When Debate Doesn't Make Sense

[_Coggins7]

If someone says that a statement is capable of being if and only if it is logical and supportable through evidence, then the term "logic" in that sentence isn't referring to soundness of premises, it is referring to making good inferences. How do I know this? Because evidence is how one goes about establishing the truth of most premises. If the term "logic" in that sentence encapsulated the notion of having true premises, then there would be no reason to refer to evidence at all. At the same time, it would be the most trivial thing to say ever. Logic, then, just means "capable of being reasonable." And if that is all that is being said: That propositions are only meaningful if they can be reasonable, then, "Duh!!!!!!!" Holy obvious Batman. But, that's not really what was being said. This can be figured out from the dicussion on evidence that follows. He's trying to explain what it means to be reasonable. According to him, being reasonable entails using good logic and having evidence. This, however, can't quite be right for some reasons I listed above.

What I find interesting about this entire set of threads is that we have now gone from the secular materialists here digging in their heels and determinedly refusing to see what in essence is, once you've worked you way through the argument, a fairly clear cut logical contradiction regarding Dawkin's claims about the world and value judgments within it, to a full blown argument regarding utterly straightforward principles of deductive logic that any Freshman philosophy course would have covered within the first couple of weeks. Mercury telling Light that he doesn't know what he's talking about, when Merc clearly doesn't even understand the first principles of critical reasoning, is roughly like telling Godzilla he doesn't know how to break things.

I find the fact that an actual argument about rudimentary principles of deductive reasoning fascinating, if only because it demonstrates how critics of the Church, and theism proper, will go to any lengths and challenge even established canons of intellectual discipline to preserve their onw metaphysical beliefs and assumptions.

[_Coggins7]

This argument is in formal deductive structure, that does not make it a logical argument. Formal logic may not be concerned with content, but informal logic is. Your first premise is nonsense, commits the fallacy of explanation.

Yes, it is nonsense, but you just missed the point. Validity is the formal logical connection between premises and conclusion. Soundness is a deductive argument that valid and has true premises.

The point is that logic, as a disciplined form of thinking, is only as good as the assumptions, perceptions, or data that inform its initial premises. Inferential logic is no different in this respect. Faulty premises generated through any number of corruptions that seep into observation or interpretation of phenomena will inevitably lead to faulty conclusions, and the farther the reasoning is carried, the farther from the truth will we find ourselves. This is true even when we have solid empirical data to fall back on. Data must be interpreted before it becomes evidence of anything, and the more circumstantial or indirect the data, the more difficult reliable inference becomes.

[_Coggins7]

It is misleading to say "logic" isn't concerned with whether proposition are true or not. Logic doesn't determine whether propositions are true. Observations, testing, experiences, determine truth of propositions.

Huh?? Logic is the discipline that studies how the laws of language are used to analyze arguments. Logic, and particularly deductive logic, is only peripherally concerned with whether or not a proposition is true or not. Its primary concern is whether or not such propositions, if we consider them to be true, are logically connected to the conclusion of the argument.

If a premise isn't true, we have any number of ways of ascertaining that (including pointing out empirical problems), but an argument can still be valid even if one premise isn't true or if the conclusion isn't true (the only caveat here is that no argument can be valid if both premises are false).

[_Coggins7]

Yeah, you don't understand what you're talking about at all. I'm not going to provide any evidence for it. You'll just have to take my word for it, because I am so much smarter than you are, you lowly intellectual ant.

Have I got that about right?

This is definitely DCP I'm talking to. It's got his stench of dumbass written all over it. The lying, deceitful sockpuppet using hell-bound dumbass...

Pretty funny. It's always entertaining to watch you masturbate all over the forums here, Danny boy, thinking you're actually arousing someone.

Schmo, any debate between you and DCP would be tantamount to dropping a ten megaton thermonuclear bomb on a small blob of grape jelly.

I like you Schmo...you're silly.

[_Bond...James Bond]

Schmo, any debate between you and DCP would be tantamount to dropping a ten megaton thermonuclear bomb on a small blob of grape jelly.

Now that's not very nice.....you know DCP rates at least as a jar of grape jelly ;)

[_Coggins7]

How daft you sound, Coggins7.

