What Is The Difference Between Prayer And Witchcraft?

ashurbanipal · May 4, 2015

Gonzo Rodeo said:
What you have said doesn't matter.

Whyever not? If what you've been arguing isn't a consequence of what I've said, then your arguments are basically irrelevant.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
You have stated, several times, that contradictions require special pleadings instead of reexamined premises.

Now, where did I ever say that?

Gonzo Rodeo said:
Contradictions are not possible

Really? Seems to me they are. Fitch's Knowability Paradox is a good example. There are unknown truths, and all truths are, in principle, knowable. Turns out, those two propositions result in a contradiction. But they're both true.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
inventing a magical gap filler (literally, a god of the gaps) to wed the two contradicting statements together is the act of removing oneself from the rules of logic in order to prove something else logically.

If you want to make this point, please show how the three sentences I posted--i.e. the results of the argument from causation, are inconsistent. Here they are again:

(Ax)(Ey)(~Ixy)
(Ax)(Fx -> Cx))
(Ey)(Fy & ~ Cy)

Here it is in rough English:

No X's are Y's.
For all X's, if X F's, then X C's
There is a Y such that Y F's and Y doesn't C.

Those are obviously consistent. The argument would work just as well, and avoid your "criticisms" altogether if phrased just a little differently. The first premise might read, instead of "everything," merely "everything in the universe."

Gonzo Rodeo said:
You literally cannot define what "outside of time" means in any meaningful way.

So what?

Gonzo Rodeo said:
Time is a measurement of change between one moment and another.

I think the jury is still out on just what time is.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
If there is no change between an arbitrary first moment and some point before it... you see the problem?

The problem I see is that if there is a first moment, there is no point before it.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
This is simply gibberish built on the assumed necessity of a contradiction. No, something does not have to be an exception; it is far more likely that the premise is inaccurate than a contradiction must exist. I don't know how many times you need to see that before it sinks in, but it's never going away.

So far, you've been posting as if the Kalaam is the only cosmological argument to exist, and it's comparatively easy to give up one of its premises. I bet if you look at all cosmological arguments and realize you'll have to give up premises from all of them, you'll begin to appreciate the issue.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
It's dishonest and circular on it's face. Not to mention, NOT OBVIOUS. How do we know that everything had a beginning? Oh, that's right, because infinity doesn't exist! Again, though, except where God is concerned.

I think a more general set of paradoxes exist with regard to infinity. On the one hand, finished infinities cannot exist. On the other hand, infinities must exist.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
Time is intangible, just like the decimals of irrational numbers.

Tangibility isn't the only relevant property here. Irrational numbers are also abstract; time is not.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
If you want to attempt to say that time can't be infinite because we are somewhere in it, then you can say irrational numbers don't go on infinitely because we can start to count the decimal places. It's just absurd.

There's a difference between saying that there may be an infinite amount of time in the future and saying that an infinite amount of time has already elapsed. Imagine a teacher separates her class into two groups and has them start counting positive integers forward from one. After an unspecified period of time, she asks each group two questions: 1. How many numbers are there? 2. What number are you on?

The first group answers: 1. An infinite number. 2. 1,245,632.

The second group answers: 1. An infinite number. 2. Infinity.

Clearly, the second group cannot be telling the truth--one cannot count to infinity.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
But the mysterious isn't anymore of a realistic proposition than the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny.

I'm rather less confident in our ability to understand the universe than that. Of course there are things we probably don't, and can't, understand.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
Only those who are attempting to argue in favor of a God (which they already have picked out!) even attempt to shoehorn the OBVIOUSLY FALSE premises around the OBVIOUSLY CONTRADICTORY conclusions.

I have no God picked out.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
No one without any skin in the game has ever come up with such an absurd notion. Contradictions cannot exist by definition

Wait--what? A contradiction is a proposition and its negation. Why can't those exit?

ashurbanipal · May 4, 2015

Gonzo Rodeo said:
creating a convenient gap filler to explain away the contradiction doesn't actually explain away the contradiction. Literally every single property you can load onto some type of creator deity breaks all of the logical arguments showing that they are necessary, otherwise all of those properties already exist in the universe without a need for them to be attached to a god!

Again, obviously false. I've already said why.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
This is like saying there can't be an infinite number of decimals to pi because we would have to count them for forever, and forever doesn't exist so therefore the infinite nature of irrational numbers doesn't exist either.

No. It would be like saying we cannot have already calculated all the decimals to pi, not that those decimals don't exist.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
Not at all. I'm saying that if A implies B, and B implies C, but C and A are mutually exclusive, then you have to recheck your premises.

