Dear Uke, thanks for your reaction.

I ask and ask and ask you to do thinking, go and do thinking, grounding yourself on truths, facts, logic, and the history of ideas.

I am not going to read your request anymore unless you present to me some fruit of thinking with your working reason and intelligence.

I told you already to do some thinking on infinite regress and causation.

Go and do it and reap some fruit from your concentration, and report here what your fruit is.

Stop already this awful unproductive habit of yours asking questions, when you are also possessed of the faculty of reason, no different from all humans.


Happy thinking and writing,

Yes, Frommagio, good! Now proceed to do thinking about infinite regress and causation, and report here on how they impact on God, but first tell everyone what is your concept of God.

My concept of God is the following:

"God in concept is first and foremost the creator and operator of the universe and man and everything with a beginning."



Happy thinking and writing!

Dear colleagues of this 2+2 forum, please take notice of the various kinds of posters in every forum; but I will be short, watch out for the ones who play ignorant, witless, and stupid: don't bother to give them any attention - unless you want to play their silly game of acting ignorant, witless, and stupid.

Another kind are the ones who imagine themselves to be so smart with abusing their brain cells to come up with questions and questions and questions, but never will take the serious work of thinking out themselves their own answers to their own questions, by employing their working reason and intelligence to think on truths, facts, logic, and the history of ideas.


Happy thinking and writing!

And yes, again, watch out for all kinds of useless posters who are just into as though grinding out words to no one's profit. except their own sense that they are writing, which is an otherwise commendable undertaking of mankind; but see that you yourselves don't write as to behave like for example the two kinds I mention here among many useless ones.

this doesnt make sense. The cells come from other things, namely other cells.
If I take a stick and cut it in half ( roughly analogous to what the cells are doing) does that mean that I have 2 sticks, both of which came from themselves? No, it doesnt mean that at all

This doesnt help me understand what something that comes from itself is.

You cannot seriously be suggesting that Frommagio has grasped what you mean, and expressed it clearly.

Fairly certain youre a troll now. Either that, or disgustingly dishonest

Thank you Susmario for recognizing the validity of my argument so far.

Now as a mere human, I don't feel confident putting forth a concept of God. But let me say that God conceptually must be all-powerful and more, an entity for which we lack the words to describe. But certainly God must be at least the creator and operator of the universe and man and everything with a beginning, and much more than that, but which we cannot understand or explain. This is obvious from the definition of God, and by the history of ideas for all mankind in all cultures across many times and places, in which God is described in many varieties of ways and taken all together is seen to be all-powerful, and so easily meets your concept and undoubtedly greatly exceeds it in ways that we cannot envision. Do you concur on my concept?

But what of God's existence? For this I will consider your suggested path of thinking on infinite regress and causation.

We must think on infinity. In mathematics we know a line goes on and on forever in both directions which is well established by thinking on the theorems and history of mathematical ideas. But lines in real life do not act that way. A spaghetti strand has an end, a football field sideline has an end, a highway has an end, and the largest ball of string in the world can be unraveled and seen to have an end, and in fact all of these have ends at both ends. And even a mobius strip has an end if we do not allow dishonest tricksters who may try to muddle things up with twisting and cutting and taping paper like a cheap magician who can fool some people but not those who are into thinking with logic on the facts of what they see.

But do those long finite lines violate the laws of endless lines in mathematics? NO! We must also think on the ideas of mathematical philosophy and applied mathematics, where we see that infinite lines are just an abstraction for reasoning and thinking practice and are not the same as actual real lines which as we have seen always have ends at both ends.

And a similar thought process shows there are no infinite regressions in real life. When we consider the cells in the nose in your face that continue to divide and produce new cells from themselves, seemingly forever, we realize that it's not infinite but starts with the nose that comes from your parents, and ends with the death of the man and the face and the nose. And the nose itself of course begins in your face and ends at the tip. And the word nose was created and put into a language and a dictionary by a group of men at some time and place, and will vanish when the men are all gone. And the very concept of a nose begins and ends with the lifetimes of all the animals with noses, and afterwards not a single nose left behind, with even the nasal fossil records destined to be lost ultimately.

After thinking on the nature of our universe, and even on the universe itself with its big bang beginning and its heat death ending, and everything in there, where are the infinite regressions and sequences? Animals and humans, buildings and civilizations, continents and planets and noses and galaxies and stars all with beginnings and endings. I submit there are no infinities based on plain to see facts, and thinking with logic, and observing without muddling it up with tricks like mobius strips and considering very long things to be infinite. So we can say that the default status of lines and other infinite sequences in real life is to be finite although perhaps very long and apparently infinite, but finite. Things that come from themselves must have started with the first such thing, and if you chase backwards looking at those things from other things, you eventually get to a first thing that all those things must have come from.

