LOL. Do you even know how logic works? Giving you a different conclusion isn't how you show that the argument is invalid. I only need to show that the conclusion you provided doesn't follow, which I've done.

Nope. But this shows that you don't understand what's happening. You're trying here to argue that I cannot conclude the negation of your statement. But that's not how any of this stuff works. The statement you concluded has an additional time element to it that is absent from the premises. The fact that I cannot conclude the negation of your statement doesn't mean that your statement is therefore the proper conclusion.

P1) Nothing comes from nothing
P2) There is something
..C1) The sky is blue.

What? You think you can conclude the sky *isn't* blue?

The word "never" here plays a function that does not follow from your assumptions. The best you can conclude here is that "At some point in time previous to this there was something." You don't have the ability to know how far backwards things go. Which is precisely what my argument (which you *still* haven't addressed) shows.

You're rambling at this point. You are conflating two separate concepts. The Kalam cosmological argument is still about "caused to exist." The argument for the justification of why Craig thinks K-P1 should be accepted is "something cannot come from nothing." It's not part of the "logical" (deductive) part of the argument.

You've used the word "unsound" with regards to an argument, so I hope that you actually understand that sound means valid with true premises. Kalam is a valid argument. The conclusion *necessarily* follows from the assumption. The "nothing cannot come from nothing" does not affect the validity of the argument. It impacts the soundness of it. So I can formally accept Kalam without accepting that nothing cannot come from nothing. It's logically possible to support K-P1 using premises *other than* the idea that nothing cannot come from nothing.

Your argument is built on the premise of "nothing cannot come from nothing." Your argument is therefore starting from a different place.

LOL -- This may come as a total shock to you: *YOU* are not an argument.

Arguments succeed or fail on the basis on the merits of the argument. People fail at arguments on the basis of their ability to recognize the merits of the argument. Your intellectual failures all come from the fact that you seem utterly incapable of understanding most arguments.

The *reason* you fail is because you lack intellectual humility. When you don't understand something, you rarely show the interest in learning something new. You just blindly insist that you're right.

You also appear to evaluate arguments on the basis of whether you like the conclusion. Specifically, this means that your goals turn out be to less about assessing the quality of an argument, and much more about defending your desired conclusion. And you will do all sorts of things to defend your desired conclusion, such as introduce new arguments, play whataboutism games (which is what you're doing here), and otherwise intellectually shutting down.

Oh.... *PLEASE* tell me what other arguments I accept. This ought to be good.

No, you haven't shown it, you just claimed it, but failed to show how it could be something other than what it is.[/quote]

Ah, 'additional time element', when did that occur to you? Interesting, but it doesn't change anything. 'something cannot come from nothing' does have a time element because it would clearly be a transition from one state to another and the two different states cannot both exist simultanouesly, so your new objection fails.


Notice how in all of this, you have constantly sidestepped having to address that you are guilty of special pleading, whilst using it to try to show that my claim that the universe has always existed is special pleading. I'm simply using the same concept that you are, that there can be something that exists without a cause of itself, and I didn't even need to bring in a completely new element to explain the beginning of the universe when you can't even show that the universe had a beginning. The OP solution is much neater.

By all means, prove that there cannot be something that exists without a cause of itself? Or why that thing would be a god instead of the universe itself?

LOL --- You suck at reading. See post #26.

------

See Post #26. If you had actually read my post, you would have seen it already. But alas, you suck at reading.

LOL. No. How little you seem to understand about anything you're actually arguing. You're pointing right to Zeno's paradox, as I had anticipated way back. If you understood that paradox, you would understand why this type of time tracing simply fails. You cannot trace backwards infinitely far in time with your logic.

Edit: Explicitly -- Achilles and the Tortoise: Suppose you give a tortoise a head-start in a race against Achilles. At the start of the race, the tortoise is ahead and therefore it must take time for Achilles to get to where the tortoise started. But in that amount of time, the tortoise has moved forward. So then after Achilles gets to that point, he's going to have to catch up again to get to the tortoise's new position. But in the time it takes him to get there, the tortoise has moved forward again. And in this way, Achilles can never catch the tortoise because every time he reaches the next spot, the tortoise has moved ahead again.

I have made no argument. Therefore, I have made no special pleading.

This may be a shock to you: Most people don't believe things in their lives on the basis of formal arguments. I'm one of those most people. This doesn't negate the value of formal arguments, but it turns out that what you believe is a function of what you assume, and assumptions are not formally derived statements.

I don't believe you can derive "God" in any formal logical sense. I've already been explicit that I think the Kalam argument is weak. You are once again assuming that anyone that believes X must support any argument of X. That's literally not how any of this stuff works.

Also notice (again) how you're trying to evade your own intellectual problems by pointing at places other than yourself. You are the source of most of your intellectual issues. Trying to compare yourself to me does you no good.

