Shtal is having imaginary conversation with VK4 - Page 1

Hi, just wanted to entertain myself :)

You would agree vk4 that this discussion we are having presupposes knowledge? We have to be able know things in order having discussion! Correct?

 

Vk4 says of course!

 

Right, what I says is scripture says the fear of the lord is the beginning of knowledge, what that basically means that is you have to start with God to know anything at all, so the fact vk4 that you know things actually exposes that you know that God exists.

 

Vk4 says the problem with your foundation, because basically you taking an assumption that the Bible is correct, so it’s kind of like, basically Shtal you finding that is correct by assuming is Bible is correct, so….

 

My reply to Vk4, I’m not going to quote scripture but will demonstrate for you too, the question I’m going to ask you can you be wrong about everything you claim to know?

 

Vk4 says absolutely!

 

Now Vk4 if you can be wrong about everything you claim to know you giving up knowledge?

 

Let me explain that for you Vk4!

 

Let say you ask me; what is the speed of the road outside my house right now. And I said its 30 miles per hour but I could be wrong? Do I know it?

 

Vk4 replied to me; basically when you say that I could be wrong because of course my perception could be wrong so whether or NOT, so I see things and I have to assume that at some level that I have some ability perceived a world around me. Otherwise I have no ability as you say Shtal, we have no ability to talk, have no ability to do anything. Basically you are using no in the kind of couple different frames, so the thing is Shtal that just because let say I say I know something, there is a different between saying you know it and saying knowing with absolute certainty, vk4 says I do not have absolute certainty about anything because I can’t because I’m being intellectually honest.

 

Shtal replied right, are you absolutely certain that you can’t? Vk4 replying I would have no-way would be able to tell so….Shtal replied are you certain about that?
 

Shtal says to VK4, if you asked me what is the speed of the road outside my house? And I said its 30 miles per hour but I could be wrong? Do I know it?

 

Vk4 replying, knowing is not binary thing, is not 100 percent binary, again there is degrees of certainty, you can know something to within your percept your ability to perceive it and that’s of limit of your knowledge.

 

Shtal replied? Does the thing known have to be true? Does it have to be true in order to know it?

 

Vk4 replied, no, it doesn’t actually.

  Shtal replied so I can know that Elvis Presley is a current President of the United States, I can know that?

 

VK4 says if based on information that you have available to you, it’s possible that you could, you know “quote on quote” know something that is incorrect, yes!

 

Shtal says, so knowledge doesn’t have to be true? Vk4 says no, it doesn’t.

 

Shtal says people can know for certain that God exists?

 

Vk4 replied, they can feel that and they can still be wrong, yeah!

 

Shtal says to vk4 I’m not asking feelings sir, I’m asking about knowledge. Vk4 replied yes they can know it and be wrong.

 

Shtal says to vk4, you can know something to be true which is actually false is that what you are telling me vk4?

 

Vk4 says see that thing is knowing something to be true is not the same of having absolute knowledge, knowing, and absolute knowledge knowing that is in fact true!

 

Shtal replied if I say to you that the speed of the road outside my house is 30 miles per hour, and I know it to be true? But I could be wrong? Do I know it?

 

You see vk4 when you say you can be wrong about everything you giving up knowledge because you can’t know anything. Now of course vk4 you disagree with that so my question is what you know and how you able to know it? You said you can be wrong about everything.

 

Vk4 replies I will say this again, knowledge is NOT binary, there are degrees of certainties, so I can know something to a certain degree certainty but I don’t have absolute knowledge, so you know I know gravity works but until gravity doesn’t work, I know have gravity works. However if something happens, just say there is something gap in my knowledge, I don’t have absolute certainty, I don’t have absolute knowledge, so there could be something about gravity that there something about it that will function differently than I perceived or expect or I would predict; that’s the limit of my knowledge because I don’t have absolute knowledge.

 

Shtal replied to vk4, how certain are you that gravity works? Vk4 replies I would say I have high degree but not absolute.

 

Shtal replied; in order to determine that gravity works, you are employing your reasoning? Correct?

 

VK4 replied that’s right!

 

Shtal says to vk4, how do you know your reasoning is valid? Vk4 says how do I know? It could be faulty which a reason why I don’t have absolute certainty.

