501. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276857 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 4:11 pm

Oh one more thing

Steve

The point is that two different initial formalisms were selected because they both fitted the data. They would not have been rejected if they had not been shown to be highly related.

Of course, but whatever theory it would still be mathematical and the theorems of Hilbert space (the abstract version of both Heisenberg and Schrodingers' formulations) would still be true, and they have to be or mathematics wouldn't be consistent.

So QM obeys mathematical laws and these allows us to make predictions about a world we have no other means to understand, whichever way you cut it. "Mathematics is the language of nature", I think they were Feynman's words. :)

502. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276856 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 4:06 pm

Mitchell

Why must math be intrinsic to the world before it can do this?

To be precise perhaps I should say mathmatics is a representation of something intrinsic to the world.

We can only deal with representations because they are the only "window" through which we can access Reality (with the big "R") So everything is representation: wave, particles, fields, space and time, energy, mass, Lagrangians, numbers.. I think they are all equally "real" or "unreal" at the fundamental level, the outer reach of physics.

Really must go. :)

503. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276850 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:59 pm

Well better go. I am procrastinating again. It is all yours Mitchell. :)

504. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276848 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:58 pm

Steve

No. Particles are modelled, not models.

Really? I find that rather astonishing coming from someone who knows the wave particle duality and the two slit experiment by heart. :)

505. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276845 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:52 pm

Steve

Steve

No, they are not the same formalism. If they were the same formalist, there would have been no need to prove that they were isomorphic.

Isomorphism basically means "the same" up to a labeling of terms. The differences between Heisenberg's and Schrodinger's approaches are mathematically trivial, it amounts to writing your matrices differently by choosing different sets of basis.

They are the same mathematical theory.

Don't be obtuse about that. Ask someone else if you don't believe me.

Sorry, but I am just not going to accept your Platonic view of mathematics.

Well you are free to hang on to your metaphysical commitment/prejudice, but I have no problem that mathematics are intrinsic to the world. I am not allergic to "Platonism".

But I wouldn't call that "dualism" though because it seems that the "abstract" and "material" are abstract categories, it is possible that there is no cut and dry boundary between them. These categories are probably rather fuzzy at the most fundamental level.

506. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276827 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:41 pm

Steve

We model particles as vibration modes of fields. We model fields as mathematical entities.

Particles are also models, no more or less than fields. Fields ARE mathematical entities.

507. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276820 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:38 pm

Steve

Just compare Heiseberg's and Schrodinger's quite different approaches to QM.

Great example.

In 1926 Dirac proved that the two approaches are isomorphic. That means they are different ways of saying the same thing mathematically and there is an exact correspondence. In the language of linear algebra Schrodinger just used a particular basis.

There you go. They started off with completely different physical premises but arrived at the same mathematics.

508. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276811 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:31 pm

Nonsense. Or are we back to talking about "numberon" particles that influence reality?

Particles are vibration modes of fields, fields are mathematical entities. So what is so "real" about your "reality"?

509. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276805 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:27 pm

Steve

By the way, mathematics doesn't mean particular mathematical theory. But mathematical "laws".

Whether you use Hilbert space or some other mathematical formalism for QM, the theorems for Hibert space theory still hold and it is essential that they do no matter what piece of mathematics you use to describe a particular piece of physics. There is a unity in mathematics.

It is not like you choose from an independent set of mathematical formalism to see which one fits. There is no degree of freedom, you have to accept all or none.

510. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276795 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:19 pm

I believe that there are real things, but that our descriptions, our theories, are not entities in themselves - they aren't real

But our descriptions are the only "reality" we can access. We are yoked to our representations.

Numbers and Lagrangians are no more or less "real" than electromagnetic fields and space-time.

511. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276792 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:16 pm

The mathematics is not "arbitrary", but we need remarkably little to get things going and get remarkably far from it.

512. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276788 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:13 pm

We don't sit down and come up with arbitrary mathematical models and then decide to test if they fit reality.

Testing is merely a procedure to confirm that we get it right. But QM is right even before you do the test,--in a broad enough range of situations that we haven't anticipated,-- that it being right doesn't depend on the test, we created the formalism based on limited data before the tests.

513. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276784 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:10 pm

Steve

I could not disagree more strongly. I think it is philosophical discourse that shows constructs like dualism melt into nothing.

