Hawking says there are no gods

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JayUtah said:
Great. Name some who worship the god whose existence you're arguing.



Yes, we can classify them by enumerating their properties.



Yes, you can name properties that weren't in the original list.

This has been elaborated at length in this thread. The only god whose existence matters is the god that has an observable effect. No effect, no god. You're just arguing the tired god of the gaps. There's a gap before the Big Bang, so that's where you shoehorn your god. And you speculatively attribute to him the properties that derive from nothing besides how well an entity with those properties would fit the gap.
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And that is your belief based on better reasoning than most theists can ever use, but belief none the less.
 
JayUtah said:
Knee-jerk.
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There is a limit to rationality. You don't decide on how reality is based on rationality alone. All your talk about the set of axioms amount to that you believe you can figure reality out using only reason, logic and evidence.

How about the set of axioms for morality? We leave that to scientists?
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
And that is your belief based on better reasoning than most theists can ever use, but belief none the less.
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Irrelevant. It is the proposition that is consistent with Hawking's statement. This is a concept you simply cannot seem to grasp. You are presented with an argument that "A is inconsistent with B," and you wrongly assume that someone is positing A or B or both as universal. Then you deploy your relativist diatribe -- clearly the only tool on your toolbelt. All you have is a hammer, so you frantically try to make everything look like a nail even when it isn't.

You want your claims to expertise to be considered valid beyond your own worldview. When someone points out that the manner in which you want them validated is inconsistent with the manner which you are able to substantiate them, you misrepresent the argument as universalist and swing the ol' relativism hammer.

You really can't seem to understand what anyone else says. You just apply relativism in cargo-cult fashion.
 
JayUtah said:
Not to my knowledge.
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Then hasn't philosophy failed in it's duty?

JayUtah said:
Among other things, I would say that it has shown that while many different (and occasionally discordant) modes of thinking are possible, the existence of that variety alone does not reduce the strength of individual modes. Realizing that one can think outside the box does not immediately refute the thinking that came from the box.
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You been sittin' too close to Tommy?
 
JayUtah said:
Irrelevant. It is the proposition that is consistent with Hawking's statement. This is a concept you simply cannot seem to grasp. You are presented with an argument that "A is inconsistent with B," and you wrongly assume that someone is positing A or B or both as universal. Then you deploy your relativist diatribe -- clearly the only tool on your toolbelt. All you have is a hammer, so you frantically try to make everything look like a nail even when it isn't.

You want your claims to expertise to be considered valid beyond your own worldview. When someone points out that the manner in which you want them validated is inconsistent with the manner which you are able to substantiate them, you misrepresent the argument as universalist and swing the ol' relativism hammer.

You really can't seem to understand what anyone else says. You just apply relativism in cargo-cult fashion.
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I get it now! You make a judgment or hold an opinion(proposition), but that says nothing about the universe or the singularity and all that. So you don't hold a view about all of the universe in toto about where it came form nothing or what ever. Why didn't you say that?
You make no actual judgement or hold no opinion about the universe as relevant to this thread.
You are only talking about theoretical physics as a model and not the universe as such.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
So you take for granted that we are in a natural world.
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This is about the 4th or 5th time in this discussion and about the 2 billionth time overall you've tried some code word or phrase to make "Doesn't reject reality" to sound like some unreasonable assumption.
 
Tommy Jeppesen said:
Are you a pragmatist or instrumentalist?
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Stop trying to be the teacher, Tommy. I'm the guy who's trying to get you to understand plain English, to take responsibility for your failure to understand what other people are saying, and to stop demanding we all accept you as some sort of guru. Let's stick with those simple things, shall we?
 
JayUtah said:
No. My point is that discovering the ability to disassemble a lawn mower teaches you how it works, but it in no way precludes the ability to put it back together again and mow the lawn.
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You have admitted that philosophy has taken the "truth lawnmower" to bits and put it back together again thousands of times, but still hasn't learned how it works.

I'm happy to leave it there. You have enough going on with the unreal philosopher.
 
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JayUtah said:
No, you don't.
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So you are saying something about the universe and thus doing metaphysics.
Start reading and give an answer:
https://www.iep.utm.edu/cog-rel/

You are either saying something about the universe in metaphysical terms or you don't do metaphysics and in effect are an anti-realist of some sort.
Of course you could be an agnostic or soft believer in metaphysics, but you are to intelligent not to have a position on metaphysics of some sort.
 
ynot said:
You have admitted that philosophy has taken the "truth lawnmower" to bits and put it back together again thousands of times, but still hasn't learned how it works.
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No. Keep in mind I'm on your side.

We start by treating a lawn mower as an inscrutable "black box" and taking its function for granted. This is akin to intuitive ways of thinking that require no special insight. Then we take the lawn mower apart and thereby learn that it's a mechanism whose design can vary, and whose processes we can investigate and perhaps change. This is akin to philosophy disassembling those intuitive ways of thinking and from that learning more about thinking in general. This new insight doesn't eliminate the value of the ways of thinking we started with, any more than comprehending the mechanism of the lawn mower stops it from being useful once we've put it back together again.

The pseudo-philosophy being employed in this thread is trying to tell you that you can't use the lawn mower once you know how it works. Naturally I disagree with that sentiment.
 
ynot said:
You have admitted that philosophy has taken the "truth lawnmower" to bits and put it back together again thousands of times, but still hasn't learned how it works.
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Go for the kill! The dirt secret is that some scientists don't have knowledge as you believe in it. They know to much. They believe in a natural world, but some of them are actually metaphysical anti-realists of some sort or another.

Instrumentalism is an interpretation within the philosophy of science that holds that a successful scientific theory reveals nothing known either true or false about nature's unobservable objects, properties or processes. According to instrumentalists scientific theory is merely a tool whereby humans predict observations in a particular domain of nature by formulating laws, which state or summarize regularities, while theories themselves do not reveal supposedly hidden aspects of nature that somehow explain these laws. Initially a novel perspective introduced by Pierre Duhem in 1906, instrumentalism is largely the prevailing theory that underpins the practice of physicists today.

Rejecting scientific realism's ambitions to uncover metaphysical truth about nature, instrumentalism is usually categorized as an antirealism, although its mere lack of commitment to scientific theory's realism can be termed nonrealism.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

Not all scientist are metaphysical realists.
Whether that applies to JayUtah or not, you ask him. He won't answer me.
 
JayUtah said:
No. Keep in mind I'm on your side.

We start by treating a lawn mower as an inscrutable "black box" and taking its function for granted. This is akin to intuitive ways of thinking that require no special insight. Then we take the lawn mower apart and thereby learn that it's a mechanism whose design can vary, and whose processes we can investigate and perhaps change. This is akin to philosophy disassembling those intuitive ways of thinking and from that learning more about thinking in general. This new insight doesn't eliminate the value of the ways of thinking we started with, any more than comprehending the mechanism of the lawn mower stops it from being useful once we've put it back together again.

The pseudo-philosophy being employed in this thread is trying to tell you that you can't use the lawn mower once you know how it works. Naturally I disagree with that sentiment.
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So how does morality work?
 
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