Brandon T. Adams

Twitter is my mental playground.

Of course I didn’t mean “do whatever you want with no regard to anyone else’s feelings or interests.” The golden rule is a good one. And it was around long before Jesus took it up. I’m sure you are a good man in many ways, Mike. But I doubt it’s solely because of your faith, as much as you’d like to give it all the credit. At least, I hope it’s not. I hope you don’t think that without it, you’d become a rampaging destructive person with no conscience to guide you. I have read the Bible, Mike. I’ve studied theology, philosophy, the history of how the Bible was formed. I’ve seen no evidence that its claims match the reality we find. In fact, I see plenty of evidence that contradicts its claims and that support the notion that it is a work of theological agendas written by men and edited together by men, in part to preserve a concept of a world that mainly serves men. This was what set me off about your post. It speaks only to people who think as you do. I was trying—admittedly in a brash way—to illustrate to you that your suggestion to “have more children” comes from a place that can never understand what that truly means for the bearer of the children you want more of. The golden rule applies here, too.

Brandon, you need to take a Xanex! BTW, letting people "do what they want" is a recipe for disaster. If you have them or did, would you raise kids to "do what they want." You should read the book of Judges in the Bible, but I doubt you read the Bible. The theme of the book is from the very last verse: "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." How'd that work out for them? Not well, to say the least.

It bums me out how many families have only two kids. It’s a pandemic! Do they really only believe they can only handle two? What’s up with that? I know the answer; it's a rhetorical question. I think it’s bordering on sin for a couple to limit themselves to having two children, for whatever reason. At best it’s a cliché. We’ve attended a goodly number of churches over the decades, and since I’ve become a full-on natalist it distresses me how many families have two children. I’m not saying all Christian families have to go old school and have ten kids like our ancestors, but as I told a young friend of mine recently and my daughter as well, you will never, ever regret having more children. You get to bring more image bearers of God into the world, and into eternity, to love and nurture and raise. So, young Christian couples, be fruitful and multiply! It’s not a suggestion.

Republicans control Congress. They are in power because of moneyed lobbyists and special interest groups and billionaires. Oh, and actual voters they represent from their state. If they want to remain in power, they must obey Trump or else the money will dry up, and Trump will sic his deranged fanbase on these “traitorous” “disloyal” politicians where their lives could truly be in danger. It’s a death cult. But, the midterms are coming. Things will begin to look different.

As a European, I don't understand how Trump remains in power after everything he has done.

Despite the unsolved logical problems of God as he is classically defined, the main problem is that he is always and only merely defined. Yes, if you give a conceptual being the definition of “necessary” then by that definition, that being must exist. The problem is you have presented no actually existing referent to support your having this definition to begin with. That’s why the unicorn is an apt parody. Both are conceptual entities only, with mere definitions and no referents to support them. All you’ve got is an empty sack full of nothing but your own ideas. You’re playing word games. Bravo. Your doctorate is being wasted. What you should do is actually present your God to everyone so they can actually witness him with their own eyes as we’re told he allowed to happen a few times long ago. Then you’d earn much more than a doctorate. Keep on puffing.

If you can convince me just one of these premises is false, I will drop out of my doctoral program now and never step foot in church again: 1. Any candidate being is either necessary, contingent, or impossible. 2. An omnipotent and omniscient being cannot be contingent, because contingency would require some deeper modal reality determining its existence, undermining its maximal knowledge and power, and making it less fundamental than the reality upon which it depends. 3. No contradiction, incoherence, or modal defect has been shown in the concept of such a being; therefore, God is not impossible. C. Therefore, God is necessarily existent, and it is impossible for God not to exist.

