Kelly Tripplehorn describes the challenge:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-aIsI6EYcA
Kelly Tripplehorn at Snopes:http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/tripplehorn.asp

A challenge to atheists to prove a negative (not possible with any proposition) based on an unsubstantiated premise. I challenge Paul Kelly Tripplehorn to prove he doesn't have an invisible gerbil up his whitebread ass.

Not quite. He wasn't a TV evangelist. I'm not trying to back up this guy (I think his argument is a crock of shit), but...we're not supporters of using ad hominems, right?

I'd agree with you on that, MrRage, if I anticipated the question of character was off the table. If he considers nature a confirmation of ham-fisted mythology, it's easy (but admittedly presumptuous) to suppose he considers morality proof as well.

 

From his site:

“In the summer of 2003, I was an intern in Washington D.C. at the Senior Texas Senator’s office representing the Honorable Kay Bailey Hutchison. Though the Holy Spirit had come into me 2 months earlier, I was still susceptible to my insecurities and misjudgments. I said some very hateful, unchristian things in an email to a fellow employee that offended her deeply.“

Wow, just wow.

I guess I'm a little tired of bashing people, but this is more than that. I see where you're going with this. 1 Cor 5:17 "Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come."

What a pathetic individual. Quoting from the i53 site:

What a drama queen. I have a lesson for him: Meaning will not kill you or help you live. You can do without meaning altogether. 

Mr. Intellectual suddenly decides to think one day. If he'd started sooner, maybe taken some lessons in thinking, he wouldn't have made so many mistakes in his thinking.

How Freudian... 

If I had to guess, I'd say he was feeling a little guilty about doing nothing but masturbating all day. Anyway, he didn't figure out by thinking about it that he was a sinner. Someone implanted that demonseed in him long before this.

Mainly god, sure, but not only god. Wouldn't want to upset the other higher powers out there. Everyone knows that higher powers can't tie their own shoelaces with people serving them all the time. And it would be bigotry to serve one higher power but not all of them.

Through the 'uniformity of god'

Seriously.

The problem, however, is that even if the theist could demonstrate a uniformity of god, it wouldn't solