>> ^cricket:

This one looks very similar to your previous sift: http://videosift.com/video/Checkerboard-Optical-Illusion


Frak. You're right. This old insect can't remember. *dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Checkerboard-Optical-Illusion

This one looks very similar to your previous sift: http://videosift.com/video/Checkerboard-Optical-Illusion

3 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by eric3579.

thanks jonny

In reply to this comment by jonny:
*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Checkerboard-Optical-Illusion

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Checkerboard-Optical-Illusion

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by jonny. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

Why would you make a video about an optical illusion and not actually properly show it?!

Having watched the first 30 seconds again and thought about it, with Craig's ...Premise Two cannot be proven, and that's Craig's argument completely sunk, and it could have been the end of the video too.

I think you're looking at the argument from the wrong perspective. Let's examine the premises:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist:

The basic question here is, in the absence of God, is there is any objective difference between good and evil? That, if there is no God, is the difference between good and evil like the difference between coke and pepsi? An example Craig gives is, is the difference like which side of the road that you drive on, which varies from culture to culture?

So, this is where you would make an argument for valid and binding objective moral values outside of Gods existence. You can invalidate the whole argument right here, but you have to provide a logical foundation. I have yet to see anyone refute premise one.

2. Objective moral values do exist

Now, to say this premise is false is to admit that objective moral values do not exist. IE, you will have to admit that torturing babies for fun isn't actually wrong. I have actually debated people who tried to defend it, but I give them credit for being intellectually honest, because that is the logical conclusion; that if objective moral values do not exist, torturing babies for fun isn't absolutely wrong. However, I think we both know that it is, therefore objective moral values do exist.

So, this is a rather tricky argument for an atheist. Qualia soup gets the whole thing wrong here. The basic trouble for you is, if you want to dispute premise one, you have to come up with a foundation for objective moral values outside of God. If you admit there is no such foundation, then we move to premise 2, and there you have to argue that objective moral values do not exist. If you can not argue it, or if you admit objective moral values do exist, then you are forced to accept premise 3, that therefore God exists.

For example, can we just accept that you and I exist, one independent of the other, neither a figment of the other's imagination? Can we accept that our normal external sensory input can be accepted as correct for the purposes of this conversation, (except in the trivial cases of optical illusions and so forth)? You probably know what I'm saying. I hate it when I get into an argument and think I've made a very strong point, only to have my opponent come back with, "Everything's subjective; you can't prove anything is real," or, "Maybe you imagined the whole thing, I mean, you can't prove you didn't," or, "You can prove anything with facts," or, "Well, you have your beliefs and I have mine," or some crap like that where I'm not talking about subjective facts or my own beliefs.

Yes, I can agree with all of this. I believe that the Universe is tangibly real, and is generally how it appears to be, in that it is not a malicious deception or a meaningless illusion. I believe we are both individuals made in the image of God with an independent existence and a soul. I believe we can come to meaningful conclusions about reality, and that there is a truth which is tangible, accessible to reason, and which does not change based on our interpretation or personal preferences.

Also, in theological arguments, I must insist on a couple things. The first is that words must have meaning. If you say something, you can't later say that it's not to be taken literally, or that that word has a different meaning when applied to God. The second is that everything logically entailed by a statement must stand with the original statement, and any other statement. If there's any inconsistencies, then at least one of the statements must be false.

I am very consistent when it comes to meanings. This is one of the hallmarks of literal interpretation, that the words in the bible, while they can sometimes be applied in a metaphorical sense, always have an intended meaning which is absolutely true in all circumstances.

Also, please don't assert supernatural things like the existence of Satan, or your knowledge of how he works, telling me these things like I'm ignorant of them, rather than fully aware of the stories, but sceptical. Say that it's what you believe or have come to believe or whatever, but don't say it like objective fact. Same goes for Bible verses. I don't accept them as fact any more than you'd accept Skeletor quotes as fact. To me that book is best treated as fiction, though it's possible it conveys some details of events that really happened, but pronouncements of the way the world is I absolutely do not accept as the word of God, especially since I don't believe he exists. I don't care if the Bible predicts atheists/sceptics. All that tells me is that people have been doubting the veracity of the word for 2,000 years, and someone took the precaution of adding a word or two against non-believers into the text so believers down the line would have justification "from God" for dismissing my arguments as guided by Satan, or whatever.