If you're asking for a picture of God, then your ask uses the wrong tool for the job. Pictures capture photons bouncing of material objects, i.e., light. If photons bounce off God, then it follows as a corollary that God material. Therefore, if you could take a picture of God, then it would prove that God exists materially, rather than immaterially. But if God is material, then He is not God, as material implies contingent, i.e., it is composite, has extension, volume, relation, mass and exists in spacetime. However, God can only be God if he exists necessarily as actus purus, rather than contingently. Therefore, it is the case that: 1. To ask for a picture of God is using the wrong tool, it's like asking for proof that the colour blue smells like steak & kidney pie. 2. To reject God on this basis does not refute the existence of God, it simply proves that you lack philosophy to ask metaphysical questions about God.

There aren’t different kinds of facts. Just facts. I can be the only person on an island and reality will push back to give me facts that are truth-apt, but I will be unable to find any “moral facts” because there is no one around to perform morality with. There is no morality without others to push back on your actions. This is the first clue why moral realism is already off on the wrong foot. The problem is that “irreducibly normative feature of reality” is doing enormous metaphysical work without any account of what that actually means in a physical universe. Where do these features live? How do they supervene on anything? Calling them irreducible doesn’t explain them. The induction analogy also doesn’t hold. I accept induction because it has a track record, a history of predictions that either survive or collapse against physical feedback. That’s not a parallel structure to moral intuition. It’s precisely the structure moral intuition lacks. Saying both “fit experience” papers over the difference between fitting experience as a corrective mechanism and fitting experience as a feeling of conviction. Grasping reasons is a cognitive capacity, not a pipeline to mind-independent normative facts. I can grasp that an argument is valid without that validity existing outside of minds. The realist needs rational agents to be detecting something, not just reasoning about something, and that distinction is never argued for, only assumed. Reason does enter moral life, but as an instrument of consistency rather than a telescope pointed at normative facts. When we expand our circle of moral concern to include people outside our tribe, or species outside our own, we’re typically applying an existing commitment more consistently. If suffering matters when it happens to me, and I have no principled basis for drawing a boundary around my group, reason exposes that inconsistency and pressure mounts to revise. That’s a real and important process. It just doesn’t require a realm of moral facts to push against. It only requires that we be the kind of creatures who care about internal coherence among our inherited values, which we evidently are. On moral progress: the anti-realist has a perfectly coherent story here. We expand our circle of concern, increase internal consistency among our values, and correct for in-group bias. That looks like progress without requiring that we’re converging on a fixed target. The appearance of progress is not evidence of a destination.

You’re right that empirical beliefs get corrected by the world’s pushback. Moral facts don’t have to be that kind of fact. Normative truths like “gratuitous cruelty is wrong” are irreducibly normative features of reality. They correct us through reason and lived moral experience, not physically mediated feedback. Your own epistemology works the same way: you accept induction and coherence because they fit experience. Moral claims do just that. When someone says “torture is fine if it boosts fitness,” they’re not just voicing a different sentiment, they’re wrong about a real normative fact. Only rational agents register moral disagreement because only they grasp reasons. That makes morality discoverable, rather than invented. Realism explains why moral discourse feels truth-apt and why we make genuine progress.

The Unlimited being is present in our intellect. Premise 1 If we have not experienced what a thing is, then we cannot abstract it from what we experience. Premise 2 We have not experienced what unlimited goodness, unlimited power, and unlimited knowledge are. Sub-conclusion A (from 1 + 2) Therefore, we cannot abstract unlimited goodness, unlimited power, and unlimited knowledge from experience. Premise 3 If we are aware of something we have not experienced, then our awareness of it comes from direct perception of the object. Premise 4 I am undeniably aware of the idea of the unlimited being (unlimited goodness, unlimited power, unlimited knowledge, etc.). Final Conclusion (from A + 3 + 4) Therefore, our awareness of the idea of the unlimited being comes from direct perception of the object (i.e., the infinite being itself

