Hi Matt, DMB, I was involved in one of those "bad questions" debates on-line recently with some Catholics about the question "why does anything at all exist?" I was arguing that this is a bad question for various reasons when I recalled your ideas in this thread.
It was asserted that the universe needs to have a Supreme Being to have created it, and I tried to argue that such a being would then not answer the original question. It would just complicate matters by adding one more part of "all that exists" that would need to be explained. We would have to then ask, "why does the Supreme Being exist?" The Supreme Being was then asserted to be a necessary and uncaused being that requires no explanation. At that point, I remembered your post about claims that something is a bad question are claims that "you will be very disappointed with the answer." I decided to just give a bad question an unstatisfying answer. I said that if "necessary" is a way to side-step the original question, then the universe too is necessary. It is necessary because we need it to be able to do all the things we want to do. Of course that answer was not supposed to be aceptable. "Necessary" has all kinds of Aristotelian meaning for Catholic apologists that I have no use for, so the issue comes down to some irreconncilable differences in choice of vocabulary. DMB said: To examine the validity of your vocabulary, don't you need to specify the particulars? Don't we need to define the point and purpose, the work we're trying to get it to do before we can say anything about its validity and appropriateness? In the abstract, in the absence of a concrete context, such a discussion is simply meaningless. And that's what I'm saying about the way you do philosophy. It's full of emptiness. Steve: I actually get a lot out of the way Matt does philosophy. I don't know anyone more ithoughtful and knowledgable on this forum--even in all the history of this forum. Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
