Underlying Philosophy

If you want to talk smack about Eusebius, I believe that there is already another thread where we were discussing it.Since the OP has come back on topic, I suggest that you meet me on that thread.But I have little patience with you. Our presuppositionalist apologist sac51495 is being more reasonable than you are. Still, if you want to talk gibberish, I could always do with a good laugh.Otherwise, c'mon, you were wrong. You read a few quotes out of context, and you were supplied with a false and deceptive context that made you think that Eusebius was advocating lying. You were wrong.I will laugh at you further on this point, but not on this thread.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, let me ask this question one more time.What makes you think that you are the one-in-a-million theist who has got it right?You Christians all disagree completely with one another, such that you beg us not to look at the opinions of "the greatest Christian leaders in history". Apparently they are nothing compared to you.But why should I believe that they are nothing compared to you? Why should you believe that they are nothing compared to you?It seems that you just want us to take you as our own personal guru in the same way that you take yourself as your own personal guru. But you have given no reason why we or you should.Or to put it another way, you have appointed yourself the voice of God. But without giving us any reason why we should believe that you are the voice of God. Without giving yourself any reason why you should believe that you are the voice of God.Well, I guess that's the beauty of presuppositionalism.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

If you have a point, this would be a great time to make it. Perhaps you are ashamed to debate, or perhaps you are too inept with the forum software to discover this thread, in which we discuss the integrity or otherwise of Eusebius.Either way, I shall be happy to debate that topic with you on that thread. But I don't see why we should derail this one further, especially since the topic of this thread interests me whereas you are boring me. Is "call it here" American English for "tacitly admit defeat"?Sure, you can do that too.

If you really don't want to debate my position, then this is a fact that you could communicate best through silence.If you do want to argue with me, then I have directed you to a thread where this subject is on topic.

I gave you an ostensive definition.If you haven't grasped my meaning, perhaps I could elaborate on it: I say that something is real if I believe that at least in principle it could be the cause of an observation one could make. I think you mean ontology; and yes, I am --- I regard ontological questions as vacuous. In your philosophy, perhaps. In my philosophy metaphysics is a disease of language. And you were asking me about my opinions, not yours. But again, that "shouldn't" is a tenet of your philosophy, not mine. In mine, there is no synthetic a priori. And to the best of my knowledge, I am and I can. Why you call this a metaphysical belief, I don't know: it is derived from observation, and if you will present me with evidence that I am confined in a mental hospital and hallucinating, or trapped in the Matrix, or whatever, then I shall reconsider this position.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

And we could bring exactly the same facile arguments against your belief in the existence of walruses or the nonexistence of unicorns. Theism doesn't help you there.The only thing that an a priori belief in the existence of God seems to buy you is that it supplies you with a worse reason for believing in God than you have for believing in real things such as giraffes. And I would point out that you would hardly find yourself in need of such a bad reason if God was in fact real like giraffes are. As has been pointed out to you, we have no such guarantee and nor have you.

And yet when I simply answered the same question by stating my belief that waffle irons and cantaloupes and alligators and income tax and ketchup and Zanzibar and firecrackers and armadillos and teacups are real, somehow you found my answer insufficient.

If your words really are capable of bringing deities into existence, then could I please ask you to speak some different words and make us a better deity?

No, of course not.Why do you ask such a bizarre question?

The implications of a statement are what follows from it if you apply logic, not what follows from it if you apply crazy backwards theist unlogic.For example: Now of course no materialist can possibly say "it's not me, it's just my brain", because a materialist thinks that he is his brain. It is precisely the immaterialist who is obliged to think that he and his brain are two different things, and who could therefore say "it's not me, it's just my brain".

