they can't answer why it is the case and how they know that without being ad hoc or circular.
But nothing can be self-evident and everything needs to be justified.
But then you can't have any knowledge. There has to be a starting point which isn't properly justified. We already have these starting points within our minds so we may as well just be explicit about them instead of pretend everything we think has some justification. Your starting point is that it's OK for you to kill babies? Great, but we're going to judge you according to our standards, not yours.
Maybe the creator is the evil demiurg of the Gnostics? Maybe ...
You think these are good explanations for the way things are? No, of course not. The fact people can come up with dumb theories doesn't tell us that we can't work anything out for ourselves. You still do work stuff out for yourself, which is how you arrived at your views. You're no different from everyone else trying to figure stuff out and judging other people's views to be wrong. You think Orthodox Christianity makes the most sense of things - cool but lots of people judge you to be wrong. You think the Christian Bible is God's explicit revelation - cool but lots of people think it's some other collection of books. Nature is the only thing that everyone who believes in a creator can agree is the work of the creator. So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims?
But then you can't have any knowledge. There has to be a starting point which isn't properly justified. We already have these starting points within our minds so we may as well just be explicit about them instead of pretend everything we think has some justification.
In epistemology, that would be assuming the classic foundationalist position. There are two other possible options - infinite regression and coherentism. I reject foundationalism because it's ad hoc. Foundationalism (like Descartes' famous cogito) got nuked during the Enlightenment by skeptics like Hume and later Kant and became an untannable position. If being ad hoc is allowed, then all argumentation and philosophical discourse about truth, existence and the good becomes impossible.
Your starting point is that it's OK for you to kill babies? Great, but we're going to judge you according to our standards, not yours.
That's an appeal to irrelevancy and an appeal to authority/majority. Nothing about this has to do with the position being true or not.
You still do work stuff out for yourself, which is how you arrived at your views. You're no different from everyone else trying to figure stuff out and judging other people's views to be wrong.
Sure, how we arrive to knowledge depends on our worldview but worldviews aren't equal. I already demonstrated how the materialist worldview can't justify it's basic principles and assumptions. The point is that the laws of logic and thought are objective. Just because I'm the one making the claim or the argument doesn't make it a subjective claim. If I can demonstrate that competing worldviews are incoherent, unjustified and lack explanatory power, while making the case that my worldview is coherent and grounds the things we all appeal to (reason, logic, meaning, purpose, free will, universals, etc), then my worldview is true.
You think these are good explanations for the way things are? No, of course not. The fact people can come up with dumb theories doesn't tell us that we can't work anything out for ourselves.
They may be dumb, but you still have to demonstrate why they're false. That something seems dumb or unlikely to you is not an argument about it being true or not. Atheists think all religious claims are equally dumb and made up. So what?
Nature is the only thing that everyone who believes in a creator can agree is the work of the creator. So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims? So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims?
Saying we all believe in nature therefore belief in nature is the common ground doesn't work. Nature to a Christian is an entirely different concept than what nature means to a materialist, new age gnostic or a Buddhist. This is a word-concept fallacy - just because the same word is used (like God, creator, nature, etc) it doesn't follow that it points to the same idea. Nature itself is a metaphysical concept. How you interpret nature depends on things that are not found in nature itself - this ties back to what Hume is/ought problem and Thomas Kuhn's ideas about paradigms and theory-ladenness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness).
This is why broad generic theism (like perennialism, theosophy and freemasonry) doesn't work in making a coherent worldview because it's riddled with incompatible core beliefs. There's no "lowest common denominator God".
Except you keep appealing to it and saying everything needs to be justified.
That's an appeal to irrelevancy and an appeal to authority/majority.
The majority have consciences that function according to God's principles, that is my point.
If I can demonstrate that competing worldviews are incoherent, unjustified and lack explanatory power, while making the case that my worldview is coherent and grounds the things we all appeal to (reason, logic, meaning, purpose, free will, universals, etc), then my worldview is true.
So as I said you're no different to everyone else who has to argue for their views and argue against others. You didn't mention the Bible as part of this process because it doesn't prove anything unless one already accepts its veracity. On the other hand if one believes in a creator then nature is already accepted to be from the creator and then one either has to accept the wisdom of nature or provide reasons for why they reject it. Christians reject it because they have a story of how nature became corrupted, but they have no evidence for this story so it amounts to an unjustified rejection.
Nature to a Christian is an entirely different concept than what nature means to a materialist, new age gnostic or a Buddhist. This is a word-concept fallacy - just because the same word is used (like God, creator, nature, etc) it doesn't follow that it points to the same idea.
But I never argued that nature means the same thing to all these people. My argument is that the natural world or universe (planets, plants, animals and so on) was made by the creator, and almost everyone believed that before philosophy sought absolute proof of everything and found God (along with everything else) can't be absolutely proven. Therefore we can learn about God through the natural world, which came from God, rather than anything else of which we have no good evidence God is the proximate cause. Yes there are different ways of extracting knowledge from nature which lead to bad and contradictory conclusions, but this doesn't invalidate my claim and that some ways are better than others.
