Neverfox

“Authority” here does not mean infallibility or omniscience. It means that rational thought genuinely discloses reality rather than merely circulating within private impressions. The moment you distinguish between rational and irrational beliefs, coherent and incoherent arguments, better and worse explanations, or what does and does not comport with reality, you are already treating some judgments as more truth-disclosive than others. Differences in perception do not undermine that; they matter only because there is some reality about which one can perceive more or less adequately in the first place. Of course finite minds are partial, revisable, and limited. Of course there may be realities beyond direct perception. None of this implies that reality itself is fundamentally opaque to reason. Rational thought is possible only because being is intrinsically intelligible to mind. Otherwise the distinctions between truth and illusion, explanation and non-explanation, rationality and irrationality collapse into mere assertion. So this has nothing to do with pretending to occupy some impossible “view from nowhere.” The claim is not that finite minds can arrive at every explanation, but that reason is genuinely answerable to reality rather than enclosed within an unintelligible order. And this is why “brute fact” cannot function as a neutral stopping point. A brute fact is not merely an unsolved mystery or current limit of understanding. It is the claim that rational explication finally terminates in sheer factuality. Nor does “intrinsic intelligibility” mean hidden messages or consciously intended meanings imposed by a cosmic mind. It means only that being is not sheer irrational opacity, but is in principle open to rational disclosure. So appeals to the limits of sensory verification miss the point entirely. The argument was never about empirically detecting God as though God were one more object within the universe awaiting observation. Logical principles, mathematical truths, metaphysical categories, and the relation between mind and being are not objects of sensory perception either. The existence of the universe being evident to experience does not make it self-explanatory. Nor does the mere fact that “experience is being had” explain why reason, logic, truth, or rational inquiry should correspond to reality at all. And if intelligibility is merely imposed upon reality by consciousness, then thought never genuinely reaches being at all, but moves only within the circle of its own representations. Yet argument itself already presupposes otherwise. That is the point running beneath this entire discussion. Rational discourse already presupposes a real relation between mind and being, truth and reality, intellect and the structure of the world.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe emergent property of perceptibility, which is an emergent property of a mind, which is an emergent property of bioelectric impulses and chemical interactions. It is not intelligible because it "Is." It is intelligible because there is an observer to perceive and experience it.

"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.

Fine. Then the burden is on you to explain how rational thought could possess any authority at all within a reality that is not intrinsically intelligible. Because the moment you speak of claims as something to “buy,” you are already treating reason as genuinely answerable to reality rather than as a closed system moving within its own impenetrable opacity.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe Yeah, I don't buy that claim.

It’s not an assumption. The claim is not: “Humans have investigated enough of reality to conclude inductively that everything has an explanation.” The claim is transcendental: “Reason is only possible within an intrinsically intelligible order of being.” That conclusion does not arise from surveying all facts from a limited vantage point. It arises from reflecting on what must already be true for rational thought, argument, explanation, or truth-claims to be possible at all.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe I am asserting that it is absurd to assume that everything necessarily has a deeper rational explanation than "it just is." We can apply that to most things at least, yes. However, it is folly to assume with our narrow scope that it can necessarily be applied to everything.

But your own language already grants the point. “Internally consistent,” “comports with reality,” “understanding,” “explication” — these are not the vocabulary of mere information transfer. They already presuppose a real relation between mind and being, truth and reality, reason and the structure of the world. Of course finite minds can encounter realities not yet understood or fully explicable. Nothing in the argument requires omniscience. But rational inquiry itself already presupposes that reality is, in principle, open to rational disclosure rather than sheer opacity. Otherwise the distinction between truth and illusion, explanation and noise, coherence and absurdity simply collapses.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe The rationality of that discourse is only quantified by how much that discourse remains internally consistent and how closely it comports with what can be understood about reality at any given time. It doesn't account for the ability to encounter something that defies explication

@MasterMaliq @BardofLagrandil Who has been claiming it was a stenographic transcript recorded by eyewitnesses?

That still proves my point. You are admitting the prayer was not recorded live by eyewitnesses at the moment it happened. You are saying the details could have been retold later after the resurrection. Which means the text is based on later narration, not direct real time documentation. That is literally the distinction I was making.

I have been reading the Bible lately and I came across a verse where Jesus is praying alone in the garden. And I kept thinking if He was truly alone with no one there who exactly heard His words and recorded them word for word No witnesses no recorder no live account yet we still read detailed prayers as if someone was present At that point it does not take deep theology just simple common sense to see the gap If no human ear was there then what we are reading is not an eyewitness record but a later retelling And that naturally raises questions about how much of the text is history versus interpretation

The irony is that your reply was the emotional one. The other person presented an actual metaphysical argument about dependent causality and explanation. Your response contained no counter-argument at all — only insults, motive speculation, and ridicule. Calling something “word salad” is not an analysis. Accusing someone of emotional need is not a refutation. It is just rhetoric replacing argument at the exact point argument became difficult.

