Try it the other way round. How can Gods existence be established if necessity can not?

It can't.

It isn't. It's a strawman of Ockham's Razor. 'God has not been proved necessary - therefore there is no reason to believe in his existence (unless other arguments are offered, of course)'.

nonsense.  You falsely claim that the theist assertions contain no argument because you refuse to hear or acknowledge them.

Sorry barney.  I have to live my own life.  Long ago I gave up debating you properly because common courtesy and honoring rules are things you think are above you.  You surrendered our opportunity to properly debate long ago.


No, you wrote a few words down.  Nothing more.


They fail in your mind because you presuppose your position is correct.  Your prejudice prevents you from even considering the claim.


Perhaps even if you won't, others will see that your position is simply a prior commitment to atheism.

Which is why, I guess, you haven't even tried to form a decent argument.

Just call it what it is, RF. You have sour grapes because you can't handle anything other than you presuppositional position.

I obviously went too fast.   I was commenting on your rejection of Tremblay premise 1.   The argument revolves around the relationship between necessary and contingent things.  Firstly I showed that you are wrong to reject premise 1 since it denies that the mental has anything necessary about it.  However, if you try to avoid this by messing with premise 3 (my suggestion about necessary -> necessary), you get a nonsense.


It is still possible that some or all could be absolute.  If God is true therefore everything is contingent on God but if God is absolute then things that are contingent on God can also be absolute.  If God exists and is absolutely truthful and absolutely logical then those characteristic could carry forward.  [/quote]

RF I think you are making a non-traditional distinction here between 'true' (which we have all agreed elsewhere to be a relationship between statements and reality) and 'absolute' (I'm not certain what features you are trying to pinpoint with this) and 'necessary'.   I syuspect that you are simply doing your usual debating trick of 'muddying the waters'.       The relationship between necessary concrete things and necessary abstract things, and the nature of entailment from necessary things to others is one that is unresolved (see the ref barney gave - oops, forgot, you don't want to be burdened by serious discussion).  Certainly your introduction of new, ill-defined terms won't resolve it.

[/quote]In Tremblay's posit, the error is that postulate 1 is not a given.  It is not a given that any feature of human understanding is necessary in any way with or without God.  It is possible that a feature of human understanding is correct, but it is not necessarily so.[/quote]

I commented on premise 1 in Tremblays argument.  You obviously didn't have chance to read it properly...  here it is again, with some additional notes. 

As a dualist, you are commited I think to the mental being part of the 'spirit world' - please correct me if I'm wrong.  It therefore has to have something that makes it distinguishable, identifiable from all other things in that realm (even if it is part of a unity, that unity has to be identifiable).  Thus the brief dscussion of the 'essence' of a non-material mind...


....because you deny Tremblay's premise 1.


... because it does not have any necessary part and an essence must be necessary.


This sort of picks up/summarises some of the Stanford article (such a pity you can't read it!).  However I assume that you would want to say that 'souls' are in some way 'coming from' god.  It is this entailment that is now a problem, because....


¹So I am here replacing the Tremblay premise that things entailed by a necessary being are 'contingent upon' his doing or being (which you appear to support) with the alternative that things that are entailed by necessary things are themselves necessary.  This holds good for logic (relationships between modal statements). 
²So, if we take Tremblay with the original premise 3, we find that your only objection (human understanding has nothing necessary about it) to be wrong and Tremblay is right.    If we take it with my alternative, we find we have the conclusion that you came to....
You can interpret this as either saying that everything is deterministic (which I guess you can't, but I would rub my hands with glee) or that there is nothing contingent, which is what you did. But of course this is a nonsense - in other words Tremblay with my premise and a necessary god is absurd.   I can't see any other possibilities of adjusting Tremblay to support your denial of premise 1, apart from starting premise 3 with an assertion that god is not necessary - but thats what its trying to prove anyhow.



I'm deeply suspicious of arguments both for and against god's existence - your sects may not 'know the mind of god', my meme-group accepts that we cannot know (not even a priori, not even by defining it into existence) anything of its properties or relationships.  Arguments are therefore pretty airy-fairy and pointless. The main point of such as Tremblay's as far as I can see is to point to areas in our knowledge of logic that need thinking through and research... or from your point of view, some of your concepts and their relationships need definition 


Anyway, I hope I clarified what I was arguing there.   Its always hard and inviting confusion to go back and comment on the original, so if I didn't mange to explain exactly please ask and I'l  try an different approach.

So, if everything is contingent on god, then so is logic. Since Logic (in your world view) can be changed by god at his whim, logic is not absolute or a principle (in fact, neither are morals or physical laws). That is, you can't use inference since you only assume god is keeping to the laws you say are fixed.

You can claim god doesn't change the laws of logic, but it is a hollow claim since he could change them at any time and we wouldn't know - since they are contingent upon him.

So, your reasoning is useless. It is untenable.


BTW, you are disagreeing with many great Theologians who use the Trancendental Argument for the Existence of God as a proof for gods existence.

(Dabney)
From wiki

They are noth claiming that a truth (in this case a logic truth) is Necessary when you see that it is true.  For example, when you see that A cannot be A and not A.


Since now you claim that God created logic, I would like you to address how God was able to create logic when no logic was in place?





For RF's sake, I will post the TAG:

1. There are a number of features of human understanding, such as logic, consciousness, science, morality, meaning, and so on, which the atheist uses, and which we can designate as X.
2. The atheist position cannot account for its use of X, because…
     Materialism fundamentally cannot account for X, because of the properties of matter.
     Materialism fundamentally cannot account for X, because of the properties of biological evolution.
     Materialism cannot account for the existence of scientific laws, which require omniscience to be known, but are necessary for X.
3. Only theism (with a god as Creator) can justify our use of X. The atheist implicitly presupposes theism when he uses X.

Gee, what is odd about this is that it sounds just like RF's arguments, and yet he has just removed himself from them.

I imagine we will stop hearing these arguments?