Vlad the Vulgarian,
Hillside I don't think I have ever said I can prove God…
But you have claimed that “God” is an objective fact, only non-believers in “Him” haven’t had the house call or can’t grasp your knock down reasoning for it. If though you’re now retrenching to where you should have been all along – “God” is a personal
faith belief for you rather than an objective fact, no more or less true for the rest of us than any other personal faith belief anyone else may happen to have in anything else (fairies included) then fair enough.
I’ve always said that personal faith beliefs of this kind are no-one’s business but those who happen to hold them. I merely raise a “now hang on a minute” when they overreach by insisting that their truth should be my truth too. Roll back the churches to private members clubs, defenestrate from the classroom clerics teaching their fancies as facts to children, eject bishops from the House of Lords etc though and I’ll find something more productive to discuss – gardening maybe.
… or provide evidence that would satisfy an old philosophical materialist like yersel'
However as I keep saying neither can ye yersel' provide that kind of evidence for philosophical materialism itself.
I thought you’d stopped saying that now I’ve shown it to be a crock?
(Wearily) I don’t believe your god to be real for exactly the same reason that you don’t think storks to deliver babies. Neither of us need recourse either to the actual or to your re-invented version of PM for our positions – we merely need assess the arguments and evidence to reach our probability-based conclusions. If either of us expects to persuade the other of his belief, then each of us has the burden of proof to show that his belief is more probably true than not – and again PM (either the real one or your misunderstanding of it) has anything to do with that.
I'm talking about standard definitions of PM of course not the implied notion of yours that unless you are on the inside you can't really understand what philosophical materialism is. That is mystical and certainly not appropriate in the type of ''front'' you wish to put up.
No you’re not talking about the “standard definition” at all, and that’s a complete straw man to boot. Your wrongheaded definition involves people claiming that the material is all there is or could be; the proper definition is that claims of the supernatural offer nothing that can be examined by the tools of materialism
or by anything else so the only rational response is to ignore them until a method –
any method that’s cogent and coherent – is finally produced to distinguish those claims from white noise.
And no, “I intuit it” doesn’t even get its trousers off for that purpose.
Until philosophical materialism is established then I am afraid that even for you God may be true.
It’s got bugger all to do with PM, and I’ve never said that “God”
may not be true – just as you have no argument that fairies or baby-delivering storks
may not be true. I know this burden of proof thing has got you foxed, but anything – literally, anything –
could be. It’s for the claimant though to explain how they propose to get from “could be” to “more probably is than is not” – something no theist (or fairyist) has ever managed to do.
As a believer no who wasn't a believer before, my experience would lead me to tell you that the only way to miss God is to be running in the other direction from him.
That’s called the reification fallacy. That you happen to be a “believer” says nothing to whether that belief is correct, and nor therefore to whether there’s anything to run away
from.
If you seriously think otherwise, why do you keep running away from my belief in Stan the Stork?
I am not here to win some kind of argument with you proving God. It is up to him to reveal himself to you and for you to make response.
And having committed the reification fallacy, you do it again. Good effort!
No doubt that’s your personal, entirely subjective belief and you’re welcome to it. I could of course say the same about you for Stan the Stork – but simply assuming our beliefs to be true for each other and then building claims on those assumptions is a pretty fruitless approach I’d have thought.
So, once we’ve cleared away all your brushwood of logical fallacies, false assumptions, misuse of philosophical terms, avoidance of the burden of proof problem and the serried ranks of straw men what you’re left with is an
entirely personal faith belief. And that’s fine and dandy – it’s none of my business after all – but it would serve you well I think finally to grasp that that’s
all you have.
And if you can do that by the way, it will have the notable side-benefit of saving you a fortune in new trousers.