From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Saturday, September 14, 2002 7:23 AM To: Alt.Atheism.Moderated Subject: Re: Science & atheism are cultures. "Skeptic" wrote > HeckleAndJeckle wrote > > There is at least one possible world where "existence" is not nonsensical. > > There is no "at most" in these statements, so there is evidently a > > contradiction. > > It appears you have him. No, he merely has taken my statement out of context. > I predict however that he will ad-hoc modify > his conjecture. No, I'll just quote numerous previous statements of my conjecture. > I think he needs to add > the phrase "except this possible world" to properly avoid you > criticism. The phrase has been there all along: ------------------ 'reality' cannot mean for other worlds the same thing that you think it means in this world. we don't have any criteria (separate from mere possibility) to judge the existence of other worlds. If existence means anything at all for other worlds, it is indistinguishable from mere possibility, and is thus equivalent. I'm instead claiming that 'existence' is not well-defined for other worlds, and that the way this lexeme is used makes it indistinguishable from (and thus equivalent to) mere possibility. ------------------- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net