@AleMartnezR1 You toss a meaningless word salads to create a veneer of rationality that hides your desperate emotional need to feel you were created for a cosmically significant purpose by a supreme being (very humble). You are full of baloney.

An Infinite Series of Caused Events Cannot Explain Itself A. There exists a whole infinite series of caused events (Xa, Xb, Xc,…) constituting the chain X. B. The chain X exists through these events, since they are its members. C. The existence of the chain X depends upon the existence of its members. D. If these events had not been caused, the chain X would not have come into existence. E. Every member of the series is caused (that is, each derives its causal actuality from another). F. An explanatory series cannot derive causal actuality entirely from members whose causal power is itself borrowed. G. If an explanatory series cannot derive causal actuality entirely from members whose causal power is itself borrowed, then the series requires an external cause. Therefore, the chain X itself requires an external cause. H. Whatever is caused or causally dependent requires an explanation. Therefore, the chain X requires an explanation beyond itself.

It’s not because I said so. It’s because anyone argues anything at all. The “demonstration” is already occurring in the very act of argument itself. The moment someone asks for reasons, appeals to logic, distinguishes valid from invalid inferences, accuses another of incoherence, or demands justification, they are already participating in the reality under discussion: the intelligibility of being and reason’s capacity to disclose truth. So this is not a matter of arbitrarily positing “God” as an extra hypothesis after the fact. The transcendental claim is that rational discourse itself already discloses a deeper unity of being, truth, and intelligibility that cannot be reduced to sheer brute opacity. So “brute fact” is not some equally explanatory alternative. It is simply where rational explication stops. And that is why the appeal to it becomes self-undermining once one is already engaged in rational argument about reality.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe Until you can demonstrate it to be the case outside of pure postulation (which is really all you have right now) we can assume that it is equally likely that it is not the case and the rejection of the unmoved mover is perfectly valid.

To point to mitosis or regeneration is merely to describe the regularities of nature, not to explain why nature is intelligible at all. “Natural” here is being treated as though it meant self-sufficient or self-explanatory. But the existence of a rationally ordered world capable of stable processes, mathematical structure, causal continuity, and intelligible relations is precisely the thing in question. And God is not a rival cause somewhere inside the cosmos, intervening between cells or competing with chemistry. God is the infinite wellspring of actuality by which anything exists and can be known at all. So to say “we can observe the mechanism” is no answer to the metaphysical question. One might as well say that because one can describe the grammar of a language, one has therefore explained the reality of meaning itself. The question is whether the intelligibility of reality is grounded in an ultimate source of intelligibility, or whether reason finally rests upon what is, in itself, inexplicable.

Yes, because “natural” in science doesn’t mean “magically self-created.” It means the phenomenon operates through consistent, observable mechanisms without requiring supernatural intervention. We can literally observe mitosis and regeneration happening!!!! What you’re doing is shifting the burden by saying “prove it’s natural” while inserting “designed” without independently demonstrating a designer, design process, or detectable supernatural involvement.🤨

Christians this has nothing to do with God!!

You are collapsing intelligibility into mere describability. Of course one can catalogue properties, regularities, and measurable relations. But that is not the relevant sense of intelligibility here, because rational inquiry is not merely the passive observation of facts. It seeks rational account — why things are as they are rather than otherwise. A “brute fact” means that, at some point, reality simply confronts thought as sheer givenness resistant to any deeper rational explication. One may still describe such a reality, but reason finally encounters opacity at the foundation of things. And rational thought itself already presupposes that reality is not ultimately opaque to reason.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe By "how" I mean quantifiable characteristics. Like "How much does it weigh" not "how did it come into being"

That is simply what “brute fact” means: something impervious to reasoned explication — unintelligible.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe What I'm asking is "how can you possibly know that brute fact is unintelligible?"

Determinism is irrelevant to anything I said. A deterministic reality would still require intelligibility, truth, rational order, and a real relation between mind and being no less than a non-deterministic one. Nor is this some claim to omniscience or impossible “view from nowhere.” The moment you ask for “demonstration,” accuse someone of “intellectual dishonesty,” or appeal to what can or cannot be known, you are already reasoning, and reason itself already presupposes truth, intelligibility, and the mind’s genuine participation in reality. What I described follows from those conditions themselves. Rational thought already stands within the irreducible unity of being, truth, and intelligibility long before either of us utters a single metaphysical conclusion.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe Well, I suppose it's very easy to assert *anything* but that's not my point. Pretending like you have such impossible knowledge is intellectually dishonest. Were you never taught that it's okay to admit when you don't know something?

