Dispatches from the Age of Reason

Portions of a true exchange on another form where TOF was amusing himself one day:

Quora Question: Why do people disagree about whether there exists proof of God's existence?

[TOFNote: Notice the question is not whether these proofs are valid or compelling, but only why people disagree about them. However, the Usual Suspects immediately responded with reflex rejection of the conclusion.]

Frank Dauenhauer, literature lover
There can be no disagreement about whether there exists proof of "God's" existence -- because there is none. No proof at all.
TOF
Actually, there are several. The question is what credence is given to them. Hence, the disagreements.

Steve McKerracher
People cite these pseudo mathematical "proofs" as proof of god, but when the "proof" relies entirely on completely unsubstantiated asserted premises (as all "proofs" of god do) it is no proof at all.

[TOFNote: "relies entirely"? Completely. Unsubstantiated. Asserted. Wow. That's a rebuttal. Let us investigate:]

TOF
Aquinas' first proof rests on the premise that some things in the world are changing. This may not be completely unsubstantiated.

Steve McKerracher
There are many other unsubstantiated premises for that "proof".  For  instance, off the top of my head, it is assuming that there must be a  "first mover".

TOF
That's not an assumption of Aristotle's proof. It's a conclusion.

Steve McKerracher
It may not be a premise, as it is concluded, but it is certainly an assumption. [sic!] ...  their conclusions are based on their presuppositions, as are the deductions, and in no way any possible "proof".

[TOFNote: All of Euclid's conclusions are based on his presuppositions, too. But one doubts that Mr. McKerracher would denounce plane geometry. Assuming that he meant "begging the question," TOF invited Mr. McKerracher to provide examples where this was done. After all, competent atheist philosophers like Kenny had questioned the major premise, but had not claimed that argument was circular. But answer, came there none. Oh, well.]

Steve McKerracher
Besides, if this is true, that nothing can initially move itself, you can't logically stop at god.  That is entirely arbitrary.  Something had to move god initially.

[TOFNote: Why did he suppose something had to move the unmoved mover? What part of "unmoved" was it hard to understand? Meanwhile, another respondent had also commented:]

Frank Dauenhauer
A proof that cannot be agreed upon is no proof. It must be incontrovertible, using commonly agreed-upon methods, for example, as used in courts of law. Without agreement, it's only a theory.

[TOFNote: This struck TOF as overly stringent. In natural science, matters are never incontrovertible, but are rather falsifiable. The verdicts of the courts of law are often contested, as far as that goes. But of course, this Incontrovertible Requirement is only trotted out when You-know-who lurks at the end of a syllogism. TOF responded modestly that there might be many reasons why a proof might not be universally agreed upon, among them:]

TOF
Sometimes people don't understand the proof. For  example, there might be a proof that a locally compact separable Hausdorff space is the union of a countable family of compact subsets.
 
[TOFNote: No one responded to this example to say they agreed or disagreed with the proof of it, but no one noticed also the irony in that.]

Mahesh Soori
"Sometimes people who claim to understand the proof and accuse others of not understanding are the ones who doesn't understand the proof in the context of the scientific method."

[TOFNote: Mr. Soori was informed that the scientific method was irrelevant in proving theorems in mathematics or metaphysics and was invited to clarify, but had not done so by post time.] 

TOF
I should probably add that many "don't understand" because many of the terms no longer mean the same thing as they did in Medieval Latin. "Motion," for example, did not mean only motion of location.

Frank Dauenhauer
"OK, so nothing means anything anymore. We should all go back to the Hebrew and be happy believers."

[TOFNote: It is unclear what Mr. Dauenhauer thought Hebrew had to do with it. The Argument from Motion was originally written in Greek and was further developed and commented on in Arabic and Latin. Hebrew is irrelevant. Perhaps he is one of those fundamentalists who obsess with sola old testament scriptura, and that has carried over to his fundamentalist atheism.]

TOF
Another sign of Late Modernity is the disinclination to use reason and logic. In what way does "People writing in that language at that time used words in a different sense" equate to "nothing means anything anymore"?

Frank Dauenhauer
You have been discontinued. Bye!

[TOFNote: Well, that will show me! Once again, those who claim to worship in the cult of the cerebral fail to employ that which they praise. In any case, TOF is no longer able to cavort there. Silencing the opponent is the preferred tool of discourse.]

All of which is tempting TOF to discuss some prime moverism here one day soon.