Intergalactic Summit

Nope.

A square circle is a contradiction in terms. If something is circular it is, by definition, not square. As such, the statement "there is no such thing as a square circle" is not a negative claim - it is a tautology.

But there is one big, fat problem with all this. Among professional logicians, guess how many think that you can’t prove a negative? That’s right: zero. Yes, you can prove a negative, and it’s easy, too.

If it's true, how can it not be provable? More to the point, if it's not provable, why should I consider it to be true? What reason do I have for believing anything that anybody tells me if they can't provide evidence? By what criteria may it be considered true if it's not provable? If something is in accordance with reality - which is the definition of "true" that I'm using - then reality will reflect it. Meaning that if it's true, it's demonstrably true. If it's not demonstrable then reality doesn't reflect it. If reality doesn't reflect it then it's not in accordance with reality, and if it's not in accordance with reality then it's not true. Ergo true = provable, and not provable = not true.

God Exists = 1 assumption
God does not exist = 0 assumptions.

If "god exists" is an assumption, then "God does not exist" is the absence of that assumption. Removing an assumption is not in itself an assumption. To put it another way, we could express the competing hypotheses as follows:

1: The universe exists = 1 assumption
2: The universe exists, and god exists = 2 assumptions.

According to the law of parsimony, the god hypothesis requires more assumptions, and should therefore not be selected.

I don't see how "the word 'true' means 'in accordance with reality'" is internally inconsistent. That's the definition I'm using, as I said. What's inconsistent about it?

You're not getting it. Existence is a Boolean value. Something can either exist (1) or not exist (0). there's no half-existence, or negative existence. A simple Boolean statement confined to one subject and one condition may be either true or false. An assumption means that we consider the Boolean value of one statement as being "True".

But I'm confused - weren't you trying to discredit logic and reason earlier? Claim that it doesn't work, and that true things are not necessarily provable and so on and so forth? And yet here you are attempting to use those exact tools to argue with me.

Which is it? Do you value the power of rationality and reason? If so then your entire "self-defeating requirements" platform collapses. If not, then what the hell are you doing trying to use it?

You can't have your cake and eat it (silly expression, wanting to eat a cake that you have seems perfectly reasonable to me, but we all know what the phrase means)

So that I am clear, ma'am;

You earlirer created a distinction between rationality and reason... I believe you stated that reason was a superior mode as it was used to approve axioms whereas rationality was a product of those axioms? Yes? Thus, reason (specifically non-rational reason, which I do not think actually exists but am willing to leave as-is for sake of the discussion) is capable of creating and approving axioms.

If this is so, wouldn't reason be boundless?

Earlier Ms Mithra was claiming that rationality was bounded due to incompleteness theorem, which is true. Formal rationality is incapable of proving its own axioms. This is her argument to the best of my limited understanding and memory.

As for the law of parsimony: It states that among competing hypotheses the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be selected. It's not asking for simplicity, but simplicity in explanation as measured by number of assumptions. Now, let us take a look at the competing hypotheses: "God exists" and "God does not exist". Both make exactly one assumption.

God Exists = 1 assumption
God does not exist = 0 assumptions.

If "god exists" is an assumption, then "God does not exist" is the absence of that assumption. Removing an assumption is not in itself an assumption. To put it another way, we could express the competing hypotheses as follows:

1: The universe exists = 1 assumption
2: The universe exists, and god exists = 2 assumptions.

According to the law of parsimony, the god hypothesis requires more assumptions, and should therefore not be selected.

Lyn:

I don't appear to have uttered the word "scriptures" at all prior to this point in the conversation. Why? because I wasn't talking about them. My statements were confined exclusively to the Imperial orthodoxy as laid down by the Theology Council and by many - most, even - of the Emperors.

If you want to claim that the Theology Council's focus and the official message of core Imperial dogma is contrary to Scripture, then go right ahead. For my part, I think I'll take their word on it over yours. They are, after all, supposed to be the authority on the subject.

You're welcome to claim that the Scriptures are all about the gathering of knowledge, but given that the bulk of what it records seems to be parable, fable, allegory and outright mythology, with the actual scientific literature comprising only the tiniest fraction of its bulk (and even then, largely couched in religious terminology, largely immune from peer review, largely dominated by theistic bias and largely wrong for the most part until such time as a later revision took precedence...) I am less than inclined to take that claim seriously.

The overwhelming bulk of it most certainly IS backwards. Eclipses and earthquakes are characterized as divine intervention. Slavery is described (and usually actively endorsed) throughout. Whatever few bits of it can be considered modern are the exception and NONE of it is progressive.