I generally won't propose arguments that would take faith to accept. I understand your natural skepticism because I used to be equally skeptical. I will just submit that when you are deceived, you don't know you are deceived:

2 Corinthians 4:4

In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

I admit the possibility that I could be deceived, so I think if we both can admit this, we will have a more fruitful conversation.

know you don't think Qualia's line of reasoning holds, but I don't know what you think of Craig's argument. Is it valid, in your mind? And here, I'm mostly interested in how you think. As I've said, the video was only intended to take apart the argument of one Christian apologist, and not to prove or disprove anything.

I think it is logically airtight. That if you cannot prove there is a foundation for objective moral values outside of God, and you cannot disprove that some actions are objectively wrong, that you must accept the conclusion of the argument.

I'm 99% sure you said in a comment somewhere that you're dubious of science. Could you explain what you mean by that? Science isn't a system of faith or a set of theories. It's a process of testing theories. Are you dubious of the process? What parts of it specifically do you mean?

I am dubious of the philosophy of empiricism upon which science is founded upon. Empiricism assumes that truth can only be discerned through our senses, and that our minds merely processes and categorizes this truth. I reject this view because there are clearly truths that empiricism cannot evaluate, including the validity of empiricism itself. I'll bring in craig again for this one:



I apologize for the title..it's just the best clip I could find.

Is it accurate to say that the sum of your experience of God is subjective, that's to say, is based solely on your own experience in your head, and possibly in things in the objective world that you have interpreted in a subjective way, and is not borne out in any demonstrable way in the measurable material world?

I would say my experience is generally subjective but is objectively confirmed, both by other people, and my daily life. You can say I have interpreted those experiences subjectively, and I am just fooling myself, of course. Personal experience is something hard to prove, as the other person is naturally skeptical of the other persons ability to evaluate what is true. All I can say is that truth is paramount to me and I am incapable of believing something just because I want it to be true. I would rather have nothing and die a meaningless death than live out a comfortable lie.

Please describe God. Where is he? When is he? What is he capable of? What does he feel? Is he immutable? Please add anything you can about why he did things like create the universe and animals and us and disease and suffering and inequality and joy, why he cares for us, why he cares what we do, why he made some things moral and some things evil, and any other informative facts. Is there a God the Father anymore, or just Jesus? Did Jesus have a human form and a godly form, or did he transmute from one to the other? What was Jesus before he was born? Was he born of the virgin Mary?

This is a rather large subject. I'll do my best..

God is perfect. He is holy, loving, and just. He exists outside of time and space in His own realm, which is called Heaven. He is capable of doing anything that can be done. As far as what God feels, that can be hard to quantify. For instance, you can say God feels love, but by definition, God is love. In general, from the bible, it seems God can be pleased, can be jealous, has compassion, is kind, is loving, can be grieved and can be angered. His nature is immutable, in that He is goodness itself. He is light and there is no darkness in Him. That doesn't change. He can however change how He interacts with us.

God created us out of the abundance of His love. It wasn't out of a need, as He already had perfect love within the relationships of the Holy Trinity, but it was an overflowing of that love. He created us to be in relationship to Him, as His children.

There were no diseases, or any inequality before the fall. He created the world perfectly, and He set us in paradise, to learn and grow under His care. However, because robots would be undesirable, He gave us free will to be obedient to Him or not. Unfortunately, we abused that, and broke fellowship with God. Sin and death were brought into the world because of it, and since then this has been a fallen creation. If you have something perfect, and introduce an imperfection, then it is no longer perfect and neither can anything perfect ever come from it. Sin and death ruined that perfection, and they are the cause for all of the disease and inequality today.

Because of this, God brought the law into the world, to give us a minimum standard for moral behavior. The law in itself was not capable of fixing the situation, as everyone fell short of the law, but rather it highlighted our need for a savior. This is the reason Jesus Christ came.

