Theology Web

people who run Theology web think ti's their duty to assist hate group atheism to slander Christians.

SR: I'm sorry to bring this shit here you guys. He's been trolling me to get a response from me. Well I'm going to give it to him. But I knew I was going to curse so I figured I'd bring it here.

Well MetaCrock you said you wanted a response from the mighty astronomy Sea of red. Well here it is. Below is my LAST response to your bullshit.

Quote:here he quotes me from our argument before.
Meta (Before) generalized overstatement. you can't say that as though all physicists and cosmologists are just absolutely certain there are other universes. I know for fact there are many who don't. there's evdience to support it and I have 26 arguments against it.

SR

Well I'm not going to go make an argument from majority, but I will say that more accept the multiverse than not. And I know that more accept a multiverse than god having been responsible for it.

Accept it in what way? As a certainty or a plausibility? That makes a big difference because it's not fair to say that an arguemnt that is merely "plausible" kills another argument that well grounded.





SR

Inflation predicts a multiverse, each universe having a different set of parameters than ours. Inflation cosmology has made many spot on predictions before and is accepted almost universally by cosmologists. You don't seem to understand that this prediction isn't something cosmologists came up with in their sleep, it's something they can conclude based on the current data. Now if you want to disagree with their conclusion then show me some better data. Where is your data? Oh that's right you don't have one fucking scrap of evidence, how could I forget.

Ironically, the major source I use on my fine tuning page is Adre Linde. He invented the inflationary theory. So the argument you are using is invented by the guy I use to document my fine tuning argument. Now does mean by that that we can bank on Mlitiverse as a proven fact? I think you know beter. If you at the 26 arguments I qutoe several major leading physicists who say it can never be proved. You want to pretend that the little magic men have some magic data that guarontees that they are right. But that's stupid. Because those men themselves admit there's no proof.

Sten Odenwald, Gaddard, Nasa

"yes there could be other universes out there, but they would be unobservable no matter how old our universe became...even infinitly old!! So, such universes have no meaning to science because there is no experiment we can perform to detect them."



Potty mouth SR

What do you offer up instead? Philosophy. Yep, a bunch of non experts that have explicative eleted clue what they're talking about. They are not using science they're using common philosophical sense, which in physics is useless. You're 26 “arguments” were piss poor straw men. It's obvious you don't understand what the multiverse even is! So why should I hold your fucking hand through it all and give you the old “and this is why this is wrong”?

It's clear this guy knows zip about philosophy. He think deductive reasoning is "common sense." He thinks philosophers like common sense! waht a dweebe. You can see waht a total ... he is because I just got through quoting through quoting an exerpt in physics.


notice of coruse he doesn't quote one. He assertst here are such people, he does not quote them. He has no understanding of debate whatsoever.





Quote:
I have 26 arguments aginst multiverse. you have not answered one of hem.


SR

I know what you're doing. You think that if you overwhelm me with bullshit that I won't address all of it and then you can bitch that I didn't answer, meaning I must of just not been able to answer.

is that an argument? does he even bother to look at one of them? No, he doesnt' even bother to check to see if even one makes sesnse. He also doesn't check to see how long the page has been there, he acts like I put it up just for him: it's been up 10 years.

Quote:
I've linked to them several times.

SR (aka old potty mouth)

Yeah I'm aware of that. I've been liked to your shitty site about a thousand times, big whoop. Do you think that I have all the time in the world? Do you think I get up and go “today sounds like a good day to refute MetaCrocks bullshit”? Do ya? I will NOT waste my time and go through that bullshit. Spin it anyway you want..

Is taht an arguemnt? does he provide one single sentila of evenidence ot prove anything that I say is "BS?" No he does not. He just asserts like he asserts everything else and you are suppossed to believe him because he's so mature.



Quote:
(1) show the hit rate for life in the MV

SR

Hit rate? Again different parameters means different chemistry, so the hit rate is unknown.

well duh! the whole bleeding multiverse is unknown you dweebe! Guess what? you still don't get to assert it as a fact because it can't be proved, stupid!

SR.

Doesn't mean you get to make the conclusion that life couldn't exist, sorry that game doesn't work with me. You started this by claiming it to be true so you have the burden proof. You say the universe is fine tuned for life so it is up to you prove that such is this case.

I did that stupo. that's what all stuff way back in the op was about. that's what the stuff on the web page is around you little illiterate clod. You are so stupid you can't even understand how arguemnts are made.

SR

You. Not me. You. Got that yet? Don't change the subject and say “well you poopy head atheists should prove you're right”. No, fuck you. I know you want me to show my hand but you don't plan on showing me yours. Your circle jerk logic isn't evidence okay? Get some data, then well talk.

learn something about argumentation you (explicative compounded and deleted). you cannot assert an argument without proving it. you have not proved the multiverse, you have not quoted a single authroity or study or any shred of data that proves it. You have not quoted anything! So you have not proved your assertino. you assert the multiverse beats my arugment. you msut prove that it exists. taht's the ruels of logic, stupid.

that's the way it works, you assert an argument you have to prove it. youc an't hang the burden of proof on me to disprove your nonse just because I'm asserting something else at another point.

You areally need to study logic. you don't understand anything. I know you are not Ph.D. student. you are a liar. You are not a student.l you are far too stupid.



Quote:
(2) each space/time in the MV would have to be fine tuned too to produce life, you just multiply the problem

SR

This doesn't even make any (four letter wrod begining with f and ryming with puck) sense. Be more clear when you speak.

why doesn't it? because you are stupid to understand it are you really so dumb that you can't figure waht "hit rate" is? God want a moron. How could you possibly be in graduate school?

It means. stupid, that before we know that the mulitiverse would kill the fine tuning arugment we must know, after the fact that it exits, at what rate life appears in each universe. That is crucial becuase if none of then have life in them we can say the fine tuning argument is right, life is extremely improbable. The fewer that have life the more improbable it is. So we have to knw the hit rate, or the rate of how mamy universes have life.


Quote:
you can't prove that. just because they have different ones doesn't mean those others don't have to fine tuned too.

That. Is . It.
Do you not understand that not being able to live in another universe does not mean that the one you live in is fine tuned for you? That's theism for ya, make assumption after assumption never to stop and test them.

you don't even understand what fine tuning means. that is not the arguemnt. no arguemnt says "we can't live in other universes." that has nothing to do wti hit. the issue is how improbable is life in a given universe? The other unvierse. if they exist, would have to be fine tunned to. So how does that beat fine tuning if they also to be fine tunned?

Quote:

but that can't happen without proof. The reason the BB has been accepted universally and is seen as "good science" is exactly because we do have proof it. The background radiation and the expansion of the universe, we can't have that kind evidence of the MV not at all. probably never will.


SR

I've already talked about why the multiverse IS good science. Only a theist that has an agenda will argue against it. That, or one that doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about(you).

you talked about it. You didnt offer any kind of proof. so it is not proved. just talking about it doesn't prove anything.

man this pathetic. thsi is his big "show down--this is the end I'm going to get you" thin and its' pathetic. I've seen retarted peole follow issues better than this guy does.

Poo Poo on it all you like big guy, it won't make it go away. You are one dishonest (four leter ford ryming with suck). You use science when it supports your case but mock it when it contradicts you. Then you go on to say “ Ha that science and it's “evidence” pfffftt..”

Hes' also so grandiloquent isn't he? "you big bad guy (explicative delieted) that just says it all.




Quote:

but you can't show a single case of any other kind of life, or a single case of another universe. all you have is total speculation. you argument is no better than saying "if you are wrong you are wrong" that's exactly all you are saying.

You can't show that other universes with different physical parameters can;t harbor life. Check mate.

But I don't have to show taht. Becasue it's not my burden of proof to disprove the multivesre, since you have not proved it. It can't beat the fine tuning arugment until we have basic reason to believei t exist. you have not provided a single quote form any source. I have given 26 reasons not to accept MV and I backed most of them up with quotes form etiher phyiscists or philsohpers who are expet in cosmolgy. you on the other hand provide nothing.

Quote:
if if if if you don't have any answers. you have no evidence.

If if if if you don't understand this subject keep your (expicative rymes with mucking) mouth shut and stop C&P from other sites.

you have clearly demosntrated that you don't understand logic, arugment, debate, or docuemntation.



Quote:

Here are my 26 argumetns against the multiverse.
http://www.doxa.ws/cosmological/anthropic2.html

Again? Really? You're not some rocket scientist. You are a wanna be apologist. Shove that link up your ass.

read the list man. what are you afarid of?

Quote:
we are cable of doing that. that's not the question. the question is now likely is it that a universe suitable for them came to be and hit all the proper trip wires right down the line when each one was extremely improbable.

Hey wait a minute! That's analogy!

Don't worry I know you wont admit you're full of (explieicative deleted by rymes with hit).

No its not an analogy that's exactly literally what the argument is. btw I think you are full of hit too. hit rate. what it rate on your illiteracy?

Quote:
It's just silly to think that other universes would not have vast improbabilities. the only example we have of a universe is a vast web of great improbabilities. Why wouldn't another be also?

You stupid little man. Every atom, every proton, every electron, everything is improbable but has zero to (ryhmes with wucking) g do with whether it is designed. If you think that improbability=design then you sir are a massive fuckhead.

aha (1) you pathetic little retardate, the fine tuning argument is not about deisgn per se. tis' not a design arguemnt.

(2) your chilcish little outburst is not an arguemnt. I know you havent' the intellect to understnd this,but what you said just now has nothing to do with anyting. Its not any kind of answer. you did not answer the arguemnt stupid.



Quote:

I want to know what you mean by "creation theists?" anyone who believes in god of any kind would believe in creation, even a theist evolutionist would believe God created. That's like saying "one of them God believing christians." You know as opposed to all those atheist Christians.

