ericmurphy
Posts: 2460
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (Spike @ April 05 2006,22:29) | em,
"Not all of life comes down to yes/no answers." Is that statement true or untrue? If true, is it always true? Yes or no? |
Yes, it's true. It's always true. Not all questions have yes/no answers. Here's another one: what's your favorite color? Does that question have a yes/no answer? The converse, "All questions have yes/no answers," is clearly false. This is elementary logic.
| Quote | | "Have you stopped beating your wife?" has no answer because it is meaningless. Just because you can assemble words into a sentence doesn't make the sentence meaningful. |
It has an answer, and it has meaning, if you do in fact beat your wife. The sentence definitely has meaning in some circumstances. Asking what's north of most points on the globe has meaning, except at one point: the north pole.
| Quote | | Science is founded on yes/no questions. |
Nope. The vast majority of scientific questions do not have yes/no answers. What's the speed of light? The temperature of the CMB? The mass of the electron. I could go on forever.
| Quote | | All moral tests are a choice between good and bad. Yes or no. |
Wrong again. An action can be wrong in some circumstances, and right in others. Normally it's wrong to kill your dog. Is it wrong to put your dog to sleep if he's got incurable cancer? You don't have to be a moral relativist to understand that there are plenty of things (one might even say most things) that are not right under all circumstances, or wrong under all circumstances.
Further, some moral questions are a matter of less bad, or more good. Plenty of moral issues are points on a curve. Most people (most rational people, that is) would deny that disposing of a freshly-fertilized ovum is "murder," but hardly anyone would deny that terminating a pregnancy three minutes before birth is murder.
Again, life is not a matter of moral absolutes. It's intellectual laziness to think otherwise.
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2006 MVD award for most dogged defense of scientific sanity
"Atheism is a religion the same way NOT collecting stamps is a hobby." —Scott Adams
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