 

Shtal says if your reasoning could be faulty you can’t know gravity works to any degree? 

 

Vk4 says no that’s false, again there are degrees, saying that you can’t know something absolutely certainty is NOT as same as saying you can’t know anything, any degree at all, so…

 

Shtal says can you tell me vk4 that you know something to one degree? Can you tell me how do you know something to point .001 percent? How can you know that you’re reasoning valid to point .001 percent?

 

Vk4 replied my reasoning could be faulty. Shtal replied right so you can’t know anything point .001 or any percent to be true.

 

Vk4 replies no that’s NOT true. Then Shtal says to vk4 then tell me how you can know anything to be true.

 

Vk4 says because I don’t have absolute certainty I can’t have any certainty but that would apply to you Shtal, so that you wouldn’t able to know anything either, and I know you claim that you do, so you refute your own position with your assertion.

 

Shtal says to vk4, sir you are actually very close. In order to have any knowledge you have to know everything, you are absolutely right vk4 or have a revelation from someone who does?

 

Vk4 replied no. VK4 replied: You are making an assertion again have any knowledge that you have to have absolute certainty and that’s not the case. Shtal replied or revelation from someone who does.

 

In conclusion vk4 says he does not accept Shtal’s foundation so conversation is ended.

 

Shtal replied to vk4 thank you for your time sir. Repent while you still can, you have to repent of your sin that God you know exists.

 

Thank you for reading,

Shtal.

Shtal's insanity is slowly falling into pure sollipism - get help shtal;

 

those voices in your head are not real

 

the road outside your house is not moving at 30 miles per hour

 

your conversation is not imaginary, you are having are real conversation - with yourself, trying to convince yourself thaat the god you imagine is anything other than imagined.

 

but here is the clincher, based on your own argument "you have to repent of your sin that God you know exists,  HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS as you also said that;

"You are making an assertion again have any knowledge that you have to have absolute certainty and that’s not the case."

 

altho i can measure gravity the same as anyone else in the world regardless of any other belief and they will get the same answer - THATS REAL, YOUR ARGUMENT LIKE YOUR GOD IS FALSE.

 

now go back and have another snooze - you can't even win an argument with yourself.

 

 

 

 

Logic is lost on him, he will never get it, don't bother trying.

Logical fallacy: Denying the antecedent

Look it up.

Shtal knows what he is doing. He understands logic just fine. I bet he understands more about what is out of the box and not just the cardboard it is made of.

 

oh the list of fallacies, Shtal is a living text book on illogical thought...in the main non-sequiter, circular reasoning,  specious reasoning, ad-hoc and ad-hominem, modus ponens: Affirming the consequent.

and just plain old butchering of the english language all without a shred of evidence, no wonder he has to snooze so much between posts.

And the best description of you, I ever heard, was... well, do you really wanna know?????

Shtal isn't a textbook of illogical thought, Sye Ten Bruggencate is and he's Shtal's hero.  Shtal's just a parrot and he doesn't understand, may be a language barrier.  He needs to take a class on logic, but I doubt he ever would.  That might make him question and that's what he fears the most.

Sye versus Matt D, anyone who follows Sye is brain dead, how do i know i know that lol?

 

Sye – Round One!
I know I know that I know there is a god
I know I know that everyone else knows there is a god
Therefore, it’s reasonable to believe there is a god
Matt can’t prove he’s not a brain in a vat.

Matt – Round Two!
An individual’s certainty of knowledge does not equate to actual knowledge
The god claim hasn’t been demonstrated to be reasonable.
Therefore, it’s not reasonable to believe in god
There is a history of apologists instead of a history of evidence
Not all perceptions of god can be right, but they all can be wrong.

Sye – Round Three!
Matt can’t prove he’s not a brain in a vat.
I don’t present evidence because that would make you the judge instead of god
Matt claims his arguments are chemical reactions of the brain. That would mean our debate would be a fizzing Dr. Pepper vs a fizzing Mountain Dew.
Matt says we should never own humans. But then he says humans are animals. And Matt owns animals and even eats animals.
The Christians that call into Matt’s show make me want to puke. It’s garbage. It’s garbage.
I wanted a free exchange, but the debate organizers didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t.
Matt can’t hang up on me here.