You've said that too...well, sorta. I was referring specifically to this:

Gonzo Rodeo said:
You can't say nothing is invisible... except for this one thing that must be invisible. The first part invalidates the second part.

Formally (ignoring the modal "must"), this is like saying "everyone in my household is female, except me." Both have the form (Ax)(Ey)((Fx & ~Fy)&(~Ixy)). If one cannot make statements of that form, as you seem to be saying, then we can derive (Ax)(Ey)((~Fx v Fy) v Ixy). From Ixy we can derived Fy -> Fx by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, and from there it's a clear inconsistency--the point being, one can make statements of the form (Ax)(Ey)((Fx & ~Fy)&(~Ixy)).

Gonzo Rodeo said:
You, on the other hand, and inventing a D that magically makes A and C inclusive, with no additional reason why or how it does this other than you believe that it has to.

The reason is that the premises result in a contradiction, but to give one or more up seems to have deleterious consequences. For example, in the argument from causation, we can give up the premise that every effect has a cause. But suppose this is false. This would mean that things just happen, magically, for no reason--that the universe lacks physis. It seems better to say that the universe has physis (i.e. it obeys law-like relations), but there exists something that doesn't. If the universe lacked physis, we'd have no science, no technology, no guarantee that one moment will cohere with the next.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
Couldn't be the premises, no! It must be that some magical, supernatural, special suspension of the entire universal order must exist.

Of course it could be the premises. But if you want to deny the conclusion, you have to give up the notion of a universal order.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
But they aren't obviously right. You have no evidence for the temporal nature of matter/energy.

Argument already adduced. An infinite amount of time cannot have elapsed.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
The same ones you give up. If nothing is eternal, then god can't be eternal either. If everything needed a cause, then god needed a cause as well.

Except, you seem to be committed to giving them up with respect to everything. This strikes me as unwise. Keep in mind the Kalaam is not the only cosmological argument, and you'd need to give up at least one premise in all of them if you don't want to accept the conclusion.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
So, let's give up the "nothing is eternal" bits, and the "everything needs a cause" bit. So, I'm going to declare that matter/energy has no cause and has lasted forever. There, I just fulfilled the special requirement to satiate the contradiction.

Then you seem to be committed to the proposition that there is no present moment. But anyway, I'm not sure this is the end of your difficulty. Why would everything be exempt, but not just things in general? Sounds like you've gone pantheist all of a sudden.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
If something can have an effect but has no cause, then why isn't that something matter/energy? You have already allowed for such a thing when you allow a god to do so.

I've already answered this question: all the matter we know about is subject to both cause and effect. If there is some bit of matter that has effects without any cause, it's special in just the way I've been saying. It's not impossible, of course, but it seems pretty unlikely.

ashurbanipal · May 4, 2015

I spotted a minor correction that needs to be made to this section:

(Ax)(Ey)(~Ixy)
(Ax)(Fx -> Cx))
(Ey)(Fy & ~ Cy)

Here it is in rough English:

No X's are Y's.
For all X's, if X F's, then X C's
There is a Y such that Y F's and Y doesn't C.

It should read:

(Ax)(Ey)(~Ixy)
(Ax)(Fx -> Cx))
(Ey)(Fy & ~ Cy)

Here it is in rough English:

There exists a Y that isn't an X.
For all X's, if X F's, then X C's
There is a Y such that Y F's and Y doesn't C.

Gonzo Rodeo · May 5, 2015

ashurbanipal said:
Really? Seems to me they are. Fitch's Knowability Paradox is a good example. There are unknown truths, and all truths are, in principle, knowable. Turns out, those two propositions result in a contradiction. But they're both true.

"Knowable" and "known" are two different things, and they aren't mutually exclusive. If you had said, "There are unknown truths," and "All truths are, in principle, already known," THAT would be a contradiction and an impossibility.

But that's not what you said.

Those are obviously consistent. The argument would work just as well, and avoid your "criticisms" altogether if phrased just a little differently. The first premise might read, instead of "everything," merely "everything in the universe."

But the universe is comprised of everything that exists. Adding "everything in the universe" doesn't except anything from the premises, since everything that exists must necessarily be in the universe by definition.

So what?
.....
I think the jury is still out on just what time is.
.....
The problem I see is that if there is a first moment, there is no point before it.

Exactly! Which means, there was no action/movement/change before it. Which means that there is no nebulous, magical "something" moving or acting or changing anything before it. The concept of first moment has no other point before it, so nothing can be said to precede it.

