Why Faith Isn't a Reliable Pathway to Determine the Truth

[SEG]

The writers mentioned in the Bible didn't only rely on personal memory.

So what else would they rely upon and how would you know?

You honestly can't think of one other way on your own?

No, enlighten me. Also let me know who they were. This should be good for a laugh.

When she received a vision of the past, she was placed amidst it, like a spectator, thus seeing, hearing, and smelling the various smells that were occurring in the vision. Then, she would describe her experience as a first-century witness, and she wasn't without help from the LORD.

That sounds either magical or bunk, which are the same.

Those words aren't synonymous.

Their close enough to describe how MV was not relating to reality.

[SEG]

You are quite right Claire. It is futile to ignore the way a word like omnipotent is actually used because you can make up a definition, based on the word's etymology rather than its usage, that implies a contradiction. Any fool can play that game.

Everyone's got their limitations Moon. Even your god. You saying he can't do anything illogical is an admission that he can't do everything.
To me, the whole idea of an immaterial being living outside our universe is illogical anyway.

If you think about it, being omnipotent make all the other omnis superfluous.

So did God die? This is a yes or no question. He either did or didn't.

The answer is in my post.

Type 2 or 3 letters.

According to Catholic theology it is the divine person who suffers death not the divine nature just as it is the divine person of whom Mary is the mother, not the divine nature. As Karl Rahner says that which is impassible becomes passible in something else.

How about your theology, did God die or not?

[Claire]

The writers mentioned in the Bible didn't only rely on personal memory.

So what else would they rely upon and how would you know?

You honestly can't think of one other way on your own?

No, enlighten me. Also let me know who they were. This should be good for a laugh.

I didn't say I wouldn't, but you can't think of ONE other way on your own?

When she received a vision of the past, she was placed amidst it, like a who, thus seeing, hearing, and smelling the various smells that were occurring in the vision. Then, she would describe her experience as a first-century witness, and she wasn't without help from the LORD.

That sounds either magical or bunk, which are the same.

Those words aren't synonymous.

Their close enough to describe how MV was not relating to reality.

You said those words mean the same, but they don't. As for them describing Maria Valtorta's writings, it doesn't hold up to analysis.

[SEG]

Another Non sequitur! We were talking about percentages!

percentages are a type of fraction.https://www.mathsisfun.com/decimal-frac ... ntage.html

So are decimals, but we weren't talking about decimals either were we?

Moonwood, you should know by now that a mind is a description of a brain's processes via neurons and synapses.

I'm afraid that's a category error.

Incorrect. From Wiki:

To show that a category mistake has been committed one must typically show that once the phenomenon in question is properly understood, it becomes clear that the claim being made about it could not possibly be true.

You can describe the brain's processes all you like and you will not be describing mind.

Then all you have to do is show how a mind can exist without a brain.

Anthony Kenny uses the following example: suppose after you die we were to cut open your skull and find no brain inside, nothing but sawdust; would we then conclude you had never had a mind?

No, but you could easily say that the brain is missing and therefore the mind is also missing.

Of course not. We may posit that the brain causes mind, though you are completely mistaken in thinking this has been proved or anything like proved, but if we want to describe those things that are symptomatic of mind we will describe a set of behaviours not a physical brain.

This can be proven and has been proven. We know that when we remove different parts of the brain, the person belonging to the brain loses some amount of functionality from that area of the brain. If we keep on removing areas, we keep on losing functionality to the extent where there remains nothing left at all. How would a mind that relies upon a brain (that ends up having no functionality) return to full functionality?

It's not a THING that works independently of the brain. We know this from what we have discovered in brain surgery and what happens to the brain with drug usage. Your mind doesn't take up any space because it isn't a physical object, it's a process.

No, we really don't. In fact one of the earliest brain surgeons became a duelist because of what he discovered in experimenting on the brain.

Really? Who was that? Name me one neurologist who has written any peer reviewed paper on the mind surviving death of the brain. In fact name me ANYONE who has and you may have a valid point.

Well, give me an example of something else that is both material and immaterial and how it is possible to combine them.

Justice.

How is justice material?

Not at all, that is how definitions work. There is no correct definition for anything, but my one (or rather Google's) is relevant to the question at hand.

That is not how definition works. If you want to answer the question of how a word is being used in a specific context you don't do that by listing twenty definitions from twenty different contexts.

No, but you can choose several different definitions of a word and not one of them particularly would be necessarily the correct one in all circumstances.

Oh, no. Two natures being blended is just ridiculous. It would be just like putting on an old coat for him eh?

Actually that is not a bad analogy though it has its limitations. If you can imagine something like that but with a closer conection you will be on the right lines.

