Ontological Argument.......Really?

[Walt Zingmatilder]

You are conflating reality by which you mean unconscious matter with infinite reality.

No, I'm presuming 'unconscious matter' because there's no reason to presume anything else.

first of all you are left with the following problems.

1: Demonstrating that material is all the reality there is.

Again? When have I said that, definitively, that's all there is? All you need do to lever in something else is give a reason to think that there is something else. Until then, given that there is justification for presuming physical reality exists, I'll work on the physical reality.

A ''have cake and eat it'' argument. Hedging the bet.

[Shaker]

No Vlad; it's called evidentialism, or proportioning your tentative and provisional beliefs to the available evidence.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

No, it doesn't. That's a deduction from the fact that everything we see is an effect of a prior cause. In the absence of any effects which do not have a cause, we can either deduce that the chain continues infinitely or arbitrarily decide that there must have been an uncaused cause. I think the former introduces fewer unevidenced elements, but if you can make a case either for an uncaused cause or against infinite reality I'm happy to review.

So, to remove an unobserved creator what you are invoking is Ockhams razor........by introducing infinite unobserved causes and infinite unobserved effects!!!!???

[Walt Zingmatilder]

No Vlad; it's called evidentialism, or proportioning your tentative and provisional beliefs to the available evidence.

Which goes out the window on invocation of multiverse, infinite series, chains which are neither created nor uncreated or any other similar stuff Outrider has intentionally or unintentionally proposed.

[jeremyp]

God the uncaused cause is perfectly reasonable once you establish any precedence for ''uncausality''.

So is the Uncaused Universe, and we have good evidence the Universe exists.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

God the uncaused cause is perfectly reasonable once you establish any precedence for ''uncausality''.

So is the Uncaused Universe, and we have good evidence the Universe exists.

Yes Jeremy but can't you see the big bang puts a big question mark over the uncaused bit since er,there is no evidence of anything before it.

In fact your assertion that it is here and everything that we see was caused points to a caused universe. I'm afraid you then have to make recourse to something you can't evidence.

Why the hell you blokes don't heed the advice of St Bertrand of Russell and St Richard of Meme and treat the providence of the universe as a 'Don't go there'......beats me.

[jjohnjil]

God the uncaused cause is perfectly reasonable once you establish any precedence for ''uncausality''.

So is the Uncaused Universe, and we have good evidence the Universe exists.

Yes Jeremy but can't you see the big bang puts a big question mark over the uncaused bit since er,there is no evidence of anything before it.

In fact your assertion that it is here and everything that we see was caused points to a caused universe. I'm afraid you then have to make recourse to something you can't evidence.

Why the hell you blokes don't heed the advice of St Bertrand of Russell and St Richard of Meme and treat the providence of the universe as a 'Don't go there'......beats me.

If you consider how the age of the Universe has been calculated, it's easy to see why it's imagined to have started out as a tiny speck .... but it aint necessarily so.  The direction and angle of travel that the galaxies take is computed back to a single dot, just in the same way as drawing perspective, all angles and lines are taken back to a single focal point.

Imagine standing on a dead straight railway track and seeing the two rails gradually run back to a single dot.  If you actually travelled down to that dot, it would no longer be a speck.  The same goes for the Big Bang.

Another way to look at it is to imagine an intelligent virus sitting on a tiny piece of shrapnel that is rushing through the air after a bomb has exploded. If it wondered where it had come from it could measure all the other pieces of shrapnel flying away in all directions and calculate correctly that the point where they all converged was where they all originated. It would be simply a single point but we know that in fact it started at something much larger than the piece of shrapnel . a whole bomb.     

[jeremyp]

God the uncaused cause is perfectly reasonable once you establish any precedence for ''uncausality''.

So is the Uncaused Universe, and we have good evidence the Universe exists.

Yes Jeremy but can't you see the big bang puts a big question mark over the uncaused bit since er,there is no evidence of anything before it.

No it doesn't.

Just because there was a Big Bang doesn't mean the Universe it was in has a cause.

Your uncaused cause is a busted flush. Anything you can say about it with reference to your god I can say about it with reference to the Universe. And I have the advantage of talking about something that exists.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Anything you can say about it with reference to your god I can say about it with reference to the Universe. And I have the advantage of talking about something that exists.

But we know that things which exist in the universe have a cause .Point to something therefore which didn't.