So far, you've been posting as if the Kalaam is the only cosmological argument to exist, and it's comparatively easy to give up one of its premises. I bet if you look at all cosmological arguments and realize you'll have to give up premises from all of them, you'll begin to appreciate the issue.

That's exactly the appreciable issue: the fact that each argument in this vein - the Kalam, the Ontological argument, the Teleological argument - all smuggle in the premise that some kind of "special" thing is needed, be that a cause or a designer or just a thing to fulfill an arbitrary definition of "maximal." But they ALL rely on the same faulty premises that end in contradiction. The contradiction is what makes these arguments - all of them - bunk.

Let me blow your mind for a second. Do you believe in free will? If so.... that means you don't believe in an omniscient God unbound by time who knows the future. Do you know why? Because if the knowledge of what was to come existed somewhere, that would make what was to come preordained, which means nobody has the choice to freely follow their own will; they may only do that which is preordained. Contradiction!

Gonzo Rodeo · May 5, 2015

ashurbanipal said:
Again, obviously false. I've already said why.

You have not addressed this point.

If you say that some special thing exists with the property of eternalness, then you have allowed for the existence of eternalness... i.e. the premise that states nothing can be eternal is obviously false, because you are allowing at least one thing to have this property. This will become clear with the next part.

Formally (ignoring the modal "must"), this is like saying "everyone in my household is female, except me." Both have the form (Ax)(Ey)((Fx & ~Fy)&(~Ixy)). If one cannot make statements of that form, as you seem to be saying, then we can derive (Ax)(Ey)((~Fx v Fy) v Ixy). From Ixy we can derived Fy -> Fx by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, and from there it's a clear inconsistency--the point being, one can make statements of the form (Ax)(Ey)((Fx & ~Fy)&(~Ixy)).

But this isn't what the cosmological argument is saying. You keep going apples-to-oranges and it's frustrating. When you say the house only has females in it, you are describing an assumed property of the house... but it is incorrect, because you are not a female and you are in the house. So, when you say something like "everything that exists has a cause," and then you say "one thing doesn't have a cause," you are saying the first statement isn't quite true. Now, you could say "the house only has females in it except for me," and that could be an observationally true statement, but you CAN'T say "everything has a cause except this one thing that doesn't," because that IS NOT an observationally true statement. The "observationally true" part is the part where everything has a cause, NOT that everything has a cause except one thing. The exception is NOT justified at all by the fact that is has been exempted!

This is the problem. To make the statement "everything needs a cause," you are disallowing things that don't have causes; to make the statement "this one thing doesn't need a cause," you are allowing things that don't have causes. You can't just pick and choose which things follow the rules and which do not, not when you're throwing around the words like "all" and "every". You can't specifically exempt a thing from the rules and then point to the rules to justify the exemption; the rules say it can't, and if it does, those aren't the rules!

The reason is that the premises result in a contradiction, but to give one or more up seems to have deleterious consequences. For example, in the argument from causation, we can give up the premise that every effect has a cause. But suppose this is false. This would mean that things just happen, magically, for no reason--that the universe lacks physis. It seems better to say that the universe has physis (i.e. it obeys law-like relations), but there exists something that doesn't. If the universe lacked physis, we'd have no science, no technology, no guarantee that one moment will cohere with the next.

This is a gibberish argument. There cannot be deleterious consequences, or else we'd have them because of the exceptions....unless you use this lack of deleterious consequences as further evidence of something holding the universe together despite itself. In which case, we can just start making stuff up whenever we want for reasons of convenience. That is not logic.

Further, this "something special" you argue must exist just happened, magically, for no reason.

Argument already adduced. An infinite amount of time cannot have elapsed.

..which means God is neither timeless nor eternal. Because nothing can be, right? Time must necessarily have a beginning, which means there is a definite point in the past beyond which there are no more points.

Except, you seem to be committed to giving them up with respect to everything. This strikes me as unwise. Keep in mind the Kalaam is not the only cosmological argument, and you'd need to give up at least one premise in all of them if you don't want to accept the conclusion.

It's not a matter of "not wanting" to accept the conclusions; I cannot, because they are contradictory and nonsensical. Again, the fact that they all share the same problems say a lot more about these arguments than it does about me.

ashurbanipal · May 5, 2015

Gonzo Rodeo said:
"Knowable" and "known" are two different things, and they aren't mutually exclusive. If you had said, "There are unknown truths," and "All truths are, in principle, already known," THAT would be a contradiction and an impossibility.

