Mr. Kalb,
Be sure to check into Frank Turek’s website: http://www.crossexamined.org/
What bothers me is Frank does not nail down his arguments but gets distracted by obfuscators such as Crowell. I mean “I don’t know” is a belief despite Crowell’s arguments. End the discussion there. I expect you could expose Crowell as a nominalist. All the obscuration with semantics should be dealt with accordingly.
Paul
Don’t know Crowell
Where does he talk about him?
Not Enough Faith
Sorry Jim. It is in his Blog, which has a link at his homepage. Most of the Blog topics are addressed by this Crowell fellow.
Paul
Not Enough Faith
Jim,
The most active topic, which is listed on the right of the Site, is “Darwinists Have a Lot of Explaining to Do.”
Paul
Turek is a charlatan
Frank doesn’t nail down his arguments because he clearly doesn’t have any worthy of the name. Or should I say, he doesn’t have any that he is willing to reveal unless you send him $12.95 for his book! What a fraud.
Crowell and others do a pretty good job of puncturing Turek’s baloons, red herrings, and straw man arguments. And “I don’t know” is the absence of belief. Nominalism indeed, your metaphysics are meaningless and are in fact a sad indication of an actual lack of higher consciousness.
Not Enough Faith
Yeah,
You will have to deal with Jim Kalb or Lawrence Auster, if they take an interest. Good luck. Actually, I hope you fade away.
Paul
Fading away
I’ve already dealt with Kalb pretty thoroughly here. Those who are fading away are the philosophers who still insist that “metaphysics” is in any way a useful concept. They are going the way of both theologians and Catholic schools.
Not Enough Faith
Let’s suppose two soldiers are facing a decision whether to attack the left or the right flank. One soldier says the left flank is the weaker, and the other says I don’t know. The other soldier has expressed a belief; he believes the answer is unknown.
In any event, discussion is a good thing.
Paul
My belief in the non-existence of God
Well knowledge is always an imperfect thing, the reason being that truth is a relation between a propositional attitude and a state of affairs outside the mind. So in a sense we never really “know” anything: our beliefs are all just appeals to the best explanation.
Having admitted this, does it follow that one belief is as good as another? Maybe I believe that my thoughts are being controlled by telepathic signals transmitted from Mars. Am I entitled to this belief, simply because no-one can disprove it? Kalb, as I understand him, will be obliged to convict me of “scientism” if I say no.
The reason we don’t help outselves willy-nilly to extravagant hypotheses that cannot be falsified empirically, or that multiply entities beyond the necessary, or which are incompatible with well-established science, is that to disregard these rules would be to abandon all possibility of rational thought.
But Kalb goes further (in his essay on “scientism”) and says that we needn’t even insist on coherence in our beliefs!
If you want to prove the existence of God based on such irrationalistic premises, I’ll prove that I’m receiving thought-signals from Mars. But that will be okay, won’t it? Your truth will be true for you and mine for me in Kalb’s postmodernist utopia…
As far as the absence of belief being itself a belief, okay, fine. My belief in the non-existence of God is NEGATIVE in content, and yours is POSITIVE. I hold similar “negative beliefs regading bug-eyes monsters from Mars,” elves, goblins and Santa-Claus. Won’t I look silly if it turns out they were real after all!
I need references …
To particular things I’ve said. As things stand I don’t know what jalnicholl is talking about.