Talk:Proposed debate summaries

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Does God exist?

Matthias, I didn't really want to edit this before conferring with you, but I saw that you added these two items to the "Does God exist?" question:

• Agnostic ("We do not have or even can not have a confirmed answer".)
• Positivistic ("The question has no sense".)

We could, of course, go even further; for example, we could offer deistic, animistic, pantheistic, and polytheistic responses as well. But I think that relatively focused debate summaries will be better. In particular, I think the debate between agnosticism and its competitors is a nicely distinguishable topic, definable as the answer to "Is it possible to know whether God exists or not?" Similarly, the view you label positivistic can be nicely canvassed in answer to "Is God-talk even meaningful?" (or something like that).

Now, given that those options are possible, I am wondering on what basis we might choose to group all the different debates together, as you suggest, or to split them apart, as I have just suggested. Clearly, the advantage of grouping the questions together, as you do, is that it might allow the user a "God's eye view" (so to speak) of all the questions that must be settled to answer the question "Does God exist?" intelligently. I do not think that that is a very well-defined approach, though, because it's hard to say what the dimensions of that topic are. Shouldn't you also list deism and pantheism too, for instance? If one interprets it in the simple way I have--to mean "are the arguments for or against the existence of God any good?"--the result is something that strikes me as better-defined and clearer. Furthermore, a series of better-defined and clearer questions can then be put.

What do you think?

--Larry Sanger 23:44, 9 August 2006 (PDT)

Ok, lets do it so that the main debate here is between atheism and agnosticism, and we make some reference to deism, pantheism, agnosticism and positivistic views an those other question. Let them be on a separate debate and only link them here. Lets keep here only the main part of the debate.

--Math 03:12, 10 August 2006 (PDT)

Can you please be only the moderator of this debate? I would take the negative stand. --Math 03:14, 10 August 2006 (PDT)

Is knowledge possible?

Declarative knowledge means propositional, theoretical knowledge, right? --Math 07:13, 10 August 2006 (PDT)

It's also called "propositional knowledge" by philosophers, yes. It's knowledge of the "S knows that p" variety. --Larry Sanger 10:26, 10 August 2006 (PDT)

No quorums yet

Gentlemen, thanks very much for jumping in!

There are no quorums yet for any of these questions, however, so creating the pages was a bit premature. Not that I care very much--I'm actually quite glad you're eager to get on with it, and so am I. I just think we need to wait for a full complement of personnel, and then I'll designate moderators, who can designate lead summarists. --Larry Sanger 10:38, 10 August 2006 (PDT)