Seriously, you don’t understand how analogies work. Stop pretending that you do.
Were you intending to illustrate the argument I was making against the EAAN? Because, if so, you did a great job there.
Yes, I did.
Yes, I have alredy acknowledged that. Now, deal with the part where I explain why that doesn’t matter.
Sorry, do you think the EES proposes non-natural explanations???
The problem is you are very stupid, and don’t understand what you are arguing against or even what the words you write mean. Sorry, but I have to be blunt.
I swear this has been discussed here many times. Rather than contribute to yet another digression, see if you can look it up. To avoid confusion, I’m referring here to libertarian free will.
He doesn’t get the written word, it seems to me. The list of things written in plain English he just outright fails to parse correctly is growing at a geometric rate (to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2).
You were actually saying survival should result usually in valid perceptions, see above in my previous response to you. I agree that validity of reasoning is the more important of the two issues, though.
For one thing, as I just said to Rumraket, we all insist on reason coming from reason, when we evaluate what people tell us. And then we are asked to make an exception to this, when we examine the foundation for the validity of our reason! It would seem odd, to abandon what we seem to consider so crucial, when we examine such foundations.
But I’m talking about something more fundamental, you seem to be addressing whether our reasoning can be considered good enough to use for our purposes.
I did, actually, with the help of someone here, I quoted him.
But it clearly demonstrates that essentialism is wrong.
No, I’m pointing out that this is a principle we all recognize, when we consider what someone tells us. Is their statement due to unreasoning, irrational causes? If so, we always reject it. I do not extend this to all causes and results, that would be essentialism.
Not at all! I insist on a fundamental reason to believe a theorem, as in needing a proof. But theorems are not some sort of essential quality somehow. A fundamental reason is a needed basis for important claims, like the validity of reason.
Well, I did, actually, mentioning him calling such a view “chronological snobbery”, though I didn’t do any further quotes.
Well, that’s fine, I don’t know what this has to do with human reasoning, though.
I think you did, actually, an inconsistent essentialist is not really an essentialist.
Um, I would call that an unsubstantiated claim. Why are they irrelevant?
I’m not claiming that, though. I do assume people know what I mean by a nonreasoning cause.
You can if they one is due to unreasoning causes, and the other is a nonreasoning cause. We recognize an nonreasoning cause in disordered thinking, and therefore reject it.
Well, I agree! But tree-rings are not causing conclusions, so your analogy is not apt. We make arguments, and form conclusions based on tree-rings, and everybody accepts such reasoning, because it’s our reasoning, we are the source, the tree-rings are not directly causing it.
Continual pain forever would not be desirable, I think we can all agree on that. I’m willing to do without further reward, for that. And my point is that in the Christian view, there is reason for suffering, reward being one of them, refining being another. I’m certainly not saying the only reason for pain is so we can be glad when it stops.
No, that is not my view, either. But improved reasoning would be appreciated.
I agree that making a single exception doesn’t make sense. Just Lewis’ point, actually.
Well, Darwin was concerned about that. Haldane pointed it out. Lennox and Lewis and Chesterton all concur. I could mention H.G. Wells, the historian, too, he wrote a piece Chesterton referred to, called “Doubts Of the Instrument”, meaning the brain. Would you say all these thinkers are making some sort of absurd declaration?
I’ve given a number of reasons it’s a problem, I’m wondering why you think I have given no reasons for this.
No, I don’t claim this!
But how do you know this? A deranged man’s reasoning suits him just fine, his logic is in fact, usually flawless, but it’s still based on irrationality.
But as I’ve said, a bridge is good if it’s worked well enough so far, but that doesn’t mean we won’t examine its foundations. So pragmatics doesn’t supply a foundation.
We do indeed have to start with reason as an axiom, but just taking refuge in a possibility, doesn’t seem to be a good landing place. And we can’t allow disproving the validity of reasoning, even if we assume it at the start! Starting with a bunch of premises, if you reach a contradiction, that’s a bad result.
Only as I keep saying, we all recognize this principle, when we evaluate what people tell us. If we see their reasoning has a nonreasoning cause, we reject it. Every time. So we have a warrant to trust our reasoning, if it comes from a reasoning cause. And we have reason to discount our reasoning, if we conclude it is the result of an unreasoning process, and if our current thoughts are just the entire and direct result of the movement of atoms in our brains.
Why do you think I don’t know this? Both of these are actually well-known, especially if you read apologetics, as I have.
But God signed the book! By that I mean the prophetic books, there is nothing like this anywhere else. Such as all the Messianic prophecies, over 300 of them, or the prophecy in Daniel 2 of the kingdoms that would succeed Babylon, which is still holding up, and cannot be postdated, and where several rulers have tried to dominate this area (the Ottomans, Hitler) and this would have overturned the prophecy, and they failed. See Isaiah 41:22-24 for God’s challenge about telling the future, it’s his signature in his book. And then there is John 7:17, where Jesus issues a challenge, if we will to do his will, we will know if what he says comes from God, or whether he is making it up.
