Animavore wrote:Nice one. Feser just defined God out of existence.

Great "argument".

Mick wrote:

Animavore wrote:Nice one. Feser just defined God out of existence.

Great "argument".

If you think I'm going to argue with the vacuous bollox pulled from the rectum of a guy talking about things he can't possibly know you've another thing coming.
This is old hat to me. I think it's time I threw the moth eaten thing into the skip.

Animavore wrote:

Mick wrote:

Animavore wrote:Nice one. Feser just defined God out of existence.

Great "argument".

If you think I'm going to argue with the vacuous bollox pulled from the rectum of a guy talking about things he can't possibly know you've another thing coming.
This is old hat to me. I think it's time I threw the moth eaten thing into the skip.

Okay, well when you have something more than a question begging response, let me know.

Mick wrote:

Animavore wrote:

Mick wrote:

Animavore wrote:Nice one. Feser just defined God out of existence.

Great "argument".

If you think I'm going to argue with the vacuous bollox pulled from the rectum of a guy talking about things he can't possibly know you've another thing coming.
This is old hat to me. I think it's time I threw the moth eaten thing into the skip.

Okay, well when you have something more than a question begging response, let me know.

No. No response. I just realised I no longer care. It was somewhere between reading Feser's piece, devoid of substance, without work or methodology showing how he arrived to his conclusion, just - words, somewhere between there and you asking for an argument against an assertion, like asking someone to argue against a guy who declares, "Pixies smell like jam", I had an epiphany, I saw myself sitting there, on the net with someone I don't even know, arguing against a belief which, to me, is plainly false, and thought, What am I doing?

What am I doing?

What am I doing?

Training to fly the black helicopters, learning how to eat kitten sandwiches, trying to get someone else to spend eternity in hell with you, arguing if pixies prefer marmite or jam...

Trying to make the world a teensy weensy bit saner

Matthew Shute wrote:

Mick wrote:Thus, we say his omniscience is his omnipotence which is his omnipresence, etc..

They're all conceptually distinct, though. Without some theological humpty-dumptyism, those imagined qualities can't be referred to interchangeably. You can't say "omnipotence" if you want to talk about God's all-knowing, since omnipotence doesn't mean that. You can't say "omnipresence" to refer to omni-benevolence - "being" doesn't mean the same as "being goodness". It's an incoherent wibble to claim they're all one "simple" essence. You might as well say: perfect hottness is perfect tallness is perfect hairiness is perfect shininess.

You can always tell you have a killer argument when the person you're arguing against tries to pretend it just doesn't exist.

Shrunk wrote:

Matthew Shute wrote:

Mick wrote:Thus, we say his omniscience is his omnipotence which is his omnipresence, etc..

They're all conceptually distinct, though. Without some theological humpty-dumptyism, those imagined qualities can't be referred to interchangeably. You can't say "omnipotence" if you want to talk about God's all-knowing, since omnipotence doesn't mean that. You can't say "omnipresence" to refer to omni-benevolence - "being" doesn't mean the same as "being goodness". It's an incoherent wibble to claim they're all one "simple" essence. You might as well say: perfect hottness is perfect tallness is perfect hairiness is perfect shininess.

You can always tell you have a killer argument when the person you're arguing against tries to pretend it just doesn't exist.

Haha. No, it would just require me to teach and explain Aquinas' analogical predication. From here, ungrateful for his education, he'll just dismiss it as wibble or whatever else. I've grown tired of that non-response, so I sometimes choose not to respond myself, at least to his posts. Saving myself the effort wasted, I refer those who are truly interested in the topic to this: http://www.unomaha.edu/esc/2008Proceedi ... dition.pdf

Clive Durdle wrote:Is not complexity a requirement of existence?

No. I think that all complex objects/substances are complexes of noncomplex objects/substances.

igorfrankensteen wrote:If complexity were a requirement of existence, nothing simple would exist. Since some simple things already exist, this is proven false.

What simple things are known to exist?

igorfrankensteen wrote:As I tried to point out, there's more than one meaning to the word "simple," and people who say something is "simple" don't necessarily mean it is in the way you want to think that they mean it, to make your arguments work out for you.

