Posted on 05/01/2003 8:44:18 AM PDT by RJCogburn
Good grief, I saw through hume decades ago, and your still caught in that trap? Whewell, and every other philosopher who accepted the a priori superstition were complete failures in the field of epistemology (the very worst, of course is Kant). Mill is so full of errors one hardly knows where to begin.
If you wanted to impress me with your knowledge of philosophers you should have picked Aristotle, Bacon (very sadly, he made major contributions to philosophy most do not even know exist), John Locke, and Ayn Rand.
I did not learn philosophy from philosophers. By the time I was nineteen, I had already developed a system of logic that I only later discovered Boole had already developed. (When I was nineteen no one was yet aware of how significant boolean algebra would be in the field of computers, which was not yet a field.) By the time I was thirty, my philosophy was fully developed. My study of philosophers has only been to discover how the principles I know are true were articulated by others. What I discovered is that most philosophers were mostly wrong, and that the field of philosophy has all but been destroyed by philosophers.
I am guessing you are an amateur philosopher, because you do exhibit flashes of clear thought. Most professional philosopher, that is, those who "teach" philosophy in some capacity, have completely surrendered their minds to one form of irrationality or another.
Like most amateurs, you have been entertaining, but not very enlightening, of course.
Hank
What! No Aristotle? It's not even a game without an opponent!
WHO SAYS THERE IS A GOD? You?
I smell a fallacious fume in the "if."
A can of possibility will never yield a does existentially (unless it is cooked up in a sentence and salted to taste with logic).
Suppose Mill grants that his divine being is perfect. Are we to be led blindfolded through this dance of a silly trio?
The divine being is perfect.The only way that last conclusion works is through sham. It works by tanking on the presupposed but unstated logical meaning of "omnipotence" in order to yield a conclusion about an existential reality.
Perfection excludes imperfection.
ergo God cannot be imperfect.
Omnipotence exludes all impotence.
The divine being is impotent (God cannot be imperfect),
ergo God is not omnipotent.
God could really use the assistance of a good libertarian here: at least the libertarian holds "he don't force the can." It's an old canard, I know, but it is presumptious to disregard the agency of a divinity or human being, whether the god is a State or a Nature. If agency is real in a world of plural beings, there are limitations to the ubiquitous blanket of a logical omnipotence.
Aristotle's distinction between what can be deliberated about or not might lend all a hand. And if his distinction can't be accepted, all we have left is the sardonic grin inside the terror of an "it is written."
(IOW the comic general_re inside the tyranny of a serious tpaine.)
Ah, Hank. This is FR. You don't need to guess 'round here.
Just for grins, you might consider the implications of God saying there is a God.
Is that good?
Shucks, if we all could only say that... a philosophy in every pot. ;-`
Who's evidence and who's reason?
There, now I feel like I've bothered you enough in the last few days. '-o
Is that good?
You, bet it is! The earlier one understands the essential nature of their own being and the world they live in the earlier they can begin pursuing knowledge which will be truly useful to them, and begin living for that which they are born to live.
If you have to ask that question, you have not yet discovered what the purpose of your life is or how to achieve it. How long do you think one should wait to do that?
Hank
Was that from the mid 70's? I think I saw it Dance Fever. Or, no... it couldn't have been Soul Train.
No thanks, I'd prefer not to have my own philosophy. Even if I hadn't known something better and just looked around at people who have devised their own philosophies, I'd see that it would be very, very improbable from all the variations that people come up with, that having one's own philosophy would do right by me.
If you have to ask that question, you have not yet discovered what the purpose of your life is or how to achieve it. How long do you think one should wait to do that?
How long should one wait, to discover one's life purpose? I don't think one should wait at all, once it is revealed, after pursuit or simply being pursued, and once one's eyes are uncovered.
Why do you suppose your life has a specific purpose? Also, it would be interesting for me, on the outside looking in, to see what you see yours as. Also, whose purpose? (Not trying to be smartalecky.)
Reality's evidence, my reason.
Hank
Reality is not interested in your whims or preferences. Every individual has a philosophy, like it or not, either an explicit one they understand and choose, or the one implicit in every choice and action of their lives, whether they are aware of it or not.
You have a philosophy, whether you prefer to have one or not. If you do not have one by choice, then you have one by default, which is the way most people acquire their philosophies.
Hank
I do not suppose it, I know it.
Also, it would be interesting for me, on the outside looking in, to see what you see yours as.
It is the same as the purpose of every human being, or for that matter, every living organism, except that human beings are the only creature who can choose to defy the purpose of thier existense.
The purpose of life, for every living creature, is that creature's enjoyment of their life. The purpose of my life, therefore, is my enjoyment of it.
Hank
More or less - either he prevents it because he is perfectly good and omnipotent, or he fails to prevent it because he is less than perfectly good or less than omnipotent. Evil exists, ergo we must choose between perfect goodness and omnipotence. And that's what Mill objects to - the notion of compatibility between perfect goodness and omnipotence, for the reasons he lays out above. I'm not at all sure that he would object to omnipotence combined with some variety of goodness that was less than perfect, but I doubt that's acceptable to you either ;)
God can be good and omnipotent -- yet freely choose to "limit" Himself -- by virtue of the logic of His having vested man with free will. If He were to intervene directly to elmininate the evil of this world, then that would be to violate His own grant of free will to men. To put it crudely, one might say that God made a "deal with man," and He keeps His promises.
Of course. But again, some action being off-limits to God can only be a result of God making such an action off-limits to Himself. God, being omnipotent and omniscient, surely knew in advance what the result of free will would be, and thus in a very real sense has chosen to permit evil and misery to both exist and flourish by his grant of free will. IOW, if God is omnipotent, God chose a course of action that He must have known would have resulted in the existence of evil and misery. If so, how can we conclude anything but that evil and misery exist because God wanted it that way?
Arguably, God did not put the evil in the world. Evil is always a possibility where man is free to choose. To "correct" man in this life for his choices -- which would be the effect of God intervening to overrule and eliminate evil -- would effectively make God an "indian-giver."
Perhaps, but why is God limited to post hoc actions? Nevermind intervening after the fact to "correct" the existence of evil, an omnipotent God must have had the power to prevent it in the first place - and yet He chose not to. And not only did He decline to prevent it, He chose a course of action that He must have known would lead to the existence of evil.
And how does that fit with the notion of "perfect" goodness? It seems to me that if this is "perfect" goodness - choosing a course of action that one knows in advance will lead to evil consequences - then perfection is going to be much easier to attain than I thought...
He is not so agnostic, however, as to fail to note that the universe is "designed"...Unlike his father, J.S. Mill was not an outright atheist.
Or at least appears to be designed. No, Mill was not an atheist or an agnostic, much to the disappointment of some of his friends when his essays on religion were published posthumously ;)
If the outcome is negative, all a utilitarian can do is change is game plan for next time, sort of a sophisticated "trial and error" philosophy.
Isn't that the essence of conservatism, if I may be so bold? That the institutions and social structures that now exist are the result of millennia of trial-and-error, and that they represent the "tried and true" methods of organizing society? And that, as a result, we ought to be loathe to simply discard them on a whim?
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