Of course you may. But it is you that has assumed a privileged rationality, unaccountable to reality.
So how would you evaluate mental states, and remember - no recourse to external reality and observation?
I hereby claim grass is green. Seems realistic. I doubt any psychiatrist will look for irrational causes.
The state of mind is measured against reality, not the other way around.
When you choose to make claims you are unable to substantiate, the blame is not with those who expose that to you.
You seem to not show this somehow. You wanting there to be some fundamental basis you can reference, all because empiricism feels insufficient to you does not make others feel the same dissatisfaction. Nor does it make there actually be anything more to fundamentally justify our reasoning.
Needless to say, “our reasoning’s reliability is transferred/inherited from the fundamentally reliable reasoning of the magical essence that permeates this universe” should not do much at all to alleviate your doubts. You have no more basis to trust God’s reasoning than you do your own, and the fallibility of at least the latter also bars you from completely trusting this argument, even if you did.
No. “The unreasoning spirit of tiredness made me do it” would be shoveling responsibility off to some “unreasoning cause”. Being tired is an explanation of what happened, but it is not an excuse, and people who have wronged someone when their reasoning was so compromised should and often do still apologize. Because even when the deed or its consequences were unforeseen or unintended at the time, many still understand that it is not, in fact, someone or something else’s doing just because of the regret they feel afterward – something, incidentally, I’d think they would not feel, if indeed they felt that it wasn’t them.
No, but that so very physical influences should have such a noticeable impact is curious, if the mind is ultimately non-physical.
What part of his calculation is actually incorrect, though? He was just summing up the years between one man’s birth and the birth of his heir. Where in that math did he make the mistake?
The problem with Ussher’s estimate was never the calculation. It was the unwarranted assumption that an ancient book of folklore was a reliable source of facts about nature. Rather than going out and measuring anything, rather than reviewing the earth itself in an effort to find out its age, he went to review and cite literature instead. He trusted the words of an authority, and drew conclusions hence, without ever bothering to compare his conclusions or the authority’s against the actual facts of nature. You disbelieve now his conclusion, you say. Good. But what have you to criticize about his methods that applies not to your own?
I am now persuaded you are intentionally obfuscating to prevent this discussion from progressing, indicating your aim is to engage in apologetics, not to seek truth.
So I will simply proceed in my next post to demonstrate that Axe’s “response to objection 3” doesn’t, in fact, work and simply begs the question.