JWeinCom said:
WolfpackN64 said:
1. I disagreed and shown why clearly enough.
2. Also shown why that isn't necessarily true
3. I have to dissapoint you, I'm a reborn Catholic
4. Necessary beings have no cause, that's the whole stick of the argument
5. If God didn't exist, he couldn't come into existence, since a necessary being that is a first cause is always prior to existence. Since God is prior to the universe and time, he is in the only position to be the first cause.
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Yeah... that's special pleading. You can't say everything needs to have a cause, and then create a class of things that don't. You'd also have to justify that something can exist outside the universe and time, and I'm not sure how that can be done, or if it is even a sensical statement. The only experience of existence we have is temporal and spatial. I don't know what existing absent of time and space means.
JWeinCom said:
I would disagree that the reasons you've provided so far are good reasons. They at best point to a deistic god, but the premises of each are flawed. I've yet to hear a solid reason to justify belief.
I'd also quibble about the definition of knowledge. Most of the time I see that definition it includes the word "justified". I can have a belief that is true, but that may not be justified. For example, I can say I know that your favorite color is blue, because my psychic powers told me. Your favorite color may actually be blue, but it really wouldn't be accurate to call it knowledge, because I have no way to justify it as of now. Justified true belief also has some issues as a definition for knowledge, but it is stronger.
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I'm probably not grounded in philosophy well enough to really debate this. To my knowledge there is no universally accepted definition of knowledge, as they are all flawed. But I would argue that to claim one knows something would require justification of some sort.
Back to the example I gave, let's hypothetically say your favorite color is blue. Did I know that when I originally said it?
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Depends, if you truly would posses psychic powers that are always spot on then you have a reliable process of gaining knowledge. If you merely guessed it and claimed it was because you have psychic powers, then you did not have a reliable process and you gained a true belief based on luck. A true believe alone is not enough for knowledge however.