I suppose if you want to regard a sentiment as a belief, or even several beliefs in some degree of coherence or incoherence with each other, you may.

Reading comprehension problems of this kind do not bode well. What I said was that my love for my wife is a sentiment and a belief. It is a mental construct for which reasons can be adduced as well as an emotional feeling. I did not claim a sentiment was a belief.

It seems so clear; I wonder why that should seem confusing to you. You seem like a smart man who has played so many mind games on himself, consciously, semi-consciously, or unconsciously, for so long, that you no longer can think clearly about these things. And it all seems to start with the notion that the creator of the universe told you that a young, desperate, talented, and amibitious young chap never told any fibs, or whoppers, about his experiences. Fortunately for you, there are worse things than spending one's life believing in Mormonism. And who knows, at this point in your life, though of course Joseph Smith didn't tell the truth about his experiences, maybe you need his church.

I didn't snip this rambling diatribe just to show where Tal is really coming from. Much of his problem with the Church, despite his pretense of intellectuality, is primarily psychological in nature.

This isn't an implausible scenario. You yourself said on that other thread, that without Mormonism, all is meaningless.

Could you point me to the post in which I made that statement? I do believe I've said that without a teleologically grounded universe, all is meaningless, but where did I say that without Mormonism, all is meaningless?

I used to say the same thing, over and over, to myself and to others.

In which case you never understood Gospel doctrine very well, which means that while you were out there in the jungle kissing tree frogs, some of the rest of us were paying attention in Sunday School.

I was as incapable as you are now of imagining how that could not be true. And perhaps, you never will be able to imagine such a thing.

But why, praytell, should I sit around imagining that what I know perfectly well to be true isn't? And for your information, I have thought about what it would mean for the Gospel not to be true, and it isn't pretty. Indeed, its a ugly and dispiriting as Dawkin's world.

Perhaps you are the kind of person who could watch a videotape of Joseph Smith roasting and eating a child, looking up at the camera with human blood dripping from his mouth, saying, "I made it all up", and still think, "A prophet is only a prophet when he is speaking as such;

This is a new one. Even Decker hasn't topped this. I think I've actually now found a move Mercury can star in alongside PP and yourself. Its called "Mormon Cannibal Holocaust: 2020 A.D. I think I could get Tom Savini to do the effects work (I've got his autograph on a napkin, but I'm not sure that would make him my pal (and he was a real jerk too, so no matter)). A scene with Joseph roasting and eating a small child, while wearing his Jupiter talisman, with a large black wall hanging behind him sporting the Goat of Medes would be very effective, don't you think?


If you ever do decide to be intellectually serious and articulate, in a philosophically coherent manner, your problems with the Gospel, I'll be here.

[_A Light in the Darkness]

Yeah, you don't understand what you're talking about at all. I'm not going to provide any evidence for it. You'll just have to take my word for it, because I am so much smarter than you are, you lowly intellectual ant.

Have I got that about right?

No. The difference here is that I actually do know what I am talking about and am just unwilling to do all the legwork for you when you display little more than antipathy towards personal growth and interaction with LDS. If it helps, you can simply read wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentialism

"Many contemporary epistemologists reject the view that evidential support is the whole story about the justification of beliefs."

It's not always the most reliable source, but that's a little better than reading one or two books by Carl Sagan in your basement and thinking you're in a position to condescend and dismiss people as idiots for suggesting that no, maybe there is more to knowing truth than evidence and logic. And mind you, Tal's evidentialism, as expressed here, is a naïve form that doesn't attempt to address problems with it by adopting an expansive definition of what counts as "evidence." Hence why it is easy for me to ask you about preconditions to reasoning with experiences. If I was responding to a more sophisticated audience, I would acknowledge that one can rescue this claim, but only at the cost of folding more and more into our definition of evidence. At that point, we risk becoming trivial in our assertion like when someone intially asserts that only "natural" things can exist, but by the end has admitted virtually everything into the natural club. A provocative, precise claim becomes a dull, trivial one.

This is definitely DCP I'm talking to. It's got his stench of dumbass written all over it. The lying, deceitful sockpuppet using hell-bound dumbass...

First I was Ray Ago. Now I'm DCP.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKFYtUJFYVE

[_Coggins7]

First I was Ray Ago. Now I'm DCP.