If you believe the universe was designed then you are a creation theist.

O there's true birlliance for you. He thinks it's a design argument. he thinks belief in design means you don't believe in evolution. so he hasn't figured out what I knew in second grade. that evolution can be part of design.

Quote:

Claiming it looks design= It is designed doesn't always follow(ask Paley).
I don't argue Paley that is not the FT argument

you are clutching at straws. that's NOT even an argument I made. You are trying to answer that because you are not sure you answered the other one? I never said anything about it "looking designed." I agree that's one of the weaknesses of the conventional design argument that's not a weakness of the fine tuning argument.

Really?

what a devistating come back! I tell him he's got the wrong end of the stick and he says "really." I am just reeling from that pugalistic pelting!


look at the facts man, you just answered an arguemnt I never made! that's clealry you don't understand anything I'm saying!

its' clear athesits hate this arugmnt so deeply because it works, it proves God. theya re scared to death of it, so they ridicule it with all their feeble little potty mouths.

From your very site...
Quote:


All the invocation of the multiverse really shows is that the atheist or anti-design critic will never accept ANY evidence for design at all. That is why I love it so much. Consider an example: We look into a distant galaxy and find that a cluster of stars perfectly spells out the first 3 chapters of the Gospel of John in Greek. Above it is the phrase: "No, this is not due to chance. It is designed. Don't even try to invoke the multiverse." The skeptic COULD STILL invoke the multiverse and claim that if there are an infinite number of universes that exhaust all possible configurations of matter, this one was BOUND to come up. MOREOVER, it it were true, it would mean that there must be universes out there where the Greek verses are spelled out by the stars and yet, mispelled, as the stars in that universe just didin't quite hit the target, so it would say "Toe, Dish et nog du to pance. Fit met Degine. Don't even fry to enpoke the Multisource." This reductio ad absurdum just shows how absurd it is to assume the multiverse when the only reason to do so is to answer the anthropic argument.


Hmmm wonder what you're trying to suggest. Oh that's right...ID. Don't pussy foot around and try and ignore what you are clearly promoting guy. I can see it, others can see it, it sticks out like a sore thumb. The design argument is clearly apart of the fine tuning argument,.

that's from my stie, but you took it out of context. that's not my arguemnt. I didn't write it, I was quotign someone and Its not part of the arguemnt as I make it in the intro. I quote for a different reason, not agree with everyting it says.

Oh I almost forgot. Get someone to correct your spelling for your site. Just a thought.
you are still distorting what I said. look cloely in this and the previous post. you just waxed. you got your butt kicked.

O yea the ultimate coup de gras. So he's talked to the idiots on CARM who give him the lo down "here's all you gotta do to handle that guy, jsut makea crack about his spelling and say he didn'g go to graduate school and he will go to peices."

so little dumb uzz who can't think and doesn't understand the issues, desptrate to save face and clutching at straws, whips out the old reliable stand by. He's just worked himself into an even deeper hole by proving he doesn't anythinga bout arugment. His logic is so weak he has to resort to cheats like spelling to make any sort of points to save face, goofy and stupid though that face may be.

Only you and your buds are going to think that, but the rest of the crowd knows that you are full of fail. You suck at apologetics, give it up.

get this straight little poofter, I do not have "buds." I have freinds. something you don't have.


Quote:
(1)you admitted you have not gone over the major parts of the argument.

You haven't gone over mine. You ignored all of my scientific arguments and threw a big philosophy tantrum. That's all you did. So (four letter word) cry me a river. When you address my arguments with science and don't link to some WLC style philosopher then I'll refute your main argument.

I just did stupid. You don't know anything about philosphy. you have no concept of where I'm coming from. I am so far over your head you have no idea.

Quote:
(2) you totally ignored the Linde stuff and tha'ts what's driving my arugment.

You ignored all of the stuff I said. Like the fact that physicists have done experiments and concluded that it is still possible for li

I just answered it dubm ass. If you think I ignored read all this agin dumb dumb.

fe to exist. Which is all that counts. (expletiave deleted, four letter word ryhming with tuck).

The rest of what you said didn't make sense and was just a pack of lies, at least the parts I could make out.

O there's a brilliant answer. well now I see, why didn't you say that before?

Quote:
You just lost big.


No fucktard.

ahahahahahah what kind of a word i staht? NO loiotard! ahaahhahaah h what a patheic worm.

You just made yourself look like a dumb retard that doesn't understand what the hell he's fucking talking about. You lost this argument. And I know that other Tweb users will say that I have a vulgar mouth, and that I insult to much, blah, blah, blah. But you know what? I don't give a shit. You drove my temper up and what you got was this. Fuck you and the horse you road in on.

ahahahahahahahah yea right. all those who think his undocunented assertions are real arguments raise your hands.

Maybe if you actually refuted me with scientific data and didn't use a bunch of philosophical bitching you'd sound more intelligent. You didn't refute any facts, you merely showed you and some other apologists don't like what I have to say. A lot of what I said can be confirmed by doing some research, but you will never do it so I don't know why I bother.

where is your scientifci data! where! you never used any dumb ass! you never had any! don't you understand .are so very stupid that you think you can assert you have data when you don't give any what a fool you are you are a little panty wast e fool.

You are very creepy. You challenged that I am in a Ph.D program for astronomy.

I actually started out aruging that we should believe what you saya bout that. but you so stupid that despite the fact hat I tried to say taht seveal times you bit the hand that tied help over and over again so now I'm talking it back. no one as sutpid and childish as ou deserves a Ph.D. you do not deserve one. You may be in a program, alhtough I doubt it bu tyou don't deserve a degree. you are a true idiot.

You stalked me for four threads now, and you've been whining for me to play. Well you got your wish. Hope enjoyed it as much as I did. The sad part is that you got me so worked up that I'm unable to write long ass rebuttals to you and your bullshit. Of course you'll claim I can;t answer, fine live in your fantasy, I don't care. I'm just pissed that a little insect like you got me this worked up.

you kept coimng in to my thread to argue with you stupid ;retarted little term. hwo the hell can you possibly think that. you don't know even know what the wrods means.

It was my thread, yo kept arguing on it stupid!

Don't try and play the martyr game. I never asked you to defend me(which I didn't even see). You got me to this point and got this kind of a response by trolling me. You earned this, so you got it.

I normally don't take it to this level but you worked me up. So let me just make it clear to all the other Tweb theists who may read this, I don't do this that often, very unlikely that I'll do this to you.

man I feel so sorry for you. you are truely lame. you are truley stupid and trley lame.

MetaCrock. Don't talk to me, don't P.M me, just fuck off.

James.

wow,what a childish litlte peion.

then one of his litle play mates adds on to that:



Susanoo
of the Sea and Storms


Joined: 25 Feb 2009
Posts: 170
Local time: 10:12 PM

us.gif


PostPosted: Wed Apr 29, 2009 12:39 am Post subject: Add User to Ignore List Reply with quote
The fact that, as a human I'm supposedly very similar in makeup to whatever the hell Metacrock is... really makes me want to put a bullet through my head right now.



Of course that's not hate is it? who would ever say atheists are hateful?


the original Guy, sea of Red says:


The guy basically stalked me until I gave him a response. He is a stupid ass fucktard. I can't believe any university would let him have any kind of Masters with his piss poor communication skills.

Dawkamentalism and it's Stiffeling Effect Upon Metnal Maturity

Arguing with a guy who claims to be a Ph.D. candidate in phsyics or astronomy. His name is "Sea of Read." The argument is fine tuning and he's just propossed that the the hypothetical multiverse kills the ft argument.

SR:

Another possibility is other universes with different physical parameters. It bothers many and sounds like something from Star Wars, but it is far from a controversy. Current cosmology predicts other universes or a multiverse.

Meta (Before) generalized overstatement. you can't say that as though all physicists and cosmologists are just absolutely certain there are other universes. I know for fact there are many who don't. there's evdience to support it and I have 26 arguments against it.


sea of red

These other universes will have a different set of parameters and maybe other kinds of life(or not in some cases).

Meta:
I have 26 arguments aginst multiverse. you have not answered one of hem. I've linked to them several times. you do not answer them. you can't just wave the term mutliverse around like a cross before a vampire and not answer of of the 26 arguments against it.

(1) show the hit rate for life in the MV

(2) each space/time in the MV would have to be fine tuned too to produce life, you just multiply the problem

(3) since you can't prove prove it is forever nothing more than a possibility so you can't really xpect it to be an answer. that's no different than just saying "maybe I'm right."




you can't prove that. just because they have different ones doesn't mean those others don't have to be fine tuned too. Your multiverse just repeats the same problem for every universe in it. you have evidence to the contrary.


SR

When alpha is changed you get different chemistry and thus different life. Many theists claim that no evidence exists for a multiverse but this shows their ignorance of the topic. Much evidence exists, all one would have to do is get a past issue of Sky and Telescope, Astronomy mag, or scientific American to get a good grasp of this theory. I won't repeat what is in these articles as people need to search for and find the answers on their, plus there will be no complaining about bias.

Now, it can thus be said that once we accept the multiverse as fact and realize that it is as good science as the big bang we can make some theories on this “fine tuning”.

Meta:
but that can't happen without proof. The reason the BB has been accepted universally and is seen as "good science" is exactly because we do have proof it. The background radiation and the expansion of the universe, we can't have that kind evdience of the MV not at all. probably never will.

