From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Friday, November 05, 2004 8:51 AM
To: 'Gary Kirkland'
Subject: RE: god

Fearing that I misunderstand something is not an argument.

You made an unsupported assertion. I asserted that your assertion evinces a misunderstanding, but I did so in a polite way. Please don't mistake my politeness for something that it doesn't purport to be.

Logic is just correct reasoning.  Reason, correct or not, does not explain everything that exists or happens. 

This does not constitute an argument for your earlier assertion that "many parts of the world may not be logical". You seem to think that "logical" means the same thing as "explainable", which suggests that I was correct in diagnosing a misunderstanding by you.

Because most things have a start, and very few do not, I think I know enough based on experience to state that it is equally likely that the universe had a start as not.

You can vouch for your own empirical authority all you want, but doing so won't make your hunches about empirical cosmological probabilities very persuasive. (Note again that probabilities are not the same thing as possibilities. As I said, they're indeed equally possible.)

The Big Bang Theory advocates that this universe had a start.

Not exactly. We have no fully-developed theory of the singularity; we just know what happened after it.

This is the only universe I have experienced.  Ipso facto it is the only universe.

That depends on what you think it means for a world to "be".

My definition of metaphysics is postulating something beyond physics, as the etymology of the word roots indicate.

Metaphysics: the study of ultimate reality. It includes Ontology, which is the study of what it means to "be".

Supernatural means beyond nature, the same concept as metaphysics.

Supernaturalism is to metaphysics as creationism is to biology. Supernaturalism is a metaphysical thesis, but it is not the same thing as metaphysics.

Facts are things I believe to be true.  What is a fact to you may not be to me.  We live in different worlds.

Your world of convenient subjectivism is indeed alien to me.

Whether the world was created or not, cause and effect is a useful "god."

Thank you for at least using scare quotes. These facts remain:
P.S. Good job in your electoral results!  If you have any tips for those of us who didn't do as well, please share to the candidates' list.