We're talking about mereological simplicity here: An object/substance is mereologically simple iff it doesn't have any objectual/substantial proper parts (components/constituents).
Note that mereological simplicity doesn't entail zero-dimensionality or spatiotemporal simplicity. A mereologically simple object may well be spatially or/and temporally extended, having spatial or/and temporal parts.

Clive Durdle wrote:Is anything in this universe simple? What? Light? Nope, light is something that spacetime with quantum effects does.

Infinite downward complexity is defined as follows:

AxEyPPyx ("For every x there is some y such that y is a proper part of x.")

If this is true, then there are no mereological simples or atoms. And then Being is bottomless!
This would mean that all complex objects such as human bodies are composed of an actual infinity of ever smaller objects.
I strongly doubt that infinite downward complexity is possible in physical reality, but I have no logical proof of its impossibility.

Mick wrote:
Properly speaking, God is not a being.

That's nonsense! If God is/exists, then he is a being. For, in the broad sense, a being is simply something that is/exists, an entity.

Clive Durdle wrote:OK, please define simple and suggest something simple.

You still aren't getting my point. I'm not in charge of which version of "simple" applies to what, any more than you are. Simple is a relative term, which applies within the context established by the subject matter and/or the person discussing whatever they are discussing.

Where you are going wrong, is you keep trying to apply the meaning from one context, into another context, and when that inevitably doesn't work, you proclaim that you have said something meaningful. You haven't, any more than my trying on your shoes and finding them too small or large, would prove that your feet (or mine) are defective.

Teuton wrote:

Mick wrote:
Properly speaking, God is not a being.

That's nonsense! If God is/exists, then he is a being. For, in the broad sense, a being is simply something that is/exists, an entity.

Read the link.

Mick wrote:

Teuton wrote:

Mick wrote:
Properly speaking, God is not a being.

That's nonsense! If God is/exists, then he is a being. For, in the broad sense, a being is simply something that is/exists, an entity.

Read the link.

What I read there is typical theological nonsense: God is not a being but "Being itself."
In my view, "being"/"Being" can be interpreted in the following five ways:

1. Being as the most general "form" of all beings, i.e. being as a universal, as a property (identical with the property of existence): All beings have or exemplify/instantiate being.

2. Being as "All the qualities constituting one that exists" (*, i.e. as a thing's nature or essence: the sum or set of its essential properties. Again, essential being is what beings have or exemplify/instantiate.
(* http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/being)

3. Being as the beings, i.e. as the totality of all beings, with Being being many things. Any sum of beings is itself a being.

4. Being as "the One", as Spinoza's God, with all other beings being attributes, modes, or "partial aspects" of that One. Spinoza's God is the only substantial being, but it is a being.

5. Being as the absolutely transcendent "ground/source of being", i.e. as something that is not a being itself.
"If Being is not a being, it follows that one cannot say anything about it. For to say anything of the form 'Being is [so and so]' would be to attribute to it being, and so make it a being, which it is not."
(Priest. Graham. Beyond the Limits of Thought. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. p. 240)

1-4 make sense to me, while 5 does not.

Priest's first sentence was a project of philosophy in the Middle Ages-it is from this problem that the discourse surrounding religious language began, and from it arose negative theology and analogical predication. I'm unsure what his second sentence means to say. Why would "Being is so-and-so" attribute to it (what is 'it'?) being? If I said 'Being is non-existent' am I attributing being to it? If I said 'Being is Being', where is the attribution? Also: does this author think we attribute existence to things?

Thommo wrote:http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/wes/shields.language.html

See, these are the sort of non-responses I speak of.

Mick wrote:

Thommo wrote:http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/wes/shields.language.html

See, these are the sort of non-responses I speak of.

It's not a "response" of any kind, I looked up my own link and found it amusing. I shared it. Ironically you then "non-responded" to me, simply expressing your disdain and not in any way giving me any reason to find it anything other than funny.

Now, I could quote you in your distancing yourself from the anti-woman screed you created a thread linking the other day, or your post just above justifying "non-responses" to points others feel salient (although it seems only you are entitled to such a defence ) and expose the hypocrisy here, but I really can't be arsed.

Why is Feser always using these fancy latin words? Trying to compensate for something? Small dick perhaps?

Sometimes the Latin has no clear and good English translation. Other times, for whatever reason, the Latin is preserved in the scholarship, and we use it without much thought. It is the jargon of Thomism.