The MB pattern is as well laid out as mine. At some point, he draws the line in the sand and insists that everything is exactly the way he says it is and that he always knows exactly what he's talking about.

Examples:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...inion-1771209/

Mightyboosh vs. wellnamed, lagtight regarding "materialism" vs "naturalism" vis-a-vis "science" -- MB insists that he's using them to mean the same thing and refuses to change his language, even though it's clearly causing him to commit errors. (Note: See also his statements regarding "1+1=2" as being both a necessary and contingent truth, demonstrating that he's unaware of what he's saying)

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https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...tence-1759393/

Mightyboosh tries to draw some sort of God-analogy ("omnipotence" meaning "unlimited" but also "limited") in the framework of discussing British politics in some other thread. He insists that the problem isn't that "unlimited" and "limited" have opposite meanings and applying them both at the same time leads to problems.

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https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...ction-1732297/

Mightyboosh vs. Original Position regarding foreknowledge, "perfection", and free-will. Also Mightyboosh vs. neeeel on why MB believes that logic is immutable

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https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/1...otent-1700213/

Mightboosh vs. tame_deuces regarding ... well... here's post #13:

Incidentally, my position has been pretty clear throughout my posting that I don't think that all beliefs are ultimately justifiable in any formal sense. I think we should challenge ourselves towards being clear-minded thinkers, and that probing questions can be helpful for generating discussions and helping us become better thinkers. There are many places where I've openly admitted the limits of what I feel I can reasonably justify to others from a "logic" perspective, and that I believe that "experience" of being human (or the experience of living life, or other similar phrases) is the ultimate driver of our beliefs.

I don't believe that every belief we hold must be formally derived by some sort of syllogism. Nor do I believe that the ability to "syllogize" one's beliefs make them any more reasonable, rational, or logical. In fact, most of the times, the syllogisms are created *after* the belief is established. In that sense, they function more of a tool of self-justification than of intellectual exploration. This is especially true if (as MB is prone to do) one focuses on the conclusion and not the reasoning. In many places, MB has shown that he accepts or rejects arguments on the basis of whether he agrees with the conclusion, and he holds other people to the same, regardless of what they say. (As shown here -- I've never used the Kalam Cosmological argument as a reason to believe in God, but he insists that I'm somehow dependent upon it because I believe in God.)

I couldn't care less about him being a hypocrite, I do care about his logical incoherence.

The OP had a purpose and it was simply to put theists in a position where they would have to attack an argument that appears to be builty of special pleading, or find some other way to defeat an argument that claims that the universe has a property of having always existed, much as they claim about their god in the cosmological argument. Or to redefine 'something cannot come from nothing' such that it no longer supports the conclusion of the OP, and I imagined that would present new problems for their own argument too. At worst I come out of it with an improved understanding.

I was curious to see what woud be offered.

You're probably not aware of my history with Aaron. If you were you might understand why I'm jumping all over his admission that his god beliefs aren't logical, and his stunning abandoment of Creation in order to resolve the poblem of whether or not god and the universe could both have always existed. Aaron has spent years telling me that I'm (fill in the blank with endless vile insults about how illogical and unintelligent I am) so for him to now admit that his beliefs are not supported by logic, and then to try to logically convince me of a belief that he's trying to show can't be supported by logic.... I'm thoroughly enjoying myself, and it's my thread...

Feel free to address the OP though.

You forgot to continue your effort to show that "Whatever syllogism you write down will have nothing to do with why you believe what you believe". I guess you got distracted again, or was that just not working out how you'd hoped so now you're pretending that you never said it? More dishonesty.

I'm not particularly attached to the OP and never was, it's sole purpose was to cause the kind of problem for theists that it's caused for you and to see what would be offered to resolve those problems. In order to avoid admitting to special pleading, you instead admitted that your god beliefs are illogical and you abandoned Creation. Now, to try to justify that, you've started this whole new thing about 'not all' beliefs are supported by logic, fine, I never said that they were, but they will be logical or illogical because logic can't not apply to reasoning.

So, here is the syllogism that you asked for, again...

P1) Aaron has admitted that his god beliefs are illogical
P2) Aaron is always truthful
C) It's true that Aaron's god beliefs are illogical

Go ahead, show me how my belief that your god beliefs are illogical isn't informed and justified logically? This is hilarious.

