Someone thinks that what she believes in her head about God is “reasonably likely”; and that, if you don’t share her own frame of mind, then what you think about God is “reasonably unlikely”?
Then what?
How are we not back to the extent to which one or another combination of definitions, analyses, arguments and accumulations of actual, factual empirical, material, phenomenal evidence finally resolves which frame of mind is more “reasonably likely”. Or even the most reasonable of all.
Or that neither are reasonable. Let alone the most reasonable.
If it doesn’t all revolve around distinguishing what we think is true about one or another God and what we can demonstrate is in fact true for all rational men and women, doesn’t it all come down to the sort of communication indicative of faith — in Sunday School, around the dinner table, between family and friends?
Why are you so concerned with “what is true for all men and women”?
There are a great many low intelligence and/or insane people who cannot recognize hardly anything as true. They certainly can’t be cognitively satisfied, only emotionally (if at all).
Sure, you can’t demonstrate things to fools, but more than that, you can’t demonstrate some things to normal, rational people. If you try to demonstrate calculus, a good many people who don’t have training in mathematics will not understand it.
Heck, I can’t even demonstrate that a grey cat ran in front of my car today. Trivially simple fact, but I have no photographs or video, so no way to demonstrate it to rational or irrational men and women. I could fabricate a demonstration for the irrational ones.
And furthermore, what is a demonstration without a standard for evaluating thoughts? What is a rational man or woman without such a standard?
The village idiot can say that something is (or is not) an adequate demonstration … how can Iambig argue with him or contradict him? Iambig is not even in a position to say that the village idiot is not a rational man.
He has tossed everything in the garbage bin and now he has a dilemma. What a surprise.
You are accusing others of ‘nonsense’ because you are philosophically ignorant in this case.
Most of my philosophical thesis and views are borrowed and paraphrased from “shoulders of philosophical giants.” In the case, it is Kant:
In the above Kant is referring to pseudo-Rational non-empirical illusory things arising from “reason” i.e. primal crude pure reason, thus his Critique of Pure Reason.
Obviously you fail to understand the difference between “logical”, “rational”, and “reason”.
There can be pseudo-rationality.
There can be pseudo-reasoning.
There is no such thing a “pseudo-logic” other than meant as “partially logical” or “fake/fallacious logic”.
Since you meant pseudo-rational, I suspect that you should stick with it. But neither is suited to your (4).
Where did I state “pseudo-logic”? You are inventing a straw man!
I stated,
“ii. never observable, can never be empirically tested and pseudo-logically possible but in thoughts only, e.g. thing-in-itself, an absolute perfect God.”
Note it is “pseudo-logically possible” the subject is ‘possible’ and it is pseudo-logically possible.
As Kant had stated, there are syllogism [per proper logic principles] that contain no empirical element but yet claimed with objective Reality, this is what is the pseudo outcome about the whole process.
Agreed. God is an individually based intuitive exposition per a dark night of the soul type experience.
It is very rare that God will manifest to even a worthy individual…
It is a.communicative=communal experience exceeding a rational, cognitive experience. But it refers to the impossibility or reducing it to the primal experiences.
The community of souls arise by virtue of communication of individual sources of experienced with enlightenment.
Actually, it is more along the lines of “what is true for all rational men and women”.
After all, what else is there for measuring the gap between what we think is true, believe is true and/or claim to know is true about God, and that which can, in fact, be demonstrated to be true for all of us.
Reason. The tool of both philosophers and scientists. Then, as I noted above, a rational understanding of God/No God will revolve around defending one or another “combination of definitions, analyses, arguments and accumulations of actual, factual empirical, material, phenomenal evidence”.
On the other hand, to me, folks like you seem considerably more content with being “cognitively satisfied” that what they have constructed “intellectually” about God in their head is quite enough. Emotion need not enter into it at all.
As though the invention of God does not revolve fundamentally around a fear of death/oblivion. Or around the trepidation that many feel in contemplating a world in which an omniscient/omnipotent transcending font is not around to establish and to confirm good from bad behavior. Vice from virtue. Sinners from saints.
And then to judge those behaviors so as to establish one’s fate for all of eternity.
Or around the agony of contemplating an existence that is essentially meaningless and absurd.
For mere mortals, religion in a nutshell.
Do you honestly imagine there are many men and women around who grapple with all of this only in order to feel “cognitively satisfied”?
Clearly, if an “idiot” lacks the cognitive capacity to make a proper distinction between an adequate demonstration of something that can in fact be shown to be true for all of us, and one that cannot, then that is in fact the case.
This can be demonstrated.
Instead, my point revolves more around those interactions in which a rational mind is able to demonstrate [re mathematics, the laws of physics, empirical facts, logical rules of language etc., in the either/or world] that something is true to other rational people, and those interactions [re moral and political narratives in the is/ought world] in which “truth” is more likely to be one or another “existential contraption” rooted in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
The village idiot can argue [and then try to demonstrate] that an abortion involves extracting the unborn baby through the nostrils, but how would one be construed as an idiot when the argument shifts to the morality of abortion?
How, in the absence of God, can rationality and virtue be established by mere mortals?
That you want to believe this I don’t doubt. But I do not toss everything into the garbage bin. I make that distinction between what is able to be demonstrated as true for all of us in the either/or world and what is entirely more problematic in the is/ought world.
And I still suspect that you believe of me what you do because on some cognitive level you recognize what is at stake if I ever do manage to yank you down into my dilemma before you manage to yank me up out of it instead.
Again, James, the distinction I make is one between demonstrating that it is reasonable/rational to believe that you and I are engaged in this exchange here and now at ILP, and demonstrating that it is reasonable/rational to believe that your arguments about God in this exchange are more reasonable/rational than my own.
In turn, acknowledging such things as the extent to which it can be demonstrated that the exchange is not just a solipsistic contraption, is not only as it ever could have been in a wholly determined universe, or that it is not but one infinitesimally insignificant aspect of one or another sim world or one or another “demonic” dream.
I think that I think, therefore I think that I think that I am?
You tell me what you think this means — as it relates to the points I raised with him above. Sure, maybe I keep missing an important point here.
My own point revolves around the assumption that, however highly skilled you are cognitively in discussing the possibility that a God, the God, my God exists, that’s not nearly the same as demonstrating empirically that this is something that all reasonable men and women are obligated to believe. Why? Because it has been shown that in fact He does exist.
And whether He does or does not, it does not appear [to me] to have much to do with telling someone to drive with their eyes closed.
Is this a profoundly significant distinction that he is making with regard to the example I noted above?
Or, instead, this but one more example of James trying to yank the discussion up into the epistemological stratosphere of “definitions” and “meaning”.
In other words…
Is it or is it not rational to state that this exchange is in fact unfolding at ILP? Can or cannot reasonable people demonstrate it?
And is establishing this on par with establishing/demonstrating which of us is being more rational in our assessment of God’s actual existence?
For me what it means to be a rational man or woman revolves around demonstrating to others that, however you define the meaning of the words you use, they are in sync with what can in fact be demonstrated to be true for all of us.
Again, sans solipsism, determinism, sim worlds and/or Descartes evil demons.
I asked of you a very simple question. It isn’t ME who is trying to divert into nonsensical BS. I asked you what YOU mean when you say a particular word, “rational men and women”.
What is wrong with you such that you can’t figure out even what you meant yourself and thus have to try to shift blame onto me?