1)Our universe is only capable of producing the kind of life we are.
2)We are that kind of life and are in this universe.
3)We are in the universe that is capable of producing our kind of life and thus evolved in it.

that's just question begging. You can't argue our existence as proof of anything becasue it does not tell us the reasons for it! can't you see that? that's so fundamental.

but you can't show a single case of any other kind of life, or a single case of another universe. all you have is total speculation. you argument is no better than saying "if you are wrong you are wrong" that's exactly all you are saying.

If there are other universes

If the parameters for life in those universes doesn't repeat the same problem

if if if if you don't have any answers. you have no evidence.

Here are my 26 argumetns against the multiverse.


SR

Other kinds life with different chemistry will only be capable of living in the universes suitable for them.

Meta
we are cable of doing that. that's not the question. the question is now likely is it that a universe suitable for them came to be and hit all the proper trip wires right down the line when each one was extremely improbable.

It's just silly to think that other universes would not have vast improbabilities. the only example we have of a universe is a vast web of great improbabilities. Why wouldn't another be also?



SR

In other words we are in the only universe we can be in, and we are in it, just like certain animals are in the only parts of the world they can survive in, but we don't think those parts of the world are “fine tuned” for those animals.

Meta:
that is a false analogy. you are arguing from analogy that in itself is a fallacious way to argue. analogous are not proof. but this is not even a good analogy becasue the basic issue is not "we are in the only universe we could be in" that's a distortion of the FT argument. you have created a straw man in order to set up a fallacious analogy to argue from. that's two fallacious ways of arguing compounding each other.




SR

Finally. Even with all that said creation theist still have a huge problem with a designer. No evidence. Even if all of their argument was true it would add not one bit of credibility to the god hypothesis.

Meta
that's nutty. that is evidence itself. How question begging can you get? that's just ridiculous. The argument itself is the evidence you say there is none of. Silly.

I want to know what you mean by "creation theists?" anyone who believes in god of any kind would believe in creation, even a theist evolutionist would believe God created. That's like saying "one of them God believing christians." You know as opposed to all those atheist Christians.



SR

Claiming it looks design= It is designed doesn't always follow(ask Paley).

Meta
I don't argue Paley that is not the FT argument

you are clutching at straws. that's NOT even an argument I made. You are trying to answer that because you are not sure you answered the other one? I never said anything about it "looking designed." I agree that's one of the weaknesses of the conventional design argument that's not a weakness of the fine tuning argument.







SR
Is a direct copy of the first post you made to me in this thread.

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...66&postcount=8

This is pathetic.. and creepy.

Meta
you are still distorting what I said. look closely in this and the previous post. you just waxed. you got your butt kicked.

(1) you admitted you have not gone over the major parts of the argument.

(2) you totally ignored the Linde stuff and tha'ts what's driving my arugment.

(3) aruge argue agsint things I don't say such as Paley

(4) you argue form analogy

(5) your basic method is question begging.


SR

Do people really expect me to respond to his garbage?

Meta
on this board, probably not, in a real debate. of course you have to answer the arguments are you lose.

You just lost big.



so here in response he shows his true maturity:


SR

Okay.

So you think this over do ya? Not a chance. I am going to address your BS arguments point by point tonight. But not at this site, it's going to be at my other home AtheistForums.com. I want to curse, and not be subject to any of the rules at this forum. You've gotten me pretty damn angry, that's a mistake you're going to regret.

Congratulations you're going to be the first theist at this forum to see the real Sea of red.

I hope you enjoyed my patience. Cuz now it's gone.

I see he's so brave he's even brave enough to go on a board he knows I wont go on and he's going to curse at me there! O my, what a regular Bruce Lee.

Why are so many atheists like this? they just become absoluteness furious when you beat their arguments in a fair debate? Because their basic motivation (not all but many) is to feel Superior. Take away their feeling of being superior to theists and they just fall apart.

the great thoughts of brilliant athesits

these geniuses are on theology web and there's a sample of the devastating arguments they make agianst my fine tuning argument. This really killer stuff showing the true intellectual depth of atheists.

Sea sancuary

In reply to this post by Metacrock




I followed a weblink to copious amounts of copy and paste. Ug.

As with all my arguments it's a rational warrant for belief, not proof of God's existence.

Mind if I just skip ahead and grant that? Since we don't know everything about the formation of the universe, there is room for a divine possibility and therefore it is rationally justifiable to hold such a view.

Of course I maintain there is also plenty of room for a non-divine possibility to it is rationally justifiable to hold that view as well.

SS again:


Originally posted by Metacrock
ahahahahaa you are so ignoorant! you bee to school? what grade are you IN ? you are in highschool right? man you need to learn a thing or two.

the things you saw on that page were written by me. that is what we call "research." it's was in debate is known as 'evidence." it' s documentation. that means we prove our opinion by quoting experts and studies and people who know. we show where we got the quotea so you can look up and know tis' not a lie. this is what one is supposed to do in dabet. it' not cuttin and apsting little child it is actually donig waht accacmeics do, its' documenting.

If your writing is academic scholarship, I must confess my unfamiliarity.




Lao Tsu

Spellchecker's are free.


Lao again:


Originally posted by TheologicalDisc
It's funny how I said atheism is inherently immature and it is even more funny how both atheists Amen'd the guys post that acts like he doesn't know what that sentence means.

Freaking clueless, thy name is Metacrock, and TD is thy prophet.

Lao Tsu again:

Excuse me for putting your post through a spellchecker. It's a built-in feature on Firefox and those red underlines were a bit much to read through. You really should try it sometime. Even LilPix does it now. As it is, you're forcing your readers to repeatedly stop short in order to translate your posts before moving on. I'm not sure what to recommend to make your grammar more parsable.

again


Originally posted by Metacrock
I am not doubting that he's a Ph.D. student.

Originally posted by Metacrock
The people who claimed they were Ph.D. students ...

Originally posted by Metacrock
so typical.

Unwitting irony award winner.

lao Tsu again


In response to the question, "What part of 'unwitting irony' does Metacrock not understand?" we observe the answer is "both." That's a useful summary of this thread. Certainly, most of the comments you've received in this thread have been somewhat oblique, but that's a fairly natural reaction when engaged with one who doesn't appear to be firing on all cylinders.

You do realize your blog post is unintelligible, don't you? Even stepping in lightly one finds you've created a quagmire. The outline is garbled (A, B, C, D, IV, 1, 2, 3 ...). Quotes are chopped off — what did Polyakov say? How much of A was quoted from Davies? Why is Koons cited "again"? References are footnoted out of order when they're footnoted at all.

again"

You've got Davies characterized as a "believer." You don't seem to realize the "Mind of God" derives from a description of the long-sought "Theory of Everything" by another well-known atheist physicist, Stephen Hawking. This derivation is incomplete as well, as Hawking was merely rephrasing Einstein. Yes, physicists use religious language. It doesn't make them religious adherents.

I did nto say Davies was a Chrsiain, I never said that. He is a believer, he's a theist. He's been one since the wrote the mind of God. try research next time..

to that bit of mindless bs philosophical pop sycle says:

Game. Set. Match

o yea, what an astrounding aray of brilliant arguments. O that just showed me didn't it? you have' all the old saws and popular truisms on your side, no need to do any thinking is there? you don't need tought when you are cool, Doooooooode!

Philosophickle

In reply to this post by Metacrock

who could match wits with those guys?

Educate yourself: Hug a Dyslexic Today

Im getting tired of dealing with stupid people who think that spelling is intelligence. I'm tired of every time I make a good criticism of atheists they come back with personal attacks on my dyslexia, as though attacking disabilities is ok as long as the person isn't in a wheel chair. Here's a thing I wrote back when I had patience for dealing with ignorant fools. "Hug a Dyslexic today" from Metacrock's Blog.


Dyslexia is not the result of low intelligence. An unexpected gap exists between learning aptitude and achievement in school. The problem is not behavioral, psychological, motivational, or social. People with dyslexia also do not “see backwards.”

Neartheast Tarrent country Dyslexia Council

People are odd. They are always confusing emotional reason with logical ones. One poster sends in a comment, which I did not publish because I will not publish comments that are attacks on personalities. This all knowing commentator deems to know that event hough I'm Dyslexic I still "just being lazy," when bad spellings appear in this blog. Let me clue you in on something, a person who does not have to look up every word he uses has no right to speak of Lazy to dyslexic. No dyslexic could get as far as I got in school and be lazy, because to get that far without spell check means I did a hell of a lot of looking up. I did not have a computer until I was in doctoral work. that means I got my Masters degree while typing on a typewriter and looking up ever word in the dictionary or paying someone to proof the papers.

This poster wasn't there in class with me as a child in the 1960s when no one knew what dyslexia was, and when teachers humiliated me for being lazy. I got my little butt whacked with a board because I was lazy. I was lazy because I looked at the words on the paper I could not see the same thing thing the teacher saw. Just imagine you are wearing special glasses that scramble the words you look at. you can't take them off they are somehow attacked to you. So what good would it do to look up words when the definition will have mistakes in it? This commentator, the all knowing one, was not there when the teacher would call on me to read and I was in a six grade class and only read on a second grade level. Why is she calling on me anyway? Then making some snide comment about "this is how not to be." Everyone was laughing their little heads off. But I'm lazy. I'm just so lazy I just love to be humiliated in class. Hearing classmates whispering "he must be really stupid." It was so fun being hauled down to the principle's office and told i was bad, and I lazy I was no good and then having my butt whacked with a big board for some reason I could not phathum.