"Material" and "non material" are mental constructions whose boundaries appear to change according to our evolving scientific knowledge. Are fields "material" or just mathematical fictions that work well?

I really find this kind of debate rather pointless. Eventually it boils down to nothing but semantics.

514. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276777 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 3:07 pm

Steve

It is more like that there are an endless number of mathematical stories. We simply pick the ones that conform to our experience of reality

It would be like what you say if you choose the mathematical description retroactively. But often time it is the other way around. Starting with QM, it is as if we are led by the mathematical formalism, not the other way around.

515. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276765 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 2:58 pm

I don't think we can talk about "utimate" reality in any meaningful way, we can only talk about representations which are peculiar to us, which appear to correspond to Reality in some way.

That's why I am skeptical of the value of philosophical discourse on topics such as dualism, materialism etc. They sound like just cleverly constructed collages of words build on air. On closer examinations,they melt into nothing.

The reason that I am an atheist are actually quite simple.

1)All of the specific Gods that have been put forward are clearly creations by not very imaginative men. These Gods are too parochial and appear to be very much like their creators,--not very imaginative and have rather bad personality traits. Their properties and deeds, to the extent that they are specific enough to be tested, all turn to be in conflict with data.

2)There are non specific Gods such as the God for the first cause, the fine tuner God, the designer God etc. They appear to be poor hypotheses,--no, they are not even hypotheses, they are mere names to stand in for our ignorance or something we find puzzling. These "Gods" are just space fillers, like "x" for the unknown in an equation, which has not been solved, or has not even been shown to have a solution.

So, no existence claims, let alone existence proofs, are genuinely proposed for this category of "Gods". They have no attributes other than the gap they are supposed to fill.

516. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276741 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 2:32 pm

"material" is also a conceptual construct.

517. Palin: average isn't good enough

Comment #276733 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 2:13 pm

Scary stuff. I wish I could post this on Holloween.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK6Rtkozexs&eurl=http://scootmandubious.blogspot.com/2008/11/anti-obama-ad-networks-will-not-run.html

518. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276726 by Bonzai on November 2, 2008 at 1:54 pm

Brian

I thought you're supposed to be preparing for your pyschology exam. :)

I am going to be busy for the next while, so I can't respond to all the posts at the moment.

However I want to make one point.

Laurie and Steve(?) seem to be saying that only things that have spatio-temporal existence are "real".

But what is spacetime? I admit that I haven't thought it through yet, but it seems that a case can be made that spacetime itself is a conceptual construct which happens to capture some aspects of the Reality (with big R) "out there", in that we can make a consistent mental picture and make predictions with it. So it is no more and less "real" than numbers.

Is electromagnetic field "real", or is it just a mathematical fiction to account for "action at a distance" that works like a book keeping device?

You observe charge particles pulling and pushing each other. You can obtain the values for quantities such as momentum, angular momentum and energy by measuring the motions of the particles. It is fairly concrete. If you tally the momenta, energy and angular momenta you discover that they don't conserve at all time, they disappear and appear in some crazy ways.

Now it happens that if you want to restore conservation, you can assign the "missing" momenta and energy to the "field". So instead of saying that these quantities don't conserve, we say they are stored temporarily in the field. The energy and momenta can be "withdrawn" from the field in the end as quantities associated with the motions of the particles which you can once again observe "directly". Everything works out.

In field theory, it turns out that we can work with the fields directly and treat particles as secondary entities, arising from the vibrations of the fields.

Now are fields "real"? Or are they just mathematical fictions? Philosophers may want to debate about that but I don't find that a very interesting question.

What is interesting and remarkable is that what started off as a mathematical fiction actually works and we can create a consistent description for interactions between charged particles(which are what we actually obeserve!)and make very accurate predictions from it. There is no a priori reason why this would work! Whatever their "true" ontological status are, fields are "real enough" for all useful purposes. They have to correspond to some deep structures in Reality in some way even though we may never know the nature of that correspondence.

Edited for grammatical and spelling errors.

519. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276504 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 9:22 pm

Steve

Sometimes it doesn't work well at all. Just look at how hard it is for us to understand chaotic system

It is not that there is no law. We can say quite a bit about complex systems. Just that they are not tractable. (But even then there are remarkable properties like the shadowing theorem, which says that even chaotic systems have a "non chaotic core" about which we can say quite a bit)

Sorry, can't continue anymore as my battery is about to die.

520. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276501 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 9:19 pm

Steve

I think things are even simpler than that. The supposed "laws of physics" are basically what you get if nothing much at all happens to very little. All you need to specify is that reality looks the same through space, time, rotation, acceleration, and a few other things, and you get Newton's laws, relativity and just about all the forces of nature.

They may be "simple", but it doesn't make them less remarkable. Utlimately the universe may be "simple" in a sense.

521. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276483 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 8:56 pm

Opps sorry for double posting. #470 didn't show up earlier.

522. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276482 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 8:53 pm

Laurie

In my opinion, those "laws" are indeed constructs of our minds, and any other minds capable of imagining them. In the real world, there are masses, energy, etc, and these things have quantities. Those quantities interact with each other in ways that correlate beautifully with the mathematical models that we construct.

But why is there such a correlation?

QM mechanics, for example, is entirely mathematical. In the quantum level we have no physical picture or intuition to go by. It is all mathematics.

Why does it work so well? There is no evolutionary reason why the mathematics and logic we develop in our environment should apply in such a spectacularly sucessful way in a world so remote from our ordinary existence, and we have no physical picture at all!

It seems that there are laws of physics "out there" independent of us, and we may only capture a fragment of it. Moreover these laws are mathematical. Our system of representation certainly depends on our species, but there is something more than our map, there is a landscape out there.

523. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276477 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 8:43 pm

How does the chemical pattern in our brain give rise to a mathematical formalism called quantum mechanics which can be tested to remarkable accuracies in scenarios where we had not thought of before, and have no idea what they mean?

There seems to be laws and they are mathematical.

What is the evolutionary reason for faculties to figure things out in an atomic scale and smaller? It wouldn't make sense if there is no underlying reality of the laws of physics "out there". There has to be some kind of unity.

524. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276465 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 8:28 pm

I think that they are patterns in our brains that describe real physical patterns and phenomenological happenings.

The representation is ours, but I think it corresponds to real pattern in the world, some kind of "logic", or logos. The relationship is a bit like a map and a landscape. I don't know.

Can I keep on calling you Mitchell?

525. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276457 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 8:20 pm

Laurie

There may be no "proofon", but what are the laws of physics? I don't know what ontological status we should assign to them, but I would find it very unsatisfactory to say that they are just patterns in our brains.

526. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276454 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 8:17 pm

Why did you change your user name?

527. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276440 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 8:08 pm

Steve

I think you are talking about nonstandard analysis. If I am not mistaken the hyperreals only offer a better way for visualization according to proponents(they were invented to put Newton's "infinitesimals" on a firm logical footing)However, all theorems that can be proven non standardly have standard proofs.

But here infinities provide the explanation for the patterns of finite integers, which can be tested (in the finire version)

I don't think they are the same phenomenon

528. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276436 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 8:00 pm

For a while I thought Worset is Mitchell.

529. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276431 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 7:52 pm

Steve

You take it rather literally. Loosen your imagination a little bit.:)

Now you test an arithmetical relationship on your computer. You input a large number of integers and see if the relationship holds. You can try 100, 1000, or 1000 billions inputs provided you have a powerful enough machine.

Why would the relationship of the theorem always hold? There is none if you look at the experiments as just isolated runs.

However, there is an abstract explanation,--the proof,-- for the consistency. Moreover, in this case the abstract reason involves infinities in an essential way.

I find that remarkable.

I don't feel I need to react knee jerkly to genuine freakiness just because there might be a chance that religious people may seiz on it for their propaganda, or there might be some implications against some cherised ontological dogmas.

530. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276405 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 7:33 pm

Brian

I don't know about any "ism". But I find that pretty cool.

531. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276403 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 7:29 pm

Mathematics is the basically the study of "abstract" patterns. These patterns may be universal in that some of the key characteristic may be found in the real world.

Fermat's last theorem says that there is no integer solution (other than x = y = z = 0) for the equation x^n plus y^n = z^n for n > 2. So you have a proof that says it is true that for any n >2 and any integres x, y, z not all zero, the equation x^n plus y^n = z^n would not hold.

