Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Fri Jul 20, 2018 11:31 amI'm still waiting for Mr Can's reformulation of his syllogism demonstrating that if there's a god, morality is objective. Perhaps furkling in his den under the bridge, he'll come up with it and enlighten us all. Or will he have the grace and humility to admit he was wrong and agree he's changed his mind?
Now I know you're joking.
Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Fri Jul 20, 2018 11:31 amThanks for the link. I contribute to the 'Reasonable Faith Debunked' group - so demolishing WLC and his go-to 'philosopher', Plantinga, has been my leisure activity for a long time.
Had a quick look at the Facebook page. There's a clip of WLC farting away about 'parallelism' and how mediterranean myths, Horus and Osiris in particular, had no influence on christianity. At the moment I'm finishing off dissertation on medieval cosmology. In Europe, a lot of effort was put into reconciling christianity with Plato; as a result, christianity is essentially a rewrite of The Myth of Er (it's at the end of The Republic if you haven't read it). Not only that, but according to legend, Plato was the son of Apollo, his mother Perictione having been visited by the god when she was still a virgin.
This is cut and pasted from something I wrote a while back:
Plato was born in about 428BC, and was believed by his more enthusiastic admirers to be a son of the god Apollo. The legend says that his mother, Perictione, beautiful and aristocratic, was a virgin when her husband, Ariston, also very well connected, tried to force himself upon her. He failed and Apollo appeared before Ariston in a vision, which persuaded him to leave his wife alone until she gave birth to the god’s son. According to some authorities he was called Aristocles; the name we know him by is derived from the Greek for width, and it is either for the breadth of his forehead, his physique or his understanding that he was given the name.
As a noble, he would have been expected to take some part in the political life of Athens. Instead, in his late twenties, Plato left the city appalled at the trial and execution of his mentor Socrates. He travelled for the next twelve years or so and when he returned he started teaching in the Academy, a sacred plot of land that was named after the hero Academus who had gained his status by revealing the hiding place of Helen of Troy when her brothers, Castor and Pollux, came to liberate her.
It is thought that the first book Plato wrote was the Apology, his version of what Socrates said at his trial. He then wrote a series of dialogues dealing with the things that Socrates had been most concerned with, principally how to lead a soul enhancing life. His most famous work, the Republic, is a description of the sort of state that Plato believed would facilitate the living of the good life. It is a disgusting place. The ruling elite, made up of philosopher kings, pass whatever law their great wisdom informs them will keep the populace in its place. For instance, lots would be drawn to determine who breeds with whom. The hoi polloi will therefore happily copulate with whatever misfit is granted them, because they are too stupid to realise that the whole thing is rigged to ensure that good blood isn’t tainted with bad.
The Republic closes with Socrates telling the Myth of Er; it is exactly the sort of codswallop designed to mollify idiot citizens. Er had been slain in battle and when the bodies were collected 10 days later, his was miraculously unaffected by decay. Taken home for cremation he came back to life on the funeral pyre and told the story of what he had seen in the afterlife. The first things he was brought to were the entrances and exits to heaven and hell. Between them sat the judges who decided the fate of the souls before them; they told Er he had been chosen to tell the mortal world about the afterlife. He described the happy souls he saw descending from heaven and others, dirty and exhausted, climbing up from the underworld. Two such miseries told how they were about to leave when some especially wicked characters appeared at the mouth of hell. The incurable sinners believed they were about to be freed, but a mighty roar came from below and wild fiery figures hauled them back, dragging them across thorns and whipping them with gouges.
Er spent the next week with the souls in a meadow; on the eighth day they started on a journey and after 4 days they saw a column of light passing through all of heaven and Earth, a day later they were amongst it and could see the chains of heaven reaching down. From these hung the ‘spindle of necessity’, in shape just like the ones Greek used to spin wool, with a hook on the top of a shaft and a weight or whorl near the bottom. The whorl on the spindle of necessity was a series of 8 closely fitting nested bowls providing the orbits for the stars and planets. On the rim of each bowl sat a siren singing a single note and together they formed a harmony. The melody was provided by the three Fates, goddesses of past, present and future who sat on their thrones, evenly spaced around the edge of the universe, making sure the whole thing keeps spinning with a gentle push from time to time. Clearly it takes a spectacular brand of credulity to take any of this at face value, and while the dreamers might have been charmed, Plato knew he would have to come up with something more substantial.