Uncaused cause a busted flush. You both want uncaused to be the state of the universe and calling uncaused a busted flush.

[jeremyp]

But we know that things which exist in the universe have a cause .

The Universe is not in the Universe. There's no evidence or reason that it has a cause.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

But we know that things which exist in the universe have a cause .

The Universe is not in the Universe. There's no evidence or reason that it has a cause.

No reason?...You mean it couldn't possibly have a cause

The universe is not in the universe? Is it now outside itself?

[jeremyp]

But we know that things which exist in the universe have a cause .

The Universe is not in the Universe. There's no evidence or reason that it has a cause.

No reason?...You mean it couldn't possibly have a cause

There's no reason why it should have a cause.

The universe is not in the universe? Is it now outside itself?

So your argument stands on your belief that you can put an object inside itself. Do you realise how stupid that sounds? If not, I suggest you go find a box or a bag and try to put it inside itself.  It should give you hours of entertainment.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

But we know that things which exist in the universe have a cause .

The Universe is not in the Universe. There's no evidence or reason that it has a cause.

No reason?...You mean it couldn't possibly have a cause

There's no reason why it should have a cause.

Ah, so cause and effect is out of the window. Can you point to anything that has popped out of nothing?

[Walt Zingmatilder]

But we know that things which exist in the universe have a cause .

The Universe is not in the Universe. There's no evidence or reason that it has a cause.

No reason?...You mean it couldn't possibly have a cause

There's no reason why it should have a cause.

The universe is not in the universe? Is it now outside itself?

So your argument stands on your belief that you can put an object inside itself. Do you realise how stupid that sounds? If not, I suggest you go find a box or a bag and try to put it inside itself.  It should give you hours of entertainment.

Are you saying there is no universe inside the universe? You said the universe is not in the universe. Where is it then?

The universe is a bag is it or box according to you.......are the things in the bag not the universe?

[Outrider]

No, it doesn't. That's a deduction from the fact that everything we see is an effect of a prior cause. In the absence of any effects which do not have a cause, we can either deduce that the chain continues infinitely or arbitrarily decide that there must have been an uncaused cause. I think the former introduces fewer unevidenced elements, but if you can make a case either for an uncaused cause or against infinite reality I'm happy to review.

So, to remove an unobserved creator what you are invoking is Ockhams razor........by introducing infinite unobserved causes and infinite unobserved effects!!!!???

Everything we see is cause and effect. Everything. So we either arbitrarily decide that's not viable for ever, or we deduce from it that there's an infinite reality. Infinite reality is a deduction from the evidence; God is an arbitrary invention to avoid the conclusion from that evidence.

Yes, Occam's razor shaves falls on the side of the infinite reality.

O.

[Outrider]

You are conflating reality by which you mean unconscious matter with infinite reality.

No, I'm presuming 'unconscious matter' because there's no reason to presume anything else.

first of all you are left with the following problems.

1: Demonstrating that material is all the reality there is.

Again? When have I said that, definitively, that's all there is? All you need do to lever in something else is give a reason to think that there is something else. Until then, given that there is justification for presuming physical reality exists, I'll work on the physical reality.

A ''have cake and eat it'' argument. Hedging the bet.

Do you believe there's sufficient evidence to be conclusive? Obviously not, or you wouldn't be questioning.

The difference is that I'm following the evidence as far as it takes and no more, you're taking the lack of absolute certainty and running with fairy tales through the gaps.

O.

[Outrider]

We are matter and we are conscious............ there's one reason

We are matter, but the consciousness does not reside in the matter. If we remove chunks they are not conscious. If we insert chunks they do not acquire consciousness. If we change certain elements we can alter the consciousness, but only when we alter the pattern of activity.

Consciousness, the evidence suggests, is in the pattern of activity, not resident within the matter.

You are presuming this universe is not all of reality....what is your reason for that?

The law of cause and effect suggests that the Big Bang must have been initiated by something - that something must have been in whatever reality exists outside of the universe.

O.

[Outrider]

...................... we can either deduce that the chain continues infinitely or.............

Which makes the chain uncreated.

Which makes the concept of creation inapplicable.

It's the difference between an empty set and a null set.

O.

[Outrider]

I don't need to demonstrate that. There is ample matter for which we have no evidence of consciousness. We have evidence that consciousness we have is not beholden to any particular piece of matter. We have evidence of consciousness being strongly correlated with particular patterns of behaviour of physical matter. We therefore hypothesise that consciousness is emergent from those patterns, we test those hypotheses and so far that evidence has validated the hypothesis. That's provisional - do you have any evidence to suggest that it's wrong?
.

