Reason, Logos, and the Image of God

The total number of ultimate necessary truths which are affirmed and assumed even in their denials, objections, and alternatives, make up the system we call mind.

Any justification or refutation, any process of deciding what is true and what is false, must proceed according to that system of necessary truths. Therefore, that system logically justifies everything including itself, and at every moment sustains our rational knowledge of the world because of it's enduring invariability and therefore reliability as an eternal ideality or standard of thought.

But only persons logically justify things.

Metatheoretic rationality is the ideal person without the limits of finitude. And it doesn't have to do anything to carry out all this universal justifying. Just being what it is does everything inertly, and automatically.

Because it is the ultimate criterion of all truth including questions about itself and its own reality, and because it logically determines the real, it necessarily indicates or implies the existentially real at every moment.

Yet Another Swashbuckling at Feser's Place

Edward Feser is the Jimi Hendrix of Thomism.

Can't thank him enough for his blog as a catalyst for intellectual development in regard to just about all aspects of classical theism versus open-ended cross-examination.

So here is my comment from:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-voluntarist-personality.html

To question or analyze whether the will or the intellect is the determiner of our belief in voluntarism or intellectualism, assumes intellectualism.

Besides, if it really were a sheer function of will, then there's no such thing as having reasons for the belief. But hey, you couldn't be bothered with asking yourself which belief you're going to will today. Just will it, and let the intellectualists ask questions later.

And if it's all sheer willing, you couldn't even be aware of that fact itself---you could only will it, and then will your belief that you willed it.

The problem with voluntarism is that voluntarists argue for it, instead of simply urging people to just WILL it.

As Charles Manson and Nike would both say: "Just will it."

* * *

"It's ALL real, sonny boy! So watch out!"
--Town Drunk, Macon Georgia

The Real Outline For Christian Apologetics

• Comprehensive public inventory of the most basic assumptions of evidentialism.

• Comprehensive inventory of relevant factors and values that justify preferences made, using the rules of general rationality or principles of thinking and deciding what is true. Examples are: survival, some sense of sanity, the value hierarchies in relation to purposes chosen, the nature and value of persons, criteria of historical analysis, and so on. Artificial intelligence programs will force this issue, thank God.

• 2D/3D charting of arguments in organizational-chart formats with easily isolable lines of inference between the uniquely-numbered and sequenced statements.

• Metatheoretically justify the set of necessary universals required to know anything about the past 5000 years or 5 minutes ago, identifying the universals that cannot be denied without assuming them in the process of that denial, in order to just think at all about anything historical. (John Warwick Montgomery's early books on history identify the self-reference issues in things like higher criticism historical skepticism, and so on, and refutes them.)

• Number every statement, whether static (as added to the system) or dynamically according to inferential sequence.

• Logically label each statement as either an Assumed Premise or Derived Conclusion (from previous statements, ultimately to an Assumed Premise.

This would outshine science in precision, and the contrasted absence of this kind of thing in science itself (and philosophy, for that matter) would become notorious virally.

Too bad christian apologists are dedicated to street stupidity and ignorant about what's so blatantly staring them in the face. They're afraid of exposure to their opposition's arguments and afraid to engage. Hence their Stepfords rhetorical patterns.

Game over. They lost.

You get 10 times the growth in knowledge and insight by reading opposition arguments. There is simply no substitute for this, and no way around it.

Sublimation is both the alcohol and the sugar of laziness itself.

Kick yourself in the ass right now, and read some heavy tome aloud. 5 minutes a day will change your life immediately. Increase it so gradually that it's almost imperceptible.

Wake your ass up! You don't get to repeat these moments!

Blockchain Jesus and the Tell-Tale Heart of Verbal Darkness

If your theory is universal and includes itself in what it's talking about, then that theory itself must be impacted by its own truth or assertion. Otherwise, the self-exemption destroys it's universality.

"Not all" logically equals only some. Not all.

But if it's not true as a universal, then why was it ever constructed as a statement itself in the first place?