It's kind of amusing. It seems like every new thread you start is you proclaiming that you've resolved some long-standing philosophical/religious question with a basic syllogism. It's like you haven't even realized that these long-standing questions exist because they aren't really that easy to resolve. And thinking that a basic syllogism is all you need to use to accomplish what all sorts of minds have been working on for millennia show just how little intellectual humility you have.

It's like an extreme Dunning-Kruger.

You're referrring to the post where you challenge the conclusion of the OP argument by presenting an argument to try to prove that it's not possible to show that something can always have existed? The post where you show that you can't prove that the god you believe in has always existed and where you implicitly acknowledge that in believing that he has, you're personally commiting a special pleading fallacy... that post?

That is a different line of reasoning from the claim that you make in #51 that ''The statement you concluded has an additional time element to it that is absent from the premises. '' which is trying to point out an error of validity in the OP argument and is not specifically challenging the informational content of the conclusion.


It's more a case of you sucking at trying to make one thing you said look like it supports something else you said when it doesn't. It's actually quite dishonest of you.

Zeno's paradox, thought to have been devised to support Parmenides' doctrine that contrary to the evidence of one's senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion. Parmenides, who also said ''ex nihilo nihil fit'', from nothing nothing comes, which is premise one of the OP argument.

Thank you for providing another argument to disprove that your god could have existed for ever. I'd say that this thread is achieving it's objective even better than I expected. I can see now why you don't believe things based solely on the basis of formal arguments, they would provide you with a problem wouldn't they. I'm starting to see how much 'faith' plays in your belief system. So there's another mistake I've been making, it's that you could argue rationally for your eternally existing god. Actually you can't can you.


Ok... going to ignore the part about you making no argument in a thread full of arguments you've made but... See below...

This is interesting. Particularly the part I bolded.

You personally believe in an eternal god, and ITT you've offered reasons why it's not possible that something can exist eternally, which of course sets up a contradiction between what you personally believe and what you're trying to convince me of, and you appear to try to resolve that contradiction (which also contains your own special pleading fallacy because you believe in an eternal god that is an exception to the very things that you yourself are arguing must be true) with the explanation that you don't believe things ''on the basis of formal arguments''.

Am I to understand then that you can't argue rationally for your god and that you're using 'faith' to support your belief? That you're attempting to convince me of something that you yourself then ignore in order to support your personal beliefs?

There's an obvious alternative to this conclusion, it's that I don't actually think that

One of your problems is that you focus far to much on the 'why' of all this, whilst simultaneously trying to convince me that arguments stand or fall on their merits and that I shouldn't worry about people's personal beliefs. You should try taking a leaf out of your own book mate.

Don't know how else I can tell you that you have no idea what you're talking about. You are criticizing a presentation that uses your premises, and you're trying to claim some implication that doesn't exist for reasons that are known only to you.

MB-P1 and MB-P2 simply do not imply MB-C. All I need to prove that is MB-P1 and MB-P2. It's possible for God to not exist AND the universe to be eternal, and your argument would still fail miserably. Your deflection is moronic.

LOL. Time is *explicit* in that presentation. I don't know how you can honestly claim that there's an "additional" time element when the whole freaking argument is about how you move backwards in time. So I must therefore conclude you are intellectually dishonest.

I don't know how else to explain to you that you have no idea what you're babbling about here. Just as not everyone that believes X must support every argument in favor of X, the rejection of an argument for X doesn't mean one disbelieves X.

As a precondition of my next substantive response, I want you to prove that you've read my argument by reframing it in your own words.

Because at this point, it's absolutely clear that you are literally failing to do any reading or reasoning, and are just shaking your fist at the sky.

LOL -- If you can't read and can't logic, what else can I do? It's similar to the wall blocking partisans from accepting factual information. They really do believe that Trump's inauguration was the biggest in history, despite the evidence to the contrary. And they will come up with all sorts of nonsense statements that have nothing to do with the size of the inauguration to prove it.

And it's all as meaningless as your ramblings. Maybe you come from the same intellectual stock.

So now you're arguing against the OP by suggesting that both God and the universe could be eternal simultaneously, which of course would mean that God couldn't have created the universe? We can both be guilty of special pleading now.

What other theistic claims are you prepared to throw under the bus just to prove me wrong?


You're an adult, it's up to you if you respond or not.

I've already explained how your argument fails at ''something must have come from something else''. Your eternal god is proof that there can be exceptions to this. So either you're giving me an argument that you know fails, or you're proving yourself wrong about your God, which is it?

(And comparing me to Trump supporters, low blow Aaaron, low blow....lol)

Indeed.

LOL. So much fail. I think you should be glad you're as ignorant as you are, as the sting of stupidity would really hurt if you felt it.

