Tuesday, August 27, 2013

The Athesits Grammar Scam and The Illusion of Technique


Most people don't know what grammar is. Grammar is sentence structure. My grammar is no great shakes but it's not bad. It's as good as any average college student's grammar. The problem is people think other things that are not grammatical are part of grammar. People think punctuation is grammar, they think spelling is grammar, they think capitailzation is grammar. None of those are grammar. I've ran into a site, while not overtly atheist it seems to be ran by atheists and they use a new scam I've never seen before to ensure that no Christain apologist get's by their checkers.

They have a bad grammar catcher. You can't post without correcting the faults. It wont post it. So none of the posts that make it on there should be ungrammatical because they all pass the checker after you correct them. Then after beating some of their really stupid people in arguments, they ban me becuase of my "horrible grammar that is destroying the English language." Most of the problems it caught on  my posts (99%) were failure to capitalize the first word of a sentence. That's just laziness, not poor grammar. First of all, I know better I just get lazy from so much posting. Secondly,capitalization is not part of grammar.

web defintion of grammar:
noun
noun: grammar
  1. 1.
    the whole system and structure of a language or of languages in general, usually taken as consisting of syntax and morphology (including inflections) and sometimes also phonology and semantics.
    synonyms:syntax, sentence structure, rules of language, morphology; More
    "the editors of this newspaper need a refresher course in grammar"
    • a particular analysis of the system and structure of language or of a specific language.
    • a book on grammar.
      plural noun: grammars
      "my old Latin grammar"
    • a set of actual or presumed prescriptive notions about correct use of a language.
      "it was not bad grammar, just dialect"
    • the basic elements of an area of knowledge or skill.
      "the grammar of wine"
    • Computing
      a set of rules governing what strings are valid or allowable in a language or text.
Free Dicitonary (Farlex)
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/grammar
gram·mar  (grmr)
n.
1.
a. The study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences.
b. The study of structural relationships in language or in a language, sometimes including pronunciation, meaning, and linguistic history.
2.
a. The system of inflections, syntax, and word formation of a language.
b. The system of rules implicit in a language, viewed as a mechanism for generating all sentences possible in that language.
3.
a. A normative or prescriptive set of rules setting forth the current standard of usage for pedagogical or reference purposes.
b. Writing or speech judged with regard to such a set of rules.
4. A book containing the morphologic, syntactic, and semantic rules for a specific language.
5.
a. The basic principles of an area of knowledge: the grammar of music.
b. A book dealing with such principles.

Some of the posts on those boards (Philosophy forums, and  Philosophy of religion section) were quite stupid. The main sections that cover philosophy were really good (and very technical) but in the philosophy of rleigion section some of them were extremely stupid. One such example is several people who kept insisting that God need not be necessary even in Christian theology. That is just a matter of sheer ignorance.


Usually we refer to God as either necessary or impossible. My question is this: Could a created god be otherwise perfect and necessarily contingent? Suppose existential laws emerged from total chaos along with miscellaneous noise. These random laws allowed the creation of an intelligent designer or an intelligent designing universe that was responsible for the emergence of order and complexity, Now I don't really believe this happened but I'm asking it as a philosophical question. Is there any reason why this is impossible?
My answer after a few go rounds:



FrankLeeSeaux wrote:


So, you are defining God as necessary? Despite the fact that most if not all scientific evidence is to the contrary?

Meta:
There is no scientific evidence about God. God is not given in sense data. So God can't be the study of scientific scrutiny. Whatever sense of scientific understanding you are dealing with it's not necessary in the same sense. All scientific data that reflects upon the existence of God is indirect.





FrankLeeSeaux
For instance, within the Big Bang model of the universe God is entirely unnecessary to "ignite the fuse" that gets the whole thing started(so to speak).
Meta:
No, there is no such evidence. That is totally just BS. It's Hawking's wisful thinking. No evidence for that.


FrankLeeSeaux
Nor is God necessary, within that model, to intervene in any way to keeps things on track, as it were(assuming a track/plan/purpose exists in the first place). God is equally unnecessary in Evolution, as well as the Abiogenesis hypothesis.

Meta:

Yes he is. first of all you are misusing the term necessity. It doesn't mean "this can't exist without God." In the context of discussion of god's own necessity it refers to the ontological nature of God as creator. That doesn't preclude the existence of any particular aspect of creation as a result of the evolutionary process. The process itself would not exist without the creator beginning it into being.

My point is that the term necessity does not refer to the existence of things in the universe but to God's relation to begin. Setting off expansion might be something God did but it's not proved that it could happen by itself.

There is no proof of something form nothing. There is no proof of something form nothing. Even so it's missing the point about God's relationship to the whole. God is not just related at one point, but at every point.



FrankLeeSeaux

In fact, I'm hard pressed to find any circumstance under which God is necessary.
[Because he's not contingent, that's the circumstance because that's what the word means in the context of speaking about God's modal status]

Meta:
That is merely wishful thinking. There is no evidence of any kind that something comes from nothing. So the basic concept of being itself is entirely dependent upon god, becuase God is being itself.





FrankLeeSeaux
God is also distinctly unnecessary in the anthropic principle(a major theistic arguing point for the likely existence of a God. So, God isn't even necessary in the "best" arguments for God. Which would tend to disprove your selected definition.

