No one challenges the ‘immaterial mind’ assertion that Craig makes… all known minds are physical. This isn’t an argument from ignorance, it’s one made despite mountains of evidence proving otherwise.

@TheLivingDinosaur

2 жыл бұрын

I've often thought the same thing. I've seen it brought up a few times here and there, but the smug dipspit should be called on this inanity every single time he excretes it.

@CounterApologist

2 жыл бұрын

Ironically about the time you posted this I saw a tweet from Ben Watkins of Real Atheology arguing exactly that: twitter.com/SpeedWatkins/status/1488127034551377930

@leob3447

2 жыл бұрын

That also applies to the concept of an immaterial soul and what happens after we die. How do 'we' possibly go on when all of our memories are stored in neurons and all of our sensory input systems have been taken away. You can't even claim it's a dream like world because our dreams are made up of different pieces of existing memories or knowledge.

@KEvronista

2 жыл бұрын

@@leob3447 and if we can exist immaterially, wtf is a physical universe for?! KEvron

I’m a Christian but I’d have to agree with you that often Christian apologists seem to spout sophistry like nobody’s business. Especially with loosey-goosey cosmological premises. I appreciate the thought

Can you put in the comments or in the description, the Facebook page that you recommend?

@CounterApologist

2 жыл бұрын

facebook.com/RealAtheology

So basically, if God's mind (I guess God IS a mind, whatever) is good, if goodness is the nature of God's mind, then "good" cannot be mind-independent, by definition: it's whatever God's mind thinks, just like any other subjective moral theory wherein morality is whatever a mind thinks. Is that about right?

@KEvronista

2 жыл бұрын

they sometimes try to differentiate between god and his nature: "he must think good because his _nature_ is good. dontcha gettit?" KEvron

@danhoff4401

2 жыл бұрын

@@KEvronista God's ways are just higher than our ways, KEv your puny little creaturely brain can't comprehend the mind of God, repent and ask him for clarity when you get to heaven ya sinner!

@KEvronista

2 жыл бұрын

@@danhoff4401 thanks for the god-rage. KEvron

@danhoff4401

2 жыл бұрын

@@KEvronista 😂 hope it made you smile.

@KEvronista

2 жыл бұрын

@@danhoff4401 it's always satisfying to elicit god-rage without even trying. KEvron

But mirages and rainbows can be captured on camera, which are not minds, and later reviewed by minds on a computer screen (for example) so there *is* something mind independent here. because either cameras can only pick up mind independent things, in which case rainbows and mirages are mind independent since they can be captured by cameras or cameras can somehow capture mind dependent things, in which case one must explain carefully why something with no mind can capture something only minds can perceive

@jaskitstepkit7153

2 жыл бұрын

The cameras are specially designed to do replicate those colours for your eyes only. Try something else. There's an infinite amount of light frequencies but the mind can create only so little of the spectrum.

@vynne3888

2 жыл бұрын

@@jaskitstepkit7153 what do you mean « for our eyes only »? It’s the first time i’ve ever heard someone make that claim. As far as I know, à camera is just a replicator of light, and that’s it. plus, the mind doesn’t create light frequencies. The senses perceive very little of it indeed, but the mind’s job is to interpret those perceptions of light, not percieve them

I’m a theist and I hold to evolutionary ethics.

The rainbow and mirage analogies fail abysmally. Rainbows and mirages exist mind-independently as patterns of photons traveling through space. If he wanted to stick to his guns, then I can argue that he doesn't exist independently of my mind because sans my senses he would merely be a pattern of atoms in space blowing off cranial flatulence into the void. He calls himself a philosopher and yet he doesn't seem able to comprehend the distinction between physical reality and the models our minds build to represent it. To top that he seems to think he has the intellectual acumen to be taken seriously when he contradicts some of the smartest people on the planet both past and present. A better analogy of something that is mind-dependent would be the concept careening around the cranium of one of his followers that Mr. Craig is a true genius. What an a$$hat.

