Let me ask a question or two.
1. In what way was my use of numbers or authority any different from.
a. Their use as substantiating material in every professional debate I have ever seen.
b. Peer review.
c. A Jury system.
d. Most court cases in the last several thousand years.
c. In traditional scholarship for the lest several thousand years.
Citing authorities, without mentioning or paraphrasing their argument, is not an acceptable scholarly practice, and you will not find it in professional debates, peer-reviewed journals, and so on. Nice try.
If virtually every show, book, or debate in scientific, historic, and philosophic arenas makes constant use of authority and even numbers at times
No, not in the manner you have been doing; i.e. citing the bare agreement as evidence. As I said, citing an expert is hardly fallacious- but you actually need to cite them; paraphrase/mention their argument- not just name-drop and say "so-and-so agrees with me".
It is specifically because I have spent far more time tracking down claims about multiverses than they deserve my claim is true.
Your claims belie one another; if you've spent any amount of time looking into multiverse models, then you know they are speculative, but nevertheless based on actual data. If you don't know this, then you clearly are unfamiliar with them- can't have it both ways. Multiverse models are, like all scientific models, posited to explain some set of data (in this case, CMB variations, fine-tuning, etc.), and which makes some predictions. Are they currently testable? No, and thats one reason why the theory remains speculative- but it does make predictions (Mersini-Houghtons, Aguirre), and it is based on empirical data- to claim otherwise is plain ignorance or dishonesty. Neither would surprise me in this case.
Nope, what I said. The arrogance displayed in your commentaries is so repulsive to me at the moment it renders replies unjustifiable.
Very convenient for you, then, that my intolerable sarcasm happens to occur during points which you are unable to answer, and so you have an easy excuse not to do so. Very, very convenient.
You implied I had not supplied evidence or something similar for a specific claim.
No, you whined and complained about how I never did what I had in fact
offered to do- an offer you refused, BTW. Once again, you can't have things both ways.
"A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. "
-http://www.iep.utm.edu/val-snd/
"An argument form is deductively valid if and only if it is impossible that its conclusion is false given its premises are true."
-https://www.msu.edu/user/blmiller/BasicLogic/DeductiveArguments.htm
"An argument is valid if it is impossible for its premises to be true while its conclusion is false. In other words, the conclusion must be true if the premises are true. An argument can be valid even though the premises are false."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning#Validity_and_soundness
We could go on here, since every single source under the sun that we care to pick will say the same thing, but hopefully you get the idea.
That is more what is required for a properly basic belief. In every court case ever decided it was possible the opposite conclusion could have been true, yet law decided (just as Christ did) that 12 people was enough to reach a reasoned conclusion with enough certainty to base life and death on it. Science, philosophy, nor faith has the burden you gave except where mentioned. It does not even pretend to, and in fact almost never meets it by accident.
The only burden a faith claim actually has is that it does not contradict reasonable certainties. I do not have to but I raise the bar for my claims to the best fit or best explanation (currently available) for evidence. My claims meet this unnecessary criteria and yours does not apply to anything in any realm except very where mentioned.
Yeah, none of this is relevant- the question was whether the cosmological argument was logically/deductively valid, which means that it logically entails the conclusion- it does not. And moving the goalposts isn't going to work here.
If your pet attempt to negate the established arguments of Aristotle, Plantinga, Philoponus, Saadia, Hackett, Bonaventure, Leibnez, Clarke, Aquinas, Craig, Gail, Pruss, and Islamic philosopher's, etc.... it most likely only deserves a hasty burial.
Notice how most of these are writers from MANY, MANY centuries ago, whose theories and systems have been either disproven or superseded (Aristotle, Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Leibniz etc.), and I seem to recall that Plantinga doesn't even claim that the cosmological argument is sound, but that it can be viewed as a probabilistic (deductively invalid, inductively probable) argument.
In any case, you're back to an argument from authority since, if we're discussing the argument these people endorsed, pointing out that they endorsed it is hardly going to carry any weight.
I did not say I did not know what logical validity is.
You didn't say that, you showed it.
You will find demands made on my behavior a waste if time. I have a much higher judge and authority than you. I will do as my conscience suggests, God requires of me.
Explain to me what the relevance of observable is first, so I know in what context your using the word observable. Are you suggesting only things verified by eyesight are valid? Are you talking about observable as in verifiable through experience? What?
Detectable, perceivable, discernible- and no, not just through eyesight.
That was the point, your question pre-supposed a burden nothing has I know of and certainly not faith claims. The questions is invalid so I did not answer it.
If there are no events or changes in the world which can
only be accounted by some god, there is no non-subjective, non-anecdotal and corroborative basis for holding that (any) god is real.
Most of the time I just wrote what comes to my mind and in that order. Hence, jumbled. LOL!