Strangely, and annoyingly, my answer to this post which took some time to compose, is AWOL... I'll try again.

Yes, it could be false, if any of the symbols 1,2,+ and = didn't mean what we commonly agree that they mean.


Our thoughts about the laws, and the physical manifestation of those laws, are not the same thing.

As explained, they're interchangeable for the purposes of this discussion. You simply need to understand that I don't accept spiritual, immaterial or non-physical and I do believe that there is only the physical, material, natural universe..

Yes, it does, and no I'm not. There may be people who use what I consider to be a corrupted version of methodological naturalism to reconcile it with their spiritual views but IMO that renders it virtually useless. How can they trust their scientific explanations/results if the explanation might actually be something supernatural that they haven't tested for, because you can't test for it.

Science considers that gravity is a property of mass, but that's only true in a physical, natural universe. If we include supernatural, spiritual explanations, then gravity might be god pressing stuff down, and now we have no way to understand it we can only observe it.

It's a good example of how useless the immaterial/spiritual/non-physical is to us. No more useful or explicable than the FSM, or fairies or any of the gods posited by humans. This is why I reject it.


You've misunderstood what's happening here, I'm not arguing for the existence or not of god, I'm highlighting a conflict between two arguments that use the same premise in the context of a claim about free will.

My OP contains an argument given to me by an apologist.

No problem, the standard way to resolve the infinite regress. But, this guy also claims that God gives us free will. Now there's a problem because the following argument against free will uses the same 'efficient cause' premise.

To defeat this new argument, we would have to undermine the premise of efficient cause, I don't see another way to do it, and if you do that, you've now undermined the argument for god that uses it.

But then it's not a necessary truth. So what are you actually saying? This also shows that you're dodging the question.

But what is the status about the laws themselves? Why do you keep avoiding the questions?

Right. These are your conclusions, but they're also your assumptions. And that's why you're applying circular reasoning.

Look: We've been through this. You're living in your own mental world that has no bearing on reality. In the thread that I linked to earlier, Original Position took a couple dozen posts trying to explain this to you. You're stuck in the same place you were a couple years ago with this.

Simply put, you lack intellectual humility. Because of your arrogance, you think you have the power to redefine the terms ("theism" is a "method of knowledge acquisition"), you refuse to differentiate between *easily* differentiable terms (materialism vs naturalism), and you essentially claim to be smarter than a large number of scientists by thinking that they are thinking incorrectly on the basis of things that you've simply declared to be true.

There's a reason you haven't learned anything, and until you break your own arrogance, you will continue down your path of ignorance. There's simply no way around it. You might as well be a flat earther as far as the quality of your argument is concerned. And you might as well be a flat earther as far as your ability to understand other people's arguments is concerned. This is literally just you being too stubborn and too intellectually dishonest to have this conversation. You're all about trying to defend your beliefs rather than analyze and assess them to become a better thinker.

And go ahead and block me. It's not like anything I say influences your thinking at all. You just fall back to your memorized statements without taking the time to reassess any of it.

I'll continue to pick away at your statements, but it's not because I have any illusion that you will read them or learn from them. You have had years on this forum to grow and learn, but you've shown zero meaningful progress.

The fundamental question is whether you know what an "efficient cause" is. Because you've thrown the word "explanatory" in front of it.

You also have to adequately define "free will" for your context.

Here's the basic idea:

A parent offers a child the choice between cereal and eggs for breakfast. The child chooses cereal. Which is the "efficient" cause of the child eating cereal? Was it the child for choosing it or the parent for providing that option?

It means "an agent that brings a thing into being or initiates a change." but you have this the wrong way around. The original version of that argument uses 'explanatory cause' and I added the 'efficient' to make sure that the apologist couldn't claim that it was a different subject.


Are you arguing that every human choice and event does not have an explanatory cause? I think that's trivially true. I would have expected you to go after "To have explanatory efficient cause is not to be free".

I have no idea what you're talking about here. In the part that is quoted in your OP, I see the following uses of "cause":

* Cause and Effect
* Efficient cause
* Transcendent cause

Nowhere do I see "explanatory cause." So it seems that the argument does not use "explanatory cause" at all, but does use "efficient cause." So I don't see how you "added" it. Also, the word "explanatory" only appears in your summary of the argument.

How should I read this in a way that doesn't make it look like you're being disingenuous?

I'm not arguing anything. I'm just pointing out that the framework of the question requires definitions. The question was intended to point out that you need to describe your terms in a way that allows us to understand what you're saying. I can't even address the basic scenario that I've laid out because I don't know what you mean by the words you're using.

You now have a definition of "efficient cause" as "an agent that brings a thing into being or initiates a change."