I knew it! I knew just as Leslie Nielson knew that birthmark on Gorbachev's head would come of with a little elbow grease.

Now, with two defenders of the Gospel here who both take Month Python humor seriously, the critics had better, like Wyle E. Coyote, open that little umbrella and raise that little sign that says "help!"

[_Some Schmo]

Yeah, you don't understand what you're talking about at all. I'm not going to provide any evidence for it. You'll just have to take my word for it, because I am so much smarter than you are, you lowly intellectual ant.

Have I got that about right?

No. The difference here is that I actually do know what I am talking about and am just unwilling to do all the legwork for you when you display little more than antipathy towards personal growth and interaction with LDS.

LOL - "I actually do know what I am talking about..." Damn, you're funny.

Just because you say or think it doesn't make it so. There's nothing in wiki that says atheists and theists think alike on these matters. And in the same way you regard me, I don't care what you think.

Talk to me about personal growth once you take your head out of your ass long enough to acknowledge Joe Smith for the fraud he was. Until then, you're as mired as anyone in the muck of personal stagnation, and your words ring hollow.

LMAO... too funny.

This is definitely DCP I'm talking to. It's got his stench of dumbass written all over it. The lying, deceitful sockpuppet using hell-bound dumbass...

First I was Ray Ago. Now I'm DCP.

I never said you were Ray. I've thought you were DCP since you came here and stunk up the joint, and said so a long time ago (by the way, your "review" of DCP's book is a dead giveaway - and what's funny is I saw that after this most recent declaration. I just about fell out of my chair laughing at that one. I can only laugh at you to protect myself from falling into the seductive trap of pitying your sorry ass). Lucky for you, I think smelly farts are funny, if not disgusting.

[_marg]

Mercury: "if one believes that if 2+2=4 then god exists, how is that in itself a logical statement?"

LD: "It might be a false statement, it is unclear how it is illogical. What rule of logic is it violating?"

marg: "http://www.virtuescience.com/logicalfallacies.html take a look at fallacy of explanation, and fallacy of definition."

LD: "It looks like you found a random website somewhere on the internet willing to engage in the same flawed understanding. Congrats. Now do that with a major text on logic. I have Copi and Cohen's Introductory text on logic sitting right in front of me. It is widely considered to be the best book of its type. Nowhere does it discuss such a fallacy. Why do you think that might be?"

See : http://www.safarix.com/0131898345/ch05lev1sec4

This is from Copi's 12 th edition. I believe that is the last and latest edition. The Fallacy of explanation is a subset of the fallacy of defective induction.

I have a book called Fallacies, classical and contempory readings by H. Hansen and R. Pinto. This is from John Stuart Mill

p 91 "Fallacies of induction, where the fact upon which the induction proceeds are erroneous, may be termed Fallacies of Observation. The term is not strictly accurate, or rather not accurately coextensive with the class of fallacies which I propose to designate by it. Induction is not always grounded upon facts immediately observed, but sometimes upon facts inferred: and when these last are erroneous, the error is not, in the literal sense of the term, an instance of bad observation, but of bad inference. It will be convenient, however, to make only one class of all the inductions of which the error lies in not sufficiently ascertaining the facts on which the theory is grounded; whether the cause of failure be malobservation or simple non-observation, and whether the mal-observation be direct, or by means of intermediate marks which do not prove what they are supposed to prove. And in absence of comprehensive term to denote the ascertainment, by whatever means of the fact on which an induction is grounded, I will venture to retain for this class of fallacies, under the explanation already given, the title Fallacies of Observation."

So LD it is not the logician's task to do the actual observation but it is the logician's task to determine why a conclusion can not be relied upon as being true, it is the logician's task to determine where the error in reasoning lies.

In your example, you propose that based on the fact 2 + 2 = 4 we can assume God exists. That proposition commits a fallacy of induction or as copi says in the 12th edition "fallacy of defective induction". No entity God is established or observed based on the mathematical fact of 2 + 2 = 4 and that is why there is an error in the reasoning or a fallacy in the argument. The first premise is nonsense and any conclusion or any other premises which follow or inferred from it can not be relied upon.

Fallacies are associated with both deductive logic as well as inductive.