P: It seems to me that you do not realize that logical possibility is epistemically indistinguishable from physical possibility. That is, if something is logically possible (whether you may see it as such or not) then it is physically possible.

P: The reason is that naturalism is purely phenomenological.  Judeo-Christian theism is what histori-logically compelled the view that all phenomenon has regular order

H: That's why you assign a confidence range to your estimates.

P: On what bas(e)(i)s do you do so?

Suppose you are very young [..]

 It is no different than the One Black Swan problem

H: Consider the theories:
A) The universe exists and is self-caused or uncaused or has no known cause.
B) The universe was caused by God, who is self-caused or uncaused or has no known cause.
C) The universe was caused by God, who was caused by SuperGod, who is self-caused or uncaused or has no known cause.

H: I'm saying that B is more parsimonious than C, and A is more parsimonious than B. I'm saying that without parsimony, you have no reason not to believe in SuperGod, and SuperDuperGod, ad infinitum. (I of course here rely on the fact that any attribute of self-causedness or uncausedness that can be imputed to God can be imputed to the universe itself.)

P: First, the type of parsimony you have here is an arbitrary one. It is thus more parsimonious for me to suppose that you, Brian, are a computer than that you are a real person, or that this computer monitor in front of me has nothing but styrofoam inside of it

Second, a hypothetical or known object/set that is said to be self-existent, necessary, eternal, and infinite cannot then be said to have a cause, whether caused by itself (which is a contradiction), caused by nothing (which is a contradiction), or caused by something else.

In other words, either you grant that there is such an object/set (what I've called the foundation), or you admit that everything you can ever argue is meaningless.

Going back over arbitrary parsimony:  if it is makes sense to argue that an uncaused universe is at least as parsimonious as an uncaused (i.e., self-existent) God who cause(d)/(s) the universe, then it makes essentially (essentially) no less sense to argue that the idea that this sentence is uncaused is more parsimonious than the idea that I caused it.

You will object that it is not essentially true that the idea that this sentence is uncaused is more parsimonious than the idea that I caused it, but you cannot prove it any more than you can prove that the universe is uncaused:

What bit of the universe are you going to point to and say that it is obviously eternal?

P: There are two main options for a 'foundation', that is, for an entity/entities that has/have 'se existence':

H: I don't agree that anyone knows any particular options for how an entity could be self-causing, or how a fact could be self-explaining.

P: ?

H: I'll take your 'foundation' to mean the property by which an entity is self-causing or a fact is self-explaining.  On this reading, I don't see that you've given any explanation whatsoever as to how in particular a fact or entity could be foundational.

P: I'm not sure you understand what I'm talking about.

I do not imply any particular fact, entity, or set (all of which I call a 'thing'), I mean only the idea that "there is such a thing as an uncaused thing".

(A) it is necessary that there is at least one thing that is P-foundational?

H: I agree that I am not self-causing or self-explaining.  So?

P: Then is there nothing that you think you are justified in asserting as a basis for argument, even the basis of parsimony?

If you grant that you are not self-existent/necessary (which means that you grant that you are contingent), then on what basis do you argue anything;

do you think that you logically grant that there is such a thing as a necessary thing, seeing that you grant that you are not it, or, contrarily, do you think that you grant that you cannot even know whether there is such a thing as a necessary thing?

There are three options here:
a) all things have only indirect causes,
b) there is something that directly causes something else, or
c) ___?.

Now the question: Are you
1)merely asking a rhetorical question to find out more about my position,
2)asserting that it is not obvious which option of a), b), or c), is the case, or
3) asserting that a) or c) is the case?

H: for our purposes (viz., of answering "why?" questions), the concept of an explanation generalizes the concept of a cause.

P: when you say that the concept of an explanation generalizes the concept of a cause, are you saying that 'explanation' is the epistemic version of 'cause'?

I assume the principle of sufficient existence, i.e., that something (as opposed to nothing, which is "properly" called 'infinite regress') must be self-existent.

Some thing must be uncaused (i.e., self-existent, necessary)

All "why" questions (i.e., a given "why" question) are either; a)meaningless (such as "why does a verb therefore?"),  b)required (such as "why is does the sky look blue?"),or,   c)self-referencing (such as "why ask why?" or "why does there have to be a purpose to anything?").

If by 'religion' you mean 'the refusal to even grant the fact that one doubts something that one wishes to believe true', then the proposition, 'fear of uncertainty explains more about religion than it does about naturalism' is self-defining. But, if by 'religion' you mean 'belief that something exists that is transcendent to any physical thing (time, space, and matter)',

Does the concept of necessary existence obtain, or not?

Where did your argument about parsimony go?

Does even parsimony, in any sense of the idea, have a quality of objectivity or not (ethical, epistemological, quantitative, or any other sense of objectivity)?

is there anything that you value above anything else and, if so, what thing or things do you value the most?

H You made no reply to my diagnosis of its speciousness, so I'll repeat that diagnosis: It's specious to define 'faith' as any occasion in which not all evidence about X is univocal and paradigm considerations (i.e. evidence about evidence) play a role in ultimately deciding between X and not-X. This is yet another facile attempt to make 'faith' into a meaningless label that makes no practical distinctions whatsoever.