What is an "explanatory cause"? What is an "explanatory efficient cause"? What does it mean to be "free"?

Just as with many of your other posts, it's really, really important for you to get your definitions clear and accurate.

Some of my answers so far;

Simply put, you've failed so far to offer anything that might convince me that immaterial can be a thing. I still have no good reasons to believe it.


This is wrong because they're not assumptions. To use your analogy, I've tried several tools and I settled on one that works and the others languish in the toolbox because they don't work.

Worse for you, even if you could persuade me to accept anything beyond the physical, material, natural universe, you'd only have done half the job, because that thing still isn't necessarily the god that you believe in, or anyone else's.

The explanatory cause is used in the second argument for Determinism.


Are you actually not familiar with this argument? I'm surprised.

Do you have any more questions or are we at a point where you can address my point about the conflict?

You have no good reasons because you haven't even addressed the question.

There are two distinct lines of inquiry: Physical laws and mathematics.

Physical Laws:
The question is not about our "thoughts" about the laws, but of the laws themselves. You stated "The physical laws of the universe would exist without or without a human to perceive them." Okay, so you've established that these "physical laws" (whatever they are) exist without humans. So what are they and in what sense do they "exist"? Is that existence material or immaterial?

Mathematics:

So here, I think you've clearly decided that 1+1=2 is a necessary truth. Is that correct? Because you later make this claim:

This is not the behavior of necessary truths. A truth is a necessary truth if it is true for all possible universes. And it's important here that we are not discussing the question of whether specific symbols might be different, but the underlying content of the statement.

So at this point, it's far from clear that you even have a coherent concept of necessary and contingent truths.

Why do you think I'm trying to convince you of anything about God? I've been absolutely explicit that this isn't the goal. You are coming across as being simply disingenuous in your presentation. It's like you're not reading or analyzing anything that's being written, but rather are just focused on making sure you don't accidentally become religious.

Notice how this *literally* does not address the fact that you have openly lied about the presentation. You said he used a thing and that you added a thing. That is not what the OP is showing.

You've made it clear that you are going to use your own definitions for things. For example, see "theism" is a "method" and the unwillingness to separate "materialism" from "naturalism." Also see your understanding of "science." I'm waiting for you to own up to that and provide those definitions.

It's funny that you think you've even addressed anything. You really aren't capable of this conversation. Take the time to stop and understand what you're talking about before trying to go any further.

So, to recap.

In order to convince me that there is 'immaterial' you've offered maths, to which I replied 'just thoughts and thoughts are material', and then you offered 'laws of physics' to which I replied, 'the laws are thoughts, but those thoughts describe properties of the physical universe which do exist independent of thought, but thoughts and the physical things they describe are two different things'.

Is that correct?

And I am curious, given how often you claim not to be trying to convince me of god, where you think this can go? Why are you trying to convince me that there is 'immaterial'?

You're just not following this.

The apologist gives a first argument, quoted in my OP, that uses 'efficient cause' (which I've defined for you) to prove god', he also claims that God gives us free will

Then there is a second, separate argument, at the bottom of my OP, that also uses efficient cause (and also has the word explanatory which I've also defined for you) but this one is for Determinism.

It seems to me that to disprove the second argument and defend free will, you must show that the premise 'efficient cause' is false, and that then undermines the first argument for god.

Aaron I've explained this several times, if you don't get it this time I'll have to give up. Ok?


Sure, theism is a paradigm, by definition, not sure what about that causes you a problem?

I've provided my views on this so many times, including in the thread you kindly linked, that for you to pretend that you don't understand my position is baffling. I'm quite certain OrP or TD could explain my position to you, whether it's right or wrong, they understand it, how come you still don't know what it is after all these years?

No. I asked you to consider the possibility of the immaterial by considering mathematics as an example.

Yes. It is true that you've said that. You have decided that math is reduced to simply thoughts and that there's no further structure to mathematics, though you have made a very confusing presentation about the nature of "truth" in mathematics, having first declared that it was contingent, then necessary, but then declaring contingency again. There's a lot here that can cause you to reconsider your understanding, or you can just blindly make assertions that show you haven't actually thought about this at all.

Right. Specifically, you claimed that "the physical laws of the universe exist with or without human brains." I'm asking you to describe the nature of that existence. Because so far, you've declared that everything that exists is physical. And so "the physical laws of the universe" are therefore physical. But physical how? Talking about it in terms of human brains doesn't work because you say that it "exists" in a manner that is independent of human brains. So what is the "existential nature" of the physical laws of the universe?

You're mostly wrong in your understanding of the issues being raised. You're factually correct about the things you've said, but you have not addressed the ways that those things have no bearing on what is being discussed.