That’s why moral realism fails. I am a moral anti-realist. You’re not arguing with my language. Why do we trust our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow? Because of past experiences of it rising every single day, and our past experience of all past experiences of consistent patterns that cohere with each other in a workable framework that allows us to navigate reality successfully. If it really matters to you that you cannot have absolute certainty that your thoughts perfectly align with reality, I don’t know how I can help you. Other than saying you don’t really have a problem believing you are looking at a screen right now and typing into an app. So just keep believing you are doing that and if you continue to get consistent feedback from your senses then you can call that belief “true.” The reason why I can say my belief about using this app is truth-apt and moral claims are not, is because the physical world pushes back. When I believe I’m using this app, that belief is embedded in a dense web of corrective feedback. My fingers feel resistance. The screen responds. Other people can observe the same device. If my belief were incorrect, something in that network would fail to cohere, and the failure would be legible to me. The belief earns its truth-aptness by being the kind of claim that reality can reject. Moral claims don’t inhabit that structure. When I say “cruelty is wrong,” nothing in the fabric of the universe pushes back. What we have instead are feelings, cultural inheritance, evolutionary pressures toward social cohesion, and the kind of convergence you’d expect from creatures who had to cooperate to survive. Only people push back on moral claims. The universe doesn’t care. Truth-aptness is earned by a specific relationship between belief, world, and corrective pressure. Moral claims, however sincerely felt, however socially useful, don’t participate in that relationship. They only express, coordinate, and motivate. They don’t describe.

Moral realism, whether theistic or natural, gives us a reason why our moral intuitions feel truth apt. If evolution systematically deceives us about the nature of morality, making subjective attitudes seem objective, why should we trust our other evolved faculties like “believe what the evidence supports”?

Digestion is universal and the product of evolution. Why can’t morality be like that? I never said morality is purely cultural. I said we have core axiomatic moral impulses that evolved. Culture expands on those core values in different ways, giving different weights/priorities to different core values. That explains how we perform morality. It does not justify the contents of moral thinking. Nothing can. Because there are no moral facts at bottom. Only moral impulses based in evolved emotional reactions. From these shared emotional inheritances we can then reason towards a goal that prioritizes one core value over another. Once we all emotionally agree that torturing children is not what we desire, then we can find objective reasons how to prevent or stop it. Different cultural expressions of core values will survive in a society as long as those expressions do not reduce the overall reproduction of those humans in that society. There is no external standard we are all pointing our minds to. The standards are internal. Our minds can’t help but use them.

@BrandonTheAdams @AleMartnezR1 @DrScotMSullivan @SeanD174 @Ausbloke93 @anchoredso37497 @CatholicCo200 @allegiantfaith @L1lL3l @limitandmind 3/ vous ne pouvez pas dire que la morale est purement culturelle, sinon vous perdez le droit de critique face aux sociétés mayas et l’URSS qui suivaient leurs « axiomes fondamentaux »

I don’t have whatever P2 is claiming. So, try again? “Goodness” is not out there to be recognized. It’s not in objects or actions. It’s a value judgment about the world based on core axiomatic standards that we evolved to be a successful social species. But being a successful social species is not itself “good” it’s just what happened to ours and others like ours. We’re the ones who evolved a higher sense of self-awareness that allow us to think about these things I a “meta” way. Fin.

@AleMartnezR1 @DrScotMSullivan @SeanD174 @Ausbloke93 @anchoredso37497 @CatholicCo200 @BrandonTheAdams @allegiantfaith @L1lL3l @limitandmind P3 : L'idée de Dieu n'est donc pas une construction de notre intellect, mais une impression directe de l'Être Lui-même, agissant en nous comme la cause de cette orientation irrépressible.

@TheOutsiderHum1 @aquavitae96 Omnia is conflating “true” with “real.” It’s a common problem most people make, and theists especially.

@aquavitae96 God can be real without being true (or false) because God is not a proposition. I just explained why atheists ask for proof of God.

Atheist: Let me use logic (an activity of the mind) to show that the universe is not the creation of a mind… If reality is bound by logic, reality is the creation of a mind (God). If reality is not bound by logic, you can’t logic a human fiction (logic) to make true claims about reality. And that is one of the many reason atheism is self-refuting.