I'm fascinated by this tactic of yours, to avoid having to logically justify your god beliefs by claiming that they're illogical, as if that somehow makes them immune to logical criticism... You're welcome to hold beliefs for whatever reasons you want, but you don't then get to use a tool that you think doesn't even apply to 'all' beliefs to show me that my beliefs are wrong. That's not simply hypocrisy, that's logical incoherence and self defeating.

I can't tell you how much my opinion of you has plummeted during this exchange, I would never defend you again as I did at the beginning of this thread. The only reason I'm still replying is that it's so much fun hoisting you on your own petard.

Hi, MB.

Maybe I'm not paying attention, but I don't recall Aaron ever claiming that his belief in God is "illogical."

"Non-logical" (is that a word?), or "alogical" might be more to the point?

Do you know the distinction between a claim being "irrational", as opposed to "non-rational?"

Since even Aaron isn't disagreeing that he's admitted to holding illogical beliefs wrt God, I don't see much point in you trying to interpret what he said in order to rescue him from this revelation., But feel free... (I am curious how you feel about him being so willing to abandon Creationism?)

What Aaron doesn't seem to grasp in his manic attempts to disprove practically anything I say, is that I actually couldn't care less if his beliefs are illogical, he's welcome to believe things for whatever reason suits him, and I'm genuinely curious about how he justifies them instead. But... he's spent years attacking my beliefs as illogical and ITT admitted that he doesn't think that 'all' beliefs are supported logically and in fact none of his are, or at the very least, that it's not important to him whether they are or not. And now he's trying to use logic to persuade me to believe that... Ummmm.....

And yet you've spent the last 50ish posts pounding the table about my beliefs when I've repeatedly tried to push you to talk about your own argumentation. (You know... the thing you actually started this thread about?)

I've spent years attacking your beliefs as unsupported by the logic you've presented. It's a completely different thing than attacking your beliefs as illogical. If anything, I'm saying that your logic is illogical. Over and over again, you present yourself as having some type of airtight argument to support your beliefs, and I (and countless others) have poked holes in it. And rightfully so. Your arguments tend to suck. You commit all sorts of logical fallacies. Conclusions don't follow from presmises. Repeatedly.

I've also spent years attacking your ability to engage in authentic self-reflection. That's not really a criticism of your particular beliefs as much as it is a criticism of how you hold them. You always present yourself as fully competent when you repeatedly show yourself to be devoid of intellectual capacity. You conflate ideas and then insist that you've never done so. You say one thing, and then a few posts later say the exact opposite (while claiming that you're being completely consistent). The thing that comes to mind most is when you say something like, "Well, I didn't need that argument anyway" and continue onward without taking a moment to rethink your conclusions.

Oh well... Leave it to MB to focus all of his efforts on the *least* controversial part of my perspective (that not all beliefs are formally derived) and think he's done something grand. This feels like a discussion you have in a freshman level philosophy course when you talk about the use and value of syllogisms. Simply writing a syllogism to support your belief is not what makes it "logical." And not writing a syllogism doesn't make it "illogical."

I'm not trying to be difficult, but please quote Aaron admitting that some of his beliefs about God are "illogical."

Thanks, MB.

Yeah.... you really just don't know how stupid this is.

1) The OP is not a problem for anyone other than the person making it because it's logically invalid.
2) Your argument is not equivalent to Kalam.
3) Kalam is not a necessary argument for people who believe in God to hold. In other words, just because someone believes in God, it does not mean that they endorse the Kalam argument as the reason they believe in God.
4) I never made any special pleading because I never presented made any arguments.

Hi, Aaron.

Would you describe some of your theological beliefs as "illogical?"

Edit: MB claims that you have.

Nope. There are things that I believe that defy the normal order of the universe (for example, that Jesus died and rose again). I can understand why some may conclude that such beliefs are "illogical" (or at least "unreasonable"). But I would not describe them to myself as being illogical.

Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't notice.

Here's what he's referring to:

His interpretation of this is that therefore all my beliefs about God are irrational (or at least illogical -- though I'm not sure if/how he might distinguish between the concepts of "rational" and "logical") and that I've abandoned Creation (presumably, meaning that I have rejected the claim that God created the universe). There may have been other things he's said (especially relative to the Kalam Cosomological Argument) that he thinks would follow from that statement as well.

Thanks for the detailed response.

I agree with the gist of what you are saying. We all know we had/have beliefs and preferences prior to thinking deeply about them and concluding they were the right beliefs and preferences to have. However, that doesn't mean we should expect to win debates or be persuasive if we rely on gut feelings as part of an argument.

