You seem determined to evade questions and obfuscate with obtuse interpretations of, nearly everything.
your “postulates” are yet another deflection from answering a direct question.
All you have said here indicates dizzying circular “reasoning” as well as an Argumentum Ignorantium fallacy.
Wow! I think you may have outdone yourself with this amalgamation of assertions. It is now perfectly clear why you have refused, all along, to define god. Finally, the veil is lifted, the curtain is parted, the volume has been turned up, the fat lady has sang…and Elvis has left the building.
You are deflecting again, you need to stick with the main points and not orphan them.
You made the claim that if we were to redefine god that the argument would be valid. I was telling you that it was not only still invalid, but also circular reasoning. Address this point here and my original claim that any god of the gaps argument falls under this fallacy.
How can one properly come up with a definition of something that can’t be measured? Address this point here. I am taking the words and ideas you are giving me and showing why they are fallacious. There is no way you can define god here that isn’t fallacious because you are assuming that being is doing something.
This is a textbook circular argument. with each of them completely relying on the other to exist. I never said you were making this argument, it is just a consequence of redefining god the way you mentioned.
Functionally, not. However, this is irrelevant. I’m not making any claims about physics on the other side of the universe. You are making claims about god existing and again, deflecting. I made the claim that there is no way of logically justifying things that are unfalsifiable. Please address this point
You are ignoring the point again and straw manning. We never claimed science has all the answers. We stated that any attribution given to god in addition to its existence are all separate claims. Please address this point
Major Premise: The natural universe exists
Minor Premise: Naturalism cannot be the cause of naturalism
Conclusion: Some god must have done it
He got this from that John Lennox video, it was just a claim without any explanation whatsoever.
Assuming the cause of the universe was non-natural, I could make the claim that something non-natural cannot be the cause of something that is non-natural so god couldn’t have created the universe. @Sherlock-Holmes Why wouldn’t this be correct too? Both are just claims without evidence and frankly, non-sensical and irrelevant. This little more than word games.
By “measured” you mean quantified? size? what do you mean? You made no mention of “measuring” so how can I have failed to address something that was never mentioned?
No, I never redefined anything, quote me if you think I did.
That’s not true, it was your own argument that you said that about, not mine:
I didn’t even proffer a specific argument, you did, you wrote (and I critiqued)
That’s not my argument, it’s yours.
I don’t see how singling out arguments based on specific unfalsifiable claims cannot also be applied to any argument that makes unfalsifiable claims. Since many atheist arguments do this then how does objecting to such arguments from theists yet not atheists, further the atheists position?
Do you view all arguments that rely on unfalsifiable postulates as fallacious or only those made by theists?
How can we properly come up with a definition of something when can’t use our 5 senses, with or without some tools, to verify them and know they are real?
I’m confused here… You set a hypothetical definition for god that was different from the original syllogism I created, and made a claim. I was showing why that claim was false. You are deflecting again…
False. You said: “IF we define “God” as “the means by which matter comes into existence” then the argument is valid.” This was your argument. My claim and counterargument was that it would still be invalid. Instead of addressing the fallacy, your are instead trying to claim something else false. You want to have your cake and eat it too. You are starting to cross the line into dishonesty…
This is the quintessential strawman fallacy and the exact same type of “whataboutism” that trump and his supporters use. I told you that it was functionally unfalsifiable, and we can have a separate discussion on this. However, once again, this is completely irrelevant because I’m not making those claims or supporting them in any way. Those people are not here making their unfalsifiable claims, you are here making your own. You are creating a straw man and knocking that down instead of my main argument, which is again, deflecting.
When you cannot address the main points of your opponent in a debate and have to resort to this type of obfuscation it’s a sign that you are losing the debate and frankly, wasting my time. Address my main points, or I’m done.
This is very common from him, you’ll have a good conversation for a bit then he will make claims about things you haven’t said or misrepresent what you have said.
Sometimes he will ask you to prove that by quoting where he’s screwed the pooche and we end up at square one again.
This is utter bollocks. Oh wait, the paper I presented on the use of trigonometry to determine the distance to SN1897A establishes that the laws of physics as we observe them, have remained unchanged over a 169,000 light year distance, and a 169,000 year time period. I’m sure that there are papers on my laptop extending both the distance and time involved, which I shall have fun digging out after some sleep.
Whataboutism
"the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.
Also a straw man fallacy, since no has ever asserted science is infallible, and also of course dishonest, as you have not attempted to address @TheMagus’s point or mine at all, but then that is the point of using whataboutism in a debate.
Bollocks. Cosmological physicists are busy constructing models based upon the idea that the observable universe in its current form is the product of testable natural processes, involving well-defined entities and interactions.
So much for your self-aggrandising comments about you “understanding theoretical physics”.
Meanwhile, I’ve found two papers in my collection, covering the business of whether or not the laws of physics as we observe them, have remained constant across large stretches of space and time. I’ll start with time, courtesy of this nice little paper:
Direct Test Of The Time-Independence Of Fundamental Nuclear Constants Using The Oklo Nuclear Reactor by Alexander I. Skylachter, arXiv (18th November 1982)
we learn the following:
After this, the author continues with:
Needless to say, such resonance shifts indicating large scale variation in the relevant nuclear constants have not been found. The author goes on to state this:
Let’s take a closer look at this shall we?
So, thanks to a natural nuclear reactor that went critical 1.8 billion years ago, and left behind it precisely the isotopic signature that we observe today in man-made nuclear reactor products derived from fission of 235U-enriched uranium, the author was able to place upper limits upon the variability of nuclear constants, by using that data from that natural nuclear reactor, and thus, he was able to determine that any variation in nuclear constants over a 1.8 billion year period that did take place was far too tiny to allow force-fitting of the data to mythological blind assertion.
I think that adequately establishes that there was almost no measurable variation in physical constants over a 2 billion year period. Oh, and before anyone launches into “fine tuning” apologetics by quote mining that paper, it was written before the papers in my collection demolishing the “fine tuning” myth.
The Oklo bound On The Time Variation Of The Fine-Structure Constant Revisited by Thibault Damour and Freeman Dyson, arXiv (27th June 1996)
Oh dear. The variation in α has been constrained to no greater than one digit in the 16th decimal place every 2 years. Which means that over the 13.7 billion year lifetime of the universe, α cannot have varied by more than approximately 0.000 001 37 from its present value. This has been determined from experimental data.
Oh, and since large scale variation would, as I stated above, have impacted heavily upon our existence, namely because it would have resulted in stable atoms other than hydrogen being impossible to form, we can conclude independently of the above that apologetic attempts to hand-wave away nuclear physics in order to prop up mythological assertion are horseshit.
Now it’s time to move on to space variation of physical laws. Courtesy of another scientific paper dealing with the constancy of α, namely:
Probing The Cosmological Variation Of The Fine-Structure Constant: Results Based On VLT-UVES Sample by Hum Chand, Raghunathan Srianand, Patrick Petitjean and Bastien Aracil, arXiv (8th January 2004)
So, this paper concludes that a similar tight constraint on variation in α arises from spectroscopic study of distant quasars 9.7 billion light years distant, and is in good agreement with the Oklo nuclear reactor data. Two independent sets of scientists, examining two completely different sets of data, arrive at similar tight bounds on α, arising from different physical phenomena. Once again, this flushes specious mythology fanboy apologetics down the toilet.
Indeed, the one point that mythology fanboys routinely forget, is that the universe would be observably very different if some of the assertions they peddle were something other than ex recto fabrication. Scientists would have detected that something weird was going on a long time ago.
Once again you can’t see the wood for the trees. To attribute the “observable universe” to “testable natural processes” does not explain the presence of those natural processes. Every school science student knows that physics attributes observation to naturalism, that was never contested - it is the ORIGIN, the very existence of NATURAL PROCESSES these INTERACTIONS (laws) that you need to address.
This is just not sinking in it seems. You cannot explain the presence, the existence of X by recourse to X - now if you disagree with this then say so and we can discuss, so do you or don’t you agree with this?
UNDERSTAND THIS - All physics enables us to do is predict the future state of an existing system with existing laws, it does not provide any means whatsoever to explain the existence of said system. For explanations to be possible laws must ALREADY BE PRESENT.
First, your bullshit dishonest “be more concise” crap is precisely that. What part of “presenting scientific papers in detail is the HONEST approach” do you not understand?
Second, I’ve already dealt with your bullshit apologetics previously, not least by reference to what Thomas Hertog has to say on the matter, only for you to lie about my posts.
Quite simply, if this shit is all you have to offer, kindly fuck off.
But you don’t actually have an answer do you? you don’t like being asked questions like this do you…
PS: I told you you were wrong about Herzog and Hawking when you interpret their work as explaining the presence of laws of nature without relying on some other laws of nature. I encouraged you to reach out to him and you blew a fuse.
So hear this, loud and clear - would you like me to speak to Herzog for you and share what he says here?
This betrays fallacious reasoning, The fallacy being that suggesting X as a cause for Y and being unable to then explain X, somehow proves the claim to be false, it doesn’t.
Consider string theory, it posits that much of what we observe can be explained by the string abstraction, the fact that we don’t have any idea what or why strings are doesn’t mean the theory is therefore false.
Go and find a real book on the fundamentals of science and you’ll see that we do this all the time, science creates explanations all the time in terms of things yet to be explained, this is science for dummies stuff for God’s sake.
It just means that the absence of evidence is evidence against an unbacked claim and it doesn’t warrant belief. Sorry if I don’t believe you if you say your god exists. I don’t think it’s fair for you to get frustrated and keep on and on about this god thing without giving me proof of his existence.