This was before anyone got any special treatment for being "challenged." No one with a problem was "challenged" in those days, they did not have that concept. If you could not walk you were crippled. If you had a problem they did not understand you weren't trying hard enough. This all knowing commentator who deems to decide that I am lazy was not there when a fine loving mother driven to despair because her two little twin boys has some strange problem no one could understand, would jump up an down literally thrashing the table with her belt (she never hit us with it) and banging her head on the fridge cried "maybe you are lazy!." I would think, as the horror that he one person who still believed in me didn't anymore, and I would whine "I'm sorry I'm bad mommy!" But the all knowing one knows all about this I"m sure. He must know because I didn't. I had no idea what they were talking about because when I looked at the words they didn't say the same things. "Saw" was "was" and Elise was Elsie, and 29 was 92 and so on.The authorities of the school board had a talk with my parents. They already had it worked out, either we were restarted or we were lazy. they sent us to a testing place, certain that the test would show our IQ's were lower than average. The testing people had a nice little chat with us. I remember they were really friendly and I liked what we were talking about. So I got into it and chatted amiably. My mother would keep saying "I they are smart. I know they are."

They kept dragging other researchers in and saying things like "tell him what you think about Daniel Boone," or "explain to Dr. so and so why oil floats on water." I knew the answer because my father told me. My Dad was a tool design engineer in air craft. He loved to give long winded technical explanations. My eyes would glaze over and I would think "I'm sorry I asked." But tried really hard to remember what he said. The funny testing people said we were "geniuses." They said there was no way we could be restarted. They told my mother our IQ's but she wouldn't tell us at first. They were real high. Then the people back at the school decided to work on plan B. If we weren't stupid we had to be lazy. My parents worked really hard in all kinds of wasy to get us to learn. They thought lazy meant we needed to be spanked, but they also tried more intellectual activities. When nothing worked they became frustrated and started beating the table as though we would feel the pain through the table and shape up. I know it caused them a great deal an anguish. I made me feel that I must be just bad because they said I was bad (lazy = bad right?).

I remember we first heard of dyslexia because our family doctor had it. He had stories of how hard he had to struggle in the 30's to become a doctor when he could not spell. Through him I guess we found Scottish Rite Children's Hospital in Dallas their "language lab." Back then I think it was called "Hospital for Crippled children" But they can't use that word today. Going to a hospital to have my spelling worked on made me feel that I must be crippled in my head. I was marked out as a special wounded freak from early childhood. I will never forget Luke Waites. He was the great guy. He discovered dyslexia. He wore a while lab coat and ran the "language lab" (which today is named after him). He was my friend he worked at treating every kid in the program like his friend.In those days that was the only program in the country, and it just happened to be where we lived or we would not have gotten to go. When I went to college he wrote a letter to my professors saying I was smart but couldn't spell and that there were scientific reasons why I could not spell. They didn't meet with the Scottish Rite guys once, the had a million meetings. Those guys had to deprogram them of years and years of having it pounded into their heads that something was wrong with us we must be stupid or bad. It was the major thing in my life for a long time in childhood.

I will never forget how happy and relieved my parents were to learn about dyslexia. I will always hear my mother's voice telling everyone she knew over and over "there aren't lazy, they aren't stupid, there's a reason why they can't learn to spell." Even though it was like finding a miracle cure (although one cannot ever get over dyslexia--the language lab just taught us tricks like phonetic spelling)it still made me feel like a wounded special helpless freak. But my parents were so relived. Then began a life long journey of looking up words. This all knowing poster, who must know all of this, even though he was not there, has the nerve to tell me I'm lazy. The one word I would use for that part of my childhood is "anguish."

The little brown shirt atheist thugs on message boards quickly discovered that spelling is a weapon to use against me. "your spelling is horrible." After a 25 post thread in which I've batted down all their arguments, here comes the stuff about spelling, like clock work. That's all they have to say so they use that like a weapon. Even after I got firefox they still say it even when there are no mistakes. I know mistakes get through but clearly its' better. But they still feel called upon to point it out. I even put up a thread saying "isn't my spelling better?" they all agreed they could tell a difference. btw I used to hypothesize when I was a child that someday they would invent a technological device like spell check that would spell for you. I was elated when I first heard of spell check.

When I first got saved I prayed that I would see Mrs. Messenger, my old Scottish Rite Language Lab teacher, so I could tell her "thanks." I'll be damned if I didn't see her in an air port just a few weeks latter! What are the odds? She lived in another part of the country by then, the odds are I would never see her again. I did thank her and told her about the prayer thing. She was really happy.

So this is why I will not post comments telling me "your spelling is horrible."


Here is a link to the best dyslexia site I've found. The NTDC If you think your child might have learning problem I urge you to read this site.

Page by Scottish Rite

Get the best possible rate on your mortgage

Anti-Intellectual Tendencies in Atheism

Adolf Von Harnack, 1851-1930
Major liberal Bible scholar


This is a statement by a troll on a Message board:

In reply to this post by jimbo
Last edited by Metacrock : Today at 03:06 PM .




Fact is, "exegesis" was developed and honed just to thwart such attacks as mine. They are just specious explanations that ARE NOT BIBLICAL! THAT IS NOT WHAT IT SAYS, FOLKS! It is what it says and not just when it is convenient for your position! I don't fall for that "commentary" BS! I now well how to read and interpret things for myself, including the Bible! What we have here is the phenonenon described in the book WHEN PROPHCY FAILS. Read it!

I realize that this guy does not represent all atheists. But I have seen many other atheists reflect this same idea. In fact the whole concept of the "Courtier's reply"


Atheists are always coming up with little gimmicks. Anytime you trump them with real knowledge they get up set and find a gimmick. The Jesus myth theory was such a gimmick. Jesus was such a compelling figure and there is some decent evidence he rose from the dead, so to counter that they just pretend he never existed, and give it a little name and make up some pseudo intelligent sounding crap pertaining to it. The "default" and the "extraordinary evidence credo" these are all gimmicks atheists made up and they are passed off as pseudo official sounding quasi logical tactics that in actuality mean nothing.

The latest is the Courtier's reply. This is it:

I recently referred to the "Courtier's Reply", a term invented by PZ Myers to rebut the claims of believers who insist that their superstitious beliefs are ever so much more sophisticated than the simple version that Dawkins attacks.

PZ's response deserves much more publicity because it goes to the heart of the debate between rationalism and supersition. I'm going to post his original Courtier's Reply below (without permission, but I'm sure he'll understand) but before doing so I need to remind everyone about the original fairy tale [The Emperor's New Clothes]

This is a statement by a reductionist scientism king. Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. He's on a blog called Sand Walk.


So What this courtier's reply is saying is that if the skeptic says stupid things about theology and demonstrates that he knows nothing about it and the theist says "O your criticism is invalid because you don't understand what you are criticizing" then all the atheist has to do is say "that's the courtiers reply" and the theist is supposed to go "O my God, I've violated a law of logic!" and give up and stop believing in God. But in realty it's into a log of logic, I never heard it in a logic class.It's not in a logic text book, and the meaning of it is silly. I'ts just saying 'You can't point out my ignorance of theology because I will not allow theology to have any kind of validity or importance and religious people may not not any sort of human dignity." That's all it's saying. It's nothing more than anti-intellectual stupidity.


Sanders lauds PZ Myers's version of the tactic,Here is Myers statement about it:


The Courtier's Reply
by PZ Myers

I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor's raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.

Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.

Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed — how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry — but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form.

Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

In other words, knowledge of theological subjects is just plain bull shit and it doesn't matter if Dawkins doesn't understand it because it's not worth understanding. So it's not valid criticism of him to say that. Except the problem is, if he understood theology he would see that his criticisms are wrong. The criticisms he makes are almost always about fundamentalists views. Since he refuses to accept that there are other non fundamentalist types of theology, when you point it out he just says O that's ridiculous because all theology is crap so it doesn't matter--but if he knew that he might not make the criticisms becasue they don't apply. But it's not worthing knowing that. he's just reasoning in a cirlce.

Here's his logic:

Him: religion is evil superstiion because fundies believe X

Liberal: we don't beileve x

him: that doesn't matter becasue religion is all crap no matter what. so even if you don't believe the thing I say is crap you still your own crap that must be stupid because you are religious. I know it's stupid because religion is stupid. Of course that's based on the stuff that you don't believe but that doesn't matter.

Narrow minded anti-intellectual brinkman ship in a most unsophisticated manner.

A very emotionally immature atheist tried this on me recently. Here's how it went.

Brent: All religious people believe in big man in the sky.

Me: process theology doesn't believe in big man in the sky

Brent: that's nonsesne all religous people do so they mustt.

Me; you clearly don't know enoguh about theology to say that

Brent: Courteiers reply! Courtiers' replay!

Like some magic king'x X that's suppossed to mean something. Clearly it's stupid because they are only trying to dodge the fact that their criticisms are based upon things they don't understand and that don't apply. Its' an attempt to hide their ignorance. They are committing an informal fallacy with the use of this gimmick. It's called "ipsie dixit." It means "truth by stipulation." They are saying in effect "I simply stipulate that I will not allow you to have knowledge. AT this point on your knowledge is now void becasue I declare to be so, since it's religion and religion is stupid."

Again their reasoning is quite circular since the reasons they would give for reducing religion to superstition don't' apply to modern sophisticated theology, but the fact that it can be labeled "theology" and they don't even know what that means, they stipulate that it must be stupid. So even though their reasons don't apply they just demand that they must do so any way.

Again they are merely stipulating truth and insisting they are right without any just reasons. It's idiotic to try and criticize a whole field you know nothing about. To make up for appalling ignorance they imply a third rate gimmick that is actually made up of two informal fallacies: ipsie dixit and circular reasoning.


This anti-intellectual tendency is not confined to this one tactic. The new tactick, which I have noticed for a few years now, is to deny any sort of discipline of scholarship that has developed within the theological community. So any self defense that a believer could make is automatically suspect and wrong merely becasue it is theological. But then one wonders how the skeptics knowledge that theology is all bull shit could ever have developed in the first place? When we consider the history of Biblical scholarship it becomes clear that the atheists are merely arguing in a circle.

