Comments on: Theistic Critiques of Atheism, Part 11

By: » Theistic Critiques of Atheism, part 12 Evangelical Realism

» Theistic Critiques of Atheism, part 12 Evangelical Realism — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:31:45 +0000

[...] so that was a nice little 6-month diversion from the topic which we were originally considering, which was William Lane Craig’s article on [...]

By: John Morales

John Morales — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:39:58 +0000

My pleasure – though I think it would be polite to still use natural language to paraphrase those expressions.
But it’s kind of fun

Personally, I prefer the biconditional symbol to the equals symbol…

To say it another way: ¬∃x∃y((G(x)∧G(y))∧¬x↔y)
There can’t be two entities, both of which are God and also differ from each other.

By: Bacopa

Bacopa — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:08:12 +0000

I meant to say y=x, but this is good enough. Thanks JM.

By: Bacopa

Bacopa — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:04:48 +0000

I see it does.

There is at most one God:

∀x[Gx→∀y(Gy→x=y)]

By: Bacopa

Bacopa — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 04:57:51 +0000

Does it work?

∀

By: John Morales

John Morales — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 09:35:21 +0000

Bacopa, the entities begin with ampersand and finish with a semi-colon. Check out the source HTML of the page to see what I typed.

By: Bacopa

Bacopa — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 06:28:48 +0000

So, it didn’t work. Presumably there is some tag this must be inserted in to make it make a universal quantifier. What’s the tag. We’ll get our logic on and talk about prenex.

By: Bacopa

Bacopa — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 06:23:48 +0000

John M. Thanks for the info. Your formula “It’s not the case everything is P iff something is not-P” came through well. I’m pretty good at symbolic logic with pencil and paper, but I am impatient with computers. I hang on to cell phones until they die. Do I need to need to put these little codes inside a tag or, can I just copy and paste them and have HTML work its magic?

Let’s see if the magic works:

&forall

By: John Morales

John Morales — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:23:05 +0000

OK, so that works. Test expression: ¬∀xP(x)↔∃x¬P(x) You can find a list of entities here.

By: John Morales

John Morales — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:17:51 +0000

Bacopa, maybe HTML entities?

Testing:
∀ ∀
∃ ∃
→ →
⇔ ⇔

By: Bacopa

Bacopa — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:32:43 +0000

I think this argument is question-beggingly valid, or clearly invalid and thus not satisfactory at all. I could make this much clearer if I could figure out how to do any kind of symbolic logic font in these comments. I did this on pencil and paper using no modal symbols and did not resort to that accursed “free logic” or Meinongian semantics. Pure simple classical first-order predicate logic all the way. Problem was with representing premises 2 and 3. Premise 2 is easy if you treat “the universe” as a singular term. Very well then. But then #3 says “The Universe exists”. Ouch! There’s no easy to represent the idea of somethinig designated by a singular term as existing or not.

You see, in classical predicate logic we cannot say of a thing picked out by a singular term (the term “god”, for example) that it exisits. At best we can say that at least one thing has the property of being “Goddish”, that this thing is designated by the name “god”, and if we are careful we will also add that there is no more than one goddish thing. But the problem here is not th term “god”, but “the universe”.

Since I can’t give my two alternatives in symbolic notation, here is my best rendition in English

1. Everything either explains itself or is explained by something non-identical to itself

2. Anything which has the property of being the universe is explained by god.

3. There is a thing which has the property of being the universe.

Therefore, 4. God explains the universe.

Seems the first premise is unnecessary. 2 and three are enough to make this argument valid, but I think question beggingly so, as premise 2 is hardly more clear than the conclusion.

But premise one would seem unfairly exclude pantheism as a possibility.

Anyone know a way to get symbolic fonts into blog comments?