juggernaut
Permabanned
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2009
- Messages
- 1,009
If she meant the same thing, why did she ask "how" and "why" as two different questions? If I use the word "why" as a synonym for "how" I don't go through the trouble of distinguishing between the two. And how do you know what I would have argued 250 years ago? Have I given you any indication that I'm making an argument here from a consensus position rather than taking things on their own merits? I can't possibly have, because active disbelief in the supernatural is not the consensus position.
And whether or not we know how a thing happened or how a thing does happen is not grounds for agnosticism about deities. Here's a dialogue:
Man 1: I don't believe in storm giants. In fact, I have good reason for thinking they do not exist.
Man 2: How can you say that? I don't know how the red spot on Jupiter works, so we can't claim that storm giants don't exist. We just don't know.
Man 1:
We did.
This argument has been conducted illogically and in poor faith, with more presumption of my motives and defects than cases being made. I've no reason to persist in it any longer.
Yes, you've given several. Every single point you've raised has been raised in the literature on the subject by someone else. Nothing you've said hasn't already been said by a zillion other philosophers of religion. Your position is the default in every analytic department in this country. It reflects a fairly decent coverage of the available material, but nothing that is recognizable as original thought.
How and why should not be separated in ontological discussions (this is an ontological argument insofar as we are debating the existence of a deity and whether or not to believe in such an existence). While they are not, logically, necessarily connected in that as we can construct models of one or the other without logically relying on the other, the "why" often determines the "how".