If you're not being an intellectually hypocritical liar, why not just use the word "some" or even "most"? Instead of the typical social dilettante's absolutistic claiming of universal X about A?

Where's the agenda'd bigotry now?

In the future, rash precocious adolescents will ask these questions. And they won't be kind. I will be the one who looks kind in retrospect.

Which views can say something about all views and not have to be treated accordingly, and which one's can't? Whose ox gets gored is the streetwise truth here. It's about getting the intellectual upper hand before you have any opportunity to say anything.

See how it works, kickin-it mental party-ravers?

Or if I'm wrong about that, then pray tell why would any self-contradictory or self-referringly contradictory claim ever be stated to another person in the first place, and in repeated unargued verbal rituals in all social situations?

Constant repetition---and without any argument. Someone is trying to convince themselves of something that just somehow won't convince, all the while running interference against any scrutiny that might reveal the telltale, implicit (the more the better), but quite fatal self-reference contradiction.

Modern Science: Bragging About Precision in Sloppy Traditional Prose

Once you start really exploring scientific method, you realise that if you took the advertised exactitude seriously and you yourself obtained detailed knowledge of, not only scientific method, but also of what exactly science is defined as being in the first place, you'd get the distinct impression that you're more of a scientist than many practicing research scientists.

I guarantee that if you become an expert on scientific method and the definition of science---and don't even bother with the rest of the universals of science, just those two things alone---you would totally freak out the staff in just about any research facility today. And they would find a way to get rid of you asap.

Don't get me started on the laxness and politics of the environments their underlings often have to work in.

A lot of scientific research doesn't verify its own procedures, just as a lot of businesses don't verify design or procedures with real-world users before taking the product or service to market.

It's the collectivism, of course, but note the blatant hypocrisy of the hype versus the daily---as well as the theoretic---reality.

Just another reason why I avoid all organizations of any kind, as much as possible.

Another Demon Forever Haunts Empiricism-Positivism

Trial-and-error already assumes an un-trialed perfectly error-free relation between trial and error.

Sydney Hook: God, Necessity, and the Laws of Logic

"Now if the laws of logic are taken as formal conditions of discourse, they cannot establish the existence of anything (including God) as necessary. If they are taken as statements ,about things, then they produce an embarrassing richness of necessary existences. Those who accepted them would be under the intellectual compulsion of finding a way to distinguish between God and other necessary existences. This makes it impossible for believers to use the laws of logic alone, for since they generally assume that the existence of other things depends upon God, they cannot accept any method of argument which leads to the conclusion that there are other necessary existences as well. Such a conclusion would entail that God's power is limited."

--from Critiques of God (1976), Peter Angeles ed., "Modern Knowledge and the Concept of God", page 24 (from Hook's Quest For Being, 1961)


This has a number of problems:

1 If the laws of logic are the formal conditions of discourse, then one cannot question their own existence or the existence of what must be assumed in order to contemplate the situation. The laws of logic are necessarily both the formal and the practical existing conditions that make discourse possible.

2 To say that the formal conditions of discourse cannot prove existence is to use those formal conditions of discourse as authorities about formal conditions of discourse adjudicating existence in that statement itself. A denial doesn't get you a free arbitrary exemption from scrutiny, unless the burden of proof is on the affirmative claim. And this is compounded by the fatal self-reference inconsistency and self-destruction.

And the burden of proof is on the person who can't avoid using as well as assuming those formal conditions of discourse in order to pass judgment on the proper means of deciding existence claims.

Once again, as I said in the frontiers lecture, the rationally necessary is necessarily the existentially real, as well as the theoretic real, because any argument denying that is self-contradictory in trying to rationally necessitate its own truth about the experientially real in that selfsame formal-condition-based argument about existential moment-by-moment reality.

3 And those formal conditions of discourse produce, in the sense of revealing, in both what they assume and what they imply, a number of irreducibly basic necessary statements.

But the only embarrassment is from Hook's self-contradictions. Distinguishing between God and other necessary existences is precisely what prevents the atheist from seeing God in the ultimacy, efficacy, and, even morality of general rationality itself.