I remember when this sort of stuff used to bother me and I'd have to block you. I can't imagine caring that much now.

Except God, and/or the universe.

This thread has served a very useful purpose for me. It's shown two things. That as a theist you were completely unable to cope with an argument that you didn't agree with but that relied on the same special exception that you use to sustain your belief in an eternal god, you even had to resort to trying to use arguments that you yourself didn't believe to be sound, and the way it forced from you the confession that you can't argue logically for god.

After all this time, after all the logic, it turns out that your just another 'faith' user. After all the times you've called me dishonest, and it turns out that you're the most intellectually dishonest of either of us. You undermined everything you've ever said to me.

Honestly, I'm a little dissapointed. I get better arguments for God from the atheists here.

LOL... I'm literally quoting and highlighting your own assumption and you're now denying it through special pleading. Because that's somehow in your favor?

You literally don't even understand your own argument.

LOL -- And you continue to show yourself utterly incapable of learning. I'm criticizing your argument, and you're criticizing me for not making an argument that I never intended to make and holding me to an argument that I don't even support.

This is on the same intellectual level of a flat earther trying to bask in having proven that the earth is flat because science has failed to successfully argue that the earth is round because he took a ball and splashed it with water and noted that the water doesn't stick to it. And you are wanting to take your victory lap and act as if you've done something great.

But whatever. This isn't the first time you've completely missed the point, and it certainly won't be the last. You're just *that* good at logic.

The useful purpose of this thread to me is that it marks just how little progress you've made compared to where you've started. You've proven me right in my assessment of you at every step.

No Aaron, you just never understood the purpose of the OP. And there's no 'basking' going on, I'm genuinely disappointed.

I must admit to some curiosity about your revelation though. Since you've now admitted that you can't support the existence of your god logically, that you don't even think that's possible, on what do you base your beliefs, and justify your certainty? Are you knowingly being illogical?

I welcome you to explain the purpose. Is it anything more than an attempt to justify the assertion that the universe is eternal? That's what I've claimed it to be.

The rest of it is you failing at logic. You took an argument, changed it, and then presented it as being identical to another one. You did this as an attempt to justify yourself and make it appear that you are using the same logic as the original argument. It fails because you've changed it into something the original argument is not, and it's demonstrably different. You don't seem to understand that, either.

You ought to be disappointed. But it's not me that's doing the disappointing. It's you. Your strongest defense of your own argument has been to try to point at some argument I'm not making nor have never made. That's sad. Embarrassingly so.

The human mind is knowingly illogical. Human beliefs are built upon a collection of irreducible experiences, not logical deductions. Our core belief structures are not logically derived in any formal sense. They are extrapolations. They are generalizations. And it's staggering the amount of information we accept on the basis of authority and cultural proclivities.

While you spend all this time criticizing me, it stems from the simple fact that you don't understand yourself. You don't know yourself well enough to admit to yourself who you are and why you believe what you do. That's why you never learn. And you will continue to never learn if you persist in this way. This is why you have the track record you do. This is why you can't present your own argument and defend it on its own merits.

You try to create arguments to justify pre-existing beliefs. You don't use arguments to challenge those beliefs. And when flaws in your arguments appear, you simply try to shore it up with some other argument rather than stepping into the space of "maybe I'm wrong about this." You turn around and accuse others of things in ways that are utterly unreasonable.

You want to make it about me, and all the time this is really just about you.

You think I'm making this about you personally, which is a little egocentric but kind of true given that this thread was about the special pleading used by theists, and the purpose was to switch the shoe to the other foot and give them a little taste of what it's like arguing with them, and look what it caused you to admit. That your religious beliefs are illogical and that you'd accept that god and the universe have both always existed, abandoning the idea of creation, just like that.

Of course, I could simply have had the wrong idea about what you believe all this time, but it's a bit irrelevant now.

The claim that human beliefs are not built on logical deductions is trivially false, we all hold beliefs we would consider to be 'common sense' that are actually intuitive understandings of certain laws of logic.

However, I'm well aware of Cognitive biases, heuristics, the fact that an empirical ideal is impossible because we can't trust our perceptions, cognitive dissonances and other flaws in our psychological makeup etc etc. It all explains religion to a great degree (and many other things, like Trump), the only thing it can't do is prove whether or not there are any gods. I've also done some reading on Belief and I'm aware of what a complex issue that is, same for Truth, and Morality. You're not teling me anything I don't already know. In fact it's somewhat ironic that you're offering this given how many times I've offered those as explanations for religious beliefs and now you're actually agreeing with me that they're the reasons that you hold religious beliefs. If you were right that all I care about is 'winning', I'd stop now, I just won in the most satisfying way imaginable. But it's never been about winning.

