Philosophy Now Forum

But you don't have any personal evidence. The evidence you accept is second-hand testimony, pictures, common belief, and so on. You've not been to the moon, I presume; and you certainly weren't there when the first man actually did. So you took others' words for it. You are playing the skeptic, yet...

Well, empirical facts are premised on personal experience and testing. But if you haven't been to Boston, how are you going to do that? So you don't then actually have empirical facts available to you: you have testimony, secondary evidence (like maps and pictures), and so on, but not the ability t...

To clarify then. "Anyone who thinks we exist within a creation is also saying by that, that we exist within a Reality Simulation." Often Christians argue that we do not exist within a Simulated Reality while maintaining that we exist within a Creation. What is the difference between exist...

It's just a confession of personal ignorance...no more. They're just saying, "I don't personally happen to have any experience of that," which is no more impressive than saying, "I've never been to Boston." It won't stop Boston existing. That argument doesn't work IC. Yeah, it d...

It's just a confession of personal ignorance...no more. They're just saying, "I don't personally happen to have any experience of that," which is no more impressive than saying, "I've never been to Boston." It won't stop Boston existing. That argument doesn't work IC. When I say...

It's just a confession of personal ignorance...no more. They're just saying, "I don't personally happen to have any experience of that," which is no more impressive than saying, "I've never been to Boston." It won't stop Boston existing. That argument doesn't work IC. When I say...

"For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but so that the world might be saved through Him. The one who believes in Him is not judged; the one who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the ju...

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Nov 29, 2020 5:27 am

Atla wrote: ↑Sat Nov 28, 2020 9:04 pm Evidence/proof please, not arguments.

Heh. Evidence is FOR arguments, mon ami.

Which argument do you know and reject? Then we'll look at the associated evidence.

How about the intelligent design argument? That is always a good one to reject.

Advocate wrote: ↑Sat Nov 21, 2020 5:20 pm If Philosophy Now was serious about philosophy they'd be drawing regularly from this forum for topics and authors.

There are at least two authors from this forum that have had articles published in Philosophy Now magazine. Namely, uwot and myself.

Immanuel Can wrote:
But these are big and obscure topics, requiring a level of knowledge in physics and cosmology that transcend the present audience, I suspect.

I hope you include yourself in that audience.

All Vilenkin is really saying is that the universe has a beginning. This is a classical argument that doesn't address the quantum explanation for the beginning of the universe. Actually, it does. There are only two options: the universe had a beginning, or it did not. Quite correctly, you said that...

Well, there IS one, whether you feel you "need" it or not. What I am saying is that your mathematical argument doesn't apply to a cyclical universe. Problem: we don't live in a cyclical universe. And that's empirical. The universe, as we know from things like the Red Shift Effect, is expa...

Immanuel Can wrote: Well, there IS one, whether you feel you "need" it or not.

What I am saying is that your mathematical argument doesn't apply to a cyclical universe.

Immanuel Can wrote: What's your "empirical" argument, then?

I am still working on it. I'll post it when I get some more time.

To the question,"how can an order be maintained when there is no one controlling it?" should be, Why does an origin in Nothing REQUIRE obeying a law of consistency? Order is dependent necessarily on Non-order to mean something by contrast. But if anything originates unordered (chaos of an...

The problem is that it's not possible to reason from "We happen to be here" to "It must have been from an infinite universe." That's just the old "anthropic fallacy," at best, and a complete non sequitur at worst. This is just a strawman. I said nothing about "We ...