So if you keep going backwards, what do you call the last thing that you reach, which is the very first thing that started it all? (And of course there is a last thing, for nothing that we know of comes from nothing or we would have a fact as a counterexample.) After thinking on this concept and the history of ideas of mankind at all times and in all cultures, we all know the word that comes to all of our minds, and that is God. Even those who wish to disregard the ideas of mankind at all times and in all cultures, and who seek to deny the existence of the concept and muddle up the conversation with confusion must admit that the concept of God is what comes unbidden into their minds when considering this question. That is true for all of us, and nobody can honestly deny that. If there is a problem with my argument, it cannot be at this last step for we all know the name of the concept.

Of course some may honestly debate the logic and the thinking and perhaps the history of ideas. After all, not all logic is sound, and bad logic must be challenged, and not all thoughts are clear, and unclear thoughts must be dismissed, and not all ideas of mankind at all times and in all cultures are correct, although of course all cultures are worthy of respect, right or wrong, but even more respect when they are right. For those who honestly want to debate let us engage in a dialogic discussion while thinking on these facts and this argument.

Dear neeel, the two half sticks come from the whole stick, which is an example of two things that came from another thing. It is as if you cut a pizza into 8 pieces, of course those pieces came from a whole pizza. Now go backwards and see that the pizza was prepared, and that the ingredients were previously assembled, and the stick came from a tree from a forest on a continent that rose out of an ocean on a planet that eventually cooled and congealed from a hot galaxy that formed long long ago. Does this help you to understand that a piece of pizza is not in fact a pizza?

Right, and the two cells came from a whole cell, which is an example of two things which came from another thing.

If the truth is unpleasant, then find a better analogy. It is obvious that cutting a stick in half is very similar to cutting up a pizza, and nothing at all like cell replication by mitotic cell division. Do not pretend that you don't understand this.

There is zero evidence for any gods. Looking at the quotes above this surely means that this "discussion" is over now, right?

Good point. Forgive me. I was being exuberant. I know I asked you to expand your argument weeks ago on post number five of this thread. I know I've asked dozens of times - accomplishing every task you asign me in between. And I know that in the weeks you have yet to advance your argument.

I thought that was your fault.

I realize it was mine, that I should be the one completing your argument, not I. That if you just tell me the answer, I will have learned nothing.

I thus stayed up all night (it is now 7:41 am, my nose and balls are still here), carefully research the history of ideas on this subject of the cosmological argument:

Immanuel Kant objected to the use of “necessary being” throughout the cosmological argument, and hence to the conclusion that a necessary being exists. Kant held that the cosmological argument, in concluding to the existence of an absolutely necessary being, attempts to prove the existence of a being whose nonexistence “is impossible,” is “absolutely inconceivable” (B621). Kant indicates that what he has in mind by an “absolutely necessary being” is a being whose existence is logically necessary, where to deny its existence is contradictory. The only being that meets this condition is the most real or maximally excellent being — a being with all perfections, including existence. This concept lies at the heart of the ontological argument. Although in the ontological argument the perfect being is determined to exist through its own concept, in fact nothing can be determined to exist in this manner; one has to begin with existence. In short, the cosmological argument presupposes the cogency of the ontological argument. But since the ontological argument is defective for the above (and other) reason, the cosmological argument that depends on or invokes it likewise must be defective (Kant, B634).

Kant's contention that the necessity found in “necessary being” was logical necessity was common up through the 1960s. J.J.C. Smart wrote,

And by “a necessary being” the cosmological argument means “a logically necessary being,” i.e. “a being whose non-existence is inconceivable in the sort of way that a triangle's having four sides is inconceivable”....Now since “necessary” is a word which applies primarily to propositions, we shall have to interpret “God is a necessary being” as “The proposition ‘God exists’ is logically necessary” (in Flew and MacIntyre, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology, 37).
(In a later work Smart (41–47) broadened his notion of necessity.) One still finds remnants of this in the contention that speaking about necessary beings does not differ from speaking of the necessity of propositions (see the Gale-Pruss argument below).

Many recent discussions of the cosmological argument, both supporting and critiquing it, interpret the notion of a necessary being as a being that cannot not exist. It is a being that exists in all possible worlds. As such, as Plantinga notes, if a necessary being is possible, it exists (God, Freedom and Evil, 110). The only question that remains is whether God's existence is possible. This notion is similar to, if not a modernization of, Aquinas's contention that God's essence is to exist. Aquinas attempts to avoid the accusation that this invokes the ontological argument on the grounds that we do not have an adequate concept of God's essence. However, if we understand “necessary being” in this sense, we can dispose of the cosmological argument as irrelevant; what is needed rather is an argument to establish that God's existence is possible, for if it is possible that it is necessary that God exists, then God exists (by Axiom S5).