Wrt to the bolded. You're agreeing that you're knowingly illogical in your religious beliefs, there isn't really much else to say to you. Logic applies to every instance of reasoning that you ever do, and if you can't show that your reasoning is logical, then you are guilty of nothing more than wishful thinking or you're being dishonest about your levels of uncertainty.

If you're now saying that you can't logically support the idea of your god, that you're simply using faith or some similar intellectually dishonest thought process, then fine, that's your choice. I personally couldn't do that, and whether I achieve it or not, and I almost certainly don't, I at least hold my beliefs to the minimum standard of being logical and true.


This is pure projection. Reread the thread. I don't spend any time at all criticising you, what would be the point of that. Only one of us spends a lot of time personally attacking the other, and it's not me. In this reply I stripped out everything you said that wasn't progressing the conversation, look how little is left.

I personally think a healthy understanding of the various possibilities to be more effective then certainty when it comes to absolute origins.
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov is my favorite expression, I find it to be a wonderful blending of technology and theism in what I personally like to consider phase 2 of existence. (With phase 1 being the infinite regression of uncertainty as to what came before the first time this type of sequence occurred.)
Linked below, it's for free and only takes about 30 minutes to get through.
https://templatetraining.princeton.e...sac_asimov.pdf
<3

Thanks, I'll check it out, I'm a big Asimov fan.

[EDIT] Actually I've read this before, gonna read it again though, it's been a while.

LOL -- I guess you answered my question from earlier. You're dishonest.

Anyway, do you really think that I'm bothered by your incompetence? I'm in that in between space where I kind of want you to learn, but kind of enjoy your ignorance because you're just so insistent that you know what you're talking about when you're just so clueless.

Fundamentally, you continue to lack the intellectual humility to consider that you're making a mistake somewhere in your argumentation. That makes you fail intellectually. You're so confident that you know what you're talking about that you are willfully blind to your errors. The fact that I can quote an argument for you multiple times and you don't have the capacity to actually address it speaks volumes. You would rather try to argue about something else because it's too much for you to take that you made a mistake. You've been that way for the past 6 or 7 years.

I snipped out everything that was simply a personal attack. It was originally 'about you' because you're a theist Aaron. Now it's actually about you. This isn't complicated.

So, you don't want to talk about how your belief in god is illogical then huh? I am genuinely curious how you knowingly sustain an illogical belief, why don't you try to explain it?

Yup. You're literally dishonest. Not complicated at all.

I can literally quote you, and you can't even address it. Intellectual dishonesty in its fullest form.

You barely understand logic, as demonstrated throughout. Once you understand yourself and can rightly talk about your own beliefs, then other people's beliefs are much easier to understand. Until then, you're literally sitting in a self-imposed world of stupidity.

I've given you tons of information about my beliefs over the last 6 or 7 years you've posted here. The fact that you're taking this conversation as some sort of revelation to you highlights just how little you've paid attention.

When you're able to talk seriously about your own beliefs, we can talk again about my beliefs. Until then, it's simply not worth wasting my time with you on it.

You still have an outstanding request from me. You get nothing until you prove yourself capable of the basics.

For example?

Whatever you've said before, your admission that your views on God are illogical is a new. Whatever the state of my understanding of logic, I at least try to have logical views, I wouldn't ever want to be knowingly illogical. So I'm curious, given how much you pounce on logical errors, how you can knowingly sustain an illogical belief?

I can't help that you both fail at logic and reading comprehension.

I can honestly say that I've enjoyed this exchange with you more than any other. The OP performed admirably and watching you squirm as you tried to avoid accusations of Special pleading to the point where you even threw Creation under the bus and finally declared that your own beliefs are illogical and god can't be proven logically...

Superb.

The fact that we're capable of holding beliefs that are not formed logically doesn't change that logic applies to our reasoning without exception. Your confession that you consciously hold illogical beliefs has completely undermined whatever credibility that you had with me and probably with anyone else reading this.

LOL -- You suck at logic, then. It literally fails as an argument. The conclusion does not follow from the premises.

If you don't look at the problem, it doesn't just go away. You might as well be Trump claiming that the coronavirus would disappear if we would just stop testing for it.

---

It's so amusing that you continue to hold me to an argument that I never made. That you think you make your argument stronger by making false accusations only goes in the evidence pile that you're simply intellectually dishonest.

LOL -- The human brain is illogical. Whatever you want to conclude from that claim is up to you, subject to the errors of logic that you have demonstrated and continue to make.

And you're welcome to reject all modern psychology and pretend that the human mind is logical if you choose.

And I'm soooooooooo concerned with what "anyone else reading this" actually thinks. LOL.

Reading Boosh's dishonesty and obtuseness, if one didn't know better, they'd
think he was just the biggest internet troll ever. I keep hoping that maybe
after all these years, he'd somehow improve. It seems like if anything,
he's gotten worse.