Debating on Reddit hurts my brain

[Dustnite]

So I've had the unfortunate pleasure of talking to /u/Zyracksis on occasion who mods the DebateaChristian subreddit and frequents DebateReligion.

He's one of those special kinds of theists that believe that philosophy alone proves the existence of God and doesn't look at evidence unless couched within a premise. I thought you guys might like to read his argument on the resurrection, it's pretty mind blowing (like a flat tire on hot asphalt...): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KZ-ittyxd73x-VVWHqHyyzST9nAqlzbuPaSjFLGKImc/edit

Anyways the latest foray was him defending the Cosmological Argument, of which he refused to define which CA argument he was making other than there are better 1st premises other than "Whatever begins to exist has a cause". Maybe someone can enlighten me on a better CA argument because every argument I've seen begins with that first premise. I think he ended up ignoring my points about the first premise being flawed and nitpicked my use of the word invalid to describe the first premise.

I never did find a use for philosophy and if this is the kind of people it breeds, I have even less use for it.

 

[Deleted member 619]

Anyways the latest foray was him defending the Cosmological Argument, of which he refused to define which CA argument he was making other than there are better 1st premises other than "Whatever begins to exist has a cause". Maybe someone can enlighten me on a better CA argument because every argument I've seen begins with that first premise.

'Better' is probably the wrong term. Basically, though, all cosmological arguments boil down to the standard syllogism, but some of them go all around the houses to get there. For example, there's the Lewis-Leibniz Kalam for Bare Theism, which is worth a shufty. It isn't any better in terms of fulfilling its purpose in proving that a deity exists, and is still predicated on blind assertions, but at least it's not immediately easy to knock down (although it is still fairly straightforward once you get the hang of the language employed.

I think he ended up ignoring my points about the first premise being flawed and nitpicked my use of the word invalid to describe the first premise.

Which is itself a fallacious approach, unless your argument actually hinged on your usage.

I never did find a use for philosophy and if this is the kind of people it breeds, I have even less use for it.

Philosophy is one of those funny things. When you study it, especially in the West, it comes at you in the form criticised by Whitehead, namely as a series of footnotes to Plato. In reality, you don't learn how to do philosophy, you learn how people have done it, largely by absorbing the arguments and conclusions of past philosophers, and generally the point is missed. The people who understand philosophy and its remit the least are those who've studied it even to a moderate degree, because what they've learned isn't philosophy, but book-keeping. That's why they spend so much time engaging in discussion over who said what, rather than getting on with the nitty-gritty of what philosophy is really about, namely ensuring that we're asking the right kind of question. Philosophy is, in fact, all about questions. As soon as you think it's about answers, you're doing it wrong.

 

[Deleted member 619]

Oh, and this:

Also before we begin, I will just state that we are certain that Jesus existed.

Is quite simply bollocks. It's more parsimonious to operate on the principle that some character existed to whom certain alleged events were attributed, but hat's the most we can say, and it amounts to nothing at all. There is no text that can robustly support his existence

Given what we know about the early church from Acts, this must have originated from the Apostles. There is no other plausible source for this creed.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzz. Thank you for playing.

Pick a name out of a hat for the time, and you've got yourself a plausible source. If the author of the quoted sentence thinks it's defensible, he's an idiot, and should probably just shu8t the fuck up, because he's simply not ready to rigorously deal with any topic,. let alone this one. Anybody who comes away from that statement with anything other than a violent facepalm is a fuckwit.