I suspect another way of explaining the paradigm you are describing is that "experience" drives our beliefs when we lack good reasons for them. If you were able to use reasoning and data to prove or disprove the existence of some God or gods, it would enter the realm of those things which can be proven by "logic" and don't require "experience." I don't have any good reason to think that everything in the "experience" category is different from fantasy or day dreaming or wishful thinking.

But I just want to see you two have a conversation, not a meta conversation about why you won't have a conversation.

I did, in my reply.

Or are you saying that you read that and you don't think that's what he's saying?

If you're serious that you genuinely hadn't picked up on the fact that I think that you admitted that your god beliefs are illogical, despite me mentioning this in most of the 'the last 50ish posts'... then I question your reading comprehension, your intelligence, or whether you're reading my posts properly. Yet another of your regular criticisms of me that you appear to be guilty of. This thread is a gold mine of Aaron shooting himself in the foot. Being a hypocrite doesn't make you wrong about anything, but it does make you a hypocrite.

So stupid that it made you abandon Creationism. lol. So stupid that it caused you to admit that you don't think god can be proved using formal logic. So, you undermined apologetics and threw a fundamental Christian belief under the bus, and all to support something that you can't even prove logically and so you started to try to prove that my beliefs aren't formed using formal logic and immediately abandonded that when it became clear that you'd shot yourself in the foot again. lol. You can't escape logic Aaron, every second of any reasoning you ever do is subject to it, and if you can't show that the existence of the god you believe in is logical, then it's illogical, there aren't any other options.

The OP is not logically invalid.

The OP is not only similar to the Kalam in that it's guilty of special pleading but it uses a fundamental understanding relied on in the Kalam, a claim that supports a Kalam premise (which you apparently weren't aware of).

I never explicitly said that anyone had to 'endorse' anything. (I'm doing a you here... so don't bother trying to show that I must mean that even though I didn't say it unless you want to apply those rules to yourself to, so go ahead, shoot yourself in the foot again)

You think god has always existed even though you can point to nothing else that has always existed to demonstrate that this is a reasonable property to assign to something, and you believe that everything that exists has a cause, except god. You are guilty of special pleading even though you have never explicitly made an argument containing special pleading (probably why you dismiss the Kalam even though you have nothing better to offer). You seem to think that your weasel wording is escaping you from this, but it isn't. It's what you believe, and you can't prove it logically. So we'll assume it illogical until proven otherwise

You asked me for a syllogism so that you could prove that it didn't inform my belief on the subject of the syllogism, so, I'm still waiting for that to happen...

P1) Aaron has admitted that his god beliefs are illogical
P2) Aaron is always truthful
C) It's true that Aaron's god beliefs are illogical

You started that Aaron, not me, so finish it...

Oh by the way, compare Aaron's representation of what's been said to what was actually said, note things like the little words he inserts to give himself escape routes like "His interpretation of this is that therefore all my beliefs about God are irrational ", I haven't said that, and he also uses the word 'all' in posts about beliefs not being formed using formal logic. He tries to give himself little weasel exits all the time and deliberately misrepresents what's been said.

Hs dishonesty is off the scale and it's never been as clear as ITT. The OP was never intended to be anything more than a provocation (Which Aaron think is 'stupid' even though he himself uses arguments or ideas that he doesn't believe can be sound or true in order to challenge other arguments e.g. his suggestion that 'both god and the universe could have always existed' that he doesn't believe can be true. Stupid?)

The result of the OP has been Aaron throwing Creationism under the bus to prove a point, and undermining Christian apologetics by claiming that god can't be proven using formal logic. Not exactly insignificant.

He then launched an effort to prove that my beliefs aren't always formed using formal logic (but who knows what he really means here, is he saying that my beliefs aren't always logical or that I don't construct a valid syllogism to justify every single belief I hold? What weasily way has he given himself to escape criticism here?) but when it became apparent that this effort wasn't going to work he's been pretending ever since that he never asked despite me offering the syllogism in multiple posts.

So dishonest.

I do not believe that Aaron is saying that any of his theological beliefs are illogical.

Indeed.

I think this is erroneous. I'm not saying that experiences alone determine our beliefs. I'm certainly not rejecting the role of evaluated experiences in the process of developing our beliefs. But I am also not separating the experiences and the evaluation of those experiences as being two separate things. In fact, the process of evaluating our experiences are themselves experiences, and those experiences further shape our beliefs over time.

I consider it a grave error to try to draw a line between "experience-driven" beliefs and "reason-driven" beliefs. The latter category is merely a subset of the former.