It is more than merely philosophically unsatisfying, because the very demand for a “demonstration” already presupposes that reality is intelligible rather than ultimately brute. If reality were ultimately just a “brute fact,” intelligibility would be absent precisely where it is most necessary: at the very foundation of reality itself. Reason would terminate in sheer opacity, and the rational relation between mind and world would become an inexplicable accident suspended over the irrational. Yet every act of thought already testifies against this. Rational inquiry is possible only because being is inherently intelligible and mind genuinely participates in that intelligibility. And that irreducible unity of being, truth, and intelligibility is God.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe Something being brute fact may be philosophically unsatisfying, but if it is the case, then it is the case. The problem is demonstrating that it is the case, and neither side can demonstrate their case to be THE case at this point in time.

That’s also not the argument. The argument does not depend on the universe having a temporal “beginning.” Classical arguments from contingency, act/potency, or participation work even if the universe were eternal. “Unmoved mover” does not mean “first thing long ago in time.” It means that derivative actuality cannot explain itself purely through further derivative actuality. So simply replying you can’t prove the universe began misses the point entirely, because the argument was never fundamentally about a first moment in time to begin with.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe Is not special pleading. It is the exact opposite. You just don't like it because it goes against your very framework and presupposition that the universe and all things in it had some "beginning" point. This cannot be demonstrated. The unmoved mover is dead in the water.

No, because “all things are contingent except God” is not the argument. The argument is that contingent things, by definition, do not contain the sufficient reason for their existence in themselves. So either reality is an infinite chain of borrowed existence, or there is something non-derivative grounding it. That is not special pleading. It is a metaphysical distinction between the dependent and the non-dependent. Special pleading would be arbitrarily exempting one member of a class from a rule applied to all the others. But the whole point here is that the “necessary” is not being proposed as another member of the same class at all.

@neverfox @MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe But when you say "ALL THINGS ARE CONTINGENT, EXCEPT THIS ONE NECESSARY THING THAT ALL OTHER THINGS NEED FOR THEIR EXISTENCE," that is special pleading, regardless of how you dress it up or what mental gymnastics you do.

It is not special pleading because the argument is not arbitrarily exempting one member of a class from a rule applied to the others. The entire point is that God is not being proposed as a member of the class in the first place. “Contingent things require an explanation” is not the same claim as “absolutely everything without qualification requires an explanation.” If I say, “all bachelors are unmarried,” it is not special pleading to exclude married men. Married men were never part of the category being discussed. Likewise, if the argument concerns contingent realities — things whose existence is dependent, composite, temporal, mutable, or conditioned — then appealing to a non-contingent ground is not creating an exception to the rule. It is identifying what the rule itself logically points beyond. Your own move actually is closer to special pleading. Because when contingency leads somewhere uncomfortable, you simply declare that the universe as a whole gets to possess the very property denied to everything within it: necessary self-existence. But merely relabeling the totality of contingent things “the universe” does not explain why contingency exists at all. The issue is whether contingent existence can account for itself, temporarily infinite or not. Classical theism says no. And calling that “special pleading” only works if one first misstates the argument.

@MartinTweats @ThatOtherMtnJoe There is no reason to conclude that an unmoved mover is required for the functioning state of the universe.

Yeah, uhm…that is not how argumentation works. First, an objection does not become invalid merely because you declare it insufficiently justified. Otherwise every controversial premise could simply be asserted into victory unless the opponent produced a full dissertation in reply. Anderson identified the precise premise under dispute: your dichotomy in P1. Second, he did in fact provide justification. He pointed out that biblical apocalyptic literature is commonly understood as involving symbolic language, layered fulfillments, covenantal judgment imagery, and multiple temporal horizons. That is a direct challenge to your claim that prophecy must be either flat literal prediction or “metaphor.” Third, even if we granted that symbolic/apocalyptic language falls under your “metaphor” category, P3 still fails: “If it is a metaphor, it is not an actual prophecy.” That simply does not follow. Symbolic or metaphorical language can still genuinely refer to historical and theological realities. Apocalyptic prophecy has always operated that way. So the entire argument depends on smuggling in the highly contestable assumption that only newspaper-style literal prediction counts as prophecy.