The Scriptures might be an archive of divine inspiration, or an archive of unfolding human awareness. "Both" is just the former with a fake mustache on. If they are the former, then why does their technical content map so perfectly to the secular growth of Amarrian scientific progress? Why not grant some ancient desert prophet the schematics for warp drive and the formula for quantum FTL communications and have him record them in a moment of fevered inspiration, even if he didn't understand what he was writing down? It wouldn't have held the process back any - quite the reverse, it would have massively accelerated it. Amarr science would have progressed unbelievably more quickly if they had been able to treat it as an unfolding instruction manual of arcane wisdom, with each paragraph building the foundation for the next. Instead, they figured it out at - or even slower than - the same pace everyone else managed. Hell, the warp drive and fluid router were both Federation inventions, arrived at long after the Empire's best minds had given up.

If they are the latter, what justification is there for deriving any conclusions about god from them?

Instead of the instruction manual to return to technological supremacy ASAP, we have the collected ramblings of people who mistook schizophrenia for demonic possession, felt that a powerful body odour was the best means to ward off the tormenting spectre of disease, and who considered the ability to best a man in single combat to be proof of divine favour rather than, say, being proof of superior skill, tactics and equipment. The fact that such primitive ideas were overruled by later discoveries would only be relevant if they had ever actually been deleted. As it is what we get is primarily centuries-old "wisdom" that is generally anything but wise, spiced with just enough recent intelligence to necessitate my having to write this at all.

I explicitly said that the sections I was referencing are the ancient, backwards and barbaric ones. They've never been redacted, however. The Theology Council just... ignores them, I guess. Demonstrates itself to be rather more enlightened than the documentation that it exists to interpret.



I am not inventing anything here. It's all there. The unglamorous, less-quoted half of the Book of Reclaiming is full of exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about here. Then there's The Code of Demeanor in book 1. There's that popular GalNet portal full of the most glamorous and beloved quotes from the Scriptures, and out of the entire Code of Demeanor - which, I should note, runs to a book as thick as my arm in its own right - they picked out ONE phrase, five lines long.

The overwhelming majority of it is given over to trivialities about how your hair and beard should be trimmed, which animals are "unclean", how to prepare the few that are deemed sufficiently not-unclean to eat after careful ritual purification, about how no man with a scar or deformity should be permitted to set foot on sacred ground as his deformity is a sign of god's displeasure, how the lord abhors mixed fabrics, forbids women from "usurping the divine authority of the Male", describes anybody who prefers the romantic company of their own gender as being "destined for the eternal fire", that sort of thing.

Read it. Go on. I'll GLADLY wait for you to do so. I'd list chapter and verse if we had room, but by the time I finished I'd have listed a full third of the Scriptures.

I'll just leave this nugget here. this is one of the quotable, popular ones.



Now, Lyn's outraged squawk of "but that's just one book among many" or whatever is lurking in the wings, so let me address that.

Is it the Scripture? Is it holy? Is it true? If the answer to those three questions is "yes" then I don't CARE that it's just one book among many. It's still a command and creed by which the Amarr faithful are supposed to live, and directly endangers the rest of us. It has formed the heart of Amarrian foreign policy in the past, and does to this day.

THAT is why I have a problem with Amarr. It is a creed of the ultimate hubris that denies to the rest of us not only our right to live by the code and morality we choose, but furthermore demands that we bow to a hierarchy that is neither evident nor just.

There's no merit in this view of the world. According to Scripture you're born in your place, you stay in your place, and to even think of aspiring to a higher station is to blaspheme against the divine order. This is utterly, repugnantly contrary to the meritocracic ideals that I believe in.

Don't get all offended by what I'm saying. All I'm doing is accurately reciting what the religion itself is telling people to believe. I'm shining a harsh light on it and taking in everything about it, good and bad, warts and all. If that offends the delicate sensibilities of somebody who has spent their life picking off the ripest and juiciest fruit from the tree of Amarr, then I would suggest that the problem is not me, the problem is that Amarr has had some extremely good spin doctors over the centuries.

"God does not exist" is an assumption as well. You are stating that it does not exist, which holds an affirmative value as well.

Fashinating debate... i think all sides have valid points, and in the end, there is more then one way to reach somewhere... so maybe all is wrong, or all is right, or perhaps its abit of both...

...

So you tell me whats true, reasonable or probable... or is it simply so that we have to accept that things are as they be, and at times a particle zig when it should have zagged... ewen with the most justifiable proof !