Since I’ve received notice from Old_man_shouts_at_cl and CyberLN to limit myself to three posts per day, which do not exceed 200 words per post, I will unfortunately not be able to answer all questions at the rate necessary of inquiry. I apologize and ask of you all to exercise patience with the expectation of my responses.
Here’s the big problem with that statement: I can always reply “Are you 100% certain that you don’t?”
If you refuse, you open yourself up to the fact that you made a false statement (an untruth, and possibly a lie). If you accept, you have just contradicted yourself, and your proposition fails.
You seem not to understand the concept of relative probabilities.
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You seem not to understand the concept of essential properties (and… that’s three posts).
You ask mordant about 100% certainty, bsengstock.
Do you believe that modal logic and metaphysics can give you 100% certainty? If so, can you demonstrate that to us without using either? If not, then how do you propose to persuade us that they can?
Fyi, I’ve been in a parallel situation when debating Christians at Ex-Christian.net. They were just as certain as you are, but when asked to demonstrate their certainty on our terms (evidence) they claimed that was faith was needed. Believe first and then you will see by faith the certainty we speak of.
To which we replied, No, first let us see the evidence of your claim and then we might believe. This kind of stalemate cropped up frequently. Each party requiring the other to accept their terms and neither giving way.
You have claimed certain things and require us to see them on your terms, to which we have consistently replied, No, first show the evidence on our terms and then we will believe you.
The same kind of stalemate in this forum now as in the other one, differing only in the details. Both you and the Christians claim some kind of special, higher and superior knowledge, but will only demonstrate it on your terms.
Certainty through the counsel of the Holy Spirit or certainty through modal logic and metaphysics?
If neither is demonstrable through evidence then how are we to tell the difference?
Walter.
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False dichotomy fallacy, being sure does not required the strident closed mind of 100% certainty. There’s a whole scale from don’t know, right up to belief. You are projecting your desire for certainty onto others.
Pretty sure you’ve offerred a straw man as well.
It’s redundant when you’re 100% certain, apologists invariably lack the capacity for doubt, at least where their subjective religious beliefs are concerned.
I do find it fascinating that he does this apparently absent the usual religious dogma that elevates faith to a virtue and lowers “mere human reason” to a vice. It’s particularly ironic in that he’s using “mere human reason” to support his arguments (albeit what appears to have only specialist utility and is mis-applied here) and likely would disavow it as an article of faith in the religious sense. Points for originality, sort of …
Yes.
The evangelical zeal is there, without the usual foundation of biblical religiosity.
Who knows? Maybe he’ll tell to us what his motivation is for this ‘crusade’ in the name of metaphysics and modal logic? 
Personally I hope he doesn’t resemble Tolkien’s description of the character of Smaug the Fire Golden. Possessing the keenest intellect, quick of wit, supremely intelligent, learned and thirsty for more knowledge. But flawed by base motives, so that he could only turn his superior mind to selfish ends. That would be very disappointing.
Thank you,
Walter.
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Because the BIBLE says the god of the bible is real. What more do you need? Pretty simple, if you ask me. After all, why would the all-knowing god of the bible lie about itself in the PERFECT book it wrote about itself? Wake up, folks! Get with the program! Jump on the bandwagon! Don’t go throwing your eternal life away just for the sake of being a logical critical thinker. Put down your pride and stop asking so many inconvenient questions. The god of the bible hates it when you question his absolute moral authority. And he gets his all-powerful feelings hurt and becomes very jealous whenever he thinks somebody is trying to be smarter than him. How much more proof do you need? Geeez… 
By the way, how’s everybody been doing? I know, I know… I’ve been gone awhile. I stopped back in for a bit to see if the rumor is true. A little bird told me there is a new sheriff in town around here. Some cranky Old Man with a few screws loose who once rode a rusted ol’ squeaky tricycle around the joint terrorizing mangy monkeys and snotty pugs. I decided to swing by and see how long it would take for him to kick me out of here. Not that I expect much of a fight. All I gotta do is toss a couple of Cogs fermented banana peels on the floor, and it will be game over for the decrepit bag of bones. Anyway, I’ll be poking in and out of a few threads for a bit to try to catch up a little on what’s been happening around here. Catch me if you can, Old Man!… (*dashing down the hallway shrieking out a Vincent Price laugh*)……..
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It’s hard to miss isn’t it.