But this need not be the sense in which “necessary being” is understood in the cosmological argument. A more adequate notion of necessary being is that the necessity is metaphysical or factual. A necessary being is one that if it exists, it neither came into existence nor can cease to exist, and correspondingly, if it does not exist, it cannot come into existence (Reichenbach, 117–20). If it exists, it eternally maintains its own existence; it is self-sufficient and self-sustaining. So understood, the cosmological argument does not rely on notions central to the ontological argument. Rather, instead of being superfluous, the cosmological argument gives us reason to think that the necessary being exists rather than not.

Mackie replies that if God has metaphysical necessity, God's existence is contingent, such that some reason is required for God's own existence (Mackie, 84). That is, if God necessarily exists in the sense that if he exists, he exists in all possible worlds, it remains logically possible that God does not exist in any (and all) possible worlds. Hence, God is a logically contingent being and so could have not-existed. Why, then, does God exist? The PSR can be applied to the necessary being.

The theist responds that the PSR does not address logical contingency, but metaphysical contingency. One is not required to find a reason for what is not metaphysically contingent. It is not that the necessary being is self-explanatory; rather, a demand for explaining its existence is inappropriate. Hence, the theist concludes, Hawking's question “Who created God?” (Hawking, 174) is out of place (Davis).

Please, Susmario, what do you think of these thoughts?

We have Kant on the cosmological argument now, **** just got real.

Right, but my point is, that if your cell analogy is supposed to illustrate things coming from themselves, its a terrible analogy

Why not cut and paste the entire Cosmological Argument section from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? Why confine yourself to section 3.5 "Objection 4: Problems with the Concept of a Necessary Being"?

Thanks, Frommagio, you are doing great!

You are one guy who knows what is "paucis verbis."*


Tell those useless posters to just think for themselves instead of name-dropping, unless they are minions of fake intellectual dictators, because they don't have any balls to do their very own thinking on truths, facts, logic, and the history of ideas.

Carry on!


*Cf.


Hehehe...

PV Cards
You can download the Paucis Verbis cards (In a Few Words) to your smartphone or tablet using the AgileMD app from the App Store or Google Play Store, or you can use Evernote or Dropbox. All four options provide you with automatic updates.
https://www.aliem.com/pv-cards/

You see, guys here, infinite regress is a quasi concept, give credit to our mind, that it can give haven even to quasi or inherently nonsensical concepts or intrinsically self-defeating concepts like infinite regress.

How to topple smart guys who cannot think their way out of their self-mind-obfuscation, imprisoning themselves in such stupid concepts as infinite regress:

Tell them to continue thinking on and and and on, on infinite regress, in their mind, with asking themselves "Who is the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator...” and on and on and on, they will die eventually as with everything that lives, and that is the end of their infinite regress concept with the demise of their brain.

Or, tell them, "Very good, you have a brain to think on and on and on Who is the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator... Now, armed with this concept, proceed to the universe and look up such any entity at all that corresponds to your even just the generical concept of infinite regress; in the meantime we are going to go search for an entity in the universe corresponding to the concept of God, that God is in concept first and foremost the creator and operator of the universe and man and everything with a beginning: like for example, the nose is an instance of God's presence and operation in the universe, another instance, the balls in our lower torso, etc., etc., etc., and also the very tough microscopic critters called tardigrades, and bigger things like the moon and the sun in the sky.”


Happy thinking and writing!

PS
Please Frommagio, carry on!

You really have no clue what is going on in this thread, do you?

Infinite regress is not self-defeating. The number line is infinite in extent in both directions, without a single logical contradiction in sight.

Waitt what? One minute we were touching our noses, now that nose is an instance of gods presence? I must have missed the step where you showed how the nose on my face is proof of god

LOL, just LOL.


Do you have any evidence for the existence of god? No, you don't.
That means we can safely assume that god does not exist.
Which means you are lying.
Which means you wasted your precious lifetime on 2 completely worthless threads.

Also, please tell me where god came from

Infinite regress is not self-defeating, that is a paradoxical claim (because if it did self-defeat, it wouldn't infinitely regress).

You seem to have a very low understanding of the terminology you are employing.

Dearest Susmario,

You have asked me to think for myself. While I'm not on of the "smart guys" trying to self-mind-obfuscate themselves, I will do my best. I hope you will be patient with my endeavours, limited thought they certainly are.