Yes, the Gnostics talk about Jesus donning a cloak of flesh, but they never thought he was a man at all.

[SEG]

So what else would they rely upon and how would you know?

You honestly can't think of one other way on your own?

No, enlighten me. Also let me know who they were. This should be good for a laugh.

I didn't say I wouldn't, but you can't think of ONE other way on your own?

That sounds either magical or bunk, which are the same.

Those words aren't synonymous.

Their close enough to describe how MV was not relating to reality.

You said those words mean the same, but they don't. As for them describing Maria Valtorta's writings, it doesn't hold up to analysis.

[Moonwood the Hare]

You are quite right Claire. It is futile to ignore the way a word like omnipotent is actually used because you can make up a definition, based on the word's etymology rather than its usage, that implies a contradiction. Any fool can play that game.

Everyone's got their limitations Moon. Even your god. You saying he can't do anything illogical is an admission that he can't do everything.

Well think about that. Has the claim that God is omnipotent ever been taken to mean he can create an object not identical to itself. No it hasn't. Has it been taken to mean he could create an object that is both colourless and green? No, and one could list many similar examples. So if that is what the word omnipotent means then God is not omnipotent and no one has ever thought he was. But now, suppose we want a word that means that God can do anything that it is possible to do. It means that out of the set of all things that are possible he can do all of them. Would omnipotent be a good word for that? What word would be better?

To me, the whole idea of an immaterial being living outside our universe is illogical anyway.

When you say it is illogical to you, do you mean you have a personal system of logic different to any of the ones used by other people or do you mean that using the accepted systems you can show that this is impossible?

If you think about it, being omnipotent make all the other omnis superfluous.

Not really. Omnipotent does not imply omnibenevolent. Not that I would use the latter term.

So did God die? This is a yes or no question. He either did or didn't.

The answer is in my post.

Type 2 or 3 letters.

According to Catholic theology it is the divine person who suffers death not the divine nature just as it is the divine person of whom Mary is the mother, not the divine nature. As Karl Rahner says that which is impassible becomes passible in something else.

How about your theology, did God die or not?

Using the word's God and die in the senses they are used in Catholic theology: yes; using the words in whatever sense you are using them: who knows?

[SEG]

You are quite right Claire. It is futile to ignore the way a word like omnipotent is actually used because you can make up a definition, based on the word's etymology rather than its usage, that implies a contradiction. Any fool can play that game.

Everyone's got their limitations Moon. Even your god. You saying he can't do anything illogical is an admission that he can't do everything.

Well think about that. Has the claim that God is omnipotent ever been taken to mean he can create an object not identical to itself. No it hasn't. Has it been taken to mean he could create an object that is both colourless and green? No, and one could list many similar examples. So if that is what the word omnipotent means then God is not omnipotent and no one has ever thought he was. But now, suppose we want a word that means that God can do anything that it is possible to do. It means that out of the set of all things that are possible he can do all of them. Would omnipotent be a good word for that? What word would be better?

No it wouldn't. Omnipotent even within those terms is pretty meaningless. Your god that is fully man and at the same time fully God (an immaterial being) is illogical, yet you have no problem with that. If I ask you "Can God sin or appear before me right now? You will reply, "Yes, but he doesn't choose to". If I ask, "Could God give undeniable proof of his existence?" you will say "he can, but that will take away our need for faith, and we can't have that".
It's funny how people like you claim to know the mind of God and what he thinks always aligns with what you think.

To me, the whole idea of an immaterial being living outside our universe is illogical anyway.

When you say it is illogical to you, do you mean you have a personal system of logic different to any of the ones used by other people or do you mean that using the accepted systems you can show that this is impossible?

No I can't. The concept just doesn't seem logical to me at all. Can you show that it is possible?

If you think about it, being omnipotent make all the other omnis superfluous.

Not really. Omnipotent does not imply omnibenevolent. Not that I would use the latter term.

Of course it does. Just like any other power like being omnipresent, all just or all loving. These are all powers and he must have the lot if he was truly omnipresent. Of course no being has ever been proven to be omnipotent, it's a silly term.

So did God die? This is a yes or no question. He either did or didn't.

How about your theology, did God die or not?

Using the word's God and die in the senses they are used in Catholic theology: yes; using the words in whatever sense you are using them: who knows?

So you are shrugging your shoulders when speaking about your own theology? You don't know? If he didn't really die, there was no sacrifice, was there? Or aren't you sure on this as well?

[Moonwood the Hare]

Another Non sequitur! We were talking about percentages!

percentages are a type of fraction.https://www.mathsisfun.com/decimal-frac ... ntage.html

So are decimals, but we weren't talking about decimals either were we?