I’d rather he explained why Gödel’s argument has been widely rejected, and why we should consider the strident opinion of what is clearly a young man with all the hubris we’d expect from his age and religion, is right, and all other experts are wrong?
Welcome back, you make a compelling argument…
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Agreed.
I’d like to see that too, Sheldon. But we need to tread carefully here. Science doesn’t proceed by consensus of opinion. So the fact that Godel’s argument has been widely rejected isn’t a solid indicator of it’s weakness. If we go too far down the road of saying, “because a majority of scientists don’t accept this, it must be false” we risk being straying into this territory.
The title is One Hundred Scientists Against Einstein. It’s a propaganda piece pushed by the Nazi’s because Einstein was a Jew and so whatever scientific predictions are made by a Jew must be wrong. It was supposed to work on the premise that if a hundred properly German, Aryan scientists declared that Einstein was wrong, then they must be right. Weight of numbers making the argument.
Einstein’s response was, “If I were wrong, it would only take one.”
Now, I’m not saying or even implying that you’re doing anything like this. I’m just advising caution with the use of the ‘all the other experts are wrong’ line of argument. It carries some weight, but in the end numbers are not the final arbiter of what is correct. Evidence is.
Btw, do you see the neat irony on the Nazi propaganda front cover?
The first scientist against Einstein was Dr. Hans Israel!
Walter.
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While we await bsengstock20 to respond I’d like to post something about my thoughts this morning.
Not to hurry him up or to put further pressure on him to respond to this too. No. The man is limited to three posts per day and so he must choose carefully what he replies to. I simply offer these thoughts up as grist for the mill. Not just to promote further thought on relevant issues but also as a request for others to try and tear down the argument that I’m making here. Please do so. I’m not claiming to be right here - I’m just seeing a pattern and wondered if others could see it too.
I recalled that certain Christian apologists would visit Ex-Christian.net and enter into debate with the sceptics, agnostics and atheists of the forum, who had once been Christians themselves. When called upon to provide evidence for an event in the Bible, they would sometimes say this.
“The Bible proves itself!” or “The Bible is its own proof!”
Needless to say this was never accepted and we often had to patiently explain that this was an example of circular logic and was thus invalid. A source of information cannot be its own verification. But one Christian apologist even went so far as to explain the thinking behind this irrational belief.
Because it is written that God cannot lie (Hebrews 6 :18 and Titus 1 :2) He would not ask us to believe anything in His Word that needed verification from outside of His Word. From outside of the Bible itself. Nor, indeed, could any item of human evidence ever be used to measure the truth of God’s Word. How could the perfection of God’s Word ever be measured by anything other than itself? Nothing from the minds of mere men and what they considered to be evidence, could ever do this. For these reasons the Bible doesn’t need to be and cannot be verified or corroborated by anything outside of itself. It stands proven by itself, because of itself.
When it was politely pointed out that this rationalization was also an example of circular logic, using a thing to justify itself, said Christian was adamant that this was not so and persisted in his irrationality.
Now, before I go any further, can anyone see where I’m headed with this, given the recent discussions with bsengstock20? If so, good. If not, then please read on.
Modal logic is foreign to me and I really don’t know or understand how it works. But many sweeping claims have been made about it recently. One being that it doesn’t deal in provisional truths, but in essential truths. These essential truths are superior to provisional ones because a provisional truth can only be 99% true at best and never 100% true. But essential truths can be 100% true. Or so it has been claimed.
If what I have just written is correct then it would seem that any conclusions drawn from modal logic cannot be verified, corroborated, checked, tested or measured by any facts, data or evidence from outside of itself. All other truth is provisional but the truth of modal logic is essential. A lesser kind of truth cannot overturn a greater kind of truth.
Only modal logic can verify the findings of modal logic. Or, putting it another way, modal logic is its own authority that cannot be gainsaid, questioned or refuted by anything outside of itself.
Does this sound at all familiar?
I must rely on bsengstock20 to check what I’ve written here, which are just my thoughts and may be subject to error. But if he confirms that modal logic cannot be checked or tested by anything outside of itself, then that could mean trouble.
If he does that then I’m going to have to ask him how modal logic’s inviolable status differs from the inviolable status conferred upon the Bible by devout Christians. Even though clearly different in many ways, if modal logic and the Bible cannot be verified and checked by anything outside of themselves, then they share at least two things in common.