The history of scholarship shows us that it was not invented in answer to pressing atheist attacks on the bible. There was no body of talented intelligent atheists pressing for a logical reading of the bible in the days before modern Biblical scholarship. Modern scholarship grew out of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in answer to the re-birth of classical learning and the advancement of scientific knowledge. One of the first modern textual critics was Erasmus. Erasmus, who live din Rotterdam in the Northern Renaissance, never had a body of atheists to contend with. The major scholars who created modern Biblical scholarship in the 19th century were arch liberals and practically skeptics themselves, such as Von Harnack. So clearly scholarship is a trick to protect the bible from the "brilliant, Penetrating analysis" of these arrogant know nothing who are too lazy to read a couple of books.

This tendency in atheism, the revenge of the trolls shows the true intellectual bankruptcy of Dawkamentalism. They are actually spitting on their own roots when they say since, since modern skepticism and modern Biblical scholarship both grew out of Renaissance humanism. Clearly so when they don't even know that just ten years ago their predecessors on atheist boards (secular web for example) lauded liberal Bible scholars such as John Dominick Crosson. They will quote the Jesus seminary guys without even know these are Bible scholars, this is the product of Biblical scholarship.

Loftus closes Debucking Christianity to Outside Opinion

He made this move last week or so. The reasoning is what he describes as growing hotility and personal attacks. In his own words (see April 20):

I’ve been online arguing for about five years or so. When I first got online in some forums and on some Blogs I was personally attacked and mocked because I revealed a lot of damaging information about myself in my previously self-published book, which was picked up by Prometheus Books, and is getting some astounding reviews. I was also impersonated as saying horrible things, which I never said. I was repeatedly lied about and personally maligned. So I felt compelled to defend myself and attacked back. It's an interesting phenomenon really. I post under my real name. So when personally attacked I can and did attack back. When I did so other readers thought to themselves what childish behavior of me, not considering how they would feel or respond to these personal attacks if they were to post in their real name. Some of the relationships I had with people who attacked me has degenerated to the point where all I do any more is blast them for their idiocy and deceit. I really do not care at all about some of these idiots.

These personal attacks are getting stronger and more and more desperate with each passing week, probably because I'm making a difference. And the Christians doing so are increasingly becoming frustrated because I will not link to them or mention their names, since they want to be noticed. A few of them have come out of the sewer of a particular forum to post comments here that are disrespectful and slanderous in order to disrupt the decent, civil discussion I have always wanted between believer and non-believer. They think that atheists are angry and malicious people. But I appear to be decent and civil, until personally attacked, and I am. Unlike other atheists who just don’t give a damn, I do. I suppose that galls these ignorant Christians to no end. This can’t be, that an atheist cares about a civil, reasonable, and respectful discussion of the ideas that separate us. But I do. I have only wanted this. For this very reason I have gained the respect of many intelligent, educated Christians who would much rather deal with my kind of atheism following the likes of Bertrand Russell, J.I. Mackie, and former atheist Anthony Flew, than with the so-called new atheists, especially the many younger ones, who dismiss all religions out-of-hand along with all of the people who believe them to be completely stupid and ignorant. I don’t think believers are stupid nor ignorant, although some of them are, as are some skeptics, and I admit this. I even link to several Christian apologetics sites in our sidebar, which can provide some answers to our arguments, at least from a Christian perspective. You don’t see other skeptical sites do that, and you most emphatically don’t see Christian sites do that in most all cases.

I emailed him and told him I can appreciate his frustration. I'm sure some readers of Atheist Watch are expecting m to mock John for this move, or at least to chide him. While I don't think it's a good move, I can deinately empathize with his feelings. I think the net takes a tool. There's a vast over suppoly of stupid people on the net, and neither side, atheist or Christian has a monopoly on being stupid.

I'm sorry John has closed the site to comments becasue it will greatly lessen the abilitiy to contact them with links to counter articles. They may never know I've countered something they said, (which I certainly intend to continue doing). But on the other hand, I can still email John and tell him.

while I have thought many times about just killing my blogs and not doing this anymore because of the constant negative materail people are always putting on here. On the other hand I htink critics are good. It's good to have critics. I am sorry John feels this frustration and I not putting him down for it. I hope he will change his mind soon. But for examle I think Hermit contributed something good to this blog in keeping me from just running wild with my sense of anger. I hope Jhon will re consider.

Ninteeth century Features in Atheist Thinking

discussion on tweb Me vs Psychic Missile. Noteworthy because this person is arguing like a 19th century structural functioanist. It's indicative of a lot of atheist thinking..

Originally posted by Psychic Missile Why don't all religious people have this experience? they probably do to some extent. But the benefits are probably in proportion to the extent of the experince. Some estimates are as high as one in four have some version of it. But the one's who get the benefits are more open to it. Are more religious people more likely to get it than less religious people? Many times it results in conversion. So a large portion or not religious when they have it then become so. The percentage of atheists who have this kind of experience is very small. We are talking like 3% of RE people remain atheists. Larger percentage are atheists when they have it and then find God as a result. Does on religion have more followers who have had this experience? I don't expect you to answer these questions (if you can that'd be great) just think about what their answers could be. all of those are answerable in the data. I haven't seen a break down of which tradition has the most mystics, but it would be possible to do the research. they all have them. All religious traditions have some. I thought researchers were well aware that you can't depend upon your subject telling the whole truth. not the same thing, they can control for margin of error. In fact I think this is known by all statisticians When I say they're self-reported, I meant done by survey or questionaire. Nobody followed these people around to see if the claims were true or the people just thought they were but they weren't or people want others to think it's true, etc. In some they follow them around in a sense, they didn't' really but they did it under controlled conditions and watched. How do you think it would be possible to observe if someone senses the numinous? that's a silly idea. why would people lie about it, and how would they know to make their lies conform to the M scale? how many people are going to research the M scale and then get in a study so they can fake it? You misunderstand, I mean the feelings could be felt by a person recovering from mental illness, not that that's an explanation for the study. but the characteristics of experiences don't match those of the mentally lill. Several studies have addressed this and all of them conclude mystical experince is not mental illness. there are not a bunch of instances where people get over mental illness and then get their lives on tack and are transformed. Mental illness is debilitating not transformative. It's not all that common that people over it at all. No surprise there, mental illnesses tend to take up a lot of a person's time. mental illness makes up people's teeth? what? But there's no evidence of the divine being involved rather than it being purely psychological. Noooooo, try listening. There evidence that it invovles the divine. (1) the content is about the divine (2) the effects are what we expect from the divine (3) this kind of thing is why religion exists to begin with, thsi is how they got the idea of religion (4) the experince is real. since its real and the content is about God we should assume God is in it. Just as if I wake up with memories of a car wreck and the car is wrecked that's a good indication that i had a car wreck. Did the studies conclude that the source of the feeling is divine? Not their job as shrinks to do that. privately some of them do feel that way. I've had extensive email correspondence with some of the major researchers. they believe it does prove God. I fully accept that religion can make people feel a sense of belonging, purpose, etc. and that religion can give people some sort of really happy feeling or whatever you claim it is, but there is no evidence that it's based in the divine. Psychology is a hobby of mine, and anyone who has studied it knows what amazing feats it's capable of. Religious experience is no more evidence of God than sleep paralysis is evidence of ghosts or succubi. No, you can't show me another example with studies where people get self actualized from must one experince. again, how many times? (1) content o the experince involves God (2) the reason religion exists in the first place is becasue of this kind of experience (3) the experince is real so it's logical to assume the cause relates to the content. that is a logical assumption. [red]that was my only claim, that it is logical to assume based upon the effects of the experince. It conforms to the basic criteria by which we make epistemic judgements. that means we can and should trust it.[/color] If you think I'm wrong and you do care about facts and stuff then kindly start listening and take account of what i say. Originally posted by Metacrock I made it pretty clear that these are studies of people who have had certain kinds of experinces, not just any old believer! Why don't all religious people have this experience? Are more religious people more likely to get it than less religious people? Does on religion have more followers who have had this experience? I don't expect you to answer these questions (if you can that'd be great) just think about what their answers could be. NO! they are not self reported. why don't you try reading it? they the resut of many many studies, so they have lots of different kinds of methodologies. But taking a survey or answering a questionaire is a standard social practice and its' considered a valid research tool. why don't you go read smoething about how social science is done? I thought researchers were well aware that you can't depend upon your subject telling the whole truth. In fact I think this is known by all statisticians When I say they're self-reported, I meant done by survey or questionaire. Nobody followed these people around to see if the claims were true or the people just thought they were but they weren't or people want others to think it's true, etc. They compare the eperiences of those who have experienced with those who have not. they show that those who have don't have mental illness, or that its not a prevalent among them. You misunderstand, I mean the feelings could be felt by a person recovering from mental illness, not that that's an explanation for the study. they did study that. they did check that. you are wrong you are totally wrong. they found a much smaller incidence of mental illness among religious believers. No surprise there, mental illnesses tend to take up a lot of a person's time. hu? The argument is that it is rational to assume its divine because nothing else in life has this kind of effect. the content is about the divine, the experince is real. so no reason to assume it. when we find that content is real and experinces are real we usually decide the content is true. If I have a memory of a car wreck and my wark is banged up I can assume I did have a car wreck. But there's no evidence of the divine being involved rather than it being purely psychological. NO the specificity point of the studies is compare the two groups, the RE people come out ahead, 350 studies to 0. Did the studies conclude that the source of the feeling is divine? You are merely playing a game: gainsay the evidence. that is not a proper debate procedure. you cannot merely decide to doubt the evidence because you don't like it. I documented my clamis. you are just out gunned and you can't accept it. I fully accept that religion can make people feel a sense of belonging, purpose, etc. and that religion can give people some sort of really happy feeling or whatever you claim it is, but there is no evidence that it's based in the divine. Psychology is a hobby of mine, and anyone who has studied it knows what amazing feats it's capable of. Religious experience is no more evidence of God than sleep paralysis is evidence of ghosts or succubi. It's not the job of shrinks to say if it is of God. But the argument is that God can be inferred by the content of the experinces and the consequences of having the experience.