He came to Earth, putting aside His glory and position to live as a man, being the first human being since Adam to be born without sin. He lived a perfect life, though He was tempted in every way that we are, and fulfilled the entire law. Finally, He sacrificed Himself on the cross for the sins of mankind, as a substitutionary atonement for our crimes, and He tasted death for all men. God proved all of this by raising Him from the dead. So, Christ defeated death and sin on the cross, and imputed His righteousness, the righteousness of God, back into mankind. Therefore, anyone who accepts His Lordship will have his sins forgiven and receive eternal life. It is by the imputation of Gods perfect righteousness and substituionary atonement that the effects of the fall have been countered, and we are again reconciled to God and can enjoy perfect relationship to Him as His children.

God is three persons, the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit. Jesus ascended to Heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father, making intercession on our behalf. Jesus was born of a virgin, and was both God and man; He had two natures, which were united for one purpose in submission to the Father. Jesus, before He was born as a human being, existed as God. "Before abraham was, I am."

John 1:1-3

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Hope that answers your questions.



>> ^messenger:

@shinyblurry

@shinyblurry

Having watched the first 30 seconds again and thought about it, with Craig's definition of objective moral values (OMVs) inserted into Premise One, it reads: "If God does not exist, then nothing exists which is good or evil independently of whether anybody believes it to be so." If by this he means, "If God does not exist, then nothing exists which is good or evil no matter who believes or does not believe it to be so", then it's pretty close to a truism, but as Qualia says, it leaves Craig with significant problems. Then, unfortunately, Q goes off apparently on an irrelevant tangent about people assessing other people's moral behaviour, which is the wrong argument to make at this point, as Craig's definition is all about things being moral or evil independent of everyone's judgement. The correct point to make here would be that by Craig's own definition of OMVs, it's now impossible to verify Premise Two because it would require either a human or God to assess that such a moral value or duty existed. This can never happen because Craig's definition of OMVs precludes humans from evaluating things morally, and the argument cannot, obviously, invoke God's opinion, since proof of God's existence is the argument's conclusion. So, by definition, Premise Two cannot be proven, and that's Craig's argument completely sunk, and it could have been the end of the video too.

Except something interesting happens: Craig contradicts his earlier definition of "objective" meaning that it doesn't matter what any human thinks, and presents the fact that 99% of people would say that torturing and caring for a child hold different moral values as evidence that OMVs exist, in other words, now, suddenly the definition of OMVs rests in what 99% of people think. This means he accepts somebody's assessment of moral value, if on a large enough scale. If Craig appeals to the moral opinion of 99% of people to prove objectivity in his own arguments, then obviously anybody arguing against Craig is allowed to do the same, so any points Qualia Soup makes in the video based on the opinions of humans in general stand because they follow Craig's own rules of evaluation.

So, Qualia's point is valid and relevant, that on the whole, we don't make moral judgements based solely on the act itself, but on what the person committing the act believed about their actions: a healthy adult killing a baby is viewed entirely differently than a retarded adult or a very young child killing a baby. This is not irrelevant if Craig's proof for Premise Two relies on the opinion of 99% of people. This shows that OMVs may not exist independent of what people think. It suggests the opposite: that judgements of the moral value of an action may only exist based on what people think.

QS: It goes on, asking "what do we make of a being that's decided that only one species is morally accountable?"

SB: This is simply a red herring. It makes absolutely no difference and is not relevant what we think about God holding humans accountable and not animals. Our standard for moral behavior is not measured by the behavior of animals. The relevant difference is that the standard for our moral behavior is measured by what God chooses as morally correct.

Here, QS is responding to Craig's accusations of atheists being "speciesist" for thinking humans are special, and throws it back in his face by showing by his definition, God is speciesist if he only chose to hold one species morally accountable. Also, your own argument that morality relies on what God decides is morally correct assumes the existence of God, which you cannot assert in the middle of a proof of God's existence.

The section that follows about "unevaluated value" makes the point that if there are moral values that exist but we lack awareness of them, then it's useless for them to exist undetected. And if we're not positing that a God already exists, it makes more sense for the actions to be noticed, and then evaluated as either evil or good at that moment, rather than to have already been evaluated morally by God, and then detected as morally good or evil by that person due to their internal morality detector provided by God. In other words, the capacity for moral judgement is not proof that God gave it to us. It could have evolved.