@KEvronista

2 жыл бұрын

*"Rainbows and mirages exist mind-independently as patterns of photons traveling through space."* i'll grant that the photons in motion exist mind-independently, but patterns only exist when their elements are put into a set, and only minds create sets. KEvron, who can't see the rainbow for the photons

@TheLivingDinosaur

2 жыл бұрын

@@KEvronista OK. I'll change "patterns" to "configurations".

@KEvronista

2 жыл бұрын

@@TheLivingDinosaur any relationship elements of set may bear do so when the set is established. KEvron

@TheLivingDinosaur

2 жыл бұрын

@@KEvronista I'm sorry - I can only speak English.

@KEvronista

2 жыл бұрын

@@TheLivingDinosaur it's perfect english, but go ahead and pitch your fit. KEvron

The rainbow / mirage example is completely incoherent. Craig shouldn't get away with it. All perceptions that enter the central nervous system are virtual in exactly the same way. Moreover, both examples DO correspond to a specific physical object, in this case specific configurations of gas and moisture.

Let me try to untangle the problem. To say a moral value is mind-dependent is to say that if that mind did not exist, then the moral value would not exist as well. Or if the mind was significantly different, the moral value would also be different. I think that qualifies in the case of God. If God did not exist, moral values would not exist (according to religious apologists, at least). So, moral values are indeed mind-dependent. I don't think that's a serious problem, though. The apologist (that is, the master in rationalization) could say that what matters is that it is not human-mind-dependent. The apologist cares about grounding human morals and avoiding human (i.e., cultural or individual) relativism. If God's dependent-morals are unchangeable, then one can avoid these problems.

@CounterApologist

2 жыл бұрын

I addressed this a bit at the end of the video about objectivity being independent of "finite minds", it's ad hoc and self serving, and not at all what I think the intuition Craig and others appeal to captures. That said, even on the evolutionary ethic view, the point is that humans can't just decide what is immoral is moral, etc. It's not a matter of taste, and evolutionary ethics does this, because what we think of as moral is set by our biology and evolutionary history. Contingent to be sure, but beyond our ability to control or decide.

@CosmoPhiloPharmaco

2 жыл бұрын

@@CounterApologist Right. I made the comment before reaching the end of video. I would play the devil's advocate here and say that human nature can easily change (for example, a brain disease may change one's morals or even evolution). On the other hand, God doesn't change. Therefore, while intuition doesn't initially tell us that morals are grounded on God, we can reach that conclusion once we realize that morals cannot change (and so cannot be properly grounded on humans). You may ask: 'Hey, but how do you know that morals cannot change?' Right. Here the apologist would play with your intuition and ask: "But would it still be wrong to kill if everybody evolved to think it is right? bla bla bla." That means morals cannot be contingent on finite changeable minds, so the argument goes.

@CounterApologist

2 жыл бұрын

@@CosmoPhiloPharmaco The argument on human nature doesn't depend on an individual human, but the species. We can no more decide that it is wrong to kill babies for fun than we could decide to jump up and fly like superman. You could say that over time what we are could adapt and evolve to change human nature, but some things do get ruled out by previous selections, and the key moral doctrines would have been set long ago once we became a social species that needed to band together in groups to survive and reproduce.

@CosmoPhiloPharmaco

2 жыл бұрын

@@CounterApologist Sure, we couldn't decide it, but that's why I said "brain disease" and "evolution." Because these are spontaneous events that take place regardless of our desires. "but some things do get ruled out by previous selections, and the key moral doctrines would have been set long ago once we became a social species that needed to band together in groups to survive and reproduce." Sure, but this could still happen. Perhaps some environmental pressure may occur one day in such a way that groups will not be advantageous (for example, if food is very limited). But that doesn't matter. The point is that this seems metaphysically possible (there is a possible world where this obtains). But there is no possible world where we can conceive of killing innocents being morally right. Therefore, this moral fact must be grounded on something that is necessarily unchangeable in this respect.