Meta:
You have no evidence that proves that. Where are you going to get evidence form a universe known to be Godless? How are you going to compare evidence? That is nothing more than the mistake of the design argument in reverse. You are assuming that you can compare universes when you no access to evidence from any other universe; even if you did you wouldn't know factually that is a universe without God. You don't have any factual way of getting evidence from a universe with God. So you have no basis for comparison.


FrankLeeSeaux
You, on the other hand, are attempting to rationalize all the evidence away, so as to allow for your preconceived notion. Your arguments and beliefs are not beyond reason... They are contrary to facts, evidence, reason, and logic.

Meta
You are attempting to take over ontology by bullying your way in using the mystique of science as a club to beat the enemy over the head with. This is the offensive version of the fortress of facts. The atheist ides behind his house of cards telling himself it's a fortress of facts. Now you are trying to take the offensive, using it as a club.
End example


It was after that post that they banned me saying "you are destroying the English language." I had to correct problems to get by the grammar catcher so there's not much of  chance of doing any damage to the langue. Most of the corrections were about capital letters. I never saw one that said "syntax is wrong" or "you have your predicate in the place for the modifier" or anything like that. I don't never use no double negatives.

Now this site is not overtly atheist. It's billed as philosophy and I don't know the views of those who run it. It clearly is some kind of skeptical Christian hating site. Atheists are doing the grammar scam all the time just like they are with the grammar scam and the spelling. They harp on both and seldom know what they are. This usually comes after it's clear they can't answer my arguments.

In Keeping with the Illusion of Technique from matters more than content. It doesn't make any difference what your rationale is, so long as the form is suitable and the conclusion is acceptable to prevailing ideology.  This is the state of our society. We are not rational humans we are rationalizing cogs in machine.


Here are the threads where I creamed them:
is contingent God possible?

Can a God Given morality be absolute

Can Science tell us anything about God?  7-9











13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you find a new board to go on? Good luck with them if you stay on there.

BTW, on the last page of the contingent God thread:

http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/is-a-contingent-god-possible-62748-3.html

FrankLeeSeaux said that it is mathematically proven that God is entirely unnecessary for Big Bang, and he said that Quantum Singularity is essentially nothingness.

And, get this, he uses Lawrence Krauss's book A Universe from Nothing as a reference.

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

ahaha I know it's hilarious. that's why they pulled the grammar ban thing. Because I can crush his stupid argument.

that thing about mathematically proven is just the study done by Quenton Smith, using Hawking's no doundery condition.

I believe I critiqued it on atheist watch. I'll have to look for that.


Of course I will not stay there. I'm not going to post in the unmoderated "dumb ass" section.

Anonymous said...

It seems like Atheists like to drag this "Quantum" argument out all the time.

Logic Lad referred to it as "Quantum Foam".

Anonymous said...

BTW, you mentioned Quentin Smith. Jime has a new entry about him:

http://subversivethinking.blogspot.com/2013/08/quentin-smith-on-one-argument-for-gods.html

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

I've seen that argument before. I have a from of it on my God argument list on Doxa.

here

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

The quantum argument that tires to use QM theory as a basis for something from nothing is really disproved. That's what David Albert's disproof of Kruass's argument is about.

Anonymous said...

This was the entry that you had that dealt with Krauss and Albert:

http://atheistwatch.blogspot.com/2012/07/reviwe-and-debuck-lawrence-krausss.html

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

Thanks JB. I have a lot of blogs and stuff it' hard to keep track sometimes. I guess the thing I did on that study i posted on carm. It was wasted on a non comprehending audience. I'll try to do it again.

Anonymous said...

I read through some of those threads just now. Those people don't seem all that knowledgeable. For example, that LeeSeaux character did something about murder in one of them that was weird.

There are a lot of people that try to "philosophize" about God without knowing what the hell they are talking about.

Here is an example. On this football forum and site I go on, they are talking about purpose and meaning to life in the "This Ain't sports talk section".

One person said this:

I just find it bizarre and morbidly fascinating that ppl think things can randomly be created without being created by someone.


Here was a response:

This is a logical fallacy.

Suppose the universe has some creator. By your logic, that creator would also have to be created by something, since things can't "just randomly form on [their] own". But then what created the first creator? And what created that? And so on and so on...

You simply end up with an infinite string, where each creator would have to be created by some predecessor.

They don't understand how God is uncreated. It's crazy. I think I have seen other atheists use a similar argument before.

Then, here's another garden variety response by these "geniuses":

I'm not sure how to answer this question.

Personally, to me there isn't anything after this life. So the meaning of life to me is to live everyday as your last, enjoy every minute, etc every cliche. Knowing that no one will ever remember me in 500 years from now means that I will pursue what I fancy, defend what I believe in, and do or say what I want.

I want to make a difference, I want to improve the lives around me, I want to provide for those that I can provide for. I think that gives it meaning.

On the other hand, 500 hundred years...

so who knows.

Why do these people try?


Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

Yes that's one of their standard stupid things they can't get through their heads: the fundamental difference in God and the universe. To destroy the difference they have to change the basic meaning of terms like "necessity" and "contingency."

They also have found says to jack with big bang cosmology even getting leading theorists to help out.

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

quite a coincidenese the peice I was going to do on AW today is about that very thing: if the universe needs a creator why doesn't God?"

the carm morons try to tackle that one yesterday.

Anonymous said...

Ah, CARM. Home of the Fundies (that should be their slogan).

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

yes that's a good one.