I am convinced now that Loke is not a rational agent worth engaging. Nothing he ever wrote or said in reply to me even acknowledges what I said, much less rebuts it, and this has happened so many times now that I see no value in giving him any more of our time. He is just a broken record at this point.

However, if you can identify any specific, quotable statement in those two sources (and I need a quote and for the video at least roughly the minute around which it appears) that (1) actually addresses anything I have actually said and (2) I have not already refuted, do please point it out.

I will reward that effort with a response, because you are a rational agent.

Otherwise, I cannot justify the labor anymore. What I have already said already refutes everything they are saying.

Highlighting Richard Carrier’s TOP Errors on the Cosmological Argument

Link to Dr. Loke’s written response: https://www.academia.edu/115795811/60…

He means “by that kind of standard,” i.e. he means there is no logical demonstration of the impossibility or necessity of theism.

When asked about inductive arguments to a probability (the only actual arguments we have) he concludes God is not probable. Which is why he concludes “the naturalistic worldview is simpler and…there is no data that favors” any other view over it.

I think he is being too generous to theism (see Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Ten Arguments for God Destroyed and Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed) but I suspect that is because he is there speaking of theism simpliciter (any Cartesian Demon; hence his simplicity standard) and not theism as practiced in the world (e.g. read his distinction between a god simpliciter and the god of Christianity in his article on why he is not a Christian).

I was curious to know your thoughts on Graham Oppy’s comments regarding there being no compelling arguments on either side (atheism or theism) in an interview he gave to Alex O’Connor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qgl0gu1BlQ&t=3803s

Considering that he’s a naturalist, and he explains this view holds (according to him) because it is simpler, and explains all pertinent observations as well as theism does, if not better.

My point is that Kripke was confusing logical necessity (if semantically we choose to define “water” and “H2O” in a certain way, such that we would exclude anything as water people had otherwise been calling water even if we found out it was made of something else, then they are logically necessarily the same, but only arbitrarily: we chose to simply define them that way) with physical necessity (in this world, we have found out, the only way to get a liquid people would identify and use as water is by a certain arrangement of hydrogen and oxygen atoms) and then from that confusion inventing a fake third category of metaphysical necessity. That category does not exist. Only the other two do.

Physical necessity can logically change (we can build a different world in which that wasn’t the case, e.g. if we ever live in simulated universes, in no way will water in those universes even be H2O, much less “have to be”). And there is no way to get a semantic logical necessity to change that. When Galen was studying water, he had no way of knowing what physics were really required, and he believed instead that it was an irreducible element and thus not H2O; had we found out Galen was right, Kripke would have been refuted; and Kripke cannot change this outcome with semantics, because you can never change what a thing is by changing what you call it.

So, water cannot “logically necessarily” be H2O (it wasn’t two thousand years ago); nor can it “physically necessarily” be H2O (because we can make worlds where it physically isn’t). And there is no other way water can “necessarily” be H2O.

Although I sometimes find Kripke’s argument tricky, I still don’t think your challenge is successful.

Kripke doesn’t suggest that “‘Water is H2O’ is a (metaphysical) necessary truth” but he suggests that “If water is H2O, then ‘water is H2O’ is a (metaphysical) necessary truth.” The problem he wanted to deal with is the necessity of name and identity. He doesn’t believe that there is contingent identity, which is a valid point to me, as the concept of identity itself spells out certain level of necessity. Therefore, he doesn’t care what water is actually composed of (the fact of the composition of water is irrelevant to his argument), he only cares when we use the name x, x should carry a (metaphysical) necessary relation to its referent.

Your point is relevant when it concerns logical or epistemic modality. As I agree that water defined as something drinkable, fluid, colorless or with slightly blue tint, etc, is not H2O in some possible worlds. Water in this sense can be not H2O (given that we don’t consider the actual referent of water in the first place), is a logical or epistemic possibility, and the scope of such possibilities are broader.

Your challenge of water can be something else is irrelevant, as if scientific evidence were to establish that water is composed of something other than H2O, as long as the name “water” rigidly refers to its referent, Kripke’s argument could still hold.

I need a reason to bother reading it. He is making his replies into ever-long word-walls that never actually respond to me. The latest one is 13,000 words. His track record (twice now) is to not even answer my points but just repeat his own. I’ve spent far more time on this nonsense than it deserves already.

So if you want my thoughts, please pare that down to a single page of points actually worth my time reading.

Loke has never made any argument that it is metaphysically but not logically necessary (that is, IMO, an unintelligible concept anyway, so I would have rebutted it had he made it). But since you are now making that argument…

Kripke was wrong. Water is only H2O when the physics says it is. Indeed, there is water with different properties, e.g. heavy water and light water are isotopes of H2O and not identical to it (they have different neutron counts and thus different masses and other properties), and radioactive water (likewise; e.g. unusually high neutron counts in its oxygen molecules will make water radioactively lethal to animals and plants). And yet we all call all of them water. We didn’t even know these different kinds of water existed until the 20th century. So evidently it was never the case that water had to be only H2O, even on present physics; more so in alien physics.

Different physics can get us water without hydrogen or oxygen or any specific arrangement of them. So there is no special third category. Here, where we exist, it is physically necessary that water be H2O (if we fudge the meaning of H2O to include all isotopes thereof), but that is therefore a contingent fact (because it is not logically necessary: there are possible worlds in which it is not true).

Those are the only kinds of possibility and necessity: physical or logical; and everything that is not logically necessary is contingent.

So there is no way to get to Loke’s conclusion with these semantic tricks.

For example, God can make water that is not made of molecules at all, but is a continuous irreducible element: exactly as Aristotle imagined. When there is no physics, there is no truth as to what water “has” to be or be made of. Likewise, when there are no principles, there is no principle of causation. This cannot be gotten around by changing the word “physics” to “metaphysics.”

I’m not bothering to read 12,000 word monstrosity from him again. He said nothing worth replying to last time, nor in the debate. So I have no reason to believe it is worth any time to read this. He’s just building ever-larger wordwalls. I need a reason to care.

So please do let me know if you can find any statement in there that (1) is even relevant to my argument here and that (2) I haven’t already refuted with it.