Fair enough. But now you're doing it again, dammit.All the Christian leaders who differ with you also thought that the Bible was their ultimate authority, and could (with just as much justification as you) have said "When you're arguing with me, you're arguing with the Bible". Including people who would have burned you at the stake for your opinions.Now, since you admit your own fallibility, it is not possible for you to know (much less me) when I'm "arguing with the Bible" and when I'm just arguing with you. At best you can sometimes claim that I am arguing with your interpretation of the Bible; just as I would be if I was arguing with another Christian whose views were different from yours.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Imagine how silly you'd think it if a Muslim said to you: There are three things that make this sort of thing silly.(1) The supposition that you know what I'm thinking and that I don't. This is absurd. I can read my mind, you can't. If your philosophy has led you to the conclusion that I am really a devout Christian, then this leads me to the conclusion that your philosophy has made you delusional, to the point where your mind is closed against all the evidence contradicting your belief.I am interested to know how far this delusion extends. For example, do you believe that people were all Christians before Christianity? For the illogic by which you seek to prove this proposition would apply as much to them as to me.(2) The massive anti-logical non sequitur. Even if some proposition is necessary to make sense of the world, it obviously doesn't follow from that that everyone does actually believe it.By analogy, the theory of gravity is necessary to make sense of planetary motion. But it does not follow from this that everyone understands and believes the theory of gravity. Some of them, after all, cannot make sense of planetary motion.In the same way, even if we granted you the unproven and false premise: ... then you would not be justified in jumping to: ... without adding a premise: ... a premise which we know to be false.(3) The fact that you have no proof whatsoever for the premise that you have stated (let alone the one that you haven't).Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But these questions are as relevant to the theist as to the atheist. I've explained this before, but let me spell it out one more time.We both know (do we not?)^* that people hallucinate (as a result of psychosis, drugs, or simple fatigue); that people can suffer from unshakable delusions (paranoia, the idee fixe, de Clrambault's syndrome, Cotard's delusion, Capgras' delusion); that perfectly normal people have innumerable cognitive biases, failures of logic, and are prone to dozens of types of optical illusions; that our memories are faulty and suggestible; and that we can be just plain ignorant of relevant facts which would change our opinions radically if only we were aware of them. You yourself have made some fairly ghastly errors of fact and reasoning on this very thread.Therefore, a theist cannot invoke his God as a guarantor of human reason, because it is not, in fact, guaranteed. (The most we can say on this subject is that if the existence of God would guarantee the correctness of our thinking, then there is no God.)Consider the following. You believe that God exists, and that (for some mysterious reason) God allows madmen to inhabit delusional and hallucinatory worlds of their own. So on what basis could you claim that you yourself are not in such a situation? It's no good appealing to the existence of God as a foundation, because apparently he permits the existence of madmen. So you are thrown back into the same position as an atheist, i.e. an appeal to experience. Only those experiences might themselves be part of your delusions and hallucinations.Which leaves you in the same boat as the rest of us. * Footnote: the fact that some people are delusional is one thing that I can be certain of. The proof is, as we mathematicians say, "by contradiction". For I firmly believe it to be so. So if I was wrong, then there would in fact be at least one delusional person, namely me; and we would have a logical contradiction.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I'm not so sure of that. Are presuppositionalists in the majority?As for those Christians that are not presuppositionalists, the weaknesses of your mode of apologetics must be as evident to them as they are to me.First, it scarcely seems like apologetics at all. For the purpose of Christian apologetics is to present (what at least superficially could be taken for) a rational defense of the Christian faith. Now, not only do you fall down on the whole "rational" thing, but you seem to put out of bounds any attempt to discuss such essential questions as whether God exists and whether the Bible is reliable, taking them as axiomatic.Now, for whom and from whom does this defend the Christian faith? Not for or from someone like me; no, it defends Christianity for and from you --- it defends it from the possibility that you might start asking awkward questions.But it's never going to convert anyone, because no-one would be willing to enter into your particular brand of circular reasoning unless he was already a Christian. (And, I might add, he would scarcely need to unless he was a Christian worried about the awful possibility of losing his faith.) So although some Christians might comfort themselves with your style of apologetics, I hope that most of them would have more sense than to use it as a tool for evangelizing others.Finally, your method of apologetics is implicitly an admission of the weakness of your own position second only to a signed confession that you're wrong. For it seems to me that if you had any good, or even halfway plausible, arguments for the essential tenets of Christianity, you wouldn't have to construct an entire philosophy just to explain away why you can't produce such arguments and shouldn't try.I disclaim the ability to read your mind, but from the outside it looks as though you have realized that you're never going to come up with any good arguments, that the arguments that you used to think were good (presumably, the ones that made you a Christian in the first place) are in fact worthless ... but that you want to remain a Christian, and you want to go on arguing. Hence presuppositionalist apologetics.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But you didn't. It was left up to me, an atheist, to point out this obvious fact.When you say that you are speaking for God and/or the Bible, the most you can honestly say is that you hope that you're speaking for God. Just as all the people who would have burned you at the stake for your theology would have hoped, indeed firmly believed, that they were acting on God's behalf.I am baffled as to how I can choose between you. But I am also baffled as to how you can choose between the various religious sects.Sincerity, clearly, is not enough. The 9/11 bombers were so sincere in their beliefs that they gave their lives for their beliefs. You, I note, haven't done so.But what can you really say about them? You admit that your opinions about God are fallible. Good for you. But then on what can you base your morality?As with epistemology, it's no use just invoking the existence of God, because if he exists, he clearly allows people to be evil. Since he does so, you might yourself be thoroughly evil but also thoroughly confused about the difference between right and wrong, such that you are deluded into thinking that you are good. Just as Hitler thought that he was good, and Stalin thought that he was good.The same problem applies to morality as it does to epistemology. You may assert that God exists, but you must also agree that God permits people --- even theists --- to have disgusting and ridiculous ideas about the difference between right and wrong. In which case you might be in the same position.In which case you have no objective standard for telling good from evil.In which case, as with epistemology, you're in the same boat as the rest of us.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.