Dave Ellis Begining to Look like an Idiot.

David B. Ellis said...

You're free to believe that.

Have you ever tried to get one of these essays published in any sort of philosophy journal?

I suspect that anyone reviewing your work for publication in any journal of philosophy of even modest standards would have much the same reaction I have.
April 10, 2009 1:17 PM
J.L. Hinman said...

see this journal?

Negations

wh0 is the publisher?


Editorial Staff

J.L. Hinman — Publisher

Tim Wood — Managing Editor

Ray Hinman — Poetry Editor

Jim Bratone — Special Editor

Lantz Miller — Book review Editor

Fran Carris — Copy Editor

Patricia Miklos — Copy Editor

Roger Thompson — Proofing


why would academics associate with a publication like that I'm such an idiot and my articles are so stupid?

here's the editorial board. you can see this on the website but just to make sure you look at it.

Editorial Board

Alex Argyros — Literary Studies, University of Texas at Dallas

William S. Babcock — Director, Graduate Program in Religious Studies, Southern Methodist University

Charles R. Bombach — History of Ideas, University of Texas at Dallas

David Channell — History of Ideas and — Philosophy of Science, University of Texas at Dallas

William Gibson — Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara

Susan Heckman — Dean of Graduate Program in Humanities, University of Texas at Arlington

Frederick Hotz — Philosophy, Collin County Community College

Lorraine Kahn — Formerly Visiting Scholar in Film, Institute of Industrial Relations, The University of California at Berkeley

Barry Katz — Formerly Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University

Marcia Landy — Department of English, University of Pittsburgh

Kevin Mattson — Ohio University; formerly, Rutgers University

Greg Miller — Communications, San Diego State University

James O’Connor — Professor of Economics, The University of California at Santa Cruz

Jim Perkinson — Historical Theology, University of Detroit

Brian Spitzberg — Communication, San Diego State University

Trudy Struenegle — Kent State University

Theodore Walker — Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University

Victor Worsfold — Ethics, University of Texas at Dallas



You will find articles by me in there. Now that's not big deal since I"m the publisher. Even though it was blind submitted and they actually did turn me down on one and I didn't publish it. I don't expect you to believe that.

but ask yourself, why would they risk ruining their careers by publishing in a journal ran be me if I 'm so stupid and no one likes my stuff? why would they do that?

I'm sure that you don't a big name from a hole in the ground but several of those people were big names in their fields.


Now what do academics think of my book? Ralph Hood the major guy who researchers religious experinces, has read the book, the book is about the personal experience studies and thinks said "It's good." He said "I will help you find a publisher." Why would he say that if the thinks I"m stupid?

why would he stick around and help through all the chapters if thought it was stupid?

Alex Argyrox who studied wtih Derrida once said that one of my papers was "the finest paper I've ever seen." I told him the TS argument he said it was brilliant.

why is it so hard for you little ego to come to terms with the fact that you are not smart not well educated. you don't as much as me and your not amazingly brilliant like you think you are and you are real narrow minded?
April 10, 2009 1:41 PM
David B. Ellis said...

LOL

Let me get this straight. I ask you if any credible philosophy journal would publish any of these shoddily written, rambling essays on arguments for theism and, instead, you point me to the fact that the only way for you to get anything published in a journal is to create your own?

That's supposed to establish your credibility?

Again, I invite you to submit one of your theistic argument essays to a credible philosophy journal.

I think we both know it would be rejected.
April 13, 2009 9:21 AM



I think you are asshole. First of all, you totally ignore the fact that I was fucking publisher and these other academics singed on and published in it and were assocaited with it. that tells me you don't know from shinola about acadmeic anything. You don't know what hard it is to get published because you are a little coward and never tried. You are a little uneducated coward who has never been to college and didn't try.

show me me the journals you got published little genus when you did you win your nobel prize?

Whining little cry baby has been exposed as the ignorant know nothing that he is. He can' stand it so now it's time to turn to mocking an insults. why don't you email some of those guys I named on there and ask them if they think I'm an idiot. why don't you dod that coward. Cowardly custard.

for Loren: None so Blind

March 19, 2009 2:38 PM
Delete
Blogger Loren said...

Metacrock, as to "hate groups", you ought to think of why you were banned from IIDB (now FRDB). It was because of your behavior, not because of any doctrinal grounds.

April 12, 2009 3:14 AM
Delete
Blogger J.L. Hinman said...

No sweetie pie that is what they want you to think but they lied. It's because I converted someone.

It happened on the same the person said he was convinced. I had been rude before. they never even came close to doing that. Then they lied about what I said, they lied about what they said, they started an organized campaign to destroy my reputation.

atheists are liars. they never understand what they do. they can insult you with any name they wan to call you. they can say "you are a stupid piece of shit" and they never never never admit they were rude or at fault. If you fight back you are a terrible horrible person.

they will gang up on you 20 people to one, and call you all kinds of names and say the stupidest things and the most outrageous things if you fight back you are just horrible.

It's obvious what they are doing. open your eyes and look at it.

Loren, why don't you take me up on my challenge. Go to an atheist message board, pretend you are a Chieftain and see how they treat you!

i've been making that challenge for years and no one has ever done it.

Atheist Incredulity and Bullying.

Jasque Derrida about mid life


Dave Ellis came to my boards (I invited him) asking to be given God arguments to answer. I told him "I would rather not do that because we have to lay the ground work or my arugment will just sound stupid to you." But he kept insisting. So eventually I put some arguments out there. He says:

Have you ever tried to get one of these essays published in any sort of philosophy journal?

I suspect that anyone reviewing your work for publication in any journal of philosophy of even modest standards would have much the same reaction I have.

there's another atheist on the board whose intelligence I respect a lot. He doesn't think the argument is so stupid, look what he says:

e: TS argument

Postby fleetmouse on Tue Apr 07, 2009 10:37 pm
What interests me about the TS argument is how it parallels TAG. It's sort of a more refined TAG, one that doesn't insult the intelligence with that smugness that makes me want to smack someone.

I don't think it falls into the same fallacies that I've seen TAG defenders step in either, and that's because you have a philosopher's understanding of what logic is and not a superstitious yokel's. So instead of ridiculously positing "logic" at the core of everything, you have this much deeper and subtler concept of an organizing principle. And that has an intuitive appeal, because it seems to me that there is a parallel between intellectual organizing principles and the way things in the natural world appear to spontaneously self organize. And so it seems to me that what you're saying complements and extends rather than contradicts the worldview of naturalism.

I'm going to read your background material on Derrida and come back to this later.

edit: your two part essay on Derrida was terrific. I had thought from things you'd said earlier on CARM that you'd misunderstood Derrida but now I see that you just disagree with him, and I think you're performing a rescue-hijacking of the TS, like a philosophical Bruce Willis - Die Hard. :mrgreen:

User avatar
fleetmouse

What get's me is I asked Dave to read two blog pieces I did on the Derridian background and he refused. he was content to just think the argument is stupid so he doesn't have to deal with it. But I told him that we would think that if we jumped and went to the arguments before laying the ground words. Of course part of that ground work is the stuff he refuses to read. So he would rather be narrow and ignorant and just use bully tactics and incredulity than to actually think about the arguments. so typical of hate group atheism. they get this big rush out of pretending that they are so superior to Christians that they have real strong vested interest in seeing everything we say as stupid. They are really just little ignoramuses because they refuse to read the material so they fill in the gaps.

Here's the arguemnt:

A. Logic of the Argument.

Definitions

(1)Transendental Signifier (TS):


The signification mark (word) which refurs to the top of metphysical hieararchy; the organizing principle which makes sense of all sense data and groups it into a meaningful and coherent whole, through which meaning can be understood.The corrolary, the thing the Transcendental Signifier signifies, is the "Trnascendental Signified (designated as TSed)"

(2) Signifier:

The term used of writtern words in the linguistic theories know as "structurailsm" and in the theories of French Linguist Ferdenand Sassure. A signifer is a "marK," that is writting, which designates a concept forming a word, that which points to an object as the thing that it is and no other. ie, a phsyical tree is the signified, the object of the signifier "t-r-e-e."


Preliminary Observations:

(1) Any rational, coherent and meaningful view of the universe must of necessity presuppose an oranizing principle which makes sense of the universe and explains the hierarchy of conceptualization.

(2) Organizing principles are summed up in a single first principle which grounds any sort of metaphysical hierarchy, the Transcendental Signifier (TS)

(3) It is impossible to do without a Trancendental Signifyer, all attempts to do so have ended in the re-establishment of a new TS. This is because we caannot organize the universe without a princinple of organizing.

(4)TS functions Uniquely as Top of The Metaphysical Heirarchy.It's function is mutually exclusive.



Argument:


P1) TS's function is mutually exclusive, no other principle can superceed that of the TS since it alone grounds all principles and bestows meaning through orgnaization of concepts.

P2)We have no choice but to assume the relaity of some form of TSed since we cannot function coherently without a TS
P3) We have no choice but to assume the reality of some form of TSed since the universe does seem to fall into line with the meaning we bestow upon it.

P4) The logical conclusion would be that There must be a TSed which actually creates and organizes the Universe.

