Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 14:58:03 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: "Neal E. Westfall" <nwestfal@directvinternet.com> Cc: Joshua Lee <yid@softhome.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Fw: Re: Why did evolution fail? Message-ID: <3D7FBC6B.C8E2340F@mindspring.com> References: <20020911133432.P45696-100000@Tolstoy.home.lan>
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"Neal E. Westfall" wrote: > On a naturalist worldview, human beings are just machines, and > as such reasoning is just an illusion. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ You keep pulling this one out of your rear. I don't see why you keep claiming this, when it doesn't logically follow. If human beings are just machines, there no reason at all that their reasoning would have to be illusionary, rather than real. You have simply made an unsupported statement, as if it were fact, and expected us to be stupid enough to just accept it with no evidence. > All reasoning is just the > outworking of the electrical-chemical reactions in the brain. The human > brain could never transcend nature with anything that resembled "reason". "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts". > > See above. Your reduction is absurd. > > Reductions are supposed to be absurd! That's why they are called > "reductio ad ABSURDUM" arguments. They are employed to reduce an > opponent's argument to ABSURDITY. Get it? No, that's not how the symbolic logic works. A "reductio ad absurdum" is a "reduction to absurdity" argument. It works by taking a general argument, and arguing its application to a specific case where it is false, thus demonstrating that the generalization itself is false. It's possible to perform a reduction that does not result in an absurdity. This is how it works if the generalization is true. E.g. the argument "all fish are trout" is not proven absurd, if your specific case that you argue to is a rainbow trout instead of a brown trout, but it works if your specific case is a carp. The reason the reduction he called absurd *is* absurd is that you drew a conclusion unrelated to the specific case which you were reducing. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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