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An obvious point poorly presented Rubin, Ephraim Jul 12, 2004

Reading A. Eterman's essay "On Orthodox Discourse" leaves the strange impression that its author was so eager to restate the obvious that he neither took time to work out a careful presentation nor gave thorough thought to the real point of contention between him and his opponents.
To begin with, it is quite risky to suggest that "a treatise devoted to the problem of charging interest among the Jews" and written in the vein of traditional Jewish scholarship would lead its reader to a conclusion that "anyone who charges interest or refuses to give interest-free loans to Jews is a sinner and a heretic, that real Orthodox Jews conduct their dealings without charging any interest, or that Orthodox business does not use bank credit as a matter of principle." The Rabbinic authorization for charging interest to Jews -- called heter iskah -- has long ago entered the mainstream of Jewish legal thought, and it is reasonable to expect it to be mentioned in any treatise dealing with these issues. Traditional Jewish scholarship -- at least its legal branch -- is not lunatic; it does its best to keep up with real life as the practitioners of this scholarship know it. On the other hand, of course, a treatise of the kind suggested by Eterman would likely note that although charging interest to Jews is technically permissible, it is a deed of righteousness to refrain from charging such interest -- and again, in the realm of the real life there are occasions when Orthodox Jewish individuals and organizations extend interest-free loans to other Jews in the framework of charity.

[continued]

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On Orthodox discourse

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Tremblay contra Craig Meeker , Brent Jun 20, 2004

Francois Tremblay points to several flaws in Craig's Kalam argument. But one is dubious; that nothing can come nothing is a logical truth. That may be in some formal system of mathematics or logic, but the argument isn't about formal systems but rather about physical existence. Can something physical come from physical nothing? We haven't observed that and, as Tremblay notes, conservation of energy is a well established principle of physics. But that doesn't mean that you can't get something from nothing. As a quick perusal of recent cosmogony papers on arXiv.org will show, many theoretical calculations of the total energy of the universe find the value to be zero. The negative potential energy of gravity balances the positive energy of matter. So it may well be that something, in fact everything, came from nothing. All that we see is just "nothing" rearranged.

Brent Meeker

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Dembski's Backlash Article shepherdmoon@yahoo.com Jun 15, 2004

Has anyone reviewed and prepared a commentary on this article by William Dembski?

DEALING WITH THE BACKLASH
AGAINST INTELLIGENT DESIGN
By William A. Dembski
version 1.1, April 14, 2004
http://tinyurl.com/yvqsl

It seems to have a lot in it that is worth exploring and refuting. I'd encourage having one of the more experienced writers (such as Elsberry) read the article closely and present as dispassionate a response as possible. Dembski wants to give readers the impression that those who accept evolution spend most of their time fuming emotionally without addressing any of ID's substance. It should be made clear that this is not the case in general even if it is true among amateur debaters on the Internet.

Sincerely,
shepherdmoon
moderator
IntelligentDesignUpdate
Yahoo! Groups

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Sleep as FWD rebuttal rather limited? Tremblay, Francois Jun 15, 2004

As one with a keen interest on what Talk Reason calls counter-apologetics (or as I like to call it, atheology), and having published a few articles about it, I was very interested in Mr. Plugaru's argument against the FWD.

His points about the necessity of sleep being a denial of free will, and sleep being the best, least ambiguous example of such properties, are powerful and well noted.

However, I find his argument from sleep to be rather limited. That is to say, it does answer satisfactorily to a certain kind of FWDs, the kind that focus not on the moral balance entailed by our specific kind of FW, or on FW being fundamentally unchangeable, but rather on FW as an absolute value.

In the first case, believers may argue a god holds FW as "valuable" (although that term cannot mean anything for a god) and wants to effect it, given that the existence of FW does not entail more evil than the sum of all goods. Believers may then point out that effecting FW to a greater extent (including eliminating sleep) may entail overwhelming evil, although this is little more than hypothetical. Perhaps an argument may be constructed around rejecting this hypothesis, but Mr. Plugaru did not make it.

In the second case, believers posit that FW is inherently acausal and therefore beyond a god's capacity to change and completely random. Furthermore, the possibility of everyone acting for good makes a state without human evil possible. In such a case, a god could have created humans who don't need to sleep, but it would not affect the balance of good and evil. The argument therefore does not seem to assume any specific amount of FW, since FW is seen as a completely random, irrelevant factor. This argument is easily disproven by disproving acausal FW, but it is not disproven by the sleep objection.

The case where FW is considered as intrinsically valuable by a hypothetical Creator is, as Mr. Plugaru points out, well disproven by the sleep objection.

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Monty Hall problem Tremblay, Francois Jun 15, 2004

To Mark Perakh:

I appreciated your letter about the Monty Hall problem with the three doors. Before yesterday, I thought the solution was absurd and illogical. Your post seemed ridiculous. After making the calculations again, I realized that everything you wrote was completely correct.

Thanks!

Yours in Reason,
Francois Tremblay

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Improbable Probabilities

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