Fitch's knowability paradox is a known problem (which might have been obvious from the fact that it's got a name--i.e. "Fitch's paradox..."). See here:

Fitch's Paradox of Knowability (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Gonzo Rodeo said:
But the universe is comprised of everything that exists. Adding "everything in the universe" doesn't except anything from the premises, since everything that exists must necessarily be in the universe by definition.

Actually, "universe" originally meant "to turn to one,"--i.e. to conceive of everything as a single thing. But once the idea became common, it just became equivalent to how early modern intellectuals used the term "the world." Just as there can be something outside the world, there can be something outside the universe. But suppose we go with your definition: then it's just matter of changing universe to "in-principal observable" universe or "material universe" or something like that.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
Exactly! Which means, there was no action/movement/change before it. Which means that there is no nebulous, magical "something" moving or acting or changing anything before it.

The last sentence doesn't follow from the first. If there is something magical, presumably it is exempt from such considerations. The point of cosmological arguments is to show that there must be such a thing. But it would be disastrous to conceive of that property obtaining of physical things--our science would never get anywhere if that was our underlying assumption.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
That's exactly the appreciable issue: the fact that each argument in this vein - the Kalam, the Ontological argument, the Teleological argument - all smuggle in the premise that some kind of "special" thing is needed

I haven't said anything about ontological or teleological arguments. I'm just talking about cosmological arguments, of which the Kalaam is one version. There are several others, all of which demonstrate contradictions between two commonly observed properties of the universe, properties which we use to conceptualize and understand that universe. If you don't want to accept the conclusion of such arguments, fine, but you then have to give up a premise, and doing so for each such argument will leave the universe non-nomic, unintelligble, and entirely magical. Science would be a fairy tale. Seems better to accept that there's one thing that's special, rather than that everything is.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
be that a cause or a designer or just a thing to fulfill an arbitrary definition of "maximal." But they ALL rely on the same faulty premises that end in contradiction. The contradiction is what makes these arguments - all of them - bunk.

That's weird. Ontological and teleological arguments don't rely on any contradiction among their premises. Cosmological arguments are basically arguments ad absurdem. Ontological and teleological arguments are not.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
Let me blow your mind for a second. Do you believe in free will?

Do you mean freedom of will, or freedom of action? Most people say the former, but mean the latter. I'm not sure that freedom of will is a coherent concept. I do believe in freedom of action. I also believe will is not a product of deterministic natural laws.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
If so.... that means you don't believe in an omniscient God unbound by time who knows the future. Do you know why? Because if the knowledge of what was to come existed somewhere, that would make what was to come preordained, which means nobody has the choice to freely follow their own will; they may only do that which is preordained. Contradiction!

I really don't want to wade into the morass of such arguments. There are a number of solutions, all of which rely on very fine distinctions; to see some of them, see Linda Zagzebski's chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Free Will. To sketch briefly the one I think is correct: "will" is a suspender of truth values. If I will face a decision later about whether to have cake or pie, there is no truth value for the proposition "I will have cake," until I've made the decision. Omniscience is usually just taken to mean that the omniscient being knows the truth value of every proposition; it would be revised here to "knows the truth value of every proposition which has one."

Anyway, I haven't said anything about an omniscient being.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
You have not addressed this point.

I don't really see a point. If it's true that something can have a property that other things don't have, there doesn't seem to be a problem.

ashurbanipal · May 5, 2015

Gonzo Rodeo said:
If you say that some special thing exists with the property of eternalness, then you have allowed for the existence of eternalness... i.e. the premise that states nothing can be eternal is obviously false, because you are allowing at least one thing to have this property. This will become clear with the next part.

This much should already be clear.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
But this isn't what the cosmological argument is saying. You keep going apples-to-oranges and it's frustrating. When you say the house only has females in it, you are describing an assumed property of the house... but it is incorrect, because you are not a female and you are in the house.

No, there's no assumption about anything. The term "everything" turns out to have been used loosely by the time we get past the word "except."

Gonzo Rodeo said:
but you CAN'T say "everything has a cause except this one thing that doesn't," because that IS NOT an observationally true statement.

The argument is meant to show that we must infer such a thing, however. Are you claiming that only observation statements are true or something? What observation will you make to show that?

Gonzo Rodeo said:
The "observationally true" part is the part where everything has a cause, NOT that everything has a cause except one thing.

Doesn't seem to make much difference as far as I can tell. Yes, the point is that it's true of everything we observe that it is bound by paired properties of causation. But not everything can be so bound. Ergo, there must be something we don't observe which isn't.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
The exception is NOT justified at all by the fact that is has been exempted!

