Comments WRT Perception/Abstraction At SN's "Atheists Who Want Atheism To Be True"

From the thread / comment section of SN's "Atheists Who Want Atheism To Be True" as per https://strangenotions.com/atheists-who-want-atheism-to-be-true/

Relevant background ((...in part...)) is at "The Twin-Fallacies of Nothing-But Non-Belief and of Default-Atheism" as per https://metachristianity.com/the-twin-fallacies-of-nothing-but-non-belief-and-of-default-atheism/

[A] A Basic Recap:

God? We can’t even get out of the gate with respect to basic concepts about perception and reality given your own claim that you don’t know what some fairly basic terms actually mean. Let’s recap why we’ve stalled out here:

Dr. Bonnette said http://disq.us/p/26wzwo3
I said http://disq.us/p/26rrlm3
So then you said http://disq.us/p/26x46gt

Then I said a. http://disq.us/p/26x58j6 and a typo correction at b. http://disq.us/p/26x5f55

That is copied here:

You are reasoning against yourself. By that I mean you are questioning on four lines here all of which demonstrate your own comfort or satisfaction with all sorts of half-starts and outright contradictions. Those four are as follows:

1. you claim that no one has demonstrated the forced reductio ad absurdum "Given Any Non-Theism" and that's false. In fact Non-Theists themselves insist on illusory ends with respect to all contingent abstractions of our own contingent minds vis-à-vis the intentional Self/Mind and our own first person experience of "i-am" . You've been asked to address that at http://disq.us/p/26rrlm3

2. you claim your own claims about "Not Enough Evidence" are NOT based on anything at all.... meaning that you've denied that it is necessarily the case that one can doubt a belief only by basing that doubt on other beliefs . You've been asked to address that at http://disq.us/p/26oa9td

3. you're wrongheaded to claim "no contingent being vis-à-vis the contingent mind vis-à-vis the contingent abstraction has proven the abstraction’s full-on instantiation in X" because logic demonstrates that the inverse of that is ipso facto your defeater. But of course that yields nothing more than a kind of Metaphysical Armistice which leaves you once again back up in the question-begging circularity of both 1 and 2 discussed at the start of this comment.

4. as per 1 at the start you claim that no one has demonstrated the forced reductio ad absurdum "Given Any Non-Theism" and that's false ((even by Non-Theist’s own concessions far too often)). However, the flip side of that claim is the claim that you have found a fault in the natural progression of observation & perception through ten thousand intermediate syllogisms to finally End in the explanatory terminus of Being Itself as Reason Itself vis-à-vis that which goes by various terms within the Christian Metaphysic such as Absolute Consciousness or Divine Mind or Pure Act or the Absolute’s Reference Frame. But of course you’ve not demonstrated that you have and therein we can invert your Metaphysical Armistice as described above in 3.

With respect to Logic 101, a basic framework is as follows:

Begin Excerpts:

“…More importantly, we can defend them by the method of retorsion, which involves showing that one cannot deny them on pain of self-contradiction or incoherence. This method is sometimes misunderstood. Some people think it merely involves showing that we can’t help *thinking* a certain way, but where this leaves it open that this way of thinking might nevertheless not correspond to reality. In other words, they think that retorsion arguments are essentially about human *psychology*. That is not at all the case. Rightly understood, such arguments are a species of *reduction* *ad* *absurdum* argument. They involve defending a claim by showing that the denial of the claim entails a contradiction, and thus cannot as a matter of objective fact (and not merely as a contingent matter of human psychology) be correct… …The word “proof” has, historically, been used in different senses.

Naturally, I don’t mean that the arguments are proofs in exactly the same sense in which a mathematical proof is a “proof.” They are mostly not *a* *priori* arguments, for one thing. But I used the word deliberately, and I certainly claim a high degree of certainty for the claim that God exists. For example, I would claim that it is as certain that God exists as it is that the world external to our minds is real and not an illusion foisted upon us by a Cartesian demon or the Matrix. How can I say that? Well, the point of the book to show this. The arguments are “proofs” in that, first of all, the conclusion is claimed to follow *deductively* from the premises. They are not mere probabilistic inferences, arguments to the best explanation, or “God of the gaps” arguments. (I hate “God of the gaps” arguments.) The claim is that the arguments show, not merely that God is the most likely explanation of the facts asserted in the premises of the arguments, but rather that God is the *only *possible *explanation *in *principle of those facts. Second, the premises are knowable with certainty.