We have no evidence for any consciousness since we cannot prove we are not just intelligent automata. Except that we know it ourselves.

More than that, though, we have measurements of conscious activity in the brain which is consistent across the populace to show that it's a consistent sense and activity. We lack a clear conceptualisation of exactly what consciousness it, but I see no reason why we should presume that it's impossible for 'intelligent automata' - by which I presume you mean anything purely deterministic - to be conscious.

Therefore a human being is the only reliable means of detecting consciousness.

No. Measurement of neurological activity can detect consciousness.

O.
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[Outrider]

Given you think it unreasonable to presume that which you cannot see. Why presume what you have just said?

Deduction, not presumption.

O.

[Outrider]

Which brings us back to the question of laws. What is the nature of the laws governing infinitely unconscious material?

I don't know that it's possible to know. It is nature, it may be that there are an infinite regress of causative mechanisms down through layers that we cannot perceive, yet, it may be that there is a 'fundamental' level at which nature operates.

O.

[Outrider]

Or to put it more correctly..... we have no way of knowing whether we are looking at sophisticated non conscious intelligence or consciousness.

Do you have any reason to think the two aren't, or can't be, the same? Why presume the consciousness is not emergent from sufficiently sophisticated or complex intelligence?

There is therefore no such thing as consciousness (Dennett) or we are the means of the detection of it.

No, you have not made the case, you have asserted consciousness cannot be merely the same as advanced intelligence.

O.

[Outrider]

3 Demonstrate that matter is exclusively non conscious.

I don't need to demonstrate that.

It is a positive assertion.

No. We have non-conscious matter - i.e. rocks. We have no conscious matter. We have arrangements of matter which display consciousness (i.e. people) whilst identical arrangments of matter (i.e. dead bodies) don't evidence it. That suggests that whilst the activity that demonstrates consciousness might be linked to matter and material activities, it's not resident in the matter.

That doesn't preclude the possibility of conscious matter, but I'm not going to presume that it's there until and unless there's some evidence to support the claim. I'm not claiming it's impossible, but I'm not including it in the model without reason, and so far there's no reason.

O.

[Jack Knave]

And that's it....not whatever else you are dishonestly trying to gussie it up into.

What dishonesty? We have sensory input that suggests a physical reality. We presume that's valid - openly accepting that this is an assumption - and then test that assumption to see what we can discover about that physical reality. From that continued consistency we have a validation of our assumption - still provisional - and we have reason therefore to think that we might be right.

You, and others like you, then throw in ideas like 'gods' and 'souls' and don't have any justification beyond 'but I feel like it', and you pretend like that's therefore worthy of consideration.

I'm not dishonest, I'm perfectly open in what I'm saying. I might, occasionally, misphrase something, or give an incorrect impression, I might even be holding positions that aren't justifiable from those presumptions and you're more than welcome to come an point them out, if you find them.

Doesn't change the facts of the situation: I've presumed physical reality, and the body of scientific evidence reinforces that. You've presumed God, and that's as far you've gotten.

O.

God the uncaused cause is perfectly reasonable once you establish any precedence for ''uncausality''.

But with this the word God has nothing to do with Christianity or any other religion but becomes a nebulous concept. As I have said before elsewhere you could just as well use the word or term "Something". Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster...

[Jack Knave]

No amount of us answering questions will change the fact that the fundamental burden of proof remains on those making the claim. You assert 'Naturalism'; we say 'prove it'.

Nope. The proof bit has been covered already; what I would add is that naturalism is a tentative, in fact conservative conclusion justified by a methodology with a proven track record of success in consistently serving up reliable knowledge of the nature of the world. If you want to make claims outside that, that's when we start asking interesting questions about the existence and nature of the methodology you propose to use - questions which are, without exception, continually deflected and dodged and just plain old ignored.

or put more honestly nature just looking at itself, explaining itself in it's own terms and making a punt that this is all there is. Naturalists being people sliding serrupticiously from a method to a philosophy hoping no one notices.

That the methodology works on nature doesn't help you out in anyway.

At least it has something to look at. Where's your God?

Look at Jesus Christ....

Still waiting for an answer, Vlad, on how to carry this out. Or are all you Christians full of vacuous advise?