1) I firstly conclude that the concept of infinite regress is ridiculous! Anyone left believing that this is a concept I suggest the following task: Touch your nose. Then your balls. THen your nose. Then your balls. Continue in this pattern indefinitely. You can't! You will die! Enough of this foolishness, in my opinion.

2) As plain as the balls on your torso, it is self evidently the case that all things are separated into
A) Things that come from other things
B) Things that come from themselves

3) Being that an infinite regress is a nonsensical quasi-concept AT BEST, we thus conclude
C) There was something that came from itself.

Am I doing well so far? I hope so. My stumbling block is now this: How do we know that this "thing" is reaely an entity like a God?

Dear everyone here, thanks for your presence.

Now, there are already folks here who concur on these two statements, like Susmario yours truly the proponent of this thread, and Uke, and Frommagio (see Annexes 1, 2, and 3 below):

1. The nose in our face exists, or the default status of things in the totality of being is existence.

2. Things in existence are of two ultimately two classes: (a) existing from others, or (b) existing from themselves.

From premises 1 and 2, we who concur on them, the conclusion follows that God exists, in concept as first and foremost the creator and operator of the universe and man and everything with a beginning (see Annex 4).


The folks who do not concur with us, they have two wrong thoughts, namely:

First error: There is no evidence.
Folks with this thought are miserably wrong: because the evidence is everything that exists from others; all they have to do with everything that exists from others so that they will see it as evidence, is to think from everything that exists from others to things that exist from themselves.

There, the things that exist from others, like the nose in our face, ultimately they exist from things that exist from themselves: it cannot be otherwise than that is the case; if you cannot see that, then produce an example of something that is neither existing from others and nor existing from itself.

So, the things that exist from themselves we can for the present take them to be collectively God, in concept as first and foremost the creator and operator of the universe and man and everything with a beginning: all these three items are things that exist from others.

Second error: Who created God?
That is the wrong thought grounded on the self-defeating quasi nonsensical concept of infinite regress.

Folks who question God existing lapse into infinite regress because they espouse the error that everything has a cause, therefore God must have a cause.

Everything has a cause, that is an error in thinking, the correct idea is:

Everything with a BEGINNING has a cause.

For folks who do not accept that to be the case, then let them present an example of something with a beginning that does not come from a cause.

Besides, I have shown that infinite regress is a self-defeating concept, see Annex 4 below.



ANNEXES

Annex 1 - From Susmario

Annex 2 - From Uke

Annex 3 - From Frommagio

Annex 4 - From Susmario

End of Annexes

Oh how I missed these annexes...

Summary: If you think about this for too long, you will die. And therefore infinite regression doesn't exist.

Summary: I'm just going to change the subject.

Okay, guys here, thanks for your presence.


Now, please read the post from me reproduced below, before you talk about evidence, infinite regress, etc., in this thread on "How to Come to God Existing with Thinking on Truths, Facts, Logic, and the History of Ideas."

As I read your posts when I notice that you do not accept that the default status of things in the totality of being is existence for example, the nose in our face, I have to quit your posts.

Or you do not accept that things existing are of two kinds, namely, things existing from others or things existing from themselves, I will quit reading.

Next, when you talk evidence and you deny that the nose in your face is evidence of the origin of the nose and of everything else that has its existence from other things, that it is evidence of the existence of things which exist from themselves, then I quit reading you.

Lastly, when I read that you can continue to ask the question in your mind Who is the creator of the creator of the creator... without eventually dying, I quit reading you.

Still further, when I read you that you have found an example of something outside your mind that you are still searching in the objective reality like the nose in our face is in objective reality, as to confirm that it is still being caused by another thing and by another thing and by another thing without ending, I will quit reading you.

Why?

Because then I know that you are either crazy or into falsehood, also called lying.


Happy thinking and writing!


____________________________

Dear everyone here, thanks for your presence.

Now, there are already folks here who concur on these two statements, like Susmario yours truly the proponent of this thread, and Uke, and Frommagio (see Annexes 1, 2, and 3 below):

1. The nose in our face exists, or the default status of things in the totality of being is existence.

2. Things in existence are of two ultimately two classes: (a) existing from others, or (b) existing from themselves.

From premises 1 and 2, we who concur on them, the conclusion follows that God exists, in concept as first and foremost the creator and operator of the universe and man and everything with a beginning (see Annex 4).


The folks who do not concur with us, they have two wrong thoughts, namely:

First error: There is no evidence.
Folks with this thought are miserably wrong: because the evidence is everything that exists from others; all they have to do with everything that exists from others so that they will see it as evidence, is to think from everything that exists from others to things that exist from themselves.