@CounterApologist

2 жыл бұрын

@@CosmoPhiloPharmaco A brain disease isn't species wide and evolution is not spontaneous. Killing for fun isn't advantageous in any reproductive scenario anyway, so it gets culled off as possible by the nature we have a evolved beings. It doesn't seem possible to go from being the sort of species that is as group dependent as we are to being solitary again, any event that would force it would effectively cause us to go extinct rather than being able to adapt, survive, and reproduce. And even if it did, whatever that species was, it wouldn't be human anymore.

12:19 to 13:30 - This misunderstands what Craig means by objective morality. The "herd morality" in this context refers to mere patterns of behavior. Whereas the type of morality Craig refers to is more metaphysical. The definition of "objective" is actually really tricky to define precisely; usually we settle for rough definitions. Take for example, "mind-independent" as a rough definition of objective; that doesn't work exactly, since "Maverick Christian is thinking of 2 + 2 = 4" can be objectively true (or false) but is still mind dependent. Similarly so for legislated laws; the existence of those laws is in some sense objective, but they are also mind-dependent, since the law's existence is ontologically dependent on the mind(s) that created the law. Craig uses rough definitions which unfortunately aren't perfectly precise.

@CounterApologist

2 жыл бұрын

Patterns of behavior that are rooted in the nature of the species, which if natures are going to ground something, then it works literally just as well. That aside, Craig's defense against incoherence here still fails - because his ontological foundation is *not* in the sense that melts away the mind-independence distinction on theism, that of created things depending on god to create them, but rather the nature of a mind being somehow mind independent. The nature of a thing is merely a description of what the thing actually just is, anyway. It's literally incoherent. I address the notion of what we intuit "objective" to mean when Craig and others appeal to intuition to justify P2 in the moral argument, and I think "we don't get to choose what is and isn't moral" works as a much better sense of that intuition, and the herd morality discussed actually meets that. Ironically on atheism the nature of the species is determined by a mind-independent process.

@MaverickChristian

2 жыл бұрын

@@CounterApologist _Patterns of behavior that are rooted in the nature of the species, which if natures are going to ground something, then it works literally just as well._ That doesn't make any sense. Perhaps it will help if I define what most people mean by "morality." Some oughts are descriptive; e.g., when "If you want to do well at school, you ought to study" just means something like "As a matter of practical necessity, you need to study to do well in school." Some oughts prescribe in a way that is not purely descriptive; e.g., someone saying "You shouldn't torture infants" might be using this sort of ought. The type of "ought" morality uses (for most people's moral semantics; confer Hume's is-ought problem) is the not-purely-descriptive sort. A consequence of this moral semantics is that moral properties are non-natural. Given that non-natural moral properties exist, _how_ do they exist exactly? What are these non-natural moral properties identical to? Because moral properties are non-natural, any ontological explanation will have to invoke the non-natural; e.g., moral Platonism. If non-natural moral properties are identical to something else (e.g., if what is morally wrong is one and the same property as that which God forbids), that "something else" will have to be non-natural. What won't suffice then is any purely natural explanation. So the the fact that animal behavior is rooted in their nature no more grounds objective morality than Mount Everest does. Non-natural moral properties are just too metaphysical for that sort of thing to make sense. This sort of thing is largely why I think the atheist is better off just denying morality's existence altogether. Objective morality's existence is just too epistemically improbable on atheism. _I address the notion of what we intuit "objective" to mean when Craig and others appeal to intuition to justify P2 in the moral argument, and I think "we don't get to choose what is and isn't moral" works as a much better sense of that intuition, and the herd morality discussed actually meets that._ It may be a necessary condition but certainly not a sufficient one for reasons I explained above. _That aside, Craig's defense against incoherence here still fails - because his ontological foundation is not in the sense that melts away the mind-independence distinction on theism, that of created things depending on god to create them, but rather the nature of a mind being somehow mind independent._ A lot of this alleged incoherence I think boils down to a combination of bad wording and the inherent difficulty in precisely defining objective. As I explained in my previous comment, "mind-independent" doesn't work as a precise definition of objective.