They are their own authority and they prove themselves.
If this is so, then right now I just cannot see how modal logic is anything but irrational. Nothing has the intrinsic right to declare itself above testing and checking by something outside of itself. The Christian God does this and his followers believe this, but can this really be true of modal logic?
I hope not. I sincerely hope we will told by bsengstock20 how modal logic can be checked and verified by something outside of itself.
So, I’d like what I’ve just written to be checked by him for accuracy re modal logic and I also throw the general thrust of my argument open to all to see if it holds up under scrutiny.
Thank you,
Walter.
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Modal logic is important in computer science but it is above my pay grade as a line-of-business system designer. I don’t pretend to understand it. Explanations quickly degrade into this sort of prose:
I have never needed to know what a “Kripke frame” is. I assume someone somewhere finds such things useful. To do what I do really requires only high school level algebra and common sense, so I stick to that.
What I CAN conclude from all this is that modal logic has some legitimate uses but is probably being abused by people attempting to “prove” god (or God). And bsengstock20 is not the first person to write out alleged modal proofs of God here – I don’t recall the user name but it happened just recently. So I assume this is going to be a “thing” now and – credit where due – bsengstock20 is not the complete crackpot this other poster was; I think he’s attempting his proof with some actual command of the topic area, even if my intuition says he’s indulging in motivated reasoning and category errors, and probably exceeding the utility of modal logic, torturing it to do something it wasn’t designed to do.
As to the question of validating propositions in modal logic, there are formal systems of proofs for them involving “proof trees” and “semantic models”. It is claimed that if any branches of a proof tree are left open, the proposition isn’t valid and you can use open branches to construct countermodels, showing that a conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises. I don’t know what “valid” means in the real world vs the world of modal logic, though. However it would be interesting if bsengstock20 would claim that his premises have been subjected to a proof tree or to a semantic modeling process.
One more thought has occurred to me in all this discussion of modal logic: it fails what i call “the common man test”. If you’re going to propose an understanding of the world that the average person doesn’t have the background to understand, then it is inherently elitist and will never “land” for any but the Privileged Few.
Now “common man” itself has a slippery definition. But what I’m getting at with this moniker is, if you want to give people of at least average abilities some sort of “aha” moment that improves their lives, as opposed to just baffling them with bullshit, you have to construct an argument that a person of average abilities can both relate to and follow. And I seriously doubt that anything involving modal logic qualifies.
As atheists we often make fun of Biblical “Truth” as the musings of bronze or iron age goatherds, but one thing you can say for it is that it owes its success to catering to the concerns and perceptions of ordinary folks. It is a set of interlocking memes that has evolved to succeed in this realm. That they are appealing does not mean they are accurate; however, I’d argue that while not sufficient, being graspable by average people is necessary just the same.
I think it was Feynman that said that if you can’t explain something you are trying to teach to a fifth grader, you probably don’t understand it yourself. So one critique I’d have of bsengstock20 is that he needs to strip down what he’s trying to convey to its very basics or he’s not going to get anywhere with it, even if, for the sake of argument, he were actually “right”.
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Thank you for these insights, mordant.
As to the question of validation, maybe I’m being too simplistic in my internal vs external approach.
However, if what you say about proof trees is so, then as part of modal logic themselves they don’t really qualify as an external check from outside of the realm of modal logic. If that were so, then there could be fundamental problems within modal logic that can never be discovered from outside of it. Only by internal checks using modal logic itself. Which still leaves it ‘closed’ to examination by anything else.
So, essential truths within modal logic would seem to enjoy a similar status to scripture. Just as God’s Word cannot be questioned by mere men, so these essential truths cannot be questioned by the use of conditional truths.
Thank you,
Walter.
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I’m given to understand that a proof tree is a concept within the system of modal logic, so you are right that it is not an independent means of verification.
Something that would at least partly validate a claim derived from modal logic would be a prediction it would make about the observable real world that would be demonstrably true via real world observation. So far as I am aware, the only example of this is in computer science, in the sense that a system satisfies the requirements of its design. This is used to validate complex systems such as avionics, which over time, if they don’t malfunction in a way contrary to their design, indirectly demonstrate that the proof was valid. I’d imagine this works best with systems that are state machines of some sort, where you want to eliminate race conditions or unanticipated failure modes and the like, and it’s unsafe or infeasible to fully validate correctness via real-world testing. That said, real-world testing is preferable where possible. The proof is in the pudding, as they saying has it.