Using the laws of logic is using certain aspects of Ultimate Mind, or God.

Where there is no dependency, there is reason itself, whose set of principles assumes, implies, and embodies various essential characteristics of God.

Hook, like all other rationalist atheists, uses reason as a God of Mind.

Half of Colleges Bankrupt in 10 to 15 Years

The professor who made that claim thinks 9 years.

Let's try to make it 5. We can do it.

And all of them within 20!

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/15/hbs-professor-half-of-us-colleges-will-be-bankrupt-in-10-to-15-years.html

Woke Atheist Peter Boghossian Sets the Example

Some atheists see the danger of anti-intellectualism and take action. Peter Boghossian has even taken his campaign against religion's irrationality-mongering to the prisons where he has extensive experience.

The rest of the philosophers, and almost all of the religious, simply aren't that woke.

They're hiding. Someone tell them their day of reckoning is here.

Once again, somebody's not reading their Schopenhauer.

Peter's website, concepts, and strategies should be studied closely, regardless of the relative success or not of the project.

He's a courageous pioneer and hero. And I consider myself a part of his crusade.

As Nietzsche said, "One must say it ten times: The most important things are the methods!"

https://www.streetepistemology.com/

Nielsen's Infallible Fallibility

This was one of Nielsen's silences, as well as an infallible handwaving about fallibility, complete with giving fallibility the status of an infallible principle. Funny how that works.

 Like the point I made recently about nominalism, fallibility itself gets treated as if it had all the qualities of infallibility. Other issues are both the criteria and justification of fallibility itself.

We make mistakes. And I'm necessarily infallible on that point.

Bedtime for Booze & Tobacco Mentalities

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/alcohol-shunned-young-people-health-survey-for-england-non-drinkers-a8576616.html

William James on Abstract Logical Relations

Logical relations are perceived as directly as anything else.
--William James (in Durant's Mansions book, page 40)

How Do You Know That God Exists?

Well, you have to have some basis for that kind of extra belief on top of you're everyday ones.

But it turns out that that basis itself is already functioning as a God of your thinking.

So a functionally-equivalent-to-God system of analysis is necessarily assumed to analyze the question of the existence of God.

Argued denials of that basis demonstrate its necessity in using argued premises to somehow decide the truth or falsity of another claim, a conclusion, because of that same assumed basis of thinking.

That basis is general rationality, which is logic plus the practical rules of thinking that logic implies.

General rationality is a set of abstract objective universals combined with the irreducibly distinct basic concepts, including the concepts that make up those universals themselves.

And yet rational standards in all aspects of everyday  life are followed more closely than the sacred texts of any religion.

It's already the abstract universal Word of God about all logically possible candidates for the status of any more specific, say salvational/prophetic Word of God.

To think about this at all---is to have already assumed it.

Centore Wants to be Hated

"My aim in this book is to be hated."
--First sentence of F. F. Centore's book, Confusions and Clarifications: An Introduction to Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century.

Always wanted to go on an F. F. Centore book-reading binge, and now's my chance. Received three of his books today.

His book, Atheism and Theism, will be obtained as soon as the price drops into Earth's atmosphere. Check out the first 6 pages on Amazon.

Os Guinness: The Dust of Death

Just arrived today. I will not narrate it, but will take exhaustive notes and incorporate into the metatheoretic lecture. I'll also sample his other works, especially his most recent books.

Scientism and Secularism by J. P. Moreland

It's on its way. Published only four days ago. Available here. Should be interesting. Moreland is intellectually streetwise about academic philosophy. And the remarks against scientism in his and Craig's Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview were apparently just a starting point. If so, then Moreland sees the persistence as more than just a catalog entry in the list of alternatives and objections to belief in God. I'll glean the essentials as soon as the book arrives, and then post a very brief and to-the-point review.

The Stones Cry Out

Key materials of computers are mined from rocks. So, in a sense, we're deriving information gathering power from stone. It's still the Stone Age.