I got tired of the back and forth and my response would be repeating myself.
I also think the last point he makes is a good refutation of his position and a good place to leave the conversation. Paintings depict things in a way that is comprehensible even to babies who have no linguistic or other knowledge. Many depict humans so would obviously tell aliens quite a bit about humans. And nature is much more vast than all the paintings ever made.
Except you keep appealing to it and saying everything needs to be justified.
I just told you there are two more resolutions to the epistemological problem (Münchhausen trilemma). I go the coherentism route where the whole system itself serves as justification. That's why my argument is at the worldview level. Ultimately it's TAG - demonstrating that the Triune God is the necessary precondition for metaphysics, logic, ethics and epistemology which is the basis of every possible worldview.
The majority have consciences that function according to God's principles, that is my point.
That's begging the question. You have to justify this belief (i.e. where do you get it from)? The point is ultimately you have to appeal to divine revelation to justify it.
So as I said you're no different to everyone else who has to argue for their views and argue against others. You didn't mention the Bible as part of this process because it doesn't prove anything unless one already accepts its veracity.
Exactly. This is a philosophical argument, not a theological one. Asserting your worldview is true is meaningless so that can't be the starting point. The starting point are those things that both sides assume by necessity and by virtue of debating (logic, knowledge, truth, etc.)
On the other hand if one believes in a creator then nature is already accepted to be from the creator and then one either has to accept the wisdom of nature or provide reasons for why they reject it.
The problem is you have to justify those assertions. Christians have direct knowledge of the Creator and His wisdom because He has revealed Himself. So divine revelation serves as justification. The creation itself can't reveal anything on it's own because it's subject to interpretation. When looking at nature you see a wise Creator but a materialist sees seemingly purposeless matter governed by laws of physics and cause and effect that has led to all this.
Christians reject it because they have a story of how nature became corrupted, but they have no evidence for this story so it amounts to an unjustified rejection.
The evidence for the Bible story is the Christian worldview itself - it's ability to justify metaphysics, epistemology, logic and ethics.
But I never argued that nature means the same thing to all these people. My argument is that the natural world or universe (planets, plants, animals and so on) was made by the creator, and almost everyone believed that before philosophy sought absolute proof of everything and found God (along with everything else) can't be absolutely proven. Therefore we can learn about God through the natural world, which came from God, rather than anything else of which we have no good evidence God is the proximate cause. Yes there are different ways of extracting knowledge from nature which lead to bad and contradictory conclusions, but this doesn't invalidate my claim and that some ways are better than others.
Many people believing somthing is an appeal to majority and it doesn't tell us if that something is true. Again, there's no such a thing as generic common denominator God - if such an entity exists it has to have certain properties that define it. Is it personal (a he, she, they/them) or unpersonal force or realm like Plato's monad. Is he/it uncreated or created (part of the creation). Did he create the world ex nihilo or out of prima materia (meaning matter preceded it/him). Is he the sole creator or are there others like him/them? Does he have providence and participation in the creation, or is the creation a wound-up mechanism that is left on its own device as deists believe? Is he moral or amoral? Did he create everything out of necessity or out of his own free will (assuming he has it)? Etc...
I'll close with this thought experiment:
Imagine you're a disembodied psychic alien coming from another realm, who's never heard of humans. You see a painting without prior knowledge of what paintings are or where they come from.
How would you come to the conclusion that paintings are produced by humans and what can the painting itself tell you about what a human is like?
Now swap the painting with the creation and the human with the creator.
But then you can't have any knowledge. There has to be a starting point which isn't properly justified. We already have these starting points within our minds so we may as well just be explicit about them instead of pretend everything we think has some justification. Your starting point is that it's OK for you to kill babies? Great, but we're going to judge you according to our standards, not yours.
You think these are good explanations for the way things are? No, of course not. The fact people can come up with dumb theories doesn't tell us that we can't work anything out for ourselves. You still do work stuff out for yourself, which is how you arrived at your views. You're no different from everyone else trying to figure stuff out and judging other people's views to be wrong. You think Orthodox Christianity makes the most sense of things - cool but lots of people judge you to be wrong. You think the Christian Bible is God's explicit revelation - cool but lots of people think it's some other collection of books. Nature is the only thing that everyone who believes in a creator can agree is the work of the creator. So are we going to judge things by nature that we know is from the creator or are we going to judge things - including nature - by something which claims to be from the creator but cannot definitively prove it and doesn't live up to its claims?
In epistemology, that would be assuming the classic foundationalist position. There are two other possible options - infinite regression and coherentism. I reject foundationalism because it's ad hoc. Foundationalism (like Descartes' famous cogito) got nuked during the Enlightenment by skeptics like Hume and later Kant and became an untannable position. If being ad hoc is allowed, then all argumentation and philosophical discourse about truth, existence and the good becomes impossible.
That's an appeal to irrelevancy and an appeal to authority/majority. Nothing about this has to do with the position being true or not.
