Philosophy Now Forum

Because it's none of your damn business, that's why. And your comparisons are beyond stupid. Are you really this angry a person? Your behavior is way beyond committing the argumentum ad hominem fallacy. I wonder if you are trying your best to be civil and kind to your fellow humans, while also bein...

No, I actually don't see your problem with that list. The fact is that women did have abortions performed illegally when they were outlawed. This is a fact. It's also a morally relevant fact as such illegal abortions are often dangerous to the woman who undergoes them. The fact alone may not be out...

... the probability of our existence depending on an all-powerful God would have to be zero, since the probability would be 1 over infinity, representing an all-powerful God's infinite number of options for doing something else besides creating us. So, a theist cannot base his argument on the so-ca...

Point #1 is false. Life was not created by completely random processes. As with everything else in reality, life was created by the interplay of chaos and order. Chaos is not randomness, but apparent randomness. Much that appears to be random to us is ruled by fractal geometry. Nor is even the quan...

Learn to spell. The word is foetus. 'Fetus' is baby language (no pun intended). Dictionary.com: fetus. [fee-tuh s] (used chiefly of viviparous mammals) the young of an animal in the womb or egg, especially in the later stages of development when the body structures are in the recognizable form of i...

... one of the arguments against prohibition, where all alcohol was banned, was that people will drink anyway.... Consider these parallel propositions: (1) Buying and selling alcohol should not be considered unjust because if you try to restrict it by making it illegal people will do it anyway. (2)...

It's hard for me to get my head around the idea that the probability of there being a god is 0 because if god existed it would be able to do an infinite number of things, making the probability denominator infinite. Why does the number of things a being can do affect the probability of their existen...

There is actually a 4th contender for the point where personhood begins in a developing fetus, that I neglected to mention in my earlier list: The point where the fetus has an identifiable brain with detectable electrical activity. What this contender has going for it is the way it "bookends&qu...

Wisdom: When you claim that people who say that people will have abortions anyway should not be here, I'm not sure I follow you. After all, one of the arguments against prohibition, where all alcohol was banned, was that people will drink anyway, and such laws promote black-markets, fund criminal o...

[/quote] What a fuckwit. [/quote] Thanks for reminding us of the importance of avoiding the error of argument ad hominem as we discuss philosophical topics. It's an all-too-common pitfall. We want to give our best effort to thinking clearly. I find it hard to believe that this was your best effort.

This the issue o when a person emerges is the crux. There seem to be three contenders: - At first cell division (not conception: at the moment of conception there is not yet a new organism beginning to function). - Viability, as per the Supreme Court. (Advances in obstetrics keep pushing this back.)...

You can disagree, but you can't just cavalierly dismiss the argument that: Abortion kills a human being. Killing a human being is wrong except in specific circumstances (e.g. to save ones own life). Therefore abortion is wrong (except to save one's own life and whatever other exceptions there are). ...

FlashDangerpants -- Sorry I screwed up your post. Whatever I did, it was a mistake. Here is a new formulation of the argument. See what you think. r includes l no n is r l is -n where: l = life arises r = random event n = event that occurs in the natural world It is easier to see as a Venn diagram, ...

So we can skip the question of whether the premises are true (because the 'completely random' bit is weak too) because the argument as it stands isn't valid. I use the term "completely random" because so many things that are commonly called "random" are not really random at all,...

Premise #1: Life was created from a completely random process. Premise #2: No finite being can create anything that is completely random. Therefore: Life was created by an infinite being. Your argument takes the form of A or B (or an unstated C); not A, therefore B. Both premises can be true withou...