And the claim that there was a real person named Jesus of Nazareth, who died on a Roman cross, is established outside the Bible by various sources, no credible historian disputes this now, look it up! For example, the Jewish Gamarra, a source hostile to Christianity, says Jesus was a sorceror, which is evidence that he was a real person, and did miracles.
Yes, actually, I was diagnosed with mitral valve prolapse some years ago, I could check my pulse any time, and detect extra beats. Then some time after that, I went to a meeting where someone mentioned healing for my condition, I went up for prayer, and just this previous year I was told “You don’t have mitral valve prolapse”! Both times, for the diagnosis and the confirmation I don’t have it, they did the ultrasound, they did the Holter monitor, and so on.
Well, yes, I got confirmation from another doctor just a month ago that heart valves don’t just get better on their own. I’ve had a number of rather dramatic healings! And a number of people have been healed recently at work, including me as well! So yes, I believe there is a living God, I recommend seeking him. Or the prayer, “If you are real, reveal yourself to me”…
Not at all. I evaluate an argument on its merits, not its source be it authority or madness. For instance, your argument fails on its merits, apart from its apologetic motivations.
Sure. But don’t you need occasional pain to enable you to appreciate rewards? That’s what you said before. Why should this need suddenly cease in heaven, and for eternity?
Sure, but there’s no reason to believe that’s true, and there’s no reason to believe that if there’s a reason here on earth, the same reason wouldn’t apply in heaven.
Of coursse it’s not your view, but what gives you warrant to believe it isn’t true?
Your description of Lewis’s argument is that you must make a single exception, and only that. Maybe you described it wrong?
No, I’m saying that “various people said this” is not an argument for this being true. So again, why is this a problem?
No, you’ve given one “reason”, your think about not believing what a crazy person says. That’s it.
Why not? Was he incapable of it? Why would a benevolent creator fail to give us good perception and reason?
I don’t think that’s true. But we have already assumed as an axiom that our reasoning and perception work well enough to make discussion possible. This must be assumed regardless of the cause of existence.
True enough. But natural selection is a foundation, and it predicts that, for example, optical illusions will be found as long as they don’t cause problems most of the time. What does divine creation have to say about optical illusioins?
Not sure what you mean by that. Your position relies on the claim that a natural origin of thinking beings is not a possibility. It it is instead possible, your objection disappears.
Fortunate, then, that we haven’t reached a contradiction.
No, you have it exactly backwards. We evaluate what people say on its own terms, and if we see that it’s nonsense, we reject it and infer from it that they aren’t very good at thinking. Present case, for example. I know nothing of your mental state except what you post, and its nonsensical nature leads me to reject it. I then conclude, after a lot of it, that you are not good at reasoning. What I don’t do is reject what you say because I know you aren’t good at reasoning. Why, you could even from time to time say some true things, speaking hypothetically. And I would be wrong to reject those true things even though you are otherwise full of nonsense.
Sorry, no. Again, backwards. Nor does this thing comparing speech to a human mind and a human mind to God make a valid analogy. And as has been pointed out before, you are using “unreasoning” as an umbrella term to refer to causes as different as insanity and natural selection, which are not in any way comparable.
But we don’t. Your “principle”, which you keep repeating, is both backwards and inapplicable.
I think you don’t know this because you have made a number of ignorant statements about both PE and the standard narrative. I would suggest that scientific publications would be a better guide to both of these than your creationist apologetics. Again, you might start with Eldrege and Gould 1972.
Don’t really want to get very deep into this digression. I’ll just snort derisively and pass on to something else.
Congratulations. One wonders why prayer isn’t a standard medical technique if it works so well. Does it work for missing legs too?
The defender of the EAAN would likely respond that what your are describing is not “reasoning” but somatic response. Such responses are not what are at issue in the argument. Plantinga accepts that evolution can create a mind that will reliably move Paul a safe distance from the hungry tiger. What he disputes is whether it is likely that the underlying beliefs that produce this behaviour are true. The (reasonable) assumption here is that a polychaete worm does not have anything like a belief.
Yet we reject a quite logical argument that stems from paranoia, from unreasoning causes! If everyone is out to get you, you quite logically won’t call the police if something bad happens to you, because of course, they are out to get you too. An argument coming from nonreason, we always reject it, we don’t consider that valid reasoning, it’s part of a meritorious argument.
Again, the test is not the source, but the merit of the argument. Does the purported threat match reality? These days, that is more of an open question than is usually the case.
Well, as I said, I’m willing to forego reward for a time when pain and suffering cease. And what I said before is if there is nothing to overcome, what would there be to reward? That’s different than what you said I said.
But I mentioned two reasons for suffering, reward, and refinement! May I ask you how you have seen your character improve? I expect it’s not through pleasant circumstances, through pleasure and enjoyment, my experience is that it invariably involves times of suffering, if it’s handled properly. And have you read The Worm Ouroboros? It ends with the heroes getting weary of their happy ending, and requesting, and being granted an eternity of endless conflict and struggle. The book ends there, without telling us if they eventually also tired of that.
