Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Easy! He Must Have Become an Adorable Muslim.

Last week liberals loved Johnny Depp because he made fun of Trump. What do they say now that he’s an alleged wife beater?
Allahu Ackbar, Abu Bin Depp.

5 comments:

Steven Satak said...

The comments on that story are over a year old. Hasn't this been resolved already? There MUST be something fresher for you, Stan!

Unknown said...

These allegations came out months ago, when Heard filed for separation.

I've been a fan of Depp as an actor since his days on 21 Jump Street. However, his personal life is a mess, and always has been. That's no secret. I'll say innocent until proven guilty. However, it wouldn't at all surprise me if they turn out to be true.

Ryan L said...

Hello Sir,
I hope I am posting this in the right place. Your comment policy says, "For a rational answer to difficult issues, ask the question in the comment form on the latest post. All questions are welcome!" So hopefully this is the right spot. I recently have been searching over the internet for philosophy of religion blogs and most of the atheist ones are pretty terrible, but there is one argument that has me interested. http://www.atheismandthecity.com/2016/11/why-brute-facts-are-unavoidable.html Basically, the guy's argument is that brute facts are unavoidable even on theism (he argues that even if God exists necessarily, God's desire to create our universe rather than another would be brute, etc), so we may as well just posit the universe as a brute fact. He thinks that the if there are brute facts on theism, then there would be no reason why the atheist can't just say, "Well any world view will have something as a brute fact, so why not just the universe?". I hope you can give your thoughts on this attempt to avoid the contingency argument from the principle of sufficient reason. Thanks!

Stan said...

Ryan,
Thanks for your question.

He has awarded himself the ability to wand away the necessity of addressing the issue of how something came from nothing, how coherence came from nothing, and how physical existence can explain physical existence.

He does this by allowing his Atheism at least one non-explainable phenomenon, i.e., brute fact. But if such inexplicability exists (and for the entire universe no less), then Philosophical Materialism and its corollary, Physical Determinism, are both false, at least for that one brute fact, which again includes all of known existence. For a universe that has no coherent source, there is no way to posit an innate internal consistency or coherence for the structure of that universe. Especially with no such source even being imaginable in fanciful hypotheses. Settling for inexplicability erases all such pursuits.

If the universe is inexplicable, all subsets of the universe are also inexplicable, so all references to “universals” are also inexplicable, and are without knowable causation. Being inexplicable, they cannot be known to be formed with consistency internally (structurally), nor known to be consistent externally (behaviorally).

Thus Aristotelian logic starts to fail, from several collapses of principles: Reductio Ad Absurdum no longer can apply thereby leaving all deductive processes without hope of grounding. This is also the case even via the First Principles of Rational Thought (tautology, noncontradiction, excluded middle). The First Principles presuppose a universe which is internally consistent in the observation areas which the individual principles address, both ontologically and epistemologically.

No claim or hypothesis could have any deductive force, and even inductive processes could not be satisfactorily grounded, since consistency of observations in an inconsistent universe could not induce even contingent truth.

Empirical hypothetico-deductive science fails because it depends completely on the consistent behavior of physical phenomena in order to non-falsify material claims using multiple experiments. The principle of Determinism - universal cause and effect - could not be assumed any longer.

Now if we believe that we observe sufficient coherence in the universe to believe in the validity of Reductio Ad Absurdum, and if we use Reductio to analyze the claim of inexplicability for the universe, its subsets, and his use of inexplicability to avoid explanations, we naturally find that the claim fails.

And if we cannot justify the existence of sufficient coherence in the universe, then his argument(s) have no meaning, because all arguments would have no meaning.

Ryan L said...

If we say that the sane can be coaxed and persuaded to rationality, and we say that rationality presupposes logic, then what can we say of those who actively reject logic?