Matt – Round Four!
There are things we believe based on the evidence and our reasoning
Sye doesn’t prove anything, he only claims it
My definition of truth is that which conforms to reality
Sye claims to know the truth of god, but provides no evidence that his god exists
Saying we can’t know anything without god has no foundation of evidence or explanation
An argument needs to be supported by evidence to be reasonable

Back and Forth
Sye - Matt can’t prove what is true
Sye - Matt can’t prove he’s not a brain in a vat.
Sye – You’ve admitted you could be a brain in a vat
Matt – No I haven’t. I’ve stated that I can’t prove I’m not a brain in a vat.
Matt - The fact that something cannot be proved to be false doesn’t mean that it’s true
Sye - You trust your senses and reason to determine what is real in your reality?
Matt – Yes
Sye – but how do you know those are reliable?
Matt – On there continued reliability of effective results
Sye – It’s circular to use your reasoning to validate your reasoning
Matt – It’s a necessity
Sye – What do you know?
Matt – How do you define know?
Sye – I wanted a free exchange, but you didn’t
Matt – I did
Sye – But she didn’t and she started it
Sye – How do you know rocks would exist without humans?
Matt – Because a rock is a rock now and there’s no evidence rocks are effected by human minds.
Sye – But you don’t know so that’s an argument of ignorance
Matt – Whatever
Matt – How can god reveal himself to you where you can be certain?
Sye – Because he’s god
Matt – You say that we all know god exists and you’re convinced that this is true
Sye – It’s not that I’m convinced it’s true, it is true
Matt – And it’s impossible for you to be wrong about that
Sye – About that, yes.
Matt – Do you believe that babies and people of religions that don’t have a god know that god exists?
Sye – Yes, why don’t you
Matt – Because that’s not where the evidence is
Sye – Evidence presupposes truth and truth presupposes god
Matt – How can someone know that god exists but not be certain?
Sye – Because they’re suppressing the truth
Matt – Why doesn’t god reveal himself to everyone and make it obvious?
Sye – For reasons that are perfectly acceptable to god
Sye – Inductive reasoning is looking back
Matt – We’re not claiming that inductive reasoning is absolutely certain
Sye – What are you absolutely certain of?
Matt – I’m not absolutely absolutely certain about anything, I’m maximizingely certain.
Sye – You can’t prove you’re not a brain in a vat
 

Q&A
Q for Sye – How do you know that god is true when he lies in the Bible? God said Adam and Even would die if eating from the tree of knowledge but they lived for hundreds of years afterwards.
Sye – They died spiritually

Q for Sye – Jesus said the mustard seed is the smallest in the world, but we know poppy seeds are smaller.
Sye – I don’t do Bible studies with non-believers. I won’t discuss the truth in scripture.

Sye’s best moment
On how to know that the Quran is not the word of god.
The Quran is not the word of god. The Quran says the words of god cannot be corrupted which means the Bible is true. And if the Bible is true, the Quran is false.

 

 

for those not familiar;  http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sye_Ten_Bruggencate

Sye Ten Bruggencate^[1], a.k.a., Sye TenB., is an internet personality in his own right and a regular contributor to Eric Hovind's "Creation Today" videos. The videos promote anti-science and biblical literalism and disseminate provably false information about science with the goal of indoctrinating children and vulnerable adults.

Ten Bruggencate subscribes to the Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG) and accordingly to presuppositionalism, a branch of Christian apologetics.

Ten Bruggencate is internet famous for his aggressive indifference towards any reasoned response to his own argument; which consists of a single idea nowhere near as interesting as he insists it is. It is an argument based upon the widely discredited ideas of Immanuel Kant, with a reworking of a very old problem in the philosophy of mind tagged on the side; e.g., How do we know what we know is true, if we judge the reliability of our understanding according to attributes which are inherent to the very knowledge we wish to measure? Ten Bruggencate's refusal to accept that, when stripped of semantics, problems of this kind are rendered meaningless by accepting the primacy of existence axiom, often sees him play the hurt feelings card and use language synonymous with the "crazy Christian" stereotype.

Taking morality as an example of that which we wish to measure, Ten Bruggencate asserts that we can only know the difference between what is right and what is wrong if we have an absolute standard of morality by which to judge our actions against. As a Christian, Ten Bruggencate’s absolute standard of morality is the God of the bible, Yahweh.