P5) The sifnifier "God" is one version of the TS, that is to say, God functions in the divine ecnomy exacly as the TS functions in a metaphysical hierarchy.

P6) Since "God" is a version of the TS, and since TS and God concept share a unique function which should be mutually exclusive, the logical conculusion is that: God and TS share identity.ie "God" concept is descrition of the Transcendental Signified.

P7)Since the TS should be assumed as real, and TS and God share identity, we should assume that God is the Transcendental Singified, and thus is an actual reality.

rational warrent for belief in God's existence, QED.

If this sounds like gibberish and Dave says it's probably because you haven't studied Derrida. Which is part of the ground work that must be laid. So given that you need to read the material that Dave wont read. here it is:



This is a summary of Derrida on the Transcendental Signifier and why it "proves" the existence of God (in my special sense of "proof" that I use as "for practical purposes").


Derrida was from French North Africa, 1930-2004. here are two articles on him that will give you a basic run down:

Derrida on Wiki


Derrida in Philosophical Encyclopedia



Derrida was a student of Martin Heidegger. Derrida is the best known philosopher of recent times. Heidegger was an existentialist, then dropped that and began to call himself a "phenomenologist." Everything Derrida says came from Heidegger. Every move of decontracution is found in Heidegger, but Derrida put it together in a different package than Heidegger's.

"Deconstruction" was Derrida's babby. He invented it although one can find it's roots all over Western letters. He's plugging in elements from Heidegger, Sartre, Brintano, Nicholas of Cuza, Charles Sanders Pierce and all over the place.This is the run down on [B][I]Deconstruction.[/I][/B] I was taught Derrida by someone who had been his student in Paris in the late 60s before he moved to Yale.

Phenomenology is an attempt to place the observer at the center of awareness to allow sense data to be understood in ways that are not predetermined by preconceived categories. The idea is that the data will form its own categories. Attempts to gather sense data and heard it all into pre selected categories biases reality. In vernacular one might say "don't pigeon hole but remain open to possibilities for everything no matter how familiar or or obvious we think it might be. This attempt to pre select categories of knowledge is what Heidegger calls "Metaphysics." In this sense even science is metaphysics!

Derrida wants to explicate the end of western metaphysics,(his phrase). What does this mean? It means he, and most postmoderns, believe that the paths along which western metaphics have led us are dead ends. We have run out of metaphysics. We haven't run out of science, in the sense that there plenty of facts to look at, but in a way we have because reductionism has lowered our expectations about what we will find. But Derrida's beef is not with science. A Major segment of of postmodernists tried to attack modern science, but they were swept aside with the Alan Sokal stuff. Derrida was never one of them.

Derrida argues that Western metaphysics has always been predicated upon an organizing principal that orders reality and organizes sense data. William James Sums it up well in his Gilford Lectures:

"Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his 'Banquet,' "is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is." 2 In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object."




Derrida begins with Plato's theory of knowledge, this is the basis of Western metaphysics. Plato says that prior to birth we are in contact with the forms, thus knowledge is a matter of remembering, no learning for the first time. But then the question arises is speech closer to what we remember, or is writing? Socrates says the spoken word is closer to the ideas inside us, the memory of the forms, thus spoken word is better (more true, closer to reality) than written word. As he puts it "a writer dies his written words are like orphans since he is not there to defend them." This supremacy of the spoken word sets up a hierarchy of meaning and importance in western culture. We have come to value reason as the organizing principle of truth, as the "natural light" because it's an extension of the concept of this true Platonic knowledge. Reason becomes this overarching truth regime (Faucault's word) that organizes all reality. Everything is paired up into hierarchies, little hierarchies that fit into the big over all hierarchy, these are called "binary opossitions." They they take the form of couplets, consisting of the "true" or "correct" term and it's supplement; the false term or the unimportant addition to the "real thing." Examples are: up/down, black/white/ true/false/ male/female. Reason is construed as male and this resutls in "phalologocentrism."

Derrida's goal is to destroy hierarchies, to show that there is no truth, there is no meaning. We can't know anything. Derridian postmodernism is like archaeologists who try to piece together fragments of a broken vase. Some say "there is a vase here, we just have to fin out how the peices fit." Another says "there may be two vases." The postmodernist says "we don't have all the pieces, they may not have been a vase, it may be 16 vases, we can't know, there is no final answer, it's always going to be a jumble. The Deridian position is a good philosophical justification for nihilism. The difference being a nihilism takes too much effort.. The logical conclusion of Derridianism if one were consist would be to sit in a chair and say nothing until one starves to death. Of course Derrida himself was not consistent. He was one of the most prolific writers. His overall project was to tear down hierarchy and destroy the concept of the TS. Here is his argument against reason:


He asks "does reason ground itself?" Can we use reason to prove reason?



"Are we obeying the principle of reason when we ask what grounds this principle [reason] which is itself a principle of grounding? We are not--which does not mean that we are disobeying it either. Are we dealing here with a circle or with an abyss? The circle would consist in seeking to account for reason by reason, to reason to the principle of reason, appealing to the principle to make it speak of itself at the very point where, according to Heidegger, the prinicple of reason says nothing about reason itself. The abyss, the hole, ..., the empty gorge would be the impossibility for a principle of grounding to ground itself...Are we to use reason to account for the principle of reason? Is the reason for reason rational?"(Derrida in Criticism and Culture, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schlefflier, Longman 1991, 20.)



Derrida sought to destroy metaphysical hierarchy. How did he intend to do that? He did it by creating a method of reading a text, a critical tool that would allow him to dissect and destroy any hierarchy simply because it was a hierarchy. That tool was known as "deconstruction." To reconstruct one takes apart, in the sense of destroy; destruction = destruction.

Hierarchy is based upon the binary opposition. That means hierarchies are like stacks of couplets, each contianing a major term and suppolamental term:

God/
evil

up/
down

male/
female

the assumption is that the term on top is the "major term" the "real" thing, the one on the bottom is tacked on or er zots, or somehow inferior. A hierarchical metaphysics is constructed out of these binaries. These are among the categories we use to order our perception of sense data; and thus to order the world. We can see this in the atheist metaphysics of scientism:

Objective/
subjective

empirical/
logical


Derrida inverts the couplets. The "inferior term" is taken as the superior term, and the assumption is made that the hierarchy is false. But what move allows this? He accomplishes this move by the realization of the principle of "differance." This is not my dyslexia at work. He spells it with an "a" in order to out over the point that there is more to it than just "difference" as we understand it. That is, difference is the basis of meaning in language. Meaning of signifier is based upon the difference in one signifier and another. That means we call a "tree" a "tree" not because it is intrinsically endowed with treeness, but because we don't call it a "frog," a "bat" or an "elephant." The meaning of these terms, what they refer to, is totally arbitrary. Thus meaning arises through difference. Derrida uses this point as the staging ground for a multiple assault on all of Western thought. He derives from it the notion that meaning derives from absence (difference is absence) rather than presence. So Plato is screwed, the Platonic theory is crap. This is so because the meaning of truth in Platonic terms is presence, the proximity to the forms, remember? So the presence of the forms in our thinking is our nearness to truth. The closer the ware to what we recall of the forms the closer we are to truth. He sets up a hierarchy of presence in which speaking is closer to truth than writing.

Derrida destroys this hierarchy of presence by demonstrating that derives from absence (difference = absence because there is no presence of meaning in the signifier). He finds that meaning is never present. Meaning is always absent and sought after, always different and differed. He makes a pun on differ and deffer. Meaning is differed in that language has multiple meanings (why he likes puns) and one can never be sure that the meaning of a statement is always off stage waiting to come on, and when it does it only refers to another meaning. Life a child who always asks "why" the answer is never available, it's always in the next question, and the next, and the next. It's flickering away always. He uses the phase "always already," meaning is already absent.

Deconstruction works by finding a contradiction in the thesis and using that to flip over all the meanings. The classic Derridian example is the distinction in Rousseau between nature and nurture, the natural and civilized. Rousseau says that we can have natural morality we can be naturally good and naturally happy by being spontaneous and rooted in nature. He also says, however, that civilization is good because it nurtures us and gives us a basis in education and understanding. This is an inherent contradiction and Derrida exploits it to show that all of Rousseau's ideas are meaningless. In fact he shows that all meaning is meaningless. Everything falls apart, there is no grand edifice of truth that can stand before the onslaught of deconstruction. If one takes deconstruction seriously one must, to be totally consistent, just wind up sitting in a corner and never speaking and never assuming anything.

I ended part 1 with his statement that logic cannot be secured by logical argument He undermines logic and reason in this way and reduces them to ashes. Thus the final step in deconstruction is to show that there is no meaning, there is no truth all lies in ruin. His main objective is to destroy the Transendetal signifier because that is the essence of Platonic meaning,t he big idea at the top of the hierarchy that secures meaning and makes sense of all other marks that make sense of the world.He is quite aware that the TS equals God, he says so himself. This is his ultimate triumph over Christianity. It's a supreme moment for atheism, but of course the American scientifically obsessed, philosophically challenged atheists could never appreciates it. Once you come to truly understand Derrida and your faith survives it, nothing in the nature of an intellectual argument can ever threaten your faith again.

How does one survive it? One of the major pastimes in graduate school for student just encountering Derrida is to sit around trying to deconstruct Derrida. Everyone does this and everyone thinks he's the first person to think of it. You can just tell when student's understanding is reaching critical mass and she/he is about to say "Hey, let's deconstruct him!" Derrida knew this, and he traded in it. Its' one of the features that assured that people wanted to study him more. But it doesn't matter if you deconstruct him because it only proves his point. Since he says there is no truth there is no ultimate reality there is no meaning, ti doesn't matter if what he says is untrue and not meaningful. Except for one thing: you don't have to make the final step. If you are to reverse Derrida then you don't want to prove that he has no ultimate meaning, you want to prove that he does have meaning and he's just wrong. This is can be done by using his method, but not using the final step. Don't conclusion there's no meaning, just show that his meaning is wrong.

