In the mood for a fight? I am!

cool is it sarcastic or is it genuine?

cool is it sarcastic or is it genuine?

and frank, you're just mean. I don't know if you actually think you're on the ethical high ground of this debate, or if you're being extremely unethical in your statement. I will assume it is the prior and remind you of all the insults you have thrown in this thread. I have been nothing but honest. And you have repeatedly called me a liar in this. You are mistaken in this accusation. If your accusation of unethical debating comes from something you think is a lie, point it out. If it comes from something else, point it out. I am genuine. If you don't want to believe it, that's fine. But don't call me a liar.

I figured probably so, but I've never listened to Tom Petty to my knowledge.

And frank, I just thought of something. I think you're raising a red herring here. I think you're trying to distance yourself from the actual points in my posts by not addressing them but rather attacking my character. If you are, that is unethical. If not, note carefully that I did not accuse you of doing so. I just said it is my opinion that you did. Because I don't claim to know your mind as you claim to know mine.

thanks Forever, good poem

and razzberries to you frank! My post made perfect sense and you're just lazy, and you can't come up with good rebuttal to the statements in their revised forms.

Just wait for Ein... He'll show ya!

But why should the evidence lead to your conclusion? ... ... ... ... This is a very crucial notion, so please give it some thought... ... ... ... ... ... JUST BECAUSE! IN YOUR EXPERIENCE IT OFTEN OR ALWAYS DOES!... ... but clearly, that is not enough! Believe me, it's not.

It doesn't mean that the "so and so" is correct...but it most certainly and assuredly should be accepted that "so and so is his opinion."

binnyboy wrote:

thanks Forever, good poem

and razzberries to you frank! My post made perfect sense and you're just lazy, and you can't come up with good rebuttal to the statements in their revised forms.

Just wait for Ein... He'll show ya!

HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!

No I'm flattered, really. Can't say I don't find it humoruos though.

I guess I'll try to do a summary of your post.

Asserting soething as a fact is equivalent to asserting that you have guessed it, and that you have great confidence that that guess is correct. Asserting that another had great confidence in one of his guesses would be different, because it would allow for your opinion to differ from his.

Therefore assering something as fact is neither more nor less than expressing great confidence in a guess that it is so. (exept perhaps if the fact pertains to an axiomatic system)

It becomes clear that a fact is nothing more than a guess in which one is justified in placing a certain level of confidence, although asserting it as fact also signals that one has faith in the guess, i.e. that one is not considering alternatives.

Binny holds that the absurdity of the suggestion of god in itself warrants such a level of confidence in the guess that it is wrong. He has repeatedly provided examples of you asserting things as facts which you were not justified in asserting with a confidence level of one. (on a scale from zero to one)

You I expect are contending that he is not justified in placing the amount of confidence in his guess to warrant asserting it as fact.

Quantifying the level of confidence one is justified of placing in a guess that something is not so, based on that something's absurdity alone, is not easy. Even identifying what absurdity is, and justifying placing more confidence in a guess that one absurd proposal is flat out wrong than in another is hard. (I remember having a go at it with my extra complexity thesis in our other debate) Perhaps binny will aproach this from another angle, but I can't think of one.

You have however opened the door to considering an ideas dubious origins evidence against the idea, and binny seems to be warming up for a debate over the origins of religious thought. Binny: "... the spurious origin of the proposal through shamanism and the later evolution into monotheism"

To do Frank justice I didn't quite follow this bit:

binny wrote:

But why should the evidence lead to your conclusion? ... ... ... ... This is a very crucial notion, so please give it some thought... ... ... ... ... ... JUST BECAUSE! IN YOUR EXPERIENCE IT OFTEN OR ALWAYS DOES!... ... but clearly, that is not enough! Believe me, it's not.

You really should try to rephrase that. The rest of your post made sense.

Well...in my opinion, the rest of his post did not make sense at all. Most of it was gibberish.

In any case, I reiterate what I said earlier.

Binny reminds me of some of the Christians I debate.

They KNOW there is a God...just like he KNOWS there are no gods.

Neither Binny nor those Christians have the ethics nor honesty to acknowledge that they do not KNOW...in any sense of that word...and that they are merely guessing.

Binny IS unethical...and IS dishonest.

All this rationalization about what "to know" means, is absurd.

Binny was wrong to say that it is a fact that there is no God (are no gods).

But since he has no ethics or honesty to bring to bear on this situation...since he is not man enough to simply acknowledge that he is guessing...he has no recourse but to rationalize and to bring red herrings into the fray.

I'm sorry to see you are joining him in this folly, Ein...and abetting his dishonesty and duplicity.

I would have hoped you would be above that.

what I meant by that was:

why does evidence lead to conclusions?

We have evidence. I look and see ten toes. So a conclusion I might draw is to say, "If I bend over and feel where I see the tenth one, I will feel an object there, that feels like my other nine toes."

why do we draw this conclusion?

Our experience. Any time in the past we have seen something, we could reach out and touch it and feel it there if it was close.

but could we be wrong?

Sure. One day we could experience a situation like this. A nine-toed man could, in any number of convolutedly conspired ways, see a tenth toe that is not there. When he reaches down, he will feel nothing.

So is it enough that his experience has always shown things to be touchable if they are seeable?

Clearly not.



The meaning of this all is that the basis of our deduction process is experience. But we can't experience everything. So our deduction can have flaws. Everything will be just a guess. But paradocially, can the previous sentence be a guess? That will take a greater mind than mine to figure out.