Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Futurama vs. William Lane Craig

On the question of free will vs. Craig's "A or Not A" circular argument:

12 comments:

Mike D said...

Maybe there's something I'm missing, but this seems like a really confused effort from Thunderf00t and makes me glad I unsubscribed some time ago. His thought experiment doesn't show that the law of identity contradicts free will; he doesn't even seem to really understand what the law of identity is. I don't know what bullshit context Craig was butchering the logic in, but the law of identity simply says that something is itself. It goes right along with the law of noncontradiction, which says that something can't be itself and also be something else. That has nothing to do with free will.

The biggest problem with natural theology is simply that the principles of logic are abstractions derived from our sensory experiences – i.e., from physical reality. There's no reason to assume that 'beyond' the universe, the laws of logic ought to apply – and that includes deities. That makes anything beyond the universe indeterminable and irrelevant to our existence.

Also, this didn't really have anything to do with Futurama. Double fail, Thunderf00t. Double fail.

Mike D said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
B.R. said...

What the heck was the video even about? Maybe I'm just tired, but I'm glad I didn't watch it when I first got up this morning. As it was, I surblibed with only tribial brain dablage.

Also, you suck, Thunderf00t. Futurama was only in this video for ten seconds with no audio. What the hell, man? That's false advertising. Stop being a view whore.

LadyAtheist said...

Yeah, it was kind of incoherent, but I thought I just didn't get it.

OTOH, how else could one argue against WLC? He's so full of crap that any argument against him would have to reflect crap as well. He's on a different planet

...hence Futurama

okay, that's a stretch... but this blog gets a lot of traffic because I used a jpg of Charlie Brown falling for Lucy's football trick and a whole crapload of traffic for the zombie Last Supper picture. Maybe Thunderf00t should blog instead of youtube

Anonymous said...

Makes sense to me...as far as it goes.
The problem with the argument is simply that it depends on there being more than one god.
So I guess he proved that more than one god leads to a logical contradiction.
I think he also proved that he doesn't really "get" the uncertainty principal since it only says that YOU don't know the values of some things, not that those things don't have values.

Anonymous said...

William Lane Craig is simply a deciever. If you read his book "Reasonable Faith" he has a chapter called "The Absurdity of Life Without God." What He is doing here is trying to create a need or void by talking of death and causing insecurity before he moves into his arguments for God. This is the method of every seducer. They will get to know you, find out your insecurities (or create them themselves) and then fill the void with themselves. They insinuate themselves and make it look like they are the answer to your problems. When the void is filled people fall in love. This is what I believe religion is based upon. It's for people who are insecure about themselves and death. People create a God helper out of insecurity. Instead of embracing death and loving themselves and others some people become obssessed with religion because they are insecure about themselves and death.

LadyAtheist said...

Fear of death is natural so I give religion a "pass" on this as an ancient salve for this fear.

Using "absurdity" as some kind of proof is one of the things I hate about WLC. He also says it's absurd to believe that something could come from nothing, yet apparently it's not absurd to believe that God came from nothing

Anonymous said...

I'm going to have to disagree that the fear of death is natural. What has helped me is comming to see that life and death are intertwined and not seperate. When I embraced death I embraced life itself and was transformed. I now want to love myself and others. Depending on a belief in an afterlife or drowning myself in the moment to avoid pain is to despise reality, which is to despise life itself. When I affirmed life by confronting my mortality I was transformed. What matters to me now is to live my days well and as fully as possible. I am converting the terrified, denial-type relationship to death into something active and positive as I am released from anxieties and fearful responses by embracing death and not repressing it. Fearing death is what kept me in bondage and obsessed with religion. I'm learning to take control of my life and take responsibility instead of relying on an invisible person to manage my life for me. In short, I'm learning to be secure and be a man. I don't want to be a little sheep led to the slaughter. Rather, I'm learning to depend on myself and make my own pathway instead of following everybody else as I am grateful to those who have helped me along the way. If I am afraid of death then I am afraid of life. I face reality from within, finding a way to embrace death as part of being alive. It is only from such a position that I began to overcome the fear of death and break free from my bondage to the illusion that is Christ. When attaining goals becomes the main source of pleasure, then your days are filled with purpose and direction, and when death comes you will have no regrets. You will not fall into the nihilistic thinking of the futility of it all, because that is a supreme waste of the brief time that you have. The fearless way of approaching death that I speak of originated in the philosophy known as Stoicism. The core of Stoicism is learning the art of how to die, which paradoxically teaches you how to live. One of the great Stoic writers in the ancient world was Seneca The Younger. He slowly began conquering his fears by first conquering his fear of death. That's just what works for me.

LadyAtheist said...

You kind of proved my point -- a person has to work at overcoming the fear of death. The natural, instinctive state is being fearful of it.

Anonymous said...

Oh, I thought that by natural you meant that it's okay to have. I guess for some it may be. But I don't like living life and loving out of insecurity. when I talk of loving myself I'm not referring to arrogance. The way I see it, people with a weak ego do not have a secure sense of their worth or potential. They pay too much attention to the opinions of others. They might percieve anything as a personal attack or affront. They need constant attention and validation from others. To compensate and disguise this fragility, they will often assume an arrogant, agressive front.

A strong ego is completely different. People who have a solid sense of their own value and feel secure about themselves have the capacity to look at the world with greater objectivity. They are more considerate and thoughtful and less likely to be led astray.

heikki said...

It's hardly fair to say, that Thunderf00t had failed, because you don't know philosophy. Law of identity does not just say something is itself (quite a simplistic law it would be). I also robs the entity it's free will. Consider a helium-filled balloon: if, under the same set of circumstances, it were possible for a balloon B to act in more than one way — if it could rise or fall — then the law of identity would be violated. Such outcomes would have to derive from incompatible (contradictory) aspects of the entity's nature. But there are no contradictory aspects. B is B.

osthebos said...

Thunderf00t did fail, and any person with some knowledge of contemporary philosophy would know this. This is a known objection in the philosophical literature about identity. It is also universally dismissed. But Tf00t likes to speak about these things without knowing the literature. In this example he simply proves too much, because this line of reasoning would imply that there can be no numerical identity over time (given changing properties over time). Its thus easy to prove that Tf00t is misinterpreting Leibniz' law here, and all that is needed is the point that Leibniz-law simply states that A and B -- in order to be identical -- cannot have different properties at a given time. The problem with possible worlds could be resolved in the same manner.

The second problem is about the relation between determination, uncertainty and free will. Tf00ts concept of "free will" is confused. The world obeying determinism or it having genuine randomness ala Heisenberg obviously makes no difference to the question of free will. Randomness is not freedom, and being determined does not necessarily exclude freedom.