14 Comments
Apr 12Liked by Bentham's Bulldog

where are the disads, t-shells, and plan texts

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author

Haha!

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Apr 12Liked by Bentham's Bulldog

Best of luck! Look forward to watching

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Is there any way to watch the debate after the livestream is over?

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Lmk if I’m misunderstanding you here, but it seems like your first argument doesn’t hold up so much. You claim that physicists have to posit all the complicated fundamental particles and their interactions while religious people only have to posit a god. This seems not true- as physicists have experimentally proven the existence of these particles, the religious people have to posit both the existence of these particles AND god! Lmk if I’m being stupid about this

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It’s about the number of fundamental things. That’s what determines simplicity.

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as much as your arguments have moved me toward theism over time more I would have deemed possible a few weeks ago, this point always struck me as semantic trickery and borderline taking the piss on every well-established idea regarding complexity. Infinite goodness as a term explodes like the tsar bomb once you start taking its implications even remotely seriously. This is like arguing that Luhmann's isolation of the term society from individual people and replacing it with the axiom that "its just something that exists" would be an act of simplification, which only works on paper and crumbles as soon as you start expanding everything that necessarily follows.

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Not sure why that’s that needs to be the case? Can you send something or explain why?

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Think of it this way:

There has to be something that just exists, and has always existed, as a brute fact. Logically nothing can cause itself to exist (because if it doesn't exist, it has no power to cause anything), so if there wasn't something that just existed and always had then nothing would exist at all.

Given that, what kind of thing is the thing that just exists? Bentham says the thing that just exists is goodness, in infinite quantity. The alternative under discussion is that the thing that just exists is the universe as we know it. Clearly the universe as we know it is much more complicated: it consists of many physical laws, matter made of many combinations of many atoms made of many subatomic particles, energy, rocks, planets, stars, light, etc. It is philosophically simpler to propose that one thing (infinite goodness) exists fundamentally and then created the more complicated things that exist, like our universe, than to propose that everything in the universe is the thing that just exists.

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Yes, but where are your STOCK issues?

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Many-worlds/multiverse explains the last argument, the most plausible interpretation of qm.

There is one fundamental thing, put simply, space.

Morality, beyond language tricks, needs no grounding but itself, read Moore. DCT is antirealist, unless you’re a minimalist, which means morality might as well be a house of cards.

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Many worlds doesn't explain it because that predicts perhaps aleph null people, but certainly not Beth 2--and certainly not more people than could be contained in a set.

There isn't just space--there are particles and laws governing them.

I agree that morality needs no grounding and I think the moral argument is a bad argument. That's why I didn't make it--I instead made the argument from moral knowledge.

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Please post the debate if possible, betting that God and Adelstein took the W here!

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Best of luck!

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