@CounterApologist

2 жыл бұрын

@@MaverickChristian Going in reverse order (just cause I don't know the markup to make italics/etc.) : 1.) The incoherence remains and it's not really a reflection on you. Craig is the one who insisted on the definition of mind independent, and then his clarification ignored the problem by pointing to a theistic scenario where the distinction would melt away, except the nature of a mind is not mind independent in the way he describes. That's a big problem for Craig, though not you. 2.) Craig's argument doesn't make that distinction, and this was a response to him. 3.) We've done the "prescriptive ought" vs. "descriptive ought" dance plenty of times throughout the years, though my current view of it has changed a little. I think the sort of prescriptive ought, if there is one, is necessarily a function of relation between agents. What grounds the ought to obey god's commands? It's just the nature of relationship between god and humans, presumably anyway. It always reduces down to a kind of basic relationship that defines the duty. Well on atheism, at least on the evolutionary ethics we're talking about here, the prescriptive ought reduces down to the relationship between agents in a species. It becomes something simple of sociology then, not theology.

@MaverickChristian

2 жыл бұрын

@@CounterApologist _The incoherence remains and it's not really a reflection on you._ To be sure, I am sympathetic to the criticism. However, it would be good to keep in mind that this is a popular rough definition of "objective" and it's actually pretty tricky to give a precise definition of the term. _Craig's argument doesn't make that distinction, and this was a response to him._ I'm not sure which distinction you're talking about. If it's between the type of "ought" that is descriptive and the type that is not entirely descriptive, please keep in mind that the not purely descriptive sort of ought is _the sort that people commonly use_ with respect to moral obligation. Remember Hume's famous is-ought problem: Hume _specifically_ had the moral ought in mind (In _A Treatise of Human Nature_ Book 3, chapter 1, section 1, paragraph 27). If the moral ought had only descriptive characteristics, the is-ought problem wouldn't be as much of a problem. If for example moral oughts were mere hypothetical oughts, it wouldn't at all seem inconceivable that the "ought" could be deduced from an "is." _Well on atheism, at least on the evolutionary ethics we're talking about here, the prescriptive ought reduces down to the relationship between agents in a species._ What exactly do you mean by "reduces to"? If you mean "identical with" it's unclear how that could possibly work, since the not-purely-descriptive sort of ought implies that deontic moral properties are non-natural.

@CounterApologist

2 жыл бұрын

​@@MaverickChristian The distinction was between mind independence being necessary but not sufficient. Craig's definition is sufficient, he doesn't go into prescriptive vs. descriptive oughts like you do - my argument addresses his approach, not yours. As for reduces to, I mean what "grounds" the ought? What is it? I don't think a prescriptive ought has to be some kind of metaphysically weighty non-natural thing. When I ask you what grounds my moral obligation to obey gods commands, at least when it comes to Craig, he says it's the nature of authority, our relationship to god - what we are and what he is. It's a relation between persons that creates the social obligation, it's theological on Craig's view, but it's still something social in nature. Well on the evolutionary ethic view Craig discusses, the ought would just be an obligation between agents. of the same species. It's social in nature, not a weighty metaphysical thing.

It’s funny to watch you smiling while dr Craig is talking like your the arbiter of truth and this Bible pounding ignoramus is doing his best Jackie Gleason Hamana hamana . While I don’t agree with all his ideas , nobody would he’s spent most of his life studying and working on these theories and for you and others who have little or no comparable knowledge of this vast and complicated subject is deplorable. Click BAIT is your master .

this is such a childish response to something which has several other reasonable responses. you're either just joking or you are not very bright

@danhoff4401

2 жыл бұрын

Do elaborate

@thomasfplm

2 жыл бұрын

And you presented no reason for anyone to agree with you.