What it boils down to apparently is that modal logic provides proofs within formal systems like computer programs but they are not considered empirical in the scientific sense.
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Of course I do. After all, I AM the smartest guy on this site. Just ask me, and I’ll tell you. 
And if I tell you I am, then it must be true, because I don’t lie. (Hey, if the bible can use it, so can I.)
Good to see you again, Shelly. How ya been?
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I wasn’t aware he’d written anything, only offered Godel’s ontological argument. An argument that has been around for some time and failed to gain any traction, and is widely considered flawed, as it’s premises amount to question begging.
This is of course true, but a more interesting hypothetical would be to ask why an omniscient and omnipotent deity who wanted everyone to know it was real, would put that potential information out of most people’s grasp.
I’m tripping along, thank you.
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Now this is both fascinating and worrying to equal degrees, mordant.
But before I go into that, first I want to thank you for providing this information. Upon reading it this morning I had one of those ‘Aha!’ moments. So thanks for that. 
What you say about modal logic and the limits of real-world testing is almost exactly the same as the limits imposed upon cosmologists who want to study the Big Bang or theorists who write papers about totally separate universes. In both cases what is being studied or theorised is beyond direct empirical validation.
In the case of the Big Bang, no information from any part of the electromagnetic spectrum can reach us from earlier than 380,000 years after the event. That’s because the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation screens off these earlier epochs from scrutiny. (I won’t go into the reason why here.) It was hoped that gravitational wave information would give us an insight into these early times, but so far no useful signals have been forthcoming. The science of acoustics tells us a great deal about the CMBR itself because it was high-energy plasma that behaved a lot like a fluid. From that behaviour we can infer some things about the earlier conditions. But, that’s it.
So, all that we say that we know about the Big Bang is inferred knowledge based upon suppositions and assumptions that are themselves based upon the physical laws that we can observe holding good some 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Anything before that is pure inference.
In a similar way, theoretical papers like this… (PDF) Exploring the Reality of Parallel Universes: Theoretical Frameworks and Scientific Evidence …are constrained to use inference because the direct observation of these other posited universes is impossible.
Clearly there is nothing wrong or flawed in using inference where direct observation and the gathering of empirical data is out of the question. Science functions quite well when it does that, thank you very much. So the use of inference in modal logic is not a problem per se.
But it seems to me that what is a problem is when someone makes out the essential truths of modal logic to be better or superior to the provisional truths of empirical science. If both modal logic and empirical science rely upon inference to come to their conclusions, then as regards testing they are both operating on the same footing. One is not better than the other. They are the same.
Godel’s god-like object is just as removed from direct observation as either the Big Bang event or a parallel universe. What we can say about any or all of them is limited to inference.
As far as I can recall that fact seems to have been left out of our recent discussions. Can anyone help me out here? Has the role of inference been covered regarding the use of modal logic?
Now, this is all fascinating, as Mr. Spock might say. But I also said it was worrying. How so?
Not in the function of modal logic itself, so far as I can see. But more in the claims about what it can do and what it’s conclusions mean. In the hands of an atheist like myself Godel’s theorem is no more than an intellectual curiosity that might be interesting study, but which has no personal or emotional significance whatsoever.
But what about it being in the hands of a very clever person who might be strongly motivated to use the theorem to satisfy some personal agenda?
We’ve seen this kind of thing before.
William Lane Craig seized upon the Hawking - Penrose Singularity theorem, claiming that it proves that the universe must have come from nothing. A scientific confirmation of creatio ex nihilo. Science and Genesis 1 : 1 in agreement. This went down very well indeed with his eager and less clever followers.
What Craig left out is that Hawking and Penrose’s proof was a purely mathematical one that was based upon faulty assumptions and which was unsupported by any empirical evidence. The proof was entirely inferential as anything about the Big Bang event itself MUST BE, for the reasons I’ve described above.
Which brings me back to the issue of inference and it’s usage in modal logic. Thanks to mordant I think we’ve discovered a question that must be asked about the use and the conclusions of modal logic.
What role does inference play in these things?
Thank you,
Walter.
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Yes, although, I don’t know that our interlocutor ascribes omnibenevolence to his alleged God to begin with. That is most certainly a valid critique of the Christian God, and probably of the Abrahamic God generally.
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