Why must you put words in my mouth constantly? In about a third of your posts in this thread, you ask something like, “Are you saying this???” and it’s pretty much always a completely fabricated statement that didn’t come from anything I said.
I’m not denying anything ya dope. What’s obviously true is my one-liners were enough to get the judge on my side, and since this was framed as a debate with a judge instead of a conversation, that’s all that matters.
The one-liners were clearly not enough to convince you, but they were enough to convince the judge. I’m sure, from your perspective, that that’s a bit confusing – you laid out these detailed arguments, and your opponent just lazily said “nope”, AND SOMEHOW THE JUDGE IS ON HIS SIDE? Must be infuriating.
So, here’s what I’ll do for you: I’ll pick out an argument you made that I responded to with a one-liner, and explain how everyone else would view that argument, and why a one-liner was enough for Carleas to consider it refuted.
This was my one-liner response. Now, I actually totally thought this would be enough for you. I thought you were probably well-versed in the rules of logic, being on a philosophy forum and challenging people and all that. It’s sort of the minimum requirement.
So, let me show you how someone who has the rules of logic internalized parses this argument:
P1: A or notA
P1 is a solid premise. Totally strong. Great premise. Not necessarily a great way to start a syllogism (it’s a bit hard to come up with a second premise that, alone with that, would actually create a valid syllogistic conclusion), but it’s at least an indisputable premise. This is how someone well-versed in logic views P1.
P2: If A, then – a list of things that I think are good things become legitimate.
Again, this premise is totally true. Yes, if A is true, then all of those things are true. All of those things that you’d like to be true are true. IF A is true.
But, you see, to conclude that A is true because you’d like certain consequences of it being true…that’s both a transparent nonsequitur to anyone well-versed in logic, and another specific kind of fallacy most commonly known as Appeal to Consequence.
Your argument is like the following:
P1: Either God exists or he doesn’t.
P2: If God exists, then we can have meaningful conversations about what it is that God expects of us, and what the afterlife might be like. In fact, we do this anyway.
C: Therefore, God exists.
Is it not easy to see what’s incredibly wrong with that sort of argument?
Saying that, if A were true, you can list a whole bunch of things that would also be true with it that you’d like to be true…it doesn’t matter what you want to be true. It doesn’t matter that you want moral conversations legitimized. What you want is not a logical basis for determining truth from falsehood. Your desires do not determine the world. Either candy will fall from the sky right now or it won’t. I very much want candy to fall from the sky right now. However, reality doesn’t give a shit what I want. Just willing candy to fall from the sky doesn’t work.
So, that you can think of some desirable consequences for morality being objective is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter that such-and-such would be legitimized, or that you have conversations about morality anyway. It doesn’t matter one bit. That doesn’t make it true.
And this whole verbose post…these thoughts FLASH through the mind of anybody well-versed in logic. It takes only a moment for someone like Me or Carl to see the argument and think these thoughts. Logic is so internalized for us (and I wrongly assumed for you as well) that really, all we need is a moment’s thought to see that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise. That’s why my one-liner was enough for him. It was immediately obvious to him that the conclusion didn’t follow, and he saw that it was immediately obvious to me (likely for the same reason), and so he agreed. I’m sorry that you didn’t see it as well, but hopefully now you do.
It was more or less like that for the rest of them as well – some obvious logical mistake that took not a moment’s thought to realize was mistaken, and so Carleas saw my one-liner, shook his head at my laziness but ultimately agreed with it.