First, your image shows four theories of math, not two theories of logic. Yes the two are related, but the image doesn’t support your limiting dichotomy. Reality is not bound by logic or math. It does whatever it does. We’ve so far only found physical laws that describe its functions. Logic is what minds do, not reality as a whole. The three “laws of thought” (identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle) are, like the laws of physics which describe reality, descriptive laws of how our minds track consistent patterns in reality. So, logic is useful, but not a fiction. It does track real patterns. It evolved in reality. It’s as true and as useful as anything else that our minds use to navigate reality, like our senses.

@VBMillennial Is the universe consistent because reality is bound by logic? Or is reality not bound by logic, which makes logic a useful human fiction? Which is it?

@sola_chad This is the most “no other president in history” president. Why do you think that is? What’s the common denominator?

I’m getting sick of people trying to k!ll our president. No other president in history has had more attempts on his life.

@MattWalshBlog LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL! Matt thinks Trump is going to fix problems in this country. How have you never been right once about Trump, Matt? Oh wait, I know why. Because you’ve got your head so far up his lilly white ass that you can’t smell the shit.

Good. End this thing and move on. An enormous amount of problems to fix in our own country.

@PopePiusIXStan Sometimes you have to allow children to learn the consequences of the choices they make.

This is child abuse.

I like to think of it like this. It’s like saying that Elon Musk made a robot that was given the freedom to kill, if it decided that was in the best interest of the robot. Who do we blame? The robot or Elon? Elon could have programmed the robot to never kill, while still having the freedom to do other things, yet, Elon chose to add in the mechanism to kill. Similarly, God could have given us full freedom to choose, but programmed us to never want to choose evil, just as he apparently programmed us to never want to eat dogshit. In Heaven, we’re told we will be spiritually healed and our choices will always point back to God, never choosing sin again. Why didn’t he do this to begin with? What purpose is this mortal coil if God’s ultimate goal is to have creations who “correctly” choose him? A perfect being wouldn’t have fucked up the first time. Unless he actually wanted sin in the picture. Maybe he just likes the drama. But then again, he knows what will happen, so what real drama could there be? None of it makes sense.

Hey John. Thanks for taking my argument out for a spin! I think you almost found your way to my side, but stopped a bit short. This is where a lot of people have a hard time with the anti-realist stance. And I admit it isn’t natural to think this way. Sorry this is a bit long, but trust me it could be a lot longer! I think you said something along the lines of “once you agree on flourishing” or have flourishing or health or whatever your goal is, whatever your standard to measure against is, then you can have an objective answer. I totally agree! That’s the second level in the moral exercise. The first level is what I’m questioning. How do we agree on the standard? How do we define flourishing or health or well-being? No, you can’t measure or detect a “wrongness particle” but I wasn’t even narrowing it down to one “particle” or substance. Wetness is an emergent property of enough water molecules acting together under the laws of physics. You can’t find the “wetness” particle, but you can detect the property, the thing that occurs when particular facts combine. This is what we would detect in a “healthy heart.” There isn’t a “healthy” particle but it’s a judgment we place on a real set of facts that combine to make a well-functioning organ. The facts are real and have real effects on the surrounding body and the heart’s internal structure. The judgment is also based on those detectable facts, but this is all happening at the second level. The first level is “Why do we care about health? Is it objectively good for humans to be healthy, to survive, to flourish, to exist right now or at all?” So, in my proposed murder scene, I’m not asking for just one “wrongness” particle that we can measure. I’m asking if there is any detectable effect—whether emergent or particular—that will affect other objectively real things in a consistently reliable manner to call it “objectively wrong.” If it were objectively “wrong,” in my estimation, and by the typical use of that word (bad, incorrect, unworkable, etc.) I would think the would-be murderer would be unable to complete the act of murder. It would be an incorrect act. Unworkable. Objectively not physically possible. In much the same way as “I can fly by flapping my arms” is wrong, incorrect, and unworkable. If you got a wrong answer when you calculated the trajectory of a rocket to a destination, you could only get as far as launching the rocket, but it would be unable to physically accomplish the ultimate goal because what you calculated was objectively wrong. Reality pushed back to show you were objectively incorrect. Reality will always push back on objectively wrong ideas. The only pushback the murderer gets is from other humans. Not even from other animal minds. Only humans. So, you can have objective wrongness, but you can’t have objective *moral* wrongness. One of the problems here is one of semantics. But it’s a semantic choice built on a misunderstanding of value. This is one clue (among many) for me that morality is a fully human enterprise, made of, by, and for us. It is subjective but a kind of subjective that we all share in from our evolved neurobiology. Certain “intersubjective” foundational values are inherent to being human. Once you have that first subjective level of finding your standard, then you can get to second level of making objective claims with regard to that standard. The reason certain moral questions feel so objectively true than other “morally gray” questions is another clue. It’s the “objective-feeling” answers that are part of our core foundational inherited values that our ancestors attained in order to survive in a brutal world. Those answers needed to feel objective and come quickly in high stakes life or death situations. Our ancestors’ existence depended on these core values. If they felt wishy washy about them, they would have been out-competed by those who did have a core morality they accepted as fact. We are the inheritors of that.