I've said it several times over. I'm trying to get you to be a better thinker. You're clearly not a good one right now. You're not accurately representing the arguments that are being put forward, you're not being clean in your use of language, and you're not making meaningful responses to inquiry. It seems like you're trying your best to pretend that you know what you're talking about, rather than taking this as a learning opportunity to expand that knowledge.

Okay. So you're saying that you just crammed that word into your own argument. Which is better, but still bad.

What's going on here is that you're fundamentally misrepresenting the terms of the argument. Here's the problem:

The quoted argument from OP *never* uses "explanatory cause." Your argument does, but you shoved in the word "efficient" in order to change the meaning of your argument. That's just not how this stuff works. You're clearly *not* using the same idea in your argument. You're using the concept of "explanatory" in your original argument. Simply relabeling the term to be "explanatory efficient" without addressing the change of the definitions is not how one constructs a successful argument.

Please show me where you've defined "explanatory" because I don't recall seeing it. I've seen your definition of "efficient."

What do you think a "paradigm" is? You're just throwing words around, but it's far from clear you understand what you mean by those words. Again, you've already shown that you're willing to redefine words and just replace one word with another at will.

I can explain your position. You're arguing that scientists cannot actually trust information that they've gathered using scientific methods if they also believe in God, as God can randomly change things and scientists wouldn't know it. I'm just telling you that it's wrong and a misrepresentation of scientific beliefs and the scientific method.

None of this is adding anything new and progressing this conversation. The only part that really needs an answer is the bolded and I've already answered it.

The fact that you consistently misunderstand and/or misuse basic terms clearly suggests to me that my "spelling it out" is probably a good idea.


So, is 3+5=8 only true when a human mind is thinking about that equation?


Naturalism DOES NOT exclude the possibility of immaterial entities.

In my opinion, your already persistent confusion isn't helped by using terms interchangeably that don't mean the same thing.

I explained why I added that word to the argument that I've also explained isn't mine. I'm not certain that you're reading my posts properly Aaron.

No I didn't do it to 'change the meaning of my argument', in fact, I've pointed out that I think that it doesn't change it.

Again, really not sure you're reading my posts properly, these are basic factual errors about what I have and haven't said, it's not helping me and I don't have time or the inclination to constantly correct them.


Can't find it, it must have been in one of the two posts I've made that never showed up on the thread and I had to rewrite them. so, my bad, I haven't defined it for you. I'm still quite surprised though that you're not familiar with this argument already.


Paradigm - an underlying idea or concept that determines what questions are relevant and what answers are meaningful.

In the 'god' paradigm, there's a god. In the scientific paradigm, there isn't. That makes a big difference to the questions that can be asked and the answers that can be accepted. Do you disagree?


Close enough. So, whilst I've provided reasons to support my view that a theistic scientist shouldn't be able or willing to trust scientific answers that don't address the supernatural, whilst I've explained the 'why'... you have provided nothing to show that they could or should accept those answers except your assertions that they can (and the trivially true fact that they appear to, you've said that in previous conversations about this) and that I don't understand what science is.

Gravity could have an entirely different explanation than being a physical property of mass if we factor in the supernatural, as I said, it could be god pushing everything down, so perhaps you could explain to me how we might test for that? Perhaps you could offer me a hypothesis and then we can devise a testing regime, a way to repeat that test, a way to falsify any results so that we can have confidence in the hypothesis as means of finding an explanation, and we can use the result to make useful predictions. Could you also include a means of correcting the hypothesis to improve it.

Alright, spell things out, it's your time.


I'm gonna do an Aaron here. Well LT, it depends what you mean by 'true'. Do you know what 'true' means?

No, it simply excludes or ignores them. The end result is the same, an explanation that doesn't include the supernatural/immaterial or whatever word you prefer to use for what we're obviously discussing here.

The irony here is that despite me having decided that the scientific method is something that's useful and I reject the concept of immaterial simply because it doesn't explain anything usefully, I'm well aware that an empirical ideal is actually impossible. But you knew that already right?

1. A Theistic Paradigm (worldview) doesn't preclude science.

2. A "Scientific" Paradigm (whatever that is) would not preclude the existence of a god.

You emulating Aaron should improve the quality of this discussion, so good job!

True: " being in accordance with the actual state or conditions; conforming to reality or fact; not false"

Source: dictionary.com

It does NOT exclude immaterial entities. I thought we covered this.

I agree with the "ignore" part in most contexts.

I agree that the Scientific Method is a useful tool.

Well, 'preclude' means "prevent from happening; make impossible.", and I've never said that, which makes me wonder if you know what the word preclude means. Do you?