It's unlikely to happen. MB struggles to hold up his end when it comes to just trying to discuss things reasonably. I've posted a link to his four most recent threads (ignoring this one), and they all go down the same path.

So much irony...

Nice. I agree.

You should think carefully about the role of language in syllogisms.

P1) Socrates is a man
P2) A man is a human
C) Socrates is a human

I've constructed this syllogism using "to be" and without using the word "all." But it is impossible for this syllogism to be successful unless the word "all" is implicit in the categorical declaration ("A man is a human" means "All men are human.")

So now let's look at what you've stated:

How should one interpret the collection that you have labeled "my god beliefs"? This is "the collection of beliefs I hold about God." The word "all" is implicit in this type of categorical language, and it essentially always is.

------------------- Sorry not sorry for the wall of text that follows. If anyone quotes this, please just quote this line and not the whole thing. Nobody will be confused about what it refers to. -------

Here is the post that you've referred to (post #53). I welcome you identify where I used the word "all" or where it is that you think "all" was implicit (though your language clearly indicates that your belief is that I explicitly used that word).

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...6&postcount=53

I've bolded the part that you've quoted repeatedly as making evidence that I've claimed my beliefs are illogical. I welcome you to identify the use of the word "all" in that post. Go ahead. (Pro tip: Ctrl-F "all")

Just for fun, here is a list of all the times I've used all in this thread before this post:

Post #22: "I think the hypothesis is doing all of the work of the argument in both cases."

Post #26: "Specifically, you are arguing against P2 by concluding that the universe always existed, and all they would have to do is say in reply is that scientists have calculated an age for the universe."

Post #36a: "So if you can't talk with enough precision about that premise, then it's not at all clear that you're adequately prepared to criticize it."

Post #36b: "All you've done so far is try to insist that you're right without addressing the substance of anything put forward."

Post #38: "Set aside your defensive reflex that assumes that you're definitely right all the time."

Post #51a: "Your intellectual failures all come from the fact that you seem utterly incapable of understanding most arguments."

Post #51b: "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."

Post #54: "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."

Post #57 (Note that I've added some text because LOL can't sentence): "All I need to prove that is MB-P1 and MB-P2 [do not imply MB-C]."

Post #58: "And it's all as meaningless as your ramblings."

Post #64a: "While you spend all this time criticizing me, it stems from the simple fact that you don't understand yourself."

Post #64b: "You want to make it about me, and all the time this is really just about you."

Post #74: "And you're welcome to reject all modern psychology and pretend that the human mind is logical if you choose."

Post #79a: "You should tell all those people about their intellectual dishonesty."

Post #79b: "Just LOL at all of this."

Post #95: "If you've been paying any attention at all over the years, you would be unsurprised by my understanding and perspective of human belief structures and the role of formal logic in the development of those beliefs."

Post #98a: "As I said, you're free to willfully misinterpret and misunderstand statements all you want."

Post #98b (LOL can't sentence again): "But the all of the available evidence points in one direction."

Post #102: "Incidentally, my position has been pretty clear throughout my posting that I don't think that all beliefs are ultimately justifiable in any formal sense."

Post #107a: "You commit all sorts of logical fallacies."

Post #107b: "Leave it to MB to focus all of his efforts on the *least* controversial part of my perspective (that not all beliefs are formally derived) and think he's done something grand."

Post #111: "His interpretation of this is that therefore all my beliefs about God are irrational (or at least illogical -- though I'm not sure if/how he might distinguish between the concepts of "rational" and "logical") and that I've abandoned Creation (presumably, meaning that I have rejected the claim that God created the universe)."

Post #118: " I've posted a link to his four most recent threads (ignoring this one), and they all go down the same path."

------

So please, lecture me about intellectual honesty and reading comprehension. Go ahead. Challenge me to an evidence-based recollection of the events of this thread. It's going to go soooooooo well for you.

Btw, that idea is what I was trying to get at when I would talk about how we can never escape our consciousness and our subjectivity. I think you articulated it in a clearer way.

MB-C does not follow from MB-P1 and MB-P2. The fact that you have not addressed this even though it is among the first things I said to you (see Post #26) shows just how little you actually care about careful reasoning. All of the bluster shows that you also don't care about intellectual honesty. The combination of those two is why you've failed to make any progress as a thinker over all of these years.

Seems like we could avoid all that by arguing something like:

P: Nothing(ness) is impossible.
C: Necessarily, something exists.

Why is "nothingness" impossible?

I don't see the logical necessity of existence.