose to examine his claims. His argument is conceptually wrong, wrong according to the philosophical systems he has invoked, and wrong at the fundamental level of categorical reasoning.
There are enough problems in string theory to merit serious discussion. But the notion that he's proving the existence of God only so he can adapt the proof to throw out the anthropic principle by it is ludicrous. I get that he's trained as an engineer and works now as an IT consultant. Literally none of that is important. He's choosing fields to debate in where he can't show even a little competence. Heck, the guy in the cube just outside my office has a PhD in theoretical physics, and even he doesn't consider himself an expert on string theory.
This is why I think you all are right in characterizing this as Debate Theatre, not just to attempt to make his proof seem valid, but to establish by some empirical illusion that he really is the genius he thinks he is. Most of these claimants think they've mastered so many different fields and can take the specialized experts to task. But the exercise always turns into framing their little smidgen of additional knowledge in a giant frame of poorly-executed social engineering, with little more as their goal than delusions of grandeur.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
It's a matter of carefully choosing one's audience. We're that audience in the sense that we'll listen and respond, whether out of boredom, a zeal for truth, or morbid fascination. But we won't be that audience for too much longer. The flounce is inevitable because it will soon be evident that we won't stroke Buddha's ego for him.
And it's often hard to illustrate, in actual arguments, how so many of them boil down to the same sort of error as arithmetic with vegetables. How many times have "order" and "disorder" been equivocated to mean various things, such that some observation "disproves" thermodynamcs, or that thermodynamics "disproves" some unrelated concept? How many times have audiences been slipped things like, "But it wouldn't be me!" where me can be either a number or a vegetable depending on context?
It works because of flim-flam men who seek out vulnerable audiences and bilk them over the equivocations, if only to get a little self-esteem out of it. It works because there's a certain intuitive appeal to, "You can't refute 2+2=5 unless you've read all the collected works of Whitehead," or worse -- "You can't refute 2+2=potato unless you've personally mastered all Escoffier's recipes." (Seriously, just making the stock for those sauces requires carcasses that are hard to obtain without embarrassing questions.) As I wrote above, arguments that seem sophisticated on their face create an illusion that only a sophisticated rebuttals can unseat them.
It is amazing how many bad arguments are essentially intentional (usually) or unintentional (less usually) questions of labeling and categorization.
For instance in many contexts I've used the "How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?" question to illustrate it when two people are just arguing using two different definitions.
When Bill says his hand has five fingers and Ted says he has four fingers and a thumb they aren't really disagreeing on anything of substance, only of "correctness" of labels and if they keep arguing after each of them has clarified what they mean by "fingers" one or both of them are not arguing honestly.
Attempts by people to demand you phrase your disagreement in specific ways always set off my warning bells for this reason.
Yes! My favorite example is "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Well, how are we defining those terms? Do you define "chicken egg" as "an egg that was laid by a chicken" or as "an egg that contains a chicken"? The instant you define it the question is answered.
Setting aside the arbitrary way we delineate species and just going with the idea that at some point there was not a chicken and after that there was.
It really is amazing how many disagreements, if they were honest disagreements, couldn't survive a simple "Okay Side A please explain what you mean when you use term B? Okay now Side C what do you mean when you say it?"
But no so many arguments are one person trying to explain to another person why he can't zip up the front flap of his trousers while they both pretend they don't know they are obviously not talking about the same thing so they can keep arguing.
But no so many arguments are one person trying to explain to another person why he can't zip up the front flap of his trousers while they both pretend they don't know they are obviously not talking about the same thing so they can keep arguing.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
No, you did start with an axiom, actually, you started with two
"a theory or a statement based on never-ending experiment is false"
and
"a theory based on assumption that could not be proved or disproved is false."
This is you creating an artificial framework to make your "proof" work. Your whole "proof" is predicated on these two "axioms" (statements which you created from whole cloth and then claimed as facts). Without these "axioms" you cannot eliminate the first two options.
And by the way, you still appear to have failed address this post...
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=12375702&postcount=799
... or did you just ignore it because you are incapable of addressing it?
Translation: you are not going to address this because you can't, or are afraid to do so!