Now you can do "experimental checks" for that. Simply check a large number of triplets x, y, z and a range of n > 2 on a computer and see that the equations don't hold. You can get a more powerful computer and check more inputs, and still the equations won't hold.

So absract patterns manifest in a rather "real world" way.

For ordinary integers (counting numbers) at least their meaning is sort of clear if we are content to be naive about it. But how about infinity? In set theory there is a hierarchy of infinities, they don't seem to represent anything in the real world. Their "size" are measured on a scale called transfinite numbers.

Now here is something more freaky.

There is a theorem in arithmetic called "Goodstein theorem". It can be "checked" with computers as described above. You input any finite set of integres and the theorem always checks out. Maybe you can use the relation to make gadgets.So this is fairly concrete.

However, to prove it one has to go into transfinite numbers. Moreover, it can be shown that there is no way to prove it without making a detour to the infinities.

So, somehow infinity, which is non physical, finds a way into the physical world and influences the output of your computer!

532. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276373 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 6:58 pm

Steve

So you are happy for scientific theories to be expressed in loose and ambiguous language

It needs to be sufficently clear, but that has nothing to do with formalization. Clear definitions would do.

I don't know about biologists, but I don't know of any physicist who thinks in terms of "words",-- probably not even mathematics. The words are just pointers to a vast substrate of meaning constructed by experiemental facts, observations and mathematical equations. So the chance that a physcist would get the wrong idea about "big bang" because he can't say how big is big would be, well, slim.

No. What he showed is that all of mathematics can't be captured by any given formal system

No, you don't need to do all of mathematics. Anything 'non trivial' such as arithmetic will do.

533. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276361 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 6:48 pm

Steve

And that they don't can lead to problems

You are talking about clarity of language, that has nothing to do with formalization and formal theories.

534. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276358 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 6:46 pm

Brian

It would be very cool in one way if everything could be reduced to logical statements, mathematical formulas, etc. Then again it would be very boring......

Even arithmetic cannot be captured by a formal system. Godel showed that.

535. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276355 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 6:44 pm

Steve

Says me.

Then you're wrong.

536. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276352 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 6:40 pm

Steve

And that is precisely the kind of statement that can be expressed formally and checked for consistency.

It is always "consistent" because you have more parameters than equations. So that is exactly not the point. The point is whether you can find a large enough number of settings for Newton's scheme(program) to work, that cannot be settled by formal logic.

This example also illustrates the poverty of formal logic.

To the extent that you need to check consistency,--as in something like string theory,-- you do the math. Otherwise simple word arguments would do,--as in something like biology. I cannot envision any real situation where you actually need to transcribe a scientific theory into a formal system to show consistency, and when you do that, you are dealing with a caricature anyway because the real scientists don't do their work using the symbolic renditions that philosophers invent.

537. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276339 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 6:30 pm

Steve

If you can't express a theory in a way that cannot be formally captured, you aren't doing it righ

Says who?

I would want to see how you can reduce "evolution by natural selection" into a first order formal theory of axioms, definitions and proofs.

You can't even do that with number theory(e.g)after Godel.

538. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276328 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 6:20 pm

Steve

am not sure what Bonzai means by a theory being a program anyway - theories are statements of relationships, not program

Take Newton's second law. The statement says F = ma. Out of the three quantities, two are defined by the formula itself (F and m). So what does it mean, is it circular?

As a stand alone statement it probably is. But that is not how physicists see it.

What it says, is roughly, put a particle in an enviornment we can always find a function F of the particle's position, possibly velocity and time so that the equation holds. The form of F depends on the environment. The constant m is a property of the particle and doesn't change wherever you put it.

So when you see a planet executing some strange motion, you observe a and try to infer the force by finding some function that would fit the equation. It becomes a "law" because for a broad range of settings (where Newtonian mechanics hold "well enough") you can always find F and m so that the prescription "works".

This is not just a statement or a relationship among statements. It is a lot more open ended than the closed scheme you seem to imply.

539. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276322 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 6:11 pm

By a "program", I mean it as in "research program" and some such. Not a computer program.

540. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276320 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 6:09 pm

Steve

A major part of formal analysis is to do with the representation of programs

Yes, a caricature of the program which often misses the main point. A bit like trying to subject Shakespeare's work to typographical analysis IMO.