The argument beginning at 3:47 shows there's no way to determine that a person has detected something that was already evaluated as good by God and understood it as so, rather than has seen something and evaluated it as good himself by his own judgement.

***

And it goes on from there. Anyway, that's my evaluation of your evaluation of Qualia Soup's evaluation of Craig's ontological proof that God exists.

I'd much rather talk about you and me and our relative faiths in God, but before we go on, I have to know what the rules are and what I will be expected to establish.

About us
For example, can we just accept that you and I exist, one independent of the other, neither a figment of the other's imagination? Can we accept that our normal external sensory input can be accepted as correct for the purposes of this conversation, (except in the trivial cases of optical illusions and so forth)? You probably know what I'm saying. I hate it when I get into an argument and think I've made a very strong point, only to have my opponent come back with, "Everything's subjective; you can't prove anything is real," or, "Maybe you imagined the whole thing, I mean, you can't prove you didn't," or, "You can prove anything with facts," or, "Well, you have your beliefs and I have mine," or some crap like that where I'm not talking about subjective facts or my own beliefs.

Also, in theological arguments, I must insist on a couple things. The first is that words must have meaning. If you say something, you can't later say that it's not to be taken literally, or that that word has a different meaning when applied to God. The second is that everything logically entailed by a statement must stand with the original statement, and any other statement. If there's any inconsistencies, then at least one of the statements must be false.

Also, please don't assert supernatural things like the existence of Satan, or your knowledge of how he works, telling me these things like I'm ignorant of them, rather than fully aware of the stories, but sceptical. Say that it's what you believe or have come to believe or whatever, but don't say it like objective fact. Same goes for Bible verses. I don't accept them as fact any more than you'd accept Skeletor quotes as fact. To me that book is best treated as fiction, though it's possible it conveys some details of events that really happened, but pronouncements of the way the world is I absolutely do not accept as the word of God, especially since I don't believe he exists. I don't care if the Bible predicts atheists/sceptics. All that tells me is that people have been doubting the veracity of the word for 2,000 years, and someone took the precaution of adding a word or two against non-believers into the text so believers down the line would have justification "from God" for dismissing my arguments as guided by Satan, or whatever.

I know you don't think Qualia's line of reasoning holds, but I don't know what you think of Craig's argument. Is it valid, in your mind? And here, I'm mostly interested in how you think. As I've said, the video was only intended to take apart the argument of one Christian apologist, and not to prove or disprove anything.

I'm 99% sure you said in a comment somewhere that you're dubious of science. Could you explain what you mean by that? Science isn't a system of faith or a set of theories. It's a process of testing theories. Are you dubious of the process? What parts of it specifically do you mean?

Is it accurate to say that the sum of your experience of God is subjective, that's to say, is based solely on your own experience in your head, and possibly in things in the objective world that you have interpreted in a subjective way, and is not borne out in any demonstrable way in the measurable material world?

About God
Please describe God. Where is he? When is he? What is he capable of? What does he feel? Is he immutable? Please add anything you can about why he did things like create the universe and animals and us and disease and suffering and inequality and joy, why he cares for us, why he cares what we do, why he made some things moral and some things evil, and any other informative facts. Is there a God the Father anymore, or just Jesus? Did Jesus have a human form and a godly form, or did he transmute from one to the other? What was Jesus before he was born? Was he born of the virgin Mary?

I'll answer your most recent post in my next sitting.

There are many very simple ways just to prove immediately that it's an optical illusion, but for some reason these people just want to live in a lie and think it's a hill with messed up gravity.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'yes, no, optical, illusion' to 'yes, no, scupture, perspective, angle' - edited by xxovercastxx

I know what this is . .. this is one of those blimming optical illusions !!! GOTCHA

I think you have to "relax" your eyes.. or go cross-eyed. Or try looking "through" the video.>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

That's really odd, this one didn't work for me at all. I think it has to do with the shading on the top...or I am going flat out bonkers.

Your video, Optical Illusions are fun!, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.