Philosophy Now Forum

If it's reasonable to suppose lightning strikes are natural occurrences (until proven otherwise), it's reasonable to suppose that lightning striking people is a natural occurrence (until proven otherwise). Then, of course, it's obvious that people suffer if struck by lightning (with injuries includ...

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 04, 2023 8:02 pmPost

It’s the weekend so you know what that means

I’ll be back Monday or Tuesday. There was a second post about Adam and Eve also, not sure if you saw that.

promethean75 wrote: ↑Sat Mar 04, 2023 5:11 pm This girl is the goddamn antichrist, Belinda.

IC u better do something fast cuz I'm losing faith.

I lol’d

Well, as you well know, I'm a moral noncognitivist and to me "moral intuition" probably means more something like "intuition about what aligns with our values or not," which is really more like an introspection. Yes. That always seems horribly weak and quite circular, to me. It ...

IC, I'm separating out the debate about the onus of evidence and just doing that for this post; then doing the rest of the post in a separate post. Hopefully that proves helpful rather than a hinderance to our discussion, lol. The point is that it's reasonable to move forward on the belief that ther...

In many versions of theism, gods are assigned genders. This might make sense for some like Zeus that are supposed to be running around bodily incarnated in some way most of the time. But what about gods that are supposed to transcend space and time, do they have genders? People often refer for inst...

Sure: but this is why we make reasonable decisions about things without omniscience based on things like appearances. "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck," that sort of thing No, that's not a good analogy, because we don't know "what it looks like." We have no reason...

Put colloquially, skeptical theism is a position that we don't understand why God does certain things and that our intuitions (such as the intuition that some suffering is gratuitous) can't be trusted. Better to put it this way: we don't know whether or not we can trust our intuitions in that regar...

And voilà. We have a valid syllogism, but is it true? That's the question. And that's the thing you have to show. To say "We don't know why suffering X happens" even if true, wouldn't tell us anything more than that we are epistemically-limited creatures. But we know that, already. So now...

Principle of Proportionality 1) The principle of proportionality states that the strength of our beliefs should be proportional to the strength of the evidence that supports them. 2) The evidence for the existence of gratuitous suffering in the world is strong and compelling (the appearance of grat...

Part 2: Soul-Making Theodicy Here I will be responding to the Soul-Making Theodicy and further providing reasons to reasonably suppose that at least some apparently gratuitous suffering is actual gratuitous suffering. Put briefly, the entire notion behind the Soul-Making theodicy is that suffering ...

"Hiddenness" is, of course, a separate issue. And it is a good discussion in its own right. But I'm going to skip it, for the simple reason that it doesn't even enter consideration without us first having solved the "gratuitious suffering" empirical burden of proof. So let's foc...

B1) If God is good, then God will seek to prevent or minimize all gratuitous suffering (and so gratuitous suffering will not exist) B2) Gratuitous suffering is observed (theoretically) Conclusion: God is not good Again, the non-cognitivist doesn't have to even know what "good" means any m...

Has anyone offered a good answer to the OP's query? There's too much stuff to sift through. It's become a PoE thread in general. Some responses were difficult to see as on-topic, or were at best tangential. I've also been away and come back a couple of times through the duration of the thread; but ...

(Post) Ok. I've run back through the five-part posts you made and read them. I've also read our newest posts where I've been trying to establish that behavioral properties can contradict observations without having to understand anything about why those behavioral properties are held (e.g., I can u...