Also, you didn't answer my question about what 'true' means. You asked the question but if you want an answer then we need to agree that we understand the same things by words like 'true'.

Well, since you were specifically contrasting "God Paradigm" with "Scientific Paradigm", I wasn't sure.

Yes, I do know what "preclude" means.

Unlike certain persons in this thread that I won't name, I avoid using terms that I don't know the definitions of.

Edit: See #94 for my definition of TRUE.

Hopefully, you're sure now.

Then I don't understand why you're using it because I haven't precluded anything.

Good to know although it does raise the question of why you used it in the first place then since it doesn't describe the position of anyone in this conversation.

However, perhaps, having cleared that up, we can move on to more useful things.

Thank you. Before I can answer your questions though we need to address that you're making a claim about 'reality', can you elaborate on what you consider that to be? And we should further examine 'true' because you might, for example, subscribe to Correspondence theory and consider something true only in how it "relates to the world and whether it accurately describes that world", or you might employ some version of pragmatic truth and believe things in terms of their utility.

Could you clarify what you consider truth to be beyond a dictionary.com definition?

No, you haven't. You've not explained what it mean for "the physical laws of the universe" to "exist" other than to say that it's physical when human mind think about it.

What you have not yet realized is that you're not making a single argument for your position, but rather reiterating your assumption that it must be physical.

Yes, you explained that you inserted it so that someone might not think you're talking about something different. But that's just not how the argument functions. Your argument functions based on a specific meaning of the words. Changing those words changes the meaning. You can't just say "I just added that in" without considering the effect of that word choice.

You have to argue it.

If I made an incorrect factual claim, you can make it explicit.

You can keep saying that all you want. But you know what you haven't done? Provided the definition of the word "explanatory" in the context of your argument.

There's a practice that I'm trying to get you into, which is to practice actually articulating your arguments. You pretend that since you've said it once, that everyone must be familiar with it, and in so doing you never go back to reevaluate it. Just stop being stupid that way.

Now, provide the definition and stop running away from these basic things.

First, I'll point out that your definition is particularly arbitrary. This is another example of you using terms in an attempt for force the conclusions you want to force.

Second, yes. I disagree. Fundamentally, all you're doing with "scientific paradigm" is assuming the answers. You have gained nothing from it. All you have done in your framework is assert "Because God, questions are stupid." It's intellectually dishonest and only serves to exemplify your arrogance.

The reason I state that is because it's the simplest explanation possible. Because we see that there are lots of religious scientists that trust their scientific conclusions. Reality itself counter-indicates your claim.

But to examine this more deeply, all you're saying with your "scientific paradigm" is that "it can be trusted because we assume it can be trusted." It's not saying anything useful at all. This stands in parallel to your idea that the "theistic paradigm" implies that "you cannot trust anything."

The earliest scientists were religious folks who were interested in the mechanics with which God established the universe. The idea that God created a sensible universe that *can* be understood, and so that the application of the minds that they have been given to do that understanding is a worshipful act towards God. And so they studied it.

Implicit in this argument is that you think the "scientific paradigm" will eventually find all of the information. That is how you can avoid "God pushing everything down." And I warned you about this, because this is literally "science-of-the-gaps."

The problem is that neither science nor a "theistic paradigm" makes an assertion that all information about the universe is attainable. You're fussing over a challenge that doesn't have any bearing at all on the methods or ideas, and you're holding it up as if it's some impenetrable barrier or something.

You're just too arrogant to have a meaningful conversation. These infantile objections are laughably bad and show that you really don't think carefully about this stuff. You don't realize how much you're just assuming your way through the conversation.

Also, I would strongly encourage you to reject your own definition of "theism" as "a method" because it's "a paradigm." All of your uses of these words show that you really have very little concept of what you're talking about. You're chasing yourself in circles in a way that is completely disconnected from reality. People are able to function in multiple "paradigms" in different arenas. I believe I've used this example with you before:

A psychologist does not apply physics knowledge in while working with patients. That doesn't mean that physics is not true while they're doing their work. It just means that it's not directly relevant to what they're doing. And the physicist does not apply psychology when they do physics. Your weirdly fundamentalist reading of these "paradigms" is an unnecessary barrier.

You also didn't answer my question about it when I asked. You only created a mess of "necessary" and "contingent" truths where it seemed pretty clear that you had no clue what you were saying.

PS - Notice how when I say that I've said something before, I can actually quote it. This is a self-checking mechanism to verify that I am accurately recalling the conversation. Unlike "I already told you what X means" turning into "I can't find it" and also *still* not stating what X means.

Things like this make your argumentation appear disingenuous and dishonest. And that you are trying to do the same thing while avoiding it in our conversation makes you a hypocrite.