Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Friday, November 06, 2009, 17:08 (5495 days ago) @ dhw

"I don't know where you get such rules from"-This goes all the way back to Aristotle, and the Greek philosophers before him used those rules even though Aristotle was the first to codify them. A statement can consist of clauses separated by "and" and "or" conjunctions. There are well-known logical rules for determining the truth of the statement as a whole by looking at the truth of each individual clause and the conjunctions that connect them. If all of the clauses in a statement are separated by the "and" conjunction and all of the clauses except one are true, then the statement as a whole is false. I learned this several years before taking Philosophy 101 44 years ago, and so when my logic professor presented that material in that class, it was already second nature to me.-Google for "truth tables" to find out what all the rules are and how you can build a truth table to determine the truth of a statement as a whole. A simple example is the following, and my original statement followed this pattern: "It is raining and the humidity is 5%." If it is true that it is raining but false that the humidity is 5%, then the quoted statement as a whole is false.-I guess from now on I'll have to break up your statements and treat each individual clause as a separate statement and let you know whether I think each is true or false, since Aristotelian logic doesn't seem to be second nature with you. -'I wonder what syntactical rule you would call on to explain your acceptance (24 October at 19.10) of Dawkins' belief that "there is nothing beyond the natural physical world, no supernatural intelligence lurking behind the observable universe...", followed by your subsequent rejection of it (30 October at 21.30).'-If I ever accepted Dawkins' statement you quote I must have been smoking some illegal weed that was addling my brain. I especially find his use of the word, lurking, offensive, as I would not characterize how God observes as "lurking." I would rather characterize it this way: as intensely interested and as involving as possible, but no more than what is possible.-Hopefully it's clear to you now what I'm really proposing and we can indeed drop this sterile discussion as you suggest we should.