@LikeJAlwaysSaid @JohnAndersn3c8 Yeah, uhm..... an objection is a needs justification. One just can't say "nuh-uh". As that would just mean one is inept.

P1: If Christianity is true, Jesus cannot lie. P2: Jesus stated he would return before his contemporaries died. P3: Jesus did not return before his contemporaries died. C: Christianity is not true. Supporting argument negating metaphorical objection: P1: A biblical prediction is either a literal prophecy or a metaphor. P2: If it is a literal prophecy, it failed (which makes Jesus mistaken). P3: If it is a metaphor, it is not an actual prophecy (which invalidates the prophetic claim). P4: Jesus cannot be mistaken, and his prophetic claims cannot be invalid. C: The Christian theological position is self-contradictory.

I think that gets burden of proof wrong in two ways. First, burden of proof does not attach to who merely uttered a sentence. It attaches to the claims themselves. Otherwise, in any direct contradiction, both sides would automatically inherit equal burden merely because both made assertions, which makes the concept incoherent. Second, the issue is not whether something is a “truth claim about reality.” Virtually every meaningful assertion is a truth claim about reality. A claim can still carry little burden if it is ordinary, while another can carry enormous burden if it is sufficiently extraordinary relative to ordinary experience, background assumptions, and existing evidence.

It goes both ways. If a theist claims, "God exists", then they have made a truth claim about reality; thus, the onus is on them to prove their claim. If an atheist claims, "God does not exist", then they have made a truth claim about reality; thus, the onus is on them to prove their claim.

You are still relying on the distinction between judgments that are more or less adequate to reality. Otherwise “we track reality” means nothing at all beyond “things happen in our brains.” And once rational judgment is admitted, the question is no longer whether morality occurs “in us.” Of course it does. So do mathematics, logic, and reason themselves. The real question is whether moral judgment discloses anything real about the good of rational creatures, or whether it is merely a conditioned reflex with no greater claim to truth than indigestion.

You conflate truth with reality. Truth is a property of propositions. Reality is what is. When I say there are no truths to track, I’m saying the tracking is the truthing. We don’t track (make true propositions about) truth. We track reality. So, there are no moral truths to track. There are only actions and consequences. We have specific reactions to those consequences and give the actions meaning. This is where morality is. In us, not out there.

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.

Modern science did not arise from a civilization escaping religion into pure rational neutrality. It arose from a culture shaped by very particular metaphysical convictions: that nature is ordered and intelligible because it is creation rather than a field of arbitrary sacral forces, that reason genuinely discloses truth, and that the cosmos is open to rational inquiry because it reflects a rational source. Nor is Western humanism some obvious deliverance of secular reason. The belief that every human being possesses an intrinsic dignity transcending tribe, class, ethnicity, or political utility was not the prevailing assumption of most ancient societies. It emerged from a specifically Christian moral revolution. What modern secularism often forgets is that many of the values it treats as self-evident were forged within a theological vision of reality that first made them intelligible. Remove that vision entirely, and those values do not simply float indefinitely on their own authority. So the narrative of “progress through escaping religion” can itself seem curiously shallow: as though one could preserve the moral and rational fruits of a civilization while severing them completely from the metaphysical roots that nourished them.

This is also my view. In my opinion, the reason so many developments in the West get attributed to Christianity is - Europe was pervasively Christian, such that it’s not hard to construct narratives where pretty much any development could be attributed to Christianity. But, to me - the Enlightenment, modern science, Western-style humanism and secularism were instances of civilization progressively escaping from the clutches of religion. That said, I do think that Martin Luther and the Reformation helped that progression along. Luther didn’t intend for it to happen, of course, but undermining the authority and relevance of the Catholic Church had effects far beyond the rise of Protestantism.

“Your purpose is whatever you make of it” is not the opposite of nihilism. It is precisely the admission that there is no intrinsic meaning, truth, or telos in things themselves, only meanings projected onto them by individuals. And if all purpose is self-created, then no purpose is more true, rational, or binding than any other except by preference or power. That is already the nihilistic premise, even if one chooses to respond to it optimistically.

@allegiantfaith Nah see, you arent actually reading the comments. There is no inherently purpose in life, rather your purpose in life is what you make of it. That is the exact opposite of nihilism. Your purpose on the other hand has been dictated to you because you dont have one.

Atheists tell me that atheism doesn't inevitably lead toward nihilism. But the one response regarding purpose without God I've seen the most in the comments has been that there is no purpose. We just live and die and should seize the day. That's nihilism. Why should we seize the day (an alleged purpose) if we're on a quick journey to nowhere on a floating rock in space, upon which we popped into existence as a random accident millions of years ago?