There, the things that exist from others, like the nose in our face, ultimately they exist from things that exist from themselves: it cannot be otherwise than that is the case; if you cannot see that, then produce an example of something that is neither existing from others and nor existing from itself.

So, the things that exist from themselves we can for the present take them to be collectively God, in concept as first and foremost the creator and operator of the universe and man and everything with a beginning: all these three items are things that exist from others.

Second error: Who created God?
That is the wrong thought grounded on the self-defeating quasi nonsensical concept of infinite regress.

Folks who question God existing lapse into infinite regress because they espouse the error that everything has a cause, therefore God must have a cause.

Everything has a cause, that is an error in thinking, the correct idea is:

Everything with a BEGINNING has a cause.

For folks who do not accept that to be the case, then let them present an example of something with a beginning that does not come from a cause.

Besides, I have shown that infinite regress is a self-defeating concept, see Annex 4 below.

____________________________


ANNEXES

Annex 1 - From Susmario
Quote:
Now, to everyone even though I don't mention your name, please resume our common task to work as to come to concurrence from concurrence, because otherwise we are or you are wasting my time here.

1. We have already concurred that the nose exists, or in general, "The default status of things in the totality of being is existence.

2. I am now asking us all to work as to concur on this statement:

“Things existing are of two ultimate classes: (a) things existing from others, (b) things existing from themselves.”

Now, if you do not concur on #2, please present your explanation why.

From my part with thinking on truths, facts, logic, and the history of ideas, it cannot be otherwise than that things existing are ultimately of either one of two classes: [a] things existing from others, or [b] things existing from themselves.

What about my explanation?

Here it is:
Consider your nose, it comes from your parents, and you can go on from there to the Big Bang and beyond, that is an example of things existing from others; continue on as I said beyond the Big Bang and on and on and on… and sooner than later you come to the sure conclusion that the nose in our face has its origin ultimately in thing(s) which exist from themselves.

For posters who will not concur with me on #2 and will not explain as to be lucid to readers here, instead of going into inanities, please go away, I will not read you.

Happy thinking and writing!

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=145

____________________________


Annex 2 - From Uke
Quote:
I concur on one and two. Now how do we come to God?

Please don't abandon me when we are so close, not even the comfort of experiencing the existence of my balls and my nipples and my nose and help me here when you refuse to help me go further

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=147

____________________________


Annex 3 - From Frommagio
Quote:
Consider the nose in your face, which comes from your parents, and so is an example of a thing that comes from another thing. And also think on this: that same nose consists of many cells, each of which continues to divide, thereby producing new cells - these new cells are therefore existing things that come from themselves.

So by thinking on the nose in our face with logic and the history of ideas of biology we can verify the two types of existence (a) and (b) as Susmario described. Now could there be other varieties of existence, things that don't come from somewhere else or from themselves? I say no based on the history of ideas and logic.

Let us proceed to God.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=150

____________________________


Annex 4 - From Susmario
Quote:
You see, guys here, infinite regress is a quasi concept, give credit to our mind, that it can give haven even to quasi or inherently nonsensical concepts or intrinsically self-defeating concepts like infinite regress.

How to topple smart guys who cannot think their way out of their self-mind-obfuscation, imprisoning themselves in such stupid concepts as infinite regress:

Tell them to continue thinking on and and and on, on infinite regress, in their mind, with asking themselves "Who is the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator...” and on and on and on, they will die eventually as with everything that lives, and that is the end of their infinite regress concept with the demise of their brain.

Or, tell them, "Very good, you have a brain to think on and on and on Who is the creator of the creator of the creator of the creator... Now, armed with this concept, proceed to the universe and look up such any entity at all that corresponds to your even just the generical concept of infinite regress; in the meantime we are going to go search for an entity in the universe corresponding to the concept of God, that God is in concept first and foremost the creator and operator of the universe and man and everything with a beginning: like for example, the nose is an instance of God's presence and operation in the universe, another instance, the balls in our lower torso, etc., etc., etc., and also the very tough microscopic critters called tardigrades, and bigger things like the moon and the sun in the sky.”

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=165

____________________________

End of Annexes

Translation: You raised an objection, so I stopped reading.

Translation: You challenged my thoughts, so I stopped reading.

Translation: You didn't accept my assumptions, so I stopped reading.

Translation: Last, since you will eventually die, I stopped reading.

Translation: Whatever comes after last (is that something like what comes before the beginning?), I got God's nose, and stopped reading.

----

But since you've thanked me for my presence, I will remain present with you.