I can be wrong, but I am not aware of any enhancement of our understanding of any scientific theory stemming from such an approach.

541. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276311 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 5:51 pm

Brian

Decius, it may be because I don't understand the power of formal logic. Or it may be that I think formal systems, while potentially being inerrant, may not be conceptually perfect or applicable in an imperfect human mind. Or it may be that formal logic is just a product of the imperfect human mind

The problem is that a scientific theory cannot be captured by a formal theory. It is neither finitenistic nor static. A scientific theory is a program.

The formal statements are often just short hand summaries for facts and information which fit together as a whole, sometimes more loosely, sometimes more tightly.

Mphil has linked to some site which claims to find some "anamolies" in Newtonian mechanics. It turns out to be just semantic nitpicking stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of Newton's laws.(IIRC it takes Newton's second law as a single formal statement rather than a 'program', as most physcists would) It may be impressive for philosophers of science but I assure you that no physicist would care. I don't expect that kind of approach would lead to any interesting science anytime soon.

542. Surprise: Scientists for Obama

Comment #276297 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 5:25 pm

SilentMike

Obama. but Mccain choosing that bimbo Jesus-freak for VP was the thing that made his candidacy a joke in my eyes

Agreed. That should be the deal breaker for any intelligent voter.

As the race unfolds, McCain took the campaign to the gutter. Instead of talking about policies his camp is pumping out character assassination, smear and fear such as Obama's alleged Ayer connection and the boogeyman of "socialism".

I can't see how an intelligent person can still support McCain at this point. Before the election campaign I thought McCain was a more enlightened Republican, but he has tarnished his own legacy with this very dirty and vicious campiagn. Shame, and rather sad.

543. Surprise: Scientists for Obama

Comment #276285 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 4:59 pm

Maybe they think the Nobel Prize is something you win from some game show.

544. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276283 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 4:52 pm

Steve

MPhil knows far more about what science is than I do.

Well on second thought that was uncalled for. I have edited my post.

545. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276276 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 4:36 pm

decius

Mathematics does provide a useful constraint to what is possible. It may not tell you which cosmology is the "real one", but with some added constraints it can narrow things down quite a bit.

Also, while mathematics alone is not enough to establish physical truths. All physical theories are mathematical. Physics has a certain "logical necessity" to it (modulo the choice of some 'initial' and 'boundary conditions' and some parameters.)

So you are right that empirical evidence is a deciding factor in accepting and rejecting a theory (there are grey areas but I won't get into that). Physics has a much tighter mathematical structure than say, biology. In another extreme we have the social sciences everything is just statistcial correlation,-- there is no "logical necessity".

So what does it mean when you discover mathematical inconsistencies? This may not mean the theory is just wrong, it may be a hint that some deeper physical understanding is needed. Take the problem of renormalization. High energy physicists do crazy things to cancel "infinties" that would make the mathematicians cringe. Any first year calculus student who tries to do calculations in a similar way would be garanteed a big fat zero in exams. Yet renormalization works! That indicates there is more to the physics than captured by the mathematical model and further work is needed to uncover this "hidden" structure.

Another example is Landau's theory of phase transition. Physicists for a long time has taken for granted that all reasonable physical quantities can be expanded as power series,--another thing that all first year math students are warned against. Careless expansion of thermal dynamical quantities as Taylor series leads to divergence around phase transition. Detail investigation of these divergent series led Landau to a theory of phase transition.

So physics doesn't reduce to mathematics, and mathematics doesn't reduce to formal logic. It is my opinion that the interactions of these fields are much more textured, subtle and rich than one can appreciate from the standpoint that scientific theories can be captured as rigid formal systems of propositions. I have argued a while back that Mphil doesn't convey an accurate picture of science, he only presents a logical caricature.

546. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276259 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 4:11 pm

Steve

. What concerns me is the way that the conclusions are interpreted. For example, the conclusion that the theory of evolution as we understand it can't produce reliable beliefs does not lead to the presence of a designer.

This is obvious. It would be clearly revealed if you insist the person who makes such an argument to produce all the missing steps.

I don't find that sophisticated at all.

547. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276235 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 3:53 pm

Mphil

I do get your point that sometimes the formalities - the math - doesn't lead us to true conclusions. But we have to accept that it does AS LONG AS WE ACCEPT that a specific mathematics is applicable to the situation.

From this, it follows logically that AS LONG AS WE ACCEPT the coherence and soundess of formal logic, set theory and mathematics in general, AND AS LONG AS WE ACCEPT THE ADDITIONAL PREMISES (the premises of the actual argument) we have to accept the conclusions of any formal proof.

I have yet to see any 'philosphical' argument that resembles a 'formal proof' in this kind of debate.

In arguments carried out in natural language, words have multiple meanings and subtle connotations depending on the context. They serve to varying degree as triggers. What sounds convincing or plausible is often the result of ambiguities of words which serve mainly to evoke ill defined mental associations, rather than to convey concrete meanings. Examples are "design", "designer", "supernatural", "create", "intelligent", "truth" and so on. On closer examinations, the invocation of such words invariably turns out to be a rhetorical smokescreen.

I have seen enough of such verbal gymnastic to be interested anymore, let alone impressed.

On the other, hand, you can try to write a formal proof. But to do so you need to give mathematical like definitions for all the words you use along with the axioms--with narrowly defined and concrete interpretations. Furthermore, all intermidiate steps in the chain would have to be established as lemmas or theorems.Someone might have attempted it, but I have not seen it.(I don't insist you cast your proof in symbolic logic because no one would be able to read several hundred pages of gibberish written in the formalism and symbols of first order logic)

Finally, I don't see how 'set theory' may come into play.

548. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276211 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 3:16 pm

Steve

Sometimes it can be, if a belief is as a result of an instinct that has been produced by evolution.

Yes, the point is that evolution does not directly produce "truth beliefs". It has to go through some intermediate mechanism, such as instinct, or ability to abstract reasoning, to produce "truth ideas". These intermediate features that enable us to discover truth, whether intentionally or by "instinct" are useful traits.

549. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276197 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 2:46 pm

Steve

For example, Plantinga puts forward an argument that naturalistic evolution is very unlikely to produce true beliefs, but we have true beliefs, therefore there is a designer.

That is simply bullshit and should be laughed off.

The way to counter this kind of bullshit is to kick the ball back to his court and ask him to define "true beliefs" and demonstrate how it is more likely for a designer to instill true beliefs (which I don't think are "instilled", see below) than natural selection. In doing so he would have to give us some description of his "designer" and he would be tripped over in his own word game.

As far as the rule of engagement, I say always stick to the attack mode, avoid being led around by their off tagent songs and dances.

Now to dissect the argument in more detail (which is not necessary if we just want to win debates)

Utility belongs to a different category as "truth". We can talk about traits which are useful that are neither true or false. Your ability to run is useful, but it is not an assertion about the world, so it has no truth value.

"True beliefs", is a loaded word which presumes quite a bit about how we know.

It may be hard for a theist to wrap this around his head, but it is not "belief" that leads to truth. We discover truth as a result of examining evidence, trials and errors and so on. It is not "naturalistic evolution" that produces "true beliefs" which stick in our heads like an appendage, rather, natural evolution endows us with the ability to find out about truth(in the tentative sense of science

While an idea doesn't have to be true to be useful, however, very often it is useful and even necessary to know the true state of the world for survival. It is therefore useful to have the ability to discover truth (in the tentative sense of science)

550. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #276180 by Bonzai on November 1, 2008 at 2:13 pm

TGP

Great parlour game,
A load of bullshit merchants in the dessert make up a crock of inconsitent shite and we have to get a philosophy phd to call their bluff.
?

Rigt on the money. Truer words have never been spoken!

Steve

What I am saying is that their arguments are never really arguments for God. Even arguments for a necessary being that was some kind of first cause don't get you to God. The first cause could be could be a vague "causal principle".

My feeling is that we give them too much credit.

I have been saying that all along. What appears to be "sophisticated" philosophical arguments from these jokers are basically the the same vicuous bullocks dressed up in a smokescreen of arcane words and tortured paragraphs of philobables. If an otherwise intelligent atheist get tripped in a "debate" with such people, it is because he is unwittingly drawn into playing their game (For example, that's why Atkin seemed confused in the debate with WLC which you referred to before)