Recent content by Mahler765

I suppose I never considered free will being defined as the ability to do whatever you want - including defying your reality. If being able to overcome the laws of physics is a requirement for free will, and let's suppose that you can...then you encounter that higher-level of argumentation...

I'm not exactly sure why people try to use mathematics and physics to try to prove free will... Human beings obey different laws than math and science. One of the very first posts on this thread talked about humans not having free will because we can not choose to disobey the laws of...

To cshum00 First of all, there are only two states of being. Either God does exist or He doesn't. So the probability is either 0 or 1. If you have other numbers to through in there, I'd love to see how you calculated them. You sort of said this yourself. Same goes for the Bible. Although...

Determinism vs. Free Will This is the way I look at systems that behave according to a determine system of rules and systems that actively make decisions. In chemistry, molecules automatically pursue the lowest energy state possible...hence the influence of entropy. In quantum mechanics...

I believe the key word in your definition is "ineffable" meaning that the feeling is inexpressible in language or by any other means. It must be known by experience and you can't communicate that experience to another person.

Civil Disobedience works only because it challenges what extent the individual is willing to go to. In Ghandi's situation, large groups of people would simply allow themselves to be hurt but the idea is that you can't stop them just by hurting them, you have to actually kill them. It worked...

I have a friend who is trying to create a theoretical perfect society. He believes that war is bad and unnecessary and is therefore trying to keep war out of his perfect society. He believes that the main cause of war is a strong feeling of nationalism and other such sentiments. His solution...

It's no less meaningful than basing an argument on the assumption that we can understand everything. Both arguments have the same possibility of being false and if it's false, it has no meaning whatsoever. That's what philosophy is, isn't?

The simplest and probably the most common example of ontology that I've come across is the ontological proof of God. It may be elementary but it might help you understand what it is. The ontological proof of God basically states that by definition God is perfect and absolutely perfect...

Delayed Answers Why can't the noumena exist? I refer to them in plural because if one exists why can't another. It has nothing to do with what can or can not be observed with the naked eye. It is simply a matter of a statement being supported by different amounts of evidence. A law...

Theory of Forms Knowledge does have evidence just like a belief. However everything that we claim to "know" in this world is a belief because whatever has happened in the past is not required to happen in the future. Thus we must base our beliefs on what has happened in the past. The...

I think Creationists are operating from a lack of understanding of thermodynamics when they go this route (particularly the fact that the Sun's presence 93 million miles away makes the Earth far from a closed system), but maybe that just means I am a brainwashed lackey of the Evolutionists...

Define Things First Everyone keeps giving examples of the difference between knowledge and belief but they are all different examples of different things because knowledge and belief have not been defined. For my personal argument, knowledge is an absolute belief while belief is a statement...

As to the slug question. When I took the aerospace engineering course at Duke, we used it a lot. My understanding is that something equivilent to a Newton. English units are used in all the aerospace equations in the atmosphere. So the air pressure at sea level is something like 2377 x 10...

Thanks for the Help I'm used to discouragement by now so don't worry about it. Your suggestions for alternative variables are really great ideas. What exactly is FEMLAB? I'm in Birmingham, Alabama so I may even be able to find something like that in Huntsville with the Space and Rocket...