Is the idea of 'parsimony' 'exempt from doubt'?

If it is not 'except [exempt?] from doubt', then by all means offer a proof that that is the case.

P: you seem to choose, for your foundation, that thing which is not even solid, namely knowledge of the third-person phenomenological world, [..]
P: If, after reading all of my new replies above, you still do not see what I mean here

AI researcher Steve Grand believes that qualia may in fact be a product of certain dynamic physical organizations. This means that these certain organizations have the power to produce qualia

Why can't we keep involving ourselves in one-upmanship so that, no matter what entity we come up with as being all powerful, we can simply invent another one even more powerful still?

We have logic (as in 'logically possible') as one inherent, irreducible order, so how would physics lack an inherent order? [..] One cannot reduce true power to something else [..] the very standard by which they conceive of omnipotence as an anti-qualified power allows that power to violate that very conception: [..]

The idea that there are lesser and greater infinities is (partly) founded on the same error of one-upmanship,

for there can no more logically be two actual infinities than there can logically be two actual omnipotences.

To them, nothing is allowed to be superior to "true omnipotence", otherwise, they think, it isn't true omnipotence.

Finding out important truths is like trying to follow dance instructions given over the phone

H: I still don't know what you mean by "power", but you're obviously using some in-principle qualitative similarity to wish away an obvious quantitative difference in probability.

P: Do you wish to revise, or retract, that?

H: No.

What about now?

H: I mean that there is no irony in rationality not being used for rationality's intended purpose X if one does not think there exists any intender behind the existence of rationality. Do you dispute this?

P Believe it or not, I do, but that is not the irony I was referring to. I'll wait until another reply to qualify.

P: If an A or B 'foundation' exists, then there is no true error of 'the God of the Gaps'. [..]

H: I've seen no convincing demonstration of this from you.

P: It has to do with the concept of 'true'. If there is no truth, or if no one can ever know it, then there is no true error either way.  But, if there is truth and if we can know it, then a provisional error regarding that truth is not a true error.

[..] the atheist falls down the sudden epistemic hole, and the theist standing down there gets the dirt in his eyes. The Christian theist is always buried in the dirt looking up, so that once the new hole appears, the atheist, who had been standing he thought firmly enough on the ground, falling into the hole brings dirt down with him. [..]

H: It's laughable to say that because atheists posit certain brute facts, it's not unparsimonious for theists to posit god(s) merely for the purpose of "explaining" those facts.

P: Unparsimoniousness is not the error I was referring to here.

But, if there was no person in the world who was a theist asserting that "God makes the lightning", and assuming everyone lived in relative peace, then parsimony would not even be the issue that it is: everyone would be concerned with physics really only for practical uses.  The same would be the case if everyone in the world were Christian theists living in peace amongst themselves (defined as such, not defined simply as 'Christian theists', since not all Christian theists in the world today get along so well as that).

If you doubt this principle

H: You should use 'all' when you mean 'all', otherwise use 'almost all'.  If you can't do that, then we shouldn't be having this discussion.

P My assertion about the nature of communication stands.  I did (did) mean all, not 'almost all', But, I did not mean what you thought I meant by 'prove' and 'things' [in "prove all things"]

If you don't see how my last reply there applies to the core subject of this debate, namely the claim that a human was raised from the dead

H: Your phone/arm analogy wasn't very useful before, and it doesn't help me here either. :-)

P: [..] earth [..] flat [..] spheroid [..]

P: Like I said, dancing [..]

H: Only insofar as science is based on skepticism, which is incompatible with the faith on which so much religion is based.

P Some of those ancient Greeks were quite religious then

H: Recall from my definition of 'religion' that it does not necessarily require faith. However, for probably 99% of religionists, it involves faith or mysticism, which are antithetical to skepticism.

P: How do you justify this assertion,

and do you think it applies (%-wise) to Orthodox Christianity?

Also, do you think that, of all the science-worshipping atheists in the world, the same percentage of 'faith' does not apply to them? (Leave off the mysticism, though, for that is not the issue here unless you want me to bring up the science-worshiping-atheist version of it).

H: The fact that we might be wrong about our causal relationships is not a good reason to say that arbitrary hypothetical entities exist.

P: Please explain what you mean by 'arbitrary'.

H: See Merriam-Webster.

P I'll not. Philosophical arbitrariness essentially means misapplication.

I can define 'faith' as belief in a supernatural

P: If you do not further define your use of the term 'religion' to include the notion that religion is simple-minded, then I concede that I am incorrect in my impression.

H: Faith and mysticism are usually (but not always) more simple-minded than skepticism, and religion at any rate need not be based on either faith or mysticism.

P: I thought you used the term 'faith' in your definition of 'religion'?

that would seem to be a necessary thing, not a usual thing

Assuming you know what an algorithm is, and what an axiom is in relation to it

It's real simple (once you see it), and part of it has to do with the infinite-ness of the 'foundation' and how humans are not individually infinite.