@Your_Wrongest @BrandonTheAdams @limitandmind Where Is the Wrongness?

Street's Dilemma for Evolutionary Moral Realism 1. Our judgments have been heavily shaped by evolution. We're disposed to value survival, kin, cooperation, etc. 2. The evolutionary moral realist must explain the relation between these evolutionary forces and the supposed mind-independent moral truths. Two options: - No relation: Then it would be a massive coincidence if our evolved judgments tracked the independent truths. We should expect our morality to be mostly off-target. - Tracking relation: The realist claims evolution selected for judgments because they tracked the moral truths. But this is scientifically worse than the rival explanation: evolution selected those judgments simply because they promoted reproductive fitness.

Even if we assume the eternity of God, we cannot escape a reason for his existence. If you say it’s because you’ve defined or presupposed or “logically concluded” him to be necessary, then you’ve given no reason to not do the same for reality itself and dispense with the additional (now unnecessary) entity.

Leibniz: I certainly grant that you can imagine that the world is eternal. However, since you assume only a succession of states, and since no reason for the world can be found in any one of them whatsoever (indeed, assuming as many of them as you like won’t in any way help you to find a reason), it is obvious that the reason must be found elsewhere. For in eternal things, even if there is no cause, we must still understand there to be a reason. In things that persist, the reason is the nature or essence itself, and in a series of changeable things (if, a priori, we imagine it to be eternal), the reason would be the superior strength of certain inclinations, as we shall soon see, where the reasons don’t necessitate (with absolute or metaphysical necessity, where the contrary implies a contradiction⁵¹) but incline. From this it follows that even if we assume the eternity of the world, we cannot escape the ultimate and extramundane reason for things, God.

@MartinTweats “If you’re imagining God not existing, you’re not imagining God. Because I define God as existing.”

"How did god exist in the first place?" You're assuming that God had a first moment of existed, i.e., God was created. On the contrary, if God was created then God is contingent rather than necessary, i.e., God is not God.

@CDisillusion Fucking THANK YOU! No one believed me.

...Added together, they end up as barely passable face lighting. Except, in this case, on the neck. The shirt collar cuts the fill light, creating a little window of top-only light casting that chin shadow. The top edge moves with the collar, the bottom with the talking jaw. /🧵

Ok, Imma explain the admiral neck shadow thing. (Spoilers: it's not a rubber mask, ya weirdos)... 🧵

@loribeecee @SethAbramson Even studio lighting and poor video compression.

@BrandonTheAdams @SethAbramson So why does his face look so smooth?

I am hereby boycotting any further activities of any kind in my life until someone Googles "Robert Harward Fox News mask" and explains to me like I am a 5 year-old exactly what in the B-horror-movie hell I just saw Seriously, just shutting my life down until this is resolved

@Suzierizzo1 Walking candlesticks. Light ‘em up!

Caption this picture! 👇👇