Quote from: Meta Cognition on February 03, 2015, 04:50:10 PM

Quote from: RC on February 03, 2015, 04:47:05 PM

Regardless of the word's meaning, your argument doesn't disprove god, just a god with the arbitrarily-imposed restriction of operating within logic.

Duh. That's literally right there in the premises.

dat thread title tho

i kno ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

This is about as robust of an argument as saying, "it's logically possible to not be omnipotent, and omnipotence is the ability to do anything logically possible, therefore god cannot exist".

That's a robust argument.

Of course, deduction alone can't prove facts about the external world, so this isn't an attempt to disprove God per se. It's both an effort to show how A) deductive arguments can be misleading (especially when William Lane Craig uses them >.>) B) but also how our conception of omnipotence is logically flawed.

While we're on this subject, how do you feel about the watchmaker analogy?

Utter shit.

you really are quite clever, ashy

I should point out that, while I have expressed the same idea before, it wasn't me who structured the argument into the various premises.

P1: God is omnipotent.

P2: Omnipotence is the power to do all things logically possible.

P3: Something is logically possible is any coherent action which can be expressed without contradiction.
3a: Any action which has ever been done before is logically possible.

P4: It is logically possible to create a finite mass of rock that cannot be lifted by its own maker (from P3).

P5: Therefore, an omnipotent being can create a finite mass of rock which cannot be lifted by its own maker (from P2 & P4).

P6: Therefore, an omnipotent being can create a finite mass of rock which cannot be lifted by an omnipotent being.

P7: For any finite mass of rock, it is logically possible to generate a force that will lift it against a uniform gravitational field (2nd Law of Motion).

P8: Therefore, an omnipotent being can lift any finite mass of rock (from P2 and P7).

P9: Premise 6 and Premise 8 are contradictions.

P10: Therefore, it is logically impossible to be omnipotent.

C: Therefore, God is logically impossible.

How would it put stress on infrastructure? And would a surplus of unskilled workers be an issue?

Immigrants typically make a net contribution in taxes, relative to how much they take out in transfers or services from the government, yet things like schools and hospitals take time to build. The taxation, and accumulation of public funds is immediate, but it takes a significant amount of time to actually translate into public infrastructure.

As for unskilled workers--I don't think so. Although we should place the most emphasis on freeing up educational and high-skilled immigration. All the literature I've read doesn't suggest a significant negative impact (like wage compression) from unskilled immigration which isn't incredibly localised to one part of the native population or temporary.

What issues could potentially arise from adopting this policy in first world western countries like the UK and US?

Infrastructural stress and cultural tension are the two big ones.

I'm not completely sold on open immigration, but there's no doubt that freer immigration between culturally/racially homogeneous countries would be a massive boon.

But then to make the jump to say no one else should have kids?

It stands to reason that if you aren't going to have kids because it represents a moral transgression then--assuming this moral transgression is indeed true--others also shouldn't have kids.

A better question is why you're so afraid of suffering.

For what must be the eight time, it's a question of disutility (suffering - engendered benefits).

This is why we should just cull poor people.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on February 03, 2015, 12:29:00 PM

I find it funny that you accuse me of lying and then claim to be able to authoritatively speak for Verbatim.

Okay, you know that I didn't mean it like that >__>

Yeah, that came off more abrasively than I meant it to anyway <__<

When will he realize that pain is a good thing. You're not going to accomplish anything worthwhile in life without the sacrifice of enduring stress and suffering.

The argument is about disutility, or suffering without a net benefit. Nobody here has denied that, say, being depressed can lead to superior overall well-being in the long-term.

You know, the whole purpose for living in the first place.

Oh my God.

The point is to negate the need for utility by eliminating the imposition of disutility.

So, despite my nominally supportive position of Verbatim in that little debate, I'm not an anti-natalist. The best argument I can come up against anti-natalism will be laid out (probably haphazardly) ahead. I call it, the Problem of Parsimony.

So, it seems the moral foundation of anti-natalism is avoiding the actualisation of disutility--or, in other words, the imposition of disutility--in the form of procreation. I'm using disutility instead of suffering here, as it's clearly possible for suffering to engender some long-term benefits for a person, whereas disutility is--by definition--wholly undesirable (suffering - long-term benefit = disutility).

Anti-natalism falls down, it seems to me, in its conception of disutility. All disutility, to the anti-natalists, is equal in magnitude and moral "transgression". This, seems to me, to be false. It is worth quantifying disutility into at least two categories: significant disutility, and standard disutility. Significant disutility would be something seriously impinging on well-being (genocide), whereas standard disutility is closer to something like discomfort. It also stands to reason, therefore, that there are two kinds of utilities: significant and standard. Significant utility can properly be defined as the repudiation and transcendence of standard disutility, whereas standard utility is the mere avoidance or transcendence of significant disutility.

Now, the specific problem with anti-natalism is something I like to refer to as temporal suspension; it is locked in one frozen conception of the potential state of disutility, and the imposition of life is necessarily an actualisation of this potential state. What if, however, the potential state of disutility could be altered as to effectively exclude significant disutility, leaving only standard disutility as a thing to object to. My argument relies on the fundamental premise that the abolition of significant disutility is possible, via technology.

Represented at its most simply: significant disutility = -2, standard disutility = -1, standard utility = 0 and significant utility = 2. Under a paradigm of potential disutility involving significance, you get -1, with the only moral response being to not impose life. Under a paradigm in which potential disutility doesn't involve significance then you get 1.

In such an instance whereby significant disutility is not a potentiality, yet both kinds of utility are potentialities, it actually becomes more moral to strive for the continuation of the species with the expressed goal of eliminated significant disutility.