I really don't think I should be having to explain junior school level Maths to you. However. Fraction is the more general term that includes both decimal fractions and percentages among other things; this means if you are talking about percentages you are necessarily talking about fractions but you are not necessarily talking about decimals. Think of it as a Venn diagram with fractions as a big circle with decimals and percentages sitting inside it.

Moonwood, you should know by now that a mind is a description of a brain's processes via neurons and synapses.

I'm afraid that's a category error.

Incorrect. From Wiki:

To show that a category mistake has been committed one must typically show that once the phenomenon in question is properly understood, it becomes clear that the claim being made about it could not possibly be true.

It certainly should become clear to you but I doubt it will. The phenomena in question are a set of behaviours, including verbal behaviours, and if these behaviours are present we say there is a mind. We do not say the presence of a functioning physical brain is symptomatic of mind in the same way, rather we may hypothesise that the brain is the cause of the mind by observing these behaviours in relation with brain functioning.

You can describe the brain's processes all you like and you will not be describing mind.

Then all you have to do is show how a mind can exist without a brain.

No. This is an irrelevance. Whatever mind is and whether it is caused by brain or not we do not know about mind because we observe brain or brain processes, rather we observe a specific set of behaviours. Cartesians would say we infer mind from those behaviours, I would follow Kenny (who is following Anscomb and Wittgenstein) and say those behaviours are symptomatic of mind i.e something we observe performing these functions is something which has a mind.

Anthony Kenny uses the following example: suppose after you die we were to cut open your skull and find no brain inside, nothing but sawdust; would we then conclude you had never had a mind?

No, but you could easily say that the brain is missing and therefore the mind is also missing.

We most certainly could not. Suppose I scan your head and the scanner finds no brain bit only sawdust and yet you are talking to me, explaining your intentions, making inferences; what would it mean in that context to say that because there was no brain there was no mind?

Of course not. We may posit that the brain causes mind, though you are completely mistaken in thinking this has been proved or anything like proved, but if we want to describe those things that are symptomatic of mind we will describe a set of behaviours not a physical brain.

This can be proven and has been proven. We know that when we remove different parts of the brain, the person belonging to the brain loses some amount of functionality from that area of the brain. If we keep on removing areas, we keep on losing functionality to the extent where there remains nothing left at all. How would a mind that relies upon a brain (that ends up having no functionality) return to full functionality?

You are confusing correlation with causality. If materialism is true then presumably if you could reassemble the brain exactly as it was the last time it had functionality then it would return to functionality. If you could reproduce that structure in some other compatible medium presumably that would restore full functionality.

It's not a THING that works independently of the brain. We know this from what we have discovered in brain surgery and what happens to the brain with drug usage. Your mind doesn't take up any space because it isn't a physical object, it's a process.

No, we really don't. In fact one of the earliest brain surgeons became a duelist because of what he discovered in experimenting on the brain.

Really? Who was that? Name me one neurologist who has written any peer reviewed paper on the mind surviving death of the brain. In fact name me ANYONE who has and you may have a valid point.

Wilder Penfield. He engaged in what is called point stimulation, that is stimulating part of the brain to produce a response. He stated out as a strict materialist and he thought that if he stimulated the brain so that the fingers moved the person would think they were moving their fingers. Instead he found people saying things like 'my fingers moved but I didn't move them, you did.' So he shifted from materialism to Cartesian dualism. I don't know what his views on the mind surviving death were; that was not his concern.

You are conflating two distinct issues: mind/body dualism and the mind surviving death. You can believe the mind survives death without being a dualist and you can be a dualist without believing in survival. On the mind surviving death without dualism you need to look at some of the work the omega point theorists came up with in the nineties. As I recall at one omega point conference Kenny and Tippler persuaded Flew that a copy of the subatomic structure of a body at the point of death would in effect be a resurrection of the person. Omega point theory has now been falsified but it lead to some interesting albeit bizarre discussion.

Well, give me an example of something else that is both material and immaterial and how it is possible to combine them.

Justice.

How is justice material?

If you accept a materialist worldview how can anything not be material? But justice is expressed through matter, so if we are to share resources fairly then what we will be sharing will be material and we will look at the material objects and their distribution

That is not how definition works. If you want to answer the question of how a word is being used in a specific context you don't do that by listing twenty definitions from twenty different contexts.

No, but you can choose several different definitions of a word and not one of them particularly would be necessarily the correct one in all circumstances.

Absolutely. But if you want to say which one is correct in a particular context you need to indicate that not just give a list. I am not sure I can do much more than keep repeating myself in the hope you will understand.

Yes, the Gnostics talk about Jesus donning a cloak of flesh, but they never thought he was a man at all.

I think you will find they did think he was a man in the sense that was important to them. But yes, a lot of gnostics were docestists; they thought Jesus did not have a real human body but only something that appeared to be a human body. Later you find people saying Jesus did have a real human body but his mind or spirit was replaced by the logos or divine mind. The orthodox position is that he had a complete human nature, body, mind, spirit etc.

[Moonwood the Hare]

No it wouldn't. Omnipotent even within those terms is pretty meaningless. Your god that is fully man and at the same time fully God (an immaterial being) is illogical, yet you have no problem with that.

I would havea problem if it was illogical but so far neuther you nor the Cap have given me any reason to think it is. That may be because you are using the word illogical in a highly unconventional sense.

If I ask you "Can God sin or appear before me right now? You will reply, "Yes, but he doesn't choose to". If I ask, "Could God give undeniable proof of his existence?" you will say "he can, but that will take away our need for faith, and we can't have that".
It's funny how people like you claim to know the mind of God and what he thinks always aligns with what you think.

I am trying to wean you off the habit of arguing against what, according to you, people would say while ignoring most of what they do say, so I will not repond to this.

To me, the whole idea of an immaterial being living outside our universe is illogical anyway.

When you say it is illogical to you, do you mean you have a personal system of logic different to any of the ones used by other people or do you mean that using the accepted systems you can show that this is impossible?

No I can't. The concept just doesn't seem logical to me at all. Can you show that it is possible?

You may have heard the saying people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts; I don't think people are entitled to their own logic either. It's a little complex because there are different logical systems and disputes over the scope of some logical laws but even so being illogical means violating some logical law not simply 'seeming illogical' to some person, especially if that person has no grasp of basic logic.

If you think about it, being omnipotent make all the other omnis superfluous.

Not really. Omnipotent does not imply omnibenevolent. Not that I would use the latter term.

Of course it does. Just like any other power like being omnipresent, all just or all loving. These are all powers and he must have the lot if he was truly omnipresent. Of course no being has ever been proven to be omnipotent, it's a silly term.

I can't figure out what this is supposed to mean. But are you saying the concept of being able to do whatever it is possible to do is incoherent, if so what, other than your personal feelings on the matter, makes it incoherent?

Using the word's God and die in the senses they are used in Catholic theology: yes; using the words in whatever sense you are using them: who knows?

So you are shrugging your shoulders when speaking about your own theology? You don't know? If he didn't really die, there was no sacrifice, was there? Or aren't you sure on this as well?

I have no problem with the words or the claim when they are used in the sense that they are used in Catholic theology. I canot guarantee that the claim God died will be meaningful or possible if you chose to use the words in some other sense.

[SEG]

Another Non sequitur! We were talking about percentages!

percentages are a type of fraction.https://www.mathsisfun.com/decimal-frac ... ntage.html

So are decimals, but we weren't talking about decimals either were we?

I really don't think I should be having to explain junior school level Maths to you. However. Fraction is the more general term that includes both decimal fractions and percentages among other things; this means if you are talking about percentages you are necessarily talking about fractions but you are not necessarily talking about decimals. Think of it as a Venn diagram with fractions as a big circle with decimals and percentages sitting inside it.

You are committing a non sequitur when you introduce a new term after speaking about the original term, fractions. It went like this. I said:

You are saying that a person can be 100% male and 100% human without any contradiction, which doesn't align with a teapot that is 100% steel and 100% porcelain. You are trying to say that something like a cat being 100% animal and 100% feline is the same as something that is made of two entirely different materials, but is still 100% of each.

You said:

No I never said the nature of either God or man were things that could be measured as fractions.

Fractions aren't exactly the same as percentages nor decimals. It's like I said You are saying that a person can be half male and half human without any contradiction, which doesn't align with a teapot that is half steel and half porcelain. You are trying to say that something like a cat being half animal and half feline is the same as something that is made of two entirely different materials, but is still half of each. Then you saying:

No I never said the nature of either God or man were things that could be measured as decimals. The flow of the conversation doesn't follow when you introduce a new term to describe something that was previously said. A non sequitur is a conclusion or reply that doesn't follow logically from the previous statement.

Moonwood, you should know by now that a mind is a description of a brain's processes via neurons and synapses.

I'm afraid that's a category error.

Incorrect. From Wiki:

To show that a category mistake has been committed one must typically show that once the phenomenon in question is properly understood, it becomes clear that the claim being made about it could not possibly be true.

It certainly should become clear to you but I doubt it will. The phenomena in question are a set of behaviours, including verbal behaviours, and if these behaviours are present we say there is a mind. We do not say the presence of a functioning physical brain is symptomatic of mind in the same way, rather we may hypothesise that the brain is the cause of the mind by observing these behaviours in relation with brain functioning.

You can describe the brain's processes all you like and you will not be describing mind.

Then all you have to do is show how a mind can exist without a brain.

No. This is an irrelevance. Whatever mind is and whether it is caused by brain or not we do not know about mind because we observe brain or brain processes, rather we observe a specific set of behaviours. Cartesians would say we infer mind from those behaviours, I would follow Kenny (who is following Anscomb and Wittgenstein) and say those behaviours are symptomatic of mind i.e something we observe performing these functions is something which has a mind.

Anthony Kenny uses the following example: suppose after you die we were to cut open your skull and find no brain inside, nothing but sawdust; would we then conclude you had never had a mind?

No, but you could easily say that the brain is missing and therefore the mind is also missing.

We most certainly could not. Suppose I scan your head and the scanner finds no brain bit only sawdust and yet you are talking to me, explaining your intentions, making inferences; what would it mean in that context to say that because there was no brain there was no mind?

Of course not. We may posit that the brain causes mind, though you are completely mistaken in thinking this has been proved or anything like proved, but if we want to describe those things that are symptomatic of mind we will describe a set of behaviours not a physical brain.

This can be proven and has been proven. We know that when we remove different parts of the brain, the person belonging to the brain loses some amount of functionality from that area of the brain. If we keep on removing areas, we keep on losing functionality to the extent where there remains nothing left at all. How would a mind that relies upon a brain (that ends up having no functionality) return to full functionality?

You are confusing correlation with causality. If materialism is true then presumably if you could reassemble the brain exactly as it was the last time it had functionality then it would return to functionality. If you could reproduce that structure in some other compatible medium presumably that would restore full functionality.

It's not a THING that works independently of the brain. We know this from what we have discovered in brain surgery and what happens to the brain with drug usage. Your mind doesn't take up any space because it isn't a physical object, it's a process.

No, we really don't. In fact one of the earliest brain surgeons became a duelist because of what he discovered in experimenting on the brain.

Really? Who was that? Name me one neurologist who has written any peer reviewed paper on the mind surviving death of the brain. In fact name me ANYONE who has and you may have a valid point.

Wilder Penfield. He engaged in what is called point stimulation, that is stimulating part of the brain to produce a response. He stated out as a strict materialist and he thought that if he stimulated the brain so that the fingers moved the person would think they were moving their fingers. Instead he found people saying things like 'my fingers moved but I didn't move them, you did.' So he shifted from materialism to Cartesian dualism. I don't know what his views on the mind surviving death were; that was not his concern.

It must have been at one point.From Wiki:

Penfield devoted much of his thinking to mental processes, including contemplation of whether there was any scientific basis for the existence of the human soul.

He was heavily indoctrinated into Christianity. Where's his peer reviewed paper on the mind surviving death of the brain?

You are conflating two distinct issues: mind/body dualism and the mind surviving death. You can believe the mind survives death without being a dualist and you can be a dualist without believing in survival. On the mind surviving death without dualism you need to look at some of the work the omega point theorists came up with in the nineties. As I recall at one omega point conference Kenny and Tippler persuaded Flew that a copy of the subatomic structure of a body at the point of death would in effect be a resurrection of the person. Omega point theory has now been falsified but it lead to some interesting albeit bizarre discussion.

Well, give me an example of something else that is both material and immaterial and how it is possible to combine them.

Justice.

How is justice material?

If you accept a materialist worldview how can anything not be material? But justice is expressed through matter, so if we are to share resources fairly then what we will be sharing will be material and we will look at the material objects and their distribution

That's a stretch!

That is not how definition works. If you want to answer the question of how a word is being used in a specific context you don't do that by listing twenty definitions from twenty different contexts.

No, but you can choose several different definitions of a word and not one of them particularly would be necessarily the correct one in all circumstances.

Absolutely. But if you want to say which one is correct in a particular context you need to indicate that not just give a list. I am not sure I can do much more than keep repeating myself in the hope you will understand.

Yes, the Gnostics talk about Jesus donning a cloak of flesh, but they never thought he was a man at all.

I think you will find they did think he was a man in the sense that was important to them. But yes, a lot of gnostics were docestists; they thought Jesus did not have a real human body but only something that appeared to be a human body. Later you find people saying Jesus did have a real human body but his mind or spirit was replaced by the logos or divine mind. The orthodox position is that he had a complete human nature, body, mind, spirit etc.

But the earliest sources say he was an angel without a material body.