Sure, how we arrive to knowledge depends on our worldview but worldviews aren't equal. I already demonstrated how the materialist worldview can't justify it's basic principles and assumptions. The point is that the laws of logic and thought are objective. Just because I'm the one making the claim or the argument doesn't make it a subjective claim. If I can demonstrate that competing worldviews are incoherent, unjustified and lack explanatory power, while making the case that my worldview is coherent and grounds the things we all appeal to (reason, logic, meaning, purpose, free will, universals, etc), then my worldview is true.
They may be dumb, but you still have to demonstrate why they're false. That something seems dumb or unlikely to you is not an argument about it being true or not. Atheists think all religious claims are equally dumb and made up. So what?
Saying we all believe in nature therefore belief in nature is the common ground doesn't work. Nature to a Christian is an entirely different concept than what nature means to a materialist, new age gnostic or a Buddhist. This is a word-concept fallacy - just because the same word is used (like God, creator, nature, etc) it doesn't follow that it points to the same idea. Nature itself is a metaphysical concept. How you interpret nature depends on things that are not found in nature itself - this ties back to what Hume is/ought problem and Thomas Kuhn's ideas about paradigms and theory-ladenness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness).
This is why broad generic theism (like perennialism, theosophy and freemasonry) doesn't work in making a coherent worldview because it's riddled with incompatible core beliefs. There's no "lowest common denominator God".
Except you keep appealing to it and saying everything needs to be justified.
The majority have consciences that function according to God's principles, that is my point.
So as I said you're no different to everyone else who has to argue for their views and argue against others. You didn't mention the Bible as part of this process because it doesn't prove anything unless one already accepts its veracity. On the other hand if one believes in a creator then nature is already accepted to be from the creator and then one either has to accept the wisdom of nature or provide reasons for why they reject it. Christians reject it because they have a story of how nature became corrupted, but they have no evidence for this story so it amounts to an unjustified rejection.
But I never argued that nature means the same thing to all these people. My argument is that the natural world or universe (planets, plants, animals and so on) was made by the creator, and almost everyone believed that before philosophy sought absolute proof of everything and found God (along with everything else) can't be absolutely proven. Therefore we can learn about God through the natural world, which came from God, rather than anything else of which we have no good evidence God is the proximate cause. Yes there are different ways of extracting knowledge from nature which lead to bad and contradictory conclusions, but this doesn't invalidate my claim and that some ways are better than others.
You forgot to reply to SmithW's latest comment (view all comments, then view this thread again).
Why? Explain please? Did you get overwhelmed in notification pings? Are you working on rebuttals What? Why?
I got tired of the back and forth and my response would be repeating myself.
I also think the last point he makes is a good refutation of his position and a good place to leave the conversation. Paintings depict things in a way that is comprehensible even to babies who have no linguistic or other knowledge. Many depict humans so would obviously tell aliens quite a bit about humans. And nature is much more vast than all the paintings ever made.
I just told you there are two more resolutions to the epistemological problem (Münchhausen trilemma). I go the coherentism route where the whole system itself serves as justification. That's why my argument is at the worldview level. Ultimately it's TAG - demonstrating that the Triune God is the necessary precondition for metaphysics, logic, ethics and epistemology which is the basis of every possible worldview.
That's begging the question. You have to justify this belief (i.e. where do you get it from)? The point is ultimately you have to appeal to divine revelation to justify it.
Exactly. This is a philosophical argument, not a theological one. Asserting your worldview is true is meaningless so that can't be the starting point. The starting point are those things that both sides assume by necessity and by virtue of debating (logic, knowledge, truth, etc.)
The problem is you have to justify those assertions. Christians have direct knowledge of the Creator and His wisdom because He has revealed Himself. So divine revelation serves as justification. The creation itself can't reveal anything on it's own because it's subject to interpretation. When looking at nature you see a wise Creator but a materialist sees seemingly purposeless matter governed by laws of physics and cause and effect that has led to all this.
The evidence for the Bible story is the Christian worldview itself - it's ability to justify metaphysics, epistemology, logic and ethics.
Many people believing somthing is an appeal to majority and it doesn't tell us if that something is true. Again, there's no such a thing as generic common denominator God - if such an entity exists it has to have certain properties that define it. Is it personal (a he, she, they/them) or unpersonal force or realm like Plato's monad. Is he/it uncreated or created (part of the creation). Did he create the world ex nihilo or out of prima materia (meaning matter preceded it/him). Is he the sole creator or are there others like him/them? Does he have providence and participation in the creation, or is the creation a wound-up mechanism that is left on its own device as deists believe? Is he moral or amoral? Did he create everything out of necessity or out of his own free will (assuming he has it)? Etc...
I'll close with this thought experiment:
Imagine you're a disembodied psychic alien coming from another realm, who's never heard of humans. You see a painting without prior knowledge of what paintings are or where they come from. How would you come to the conclusion that paintings are produced by humans and what can the painting itself tell you about what a human is like?
Now swap the painting with the creation and the human with the creator.