The Christian view is different than just a happy ending, though, “his servants will serve him there”, there will be stuff to do. Just a happy ending is actually the Muslim Paradise, food as much as you want, sex as much as you want (for the men!), and that’s about it. Those don’t even satisfy us here on earth there, “they will see his face”, knowing God is better, and endless. God is not present even in Paradise, for the Muslims.
Because in my experience, and in scripture, God is not into afflicting us so we will appreciate when the pain stops. God is good, God is love, and I hope people can know him, so they have undistorted views of God.
Here is the quote: “The description we have to give of thought as an evolutionary phenomenon always makes a tacit exception in favour of the thinking which we ourselves perform at that moment.” (Miracles)
Making many exceptions is also bad! I think Lewis would agree. But naturalists do this all the time, making arguments that they want us to believe are actually based on evidence and inference, and not just and only on the motion of atoms in their brain. “The other, our present act, claims and must claim, to be an act of insight, a knowledge sufficiently free from non-rational causation to be determined (positively) only by the truth it knows.” (Lewis, again)
Because it’s not a valid reason to reject a statement out of hand. Do you reject the testimony that Julius Caesar was a real person, because somebody said that? We actually accept a lot of things on peoples’ authority, another example, why do you believe there are countries you’ve never been to? Examples could be multiplied…
I also mentioned delirium, do you go look for snakes, when a delirious person says they are in the room? Why or why not? I said people apply this principle all the time, and don’t go look for the snakes, etc., when they see a statement has nonrational causes. Are they all being unreasonable? I gave a spectrum of people who are thought perceptive, who have seen this as a problem, and I said why “just somebody said it” is no reason for dismissing them. So we need to give them consideration, and evaluate why they said what they said. And so on, I think I’ve probably stated more than just this.
Well, he corrects angels! Zechariah 2:4. I don’t think we’ll ever have perfect perception and reason, maybe so we’ll depend on God. Or maybe that would require being like God, being omniscient and so on.
Well, why not? I’m referring to Chesterton here. “Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.”
Well, yes, I agree.
Well, it’s consistent with natural selection. It’s also part of the Christian view, so I don’t see how this decides anything.
We need help! I need glasses. And that’s not strictly a bad thing, it’s part of reality, we need help outside of ourselves, and that can bring us to those who can help us. And that’s actually a good thing, in various ways.
No, I agree it’s a possible explanation, I just don’t think it’s a probable one. Like the origin of life! Like the origin of all creatures from one living cell. John Lennox I think it was who remarked that the mathemeticians have always known that the biologists are out to lunch, which is why they don’t associate very much.
I do think it’s contradictory to say your thoughts are wholly determined by the motion of atoms in your head, and yet I should consider them real insights, that somehow also depend on the logic of my reasoning, and on real deductions that are not a puppet show.
But the problem with that is that delusional people are usually very logical! Their reasoning is quite sound, only their premises are off, they are irrational, and that I why we discount their conclusions. Chesterton again: “A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street. Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever. Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.”
I don’t understand this, how is what I said backwards? And where do I compare speech to the mind, certainly speech comes from minds, but where do I compare them? Or compare the mind to God?
I agree they are not the same thing, certainly, if that’s what you mean. But how is a statement of insanity nevertheless valid reasoning? How is natural selection some sort of reasoning process? Those are my points.
Are you saying people don’t do this? Sure they do, we do this all the time. If someone puts out their hand, and tells us not to cross the street, we assume they have good reason to do so. We get upset if they tell us this if there’s a dog on the other side, and they are afraid of dogs.
And what would those be, specifically? Glad to learn.
Let’s have some moving of the goalposts, anyone? But because it’s not like magic? Prayer is making a request, not casting a spell. Actually the crippled and lame being healed is reported, too! See Matthew 11:4-5, Matthew 15:30, etc. And people who were healed generally became Jesus’ followers, such as the lame man in the temple (Acts 3), so those who initially read these accounts would have had ways of verifying them. And I heard an account of someone who had a missing finger restored. Not to mention the Jewish Gamarra, which says Jesus was a sorcerer, this being evidence, from a hostile source, that Jesus was a real person, and that he did miracles. More Chesterton would be appropriate, perhaps: “Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.”
But the argument is fine! The logic is sound, only the premise is wrong, it’s irrational. Hence we reject the conclusion. And matching reality what just what Darwin was concerned about, how can we conclude that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all? You are assuming that our reasoning can match reality, Darwin was not so sure. “But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (Darwin, in a letter to William Graham)
OK, but not what I meant. Bad reasoning does not preclude correct reasoning.
I think you might be conflating “good” or correct reasoning with all reasoning. You seem to be making a case that reaching an incorrect conclusion implies that it was not a reasoned conclusion. Example: Isaac Newton was wrong about gravity - Einstein showed this - therefore Newton was not reasoning. That’s probably not what you mean to say,