When presented with the fact that, in the Bible, Yahweh repeatedly commands his adherents to carry out acts of genocide, rape, enslavement, torture and the genital mutilation of infants, Ten Bruggencate’s position is that those who point out this obvious challenge to God’s moral authority are in no position to judge His actions, since atheism cannot account for an absolute standard of morality.

He repeats this over and over on the assumption it will eventually either make sense, or distract attention away from the fact that the atheistic position on morality doesn’t in fact depend on the kind of absolutism he nevertheless insists it does.

Ten Bruggencate is extremely sincere in his religious beliefs and enthusiastic about sharing them with others. The Achilles' heel of his argument is a coupling of his refusal to accept the syllogism at the heart of his own proposal with his eagerness to reassign this characteristic towards anyone who happens to point it out.

Ten Bruggencate and atheism

Ten Bruggencate subscribes to an all-too-common view of atheism — that atheists are in willful denial of what they know to be true. His most notorious 15 megabytes of fame came when he issued a challenge to the illusionist, public speaker, outspoken atheist, executive producer of the TV series Bullshit and one half of the magic duo Penn & Teller, Penn Jillette to debate atheism versus Christianity.

There is no evidence Mr. Jillette ever received an invitation to this debate, and the only mention of it ever having been issued may be found on pro-creationist websites to which Ten Bruggencate is either directly or loosely affiliated.

 Circular reasoning

Ten Bruggencate's one idea comes in the form of a series of straw man arguments and creationist escape hatch questions, for which there is no "yes" or "no," "right" or "wrong" answer. These questions follow a cascading script of ever more irrational assumptions, so that no matter which answer to whichever question is given, it always leads to the same conclusion; chief among these is the argument that knowledge is impossible without an absolute source, ie. God.

In a podcast debate between Ten Bruggencate, Eric Hovind and the hosts of the Fundamentally Flawed podcast, both Hovind and Ten Bruggencate admitted on several occasions that presuppositional apologetics is circular in nature. Hence as a means of proving the existence of Yahweh it is a conclusion drawn from its own proposition and, therefore, any claim to have evidence for the existence of the Christian God is based upon a logical fallacy. Having realized they had inadvertently undone their own argument, the duo went on to assert that this is no different to the atheistic position on sense, reason and memory, since without a belief in God it is "impossible to prove anything," including Darwinian evolution by means of natural selection, the big bang, the age of the earth and myriad other scientific facts which have cast doubt over the alleged inerrancy of the Bible for hundreds of years.

Refutation confrontation

Ten Bruggencate denies that his methods are viciously circular (instead dubbing them 'virtuously circular'), despite that his own website demonstrates this perfectly. The basis of this claim is that because his arguments are based on God, they cannot be circular because God is the ultimate authority and only justification needed to validate his argument. So, basically, he knows he is right because God told him so, and he knows God is right because it says so in a book which tells him God is right. And he knows the book is right because God told him so. Basically, it's the definition of circular reasoning.

His understanding of what constitutes a valid criticism of circular reasoning, versus his denial that he uses exactly the same methods, has led some to speculate that he might be being deliberately provocative, in order to raise his profile as a public speaker; rather than because he genuinely believes the creator of the universe would choose to communicate with people who already believe He exists, by remaining invisible to those who have repeatedly proven the origins of the Yahweh myth reside in bronze-age folklore.

Ten Bruggencate uses a quote by Greg Bahnsen to explain his beliefs. Bahnsen, in Pushing the Antithesis, wrote:

In the Christian worldview, however, the Christian is not engaged in viciously circular argument, a circular argument on the same plane. We appeal above and beyond the temporal realm. God's self-revelation in nature and in Scripture informs us of the two-level universe. God is not a fact like other facts in the world. He is the Creator and Establisher of all else. His existence alone makes the universe, and reason, and human experience possible... ... The "circularity" of a transcendental argument is not at all the same as the fallacious "circularity" of an argument in which the conclusion is a restatement (in one form or another) of one of its premises.

For this reason Ten Bruggencate personifies many aspects of Poe's Law. For example, a page of buttons on Ten Bruggencate's Proof That God Exists webpage, appear to ask a series of multiple choice questions on logic and rational thinking. Each button literally links back on itself in an infinite loop, until the reader either clicks an answer button which makes a demonstrably false statement or is so ambiguously phrased that it couldn't possibly have been written by someone genuinely concerned with resolving their own confusion.