Derrdia follows Heidegger in almost everything. Almost every step he makes can be seen in Heidegger's Parmenides book. Both thinkers say that metaphysics is undeniable. Derrida wants to explicate the end of metaphysics, but he also says there is no hope of escaping metaphysics. Even language itself is metaphysical. We cannot help but do metaphysics. That means metaphysical hierarchies are inescapable which means the TS is inescapable. Thus the choice we have is to assume there is a TS or to fall silent and never speak, never try to think coherently.But we cannot live with that choice. Because we have to assume it, we can't live without it, we should assume there is a Transendental signifier, and as Derrida points out, that's just a truncated version of God.





see now isn't it better to know than to just use incredulity?

now that we know a bit about the background let's put it in context of the argument. This is a explaination of what the argument says. The basic trick you need to know is that I disagree with Derrida. I think he has a compelling point, but it should be reversed and the actual reverse of his ideas are true. His arguments can be reversed with his own logic, just a matter of looking at it right. When that happens we see there is a TS and there has to be, and it's God.


The transcendental Signifyer (TS) is the mark that gives meaning to all the marks that make sense of the world; the "zeit geist," the "urmind", the "overself", the "object of ultiamte concern", the "omega point", the "Atmon", the "one," the "Logos", "reason." all the major top ideas which bestow meaning upon the wrold are examples of the TS. People have always advanced such notions. (The word "G-O-D" is the Transcendental Signifyer, the thing those letters refurr to is the "transcendental signifyed")

1) All people have some notion the "big idea" which makes sense of everything else.

William James, Gilford lectures:

"Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his 'Banquet,' "is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is." 2 In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object."



2) All Metaphysical Constructs include a TS.

Metaphysics is not merely realms unseen, but the organization of reality under a single organizing principle (this definition comes form one reading of Heidegger). All systems and groupings of the world verge on the metaphysical. Derrida and Heidegger say that it is impossible tto do without metaphysics since even language itself is metaphysical. Everything ponts to the Transcendental Signifyer. ( see Heidegger, Parenadise, and Introduction to Metaphysics, and Derrida, Margins of Philosophy and almost any Derrida book).

3) Science has TS

William James--Gilford lectures:

"'Science' in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the 'Laws of Nature' as objective facts to be revered. ..."

Science is very Metaphysical. It assumes that the whole of relaity and be organized and studied under one central principle, that of naturalism.

"For essential reasons the unity of all that allows itself to be attempted today through the most diverse concepts of science and of writting, is in principle, more or less covertly, yet always, determined by a an historico-metaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the closure." [Derrida, The End of the Book and the Begining of Writting, trans. Gayatri Spivak 1967 in Contemporary Critical Theory, ed. Dan Latimer, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovonovitch, 1989, p.166]

MetaListon Scinece and religion
http://www.meta-list.org/ml/ml_frameset.asp
Stephen Hawking's


"In his best-selling book "A Brief History of Time", physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that when physicists find the theory he and his colleagues are looking for - a so-called "theory of everything" - then they will have seen into "the mind of God". Hawking is by no means the only scientist who has associated God with the laws of physics. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, for example, has made a link between God and a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson. Lederman has suggested that when physicists find this particle in their accelerators it will be like looking into the face of God. But what kind of God are these physicists talking about?"

"Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggests that in fact this is not much of a God at all. Weinberg notes that traditionally the word "God" has meant "an interested personality". But that is not what Hawking and Lederman mean. Their "god", he says, is really just "an abstract principle of order and harmony", a set of mathematical equations. Weinberg questions then why they use the word "god" at all. He makes the rather profound point that "if language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature." The question of just what is "God" has taxed theologians for thousands of years; what Weinberg reminds us is to be wary of glib definitions."




C. Attempts to Deconstruct TS lead to abyss of Meaninglessness, and back to TS.

1) Derridian Dectonstruction.

The French Post-structuralist Jaque Derrida seeks to explicate the end of Metaphysics which is the final project of Western philosophy. His technique of deconstruction aims at undermining any logos or first principle that would give rationality to the universe by unseating the privileges of reason which under gird all such projects. Even logic itself is undermined.


Derrida:

"Are we obeying the principle of reason when we ask what grounds this principle [reason] which is itself a principle of grounding? We are not--which does not mean that we are disobeying it either. Are we dealing here with a circle or with an abyss? The circle would consist in seeking to account for reason by reason, to reason to the principle of reason, appealing to the principle to make it speak of itself at the very point where, according to Heidegger, the prinicple of reason says nothing about reason itself. The abyss, the hole, ..., the empty gorge would be the impossibility for a principle of grounding to ground itself...Are we to use reason to account for the principle of reason? Is the reason for reason rational?"

Derrida in Criticism and Culture, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schlefflier, Longman 1991, 20.



Derrida's argument amounts to saying, "logic does not endorse itself." The point of the quotation above seems to be that logic is in a dilemma. If one tries to prove logic by its own terms, one is merely arguing in circle. But, if one does not do this, there is no foundation upon which one can base logic, because logic is the foundation.

[Quotes from Derrida from "The University in the Eyes of It's Pupils" Diactricits]

2) Into the abyss and back out to TS.

Many critics of Deconstruction have noted that if we take this principle seriously we would wind up unable to speak or think, even language requires an organizing principle which orders the world of our thought and speech (of course the basic thrust of Postmodern thought understands us to be trapped in, as Jameson said, "the prison house of language" unable to get at the real things of the world and their understanding because all we can really ever think through is language). But in opening this abyss Derrida creates a safe bridge over it as well, although that is not his intention. He uses the principle of difference (which he spells as "difference" to indicate that meaning is both differing and differing) but difference becomes the organizing principle of a Derridian universe. IT not only explains how meaning is derived from signifyers, not only does it tear down the meaning of all hierarchies, but it actually builds new ones because it becomes the foundation of value in valuing difference.

"The constant danger of deconstruction is that it falls into the same kinds of hierarchies that it tries to expose. Derrida himself is quite aware of this danger--and his response--which is really a rhetorical response...is to multipy the names under which deconstruction traffics..." [--Con Davis,Culture and Critique 178-179]

D. unavoidable nature of TS indicates God is a priori.

Either way, weather we try building a reductionist notion of the universe or whether we tear down the hierarchies of reason that implies a TS, we can never escape the TS. This inescapable nature of the transcendental signifier points to the a priori nature of the God concept. That reality is ordered by a single principle which gives meaning and rationality to all other principles is inescapable, but humanities multifarious attempts to understand that principle, and the frightening conclusion that the principle leads to a creator God is the logic inference. All of the many signs which have been used to understand this uber-sign imply an intelligent ordering rationality which makes sense of the universe, and therefore, logically must have created it in the first place.

1) Transcendental signifer is unavoidable.

As has been pointed out above, there is no possibility of holding a rational view of the universe without an organizing principle, a "thing at the top." This indicates the ultiamte necessity of a TS. In other words, the fact that we cannot get away from the TS indicates that there must really be one.

2) God is the ultimate Transcendental Signifyer.

"Without God, who has been the ultimate Transcendent Signified, there is no central perspective, no objective truth of things, no real thing beyond language." [Nacy Murphy and James McClendon jr." Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies." Modern Theology, 5:3 April 1989, 211]

E. God is the ultimate unifying principle.

1) Coincidence of Oppossites.

Nicholas of Cuza's concept that God's infinity is a universal set subsuming all finite sets of oppossites. (See Westminster Dictinary of Christian Theology)

"The universe of Nicholas of Cusa is an expression or a development, though of course necessarily imperfect and inadequate, of God--imperfect and inadequate because it displays in the realm of multiplicity what in God is present in an indisaluable and intmate unity (complicatio) a unity which embraces not only the different but even the oppossite, qualities or determinations of being. In its turn every single thing in the universe represents it--the Universe-- and thus also God in its own particular manner; each in a manner different from that of all others, by contracting the wealth of the universe in accordence with its own unique individuality."[--Alexandre Koyre' From Closed World to The Infinite Universe, Baltimore: Johns Hoppkins University press, 1957, 8-9.]



Cuza's vision of a universe taken up metaphyiscally in God in an undifferentiated unity is grounded in the paradoxical nature of geomoetry. One example Cuza gives is of the dicotomy between straightness and curvelinarity. But if one was dealing with an infintie circle, from every point along the circle it would appear that the circle was a stairght line. Or another example; large and samll are opposites in a finite perspective, but in dealing with the infinitely large circle and the infinitely small one the center loses its special qualitie, both are at the same time both nowhere and everywhere, and thus equally meaningful and meaningless.This may not seem like a particularly Christian notion of God, but Paul Tillich remarks that Martin Luther embracced it," one of the most profound conceptions of God ever developed." Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought.

2) God as Being itself.

As being itself God is Metaphysically above the level of existing things in the universe and constitues all the potentiality and all actuality. This the nature of God is to order and to bring to concreseance potentialities. The signifyer 'G-o-d' universally signifies and therefore takes up into itself all concepts and principles of rationality.

3) All people seek TS, therefore, this reflects innate sense of God.

Not only do we seek it, we cannot avoid it. The alternative is a meaingless universe, and more than that, a universe without coherence to reality. Of course we have the rules of logic, and we have science to tell us facts, but those move toward the TS becasue they are both predicated upon organizing reality under a logos, a rationale.