It's not meant to be. It's meant to be justified by the fact that to not make such exception leads to far worse consequences, and ones that conflict (supposedly) with our observations.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
To make the statement "everything needs a cause," you are disallowing things that don't have causes; to make the statement "this one thing doesn't need a cause," you are allowing things that don't have causes.

This is exactly what you don't understand. By the end of cosmological arguments, we have to revise premises. Not (literally) everything has a cause--but if everything lacks a cause, well, we may as well go back to living in the stone age. So it is better to say of one thing, or a very few things, that they are special, and preserve the physis in the universe. In other words, I grant you your "problem," but point out that it amounts to very little.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
You can't just pick and choose which things follow the rules and which do not, not when you're throwing around the words like "all" and "every".

Actually, in this case, you can. It's a principle of logic called instantiation.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
This is a gibberish argument. There cannot be deleterious consequences, or else we'd have them because of the exceptions...

You'll need to argue that, not just assert it.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
unless you use this lack of deleterious consequences as further evidence of something holding the universe together despite itself.

I have no idea what this means.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
In which case, we can just start making stuff up whenever we want for reasons of convenience. That is not logic.

This is the third time I've posted this: if you want to make this point, you'll need to demonstrate an inconsistency among the following three sentences:

(Ax)(Ey)(~Ixy)
(Ax)(Fx -> Cx))
(Ey)(Fy & ~ Cy)

Here it is in rough English:

There exists a Y that isn't an X.
For all X's, if X F's, then X C's
There is a Y such that Y F's and Y doesn't C.

Seems to me to be entirely logical to propose such a solution, and that all you're really saying is that you just don't like the consequences.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
Further, this "something special" you argue must exist just happened, magically, for no reason.

Sure. Or at least, no reason we comprehend.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
..which means God is neither timeless nor eternal. Because nothing can be, right?

No, not right. Anything can be eternal, in the sense that it might last forever. Nothing, however, can have already lasted forever. Timeless (i.e. not time-bound) is an entirely different concept. It cannot apply to matter, but it could apply to non-material objects. Presumably, for instance, the axioms of logic are timeless.

Gonzo Rodeo said:
It's not a matter of "not wanting" to accept the conclusions; I cannot, because they are contradictory and nonsensical.

You have yet to show this. I've given you the conclusions in symbolic form and in English (those three sentences posted above, and in previous posts). Show that they are contradictory (well; I think you mean "inconsistent") if you can. If you can't, your continued insistence just starts to look dogmatic rather than reasonable.

zyzygy · May 5, 2015

What does any of this have to do with praying to an imaginary being?

ashurbanipal · May 6, 2015

zyzygy said:
What does any of this have to do with praying to an imaginary being?

While I've been careful not to argue this, people have used cosmological arguments to establish the existence of that being which you call imaginary. Others have used them to both define and establish the existence of such a being (Aquinas, in particular, seems to write as if that's what he's doing). I don't think cosmological arguments can establish the existence of any particular God, or even a God per se. I think they do establish that there is a mystery beyond the properties we usually use to conceptualize the universe, and I can see how someone might think this gets us closer to showing that God exists. Again, Aquinas seems to have thought so.

Historically, my most recent interlocutor had been posting about cosmological arguments in a manner which suggests he doesn't grasp them. I have been arguing that this is the case.

rhinefire · May 6, 2015

The witchcraft chicks are easier than those holy roller babes.

RAMOSS · May 6, 2015

rhinefire said:
The witchcraft chicks are easier than those holy roller babes.

I personally found Catholic school girls (in all girl schools) were easier.

lizzie · May 21, 2015

Gonzo Rodeo said:
What is the fundamental difference between prayer and witchcraft? Obviously excluding "one of them works," since that will lead to a wild goose chase over "which one."

In specific terms, how is it fundamentally different to beseech a spiritual power to intercede on your behalf and... beseech a spiritual power to intercede on your behalf?

In a manner of speaking, I can see how one could probably see them as the same, but in my own observation, one of them is a broad well-wishing for the wellbeing of others, and the other is more of a concentration of personal focus, which is intended to help one achieve personal goals.
Iow, one of them benefits the person practicing, and the other is for the benefit of others.

What Is The Difference Between Prayer And Witchcraft?

ashurbanipal

ashurbanipal

ashurbanipal

Gonzo Rodeo

better late than pregnant

Gonzo Rodeo

better late than pregnant

ashurbanipal

ashurbanipal

zyzygy

ashurbanipal

rhinefire

RAMOSS

lizzie