Posted: Aug 13, 2017 1:13 am
Thomas Eshuis wrote:
Except that it doesn't.
Fabricating two completely unrelated premises does nothing of the sort.
At best, you've just reaffirmed that you don't know how categorical statements work.
At worst you've just, again, refuted the cosmological argument.
If you admit that we don't have to regard a statement as absolutely and always true, then the first premise is false.
The premise is not a categorical statement. It is a provisional observation that holds true for the present.
Meaning premise one of the cosmological argument is false. Do continue to demolish your own arguments.
No. Meaning that premise 1 may not always have been true.
And yet another blind counterfactual assertion.
Whatsoever X, means all things that are X.
That's how the English language works.
"All" is used here as an adjective whereas "whatever" is used as a pronoun. That's a big difference in my language.
In Dutch the sentence would read: Wat ook maar beweegd wordt door ander bewogen.
Which means all moving things are moved by other movers.
Not according to Google Translate. Where is the "alle" in the Dutch sentence?
False, he said that whatever moves has been moved by something else. Meaning all things that move.
He was making an observation predicated upon present understanding. Nothing categorical about it.
Stop lying. More-over this is refuted by your point about inductive reasoning.
Hume warned us that we have to be careful not to assume that phenomena have always been as they are.In this situation, our observation can hold true forever but it can't hold true for the past or else we end up with an absurd infinite regress.
Except that he does, but do continue to lie.
Nowhere does Aquinas ever state that what we presently observe has always been so. Indeed, his argument specifically counters the idea that the causal chain of motion has always been in existence.
Except that you still haven't demonstrated this to be a problem.
I have. You just keep denying that it is a problem and a logical fallacy.
Then you have no basis to assert that all things are moved by other movers.
We know that things are moved by other movers. We have yet to find an exception to this rule., gravity including.
This is an even bigger lie than first part of this sentence.
Cosmologists don't speak of a first mover, but they do state that there was no motion in the universe at t=0. There are some who propose the Big Bang was the result of colliding branes, but this only begs the questions as to who moved the branes.
False. That is true for our local representation of the universe. Not the entire universe as a whole.
Our universe is whatever we can observe. The motion in the observable universe is a consequence of the Big Bang.
Science has not demonstrated it in either sense of the word.
Science has demonstrated that movement is imparted by movement.
Except we don't know whether our universe if finite or infinite.
The observable universe is expanding, which indicates it is finite. Unless you postulate that the moving object came from a non-observable realm of the universe, it could not have been moving forever.
Once again you're offering a description, that fails to adress the actual point being made.
No. Gravity is a consequence of masses moving away and towards each other, bending spacetime in the process.
Yea, I don't blindly accept whatever anyone asserts, especially when I know that assertion to bases on faulty reasoning and made up shit. How dare I? The only one refusing to engage in an honest discussion is you Wortfish. You're the one who keeps ignoring or dismissing out of hand multiple rebuttals. The one who keeps mindlessly regurgitating points that have already been refuted several times.
You seem to have a problem with science, whether it be gravity, mass, energy or motion. Do you doubt scientific empiricism?
Because that refers to your initial claim that infinite regress is impossible/absurd. That's the blind assertion that makes the rest of your argument invalid.
No. My statement was that if an infinite regress is impossible, then a first mover necessarily must exist. So all Aquinas and myself have to do is show that an infinite regress is impossible to show that a first mover exists.
And this is still a classical example of circular reasoning, no matter how many times you repeat it.
No. Circular reasoning begins with an assumption. The argument from motion is an exercise in inductive reasoning and logical deduction.
Again, you haven't demonstrated this to be a problem in the first place.
I have repeatedly shown the absurdity of an infinite regress. Once again, how could we be having this discussion at this present moment if it took an endless number of moments - i.e. an end-less period - to get to this arbitrary point in time?
I don't have to. According to premise 1 of the cosmological argument, that person tipping the domino also was moved by something else and that chain goes on ad infinitum.
But we're only discussing the chain of events seen in the felling of the dominoes. This chain is initiated by a first mover that is not a domino. Extrapolating. we can logically deduce that the chain of events in the universe as a whole was initiated by a first mover too. That is not a "special pleading" but a consequence of logical necessity.
And as I said, according to the cosmological argument everything that moves requires a mover, including the person that is tipping the first domino.
Noted evasion. The person tipping the first domino is the first mover of the subsequent causal chain. We can use the cosmological argument to show what is going on with the dominoes:
1. Whatever falls has been felled by its antecedent.
2. There cannot be an infinite regress of dominoes falling.
3. Therefore, there must be something which felled a domino without itself being felled.
The first premise is based on what we know about dominoes when we observe how they presently move. But, unless we could see all of the dominoes falling, and not just a snapshot of them, we would have to conclude (rightly) that there was an unfelled first mover.
Except that we don't observe or know that this is true for all things.
We know that the law of the conservation of energy holds. We know that all the motion in the observable universe can be traced to the Big Bang and the subsequent expansion of the universe. So we can be sure that whatever moves has been moved by a mover....except when it comes to the Big Bang itself which necessarily requires there to have been an unmoved first mover.