The premises include both empirical premises (for example, the premise that change occurs) and philosophical premises (for example, the premise that everything has an explanation or is intelligible). The premises in turn can be defended in various ways that show them to be beyond reasonable doubt. For example, some of them can be defended via retorsion arguments (which, again, are a species of *reductio *ad *absurdum argument). That is to say, such arguments try to show that anyone who denies such-and-such a claim is implicitly contradicting himself. So in arguments of the sort I am defending, the conclusion is claimed to follow necessarily from the premises, and the premises are claimed to be knowable beyond any reasonable doubt. That sort of argument fits one traditional use of the word “proof.”

Naturally, I am aware that some people will nevertheless challenge the arguments or remain doubtful about one or more of them. But that’s true of every single argument one could give for any conclusion, even mathematical proofs. A determined and clever enough skeptic will always be able to come up with *some* grounds for doubt, even if the grounds are bizarre or far-fetched. That doesn’t mean that the grounds are, all things considered, going to be reasonable ones. Anyway, my calling something a “proof” doesn’t entail that I think every reader, even every fair-minded reader, is immediately going to be convinced. What it is meant to indicate is the nature of the connection between the facts described in the premises and the fact described in the conclusion. It is a *metaphysical* claim, not a *sociological* claim. Too many people mix these things up. They think that as long as a significant number of people are likely not to agree with some argument, you can’t call it a “proof.” That just misunderstands the way the term is being used…”

End Excerpts ((…from https://strangenotions.com/ama-dr-feser-answers/...))

((...this comment is http://disq.us/p/26x58j6 ....))

And, then, you didn’t find any of the terms ((…dualism…etc…)) comprehensible and so you said http://disq.us/p/2716tt2

So then I said http://disq.us/p/271iz1c

You again didn’t find any of the terms ((…dualism…etc…)) comprehensible and so you said http://disq.us/p/271rqud

((…notice that this is still from the start with Dr. Bonnette’s fairly basic content and my own fairly basic reminder that the nature of our own perceptions/abstractions are inextricably relevant…))

So then I said http://disq.us/p/271s4ax which was the following:

Which terms are big & scary or confusing to you wrt mind and perception? Was it “contingent”? Or maybe “being”? Or perhaps “eliminativism”? Notice that Bennett and myself keep offering specific claims which are standard-fare wrt the philosophy of mind Etc. and we understand one another while you only come back to us with “Gibberish!”

What does that tell you?

You didn’t find any of the terms ((…dualism…etc…)) comprehensible and so you said http://disq.us/p/274kja7

So then I said http://disq.us/p/27521lw which was the following:

Not only do you claim that the historical person “Jesus” never existed as per http://disq.us/p/271neoz but, also, when it comes to the general arena of the philosophy of mind you’re now insisting that terms related to dualism ((which both Theists and Non-Theists discuss in a myriad of works)), and that terms related to contingency & necessity ((which both Theists and Non-Theists unpack in a myriad of works)), and the term Being Itself as per the thousand years of Thomism // Divine Mind ((which both Theists and Non-Theists unpack in a myriad of works)), and the term Eliminativism which is in fact foisted by countless Non-Theists such as the Churchlands, Rosenberg, and others, and which is unpacked by both Non-Theists and Theists in a myriad of works, are all, every one of them, “made-up” by Non-Theists and Theists? Or that they use them in order to dissect various In/Out groups rather than the actual topic at hand ((the nature of mind/consciousness))? Or that Non-Theists and Theists are using them because they each believe the other is clueless? Just as it’s satisfying to let you stand on your stopping point of “Jesus Never Existed” so too it’s satisfying to let you stand on your stopping point here with respect to these terms. So the description above is accurate — Yes?

You found the term dualism ((..again…)) to be incomprehensible and so you said http://disq.us/p/2766g54

((…notice that this is still from the start with Dr. Bonnette’s fairly basic content and my own fairly basic reminder that the nature of our own perceptions/abstractions are inextricably relevant…))

So then I said http://disq.us/p/276gg2j

Again I’m happy to let you persist in your insistence that these sorts of basic terms are all just incomprehensible to you and that there is ZERO evidence that the historical Jesus existed – and so on. Just as it’s satisfying to let you stand on your stopping point of “Jesus Never Existed” as per your "Zero Evidence" claim, so too it’s satisfying to let you stand on your stopping point here with respect to these terms. So the descriptions of terms and what you feel/think they mean/referent given above is accurate — Yes?

Recall that you're the one who called all of those concepts gibberish. I took you at your word. If you DO understand those concepts and they DO apply to the philosophy of mind, but you only PRETEND/EVADE and merely call it all gibberish, well then you're just disingenuous. It's one or the other. Yes?

This comment is http://disq.us/p/277yk77