What led you to God?

Sigh. You make me SO glad RR posts here.Logic, friend, logic.

What you are saying is so clear and logical, why doesn't anyone get it? And you DID say it better than I did, in fewer words. More than once.

Subjective purposes (or what I called lower-case plural purposes), are determined by ourselves or by the thing itself.Cars don't have subjective purposes.Objective purposes (or what I called capital-P Purpose), are determined by the maker of the thing, including human beings IF we have a Maker, and IF He had a reason for making us rather than just tossing a bunch of nuts and bolts together, or making a chemical soup to see what it could do.RR is right about the objective Purpose of cars. Yes, their use is their formal Purpose, or their objective Purpose. What they were made for.If we have no Maker, he is also right about there being no formal Purpose or objective Purpose for human beings. We have only our varied subjective purposes.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-18-2006 01:03 PM

I honestly cannot follow your thinking, Lfen. There's nothing so philosophically complicated about what I've been saying about purpose v Purpose, and our problem communicating may be that rather than Aristotle or Plato. It's pretty simple, commonsensical I would say. Not about Ideals or anything so highfalutin. The car was made for the purpose of transporting us. That's its Purpose. It has no purposes of its own. We have lots of purposes of our own, but what is in question here is whether we have a Purpose.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-18-2006 03:05 PM

That's a completely other subject, Lfen {oops, sidelined}. I can get into it if you want, but at the moment the subject is not anybody's EXPECTING there to be a Purpose. In context, it's a purely formal logical statement that there is a question as to whether we do or not have such a Purpose. All this, again, is another subject. Some may have such a "want for more," some may not. Such wants or the lack of them are in the realm of "subjective" purposes. Many people don't ask at all whether human beings have an "objective" Purpose. That is not what we are talking about.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-18-2006 04:16 PM

Oops. Well, one sort-of-circular picture gets confused with another I guess. Sorry.

That is correct. That is what it was made for. That is its objective capital-P purpose. That is correct. We made it, that is what it was made for, the cat doesn't know anything about it. Not so. It has the purpose of transportation. That's what it was made for. By us for us. That's correct. The cat does not have a clue to the car's objective capital-P Purpose. The cat does, however, have its own subjective purposes, which include liking the warmth of the car when it's not being taken to the vet in it perhaps. That is true. We have our own subjective purposes no matter what. This is a very confused statement I think. The car's Purpose is to transport us. That is what we made it for. It has not been established here whether we have a Maker or what His purpose might be in making us, but logically speaking if He made us for a Purpose that IS our capital-P objective Purpose whether we use ourselves for that Purpose or not. This is getting rather sophistic if you don't mind my saying so. The distinction that has been made many times on this thread accounts for there being many different purposes at once. Nevertheless when we make something we do make it for an objective Purpose even though it may be used for all kinds of other purposes. But we aren't defining Purpose by who drives the car but by who made it and what it was made for. See above.We haven't established whether we were made for a Purpose or not. It may be that we have nothing but our own subjective purposes, use ourselves for those purposes alone. That is robinrohan's belief. An objective Purpose is still a possibility apart from anything we may choose to do with ourselves. Not so. Purpose established by a Maker has been clearly shown to be objective, and all other uses quite possible and subjective.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-18-2006 04:32 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 01-18-2006 04:32 PM

No, I am not. I am disagreeing with you that there is a difference. What the maker makes the item FOR is its Purpose. If you want to use it for a planter that's your purpose, it's not the Purpose the car was made for. You've got yourself so entangled in a logic mess there is no extricating you I'm afraid.

The purpose of carving an elephant is to express an elephant, no matter what else you might want to do with it.Hey, I've said what I think. We will just go on disagreeing. Truce.

"arbitrary" is practically synonymous with free will: American Heritage Dictionary

quote:

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1. Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle: stopped at the first motel we passed, an arbitrary choice. 2. Based on or subject to individual judgment or preference: The diet imposes overall calorie limits, but daily menus are arbitrary (meaning up to the dieter's free choice).

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Why should he be able to? He already said that such a formal purpose, if it exists in a particular case, exists independently of whether a Martian or anybody else recognizes it or not. Being able to identify the purpose is irrelevant to the point. The way RR used the term did not imply the meaning of "lack" in the sense of a deficit or misfortune as opposed to a "benefit." It was merely a logical statement, as in "Items #1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 clearly have a formal purpose, but #7 lacks one." No value judgment is implied.