If, however, the reader continues to choose answer buttons which are intellectually honest, they are eventually directed to a cartoon website from the Walt Disney Corporation. But if the reader chooses an answer button which leads to the exit page the author always intended for them to reach, the promised proof that God exists is finally displayed, which simply reads, “The Proof that God exists is that without Him you couldn’t prove anything".

In 1920, the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists declared metaphysical truth-claims of this nature as essentially meaningless, so as to clarify the definition of concepts in empirical science as an exploration of their immediately observable content. This strict definition was later relaxed by Karl Popper, who favored the falsifiability of a theory over the verifiability of a hypothesis.

Ten Bruggencate’s entire argument is therefore predicated upon a semantic confusion between strict definitions of this kind in science, and the informal use of words such as theory and logic in common parlance. Therefore, as is also found with many other presuppositional apologists, his own inability to differentiate between a description of X and an analysis of the description itself, thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, leads him to incorrectly assume that because he cannot delineate what something describes from what it means, no-one else can either.

In addition, Ten Bruggencate's point that you cannot know anything without God is easily proven false by its own conditions. Firstly, if you were to admit that you couldn't know everything, then you of course could never know that God exists, disproving the basis for his argument. And secondly, his argument follows a flow of logic which tries to establish that if a person could be wrong about something, then they could be wrong about everything. This is faulty because there is one thing a person can know for certain about their knowledge, and that's that they don't know everything. If a person can be sure that they don't know everything, then they can be sure that they can't be wrong about everything, because they already know something. And they're not wrong about that. So, because a person can know this one thing, it is, in fact, possible to know something without God, meaning that God is unnecessary for knowledge.

Threats and lies

The mental acrobatics Ten Bruggencate has to perform, when presented with the facts about his methods, often results in a dark satire of religious groupthink and other forms of confirmation bias. That he is completely oblivious to the fact he demonstrates this every time he opens his mouth or sets pen to paper, has made him the unwitting poster-child of circular reasoning in various debating circles, albeit to an extremely limited clique.

Because of this, it has been argued that to merely engage him on the intellectual level he incorrectly assumes he is capable of operating on, is to give the fish all the oxygen he needs to outgrow his small pond. Others have argued that it is better to examine his ideas and reveal their weaknesses, than allow him to continue operating under the delusion that they have merit.

Ten Bruggencate therefore has a number of outstanding challenges open to him on many websites, blogs and discussion forums, which he rarely responds to directly, except to demand that other people account for his own misunderstanding; choosing instead to respond to his many critics by posting to his own comment-disabled blog, invariably with the aid of quote-mined snippets of text lifted from topics unrelated to the question at hand. This, and his repeated refusals to engage with his many critics on any topic outside of the TAG, has seen him banned from a number of websites and blog comment threads.

He frequently justifies his stonewall approach to debating any aspect of Christianity with non-Christians, by threatening them with the fires of hell for their failure to agree that to engage in such a conversation, would require that they first acknowledge the existence of Yahweh. Repeat, ad nauseam.

Unfortunately for the moderators of sites which are then given no choice but to ban him for using threatening language, this merely plays into his underlying persecution complex, leading him to play the hurt feelings card with anyone only willing to listen to his side of the story—which seldom bears any resemblance to a true reflection of the facts. Having been caught playing this game on numerous occasions, this has given rise to a supreme irony; that very often one of the few things both Christians and atheists can agree upon, in on-line debates which Ten Bruggencate has involved himself in, is that he alienates as many religious seeking common ground with non-believers, as he does atheists who demand nothing less than freedom of religious expression for their many interlocutors who, unlike Ten Bruggencate, do not make the case for Christianity by resorting to threats and fear theology.

Therefore, albeit to an extremely limited audience of dominionist evangelicals, who are either willfully ignorant of, or genuinely oblivious to the kind of bait and switch debating techniques he employes, Ten Bruggencate's exclusion from numerous debating forums is merely "yet more proof" that it is his ideas which atheists find uncomfortable, when in reality it is dealing with someone only interested in listening to themselves which proves the bigger challenge.