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To: AndyTheBear
"I object to the meaning of a premise being changed. For example consider this deduction.

So do I.

"You have made this mistake a couple of times that I have pointed out, and I have spelled out the specifics already."

No you haven't. You have made the bald accusation, but you have demonstrated no actual equivocation whatsoever. If you can make a case that I've done this, then just go ahead and do so. I'll be happy to respond.
143 posted on 02/17/2010 2:10:28 PM PST by EnderWiggins
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To: EnderWiggins
You have made the bald accusation, but you have demonstrated no actual equivocation whatsoever.

The equivocation was certainly more subtle and harder to see than the bank example. It didn't boil down to two parts of the same word like your former error with "portray". I will try one more time to point it out to you, although I doubt you are in any mood to recognize it:

The law of cause and effect is the most rigorously confirmed induction we have ever been able to make as a species. The confidence is so great that we even have invented a label for those instances when it appears the law might have been violated. We call them "miracles."

This is a premise. You used this premise further down in post 131 in another form:

If we hold the premise that all effects have causes, it cannot lead you to an effect that has no cause. It can only lead you to an eternal chain of causes and effects.

Well both these snippets appear to make sense. However, when did we ever hold this premise as stated in the second snippet? It kinda sounds like the previous one, only stated with more brevity. But it isn't really the same. I hold the first premise, but in a different way than you do that does not support your restatement: that everything in nature has to have a cause, and that exceptions are properly called miracles because they are thus an effect of some super nature.

If you like, you can assert that the non-existence of super nature was an implied additional premise, but that's hardly useful in considering the veracity of naturalism. And it would make the rest of your argument have little utility other than obscuring that you have really just assumed your conclusion.

146 posted on 02/17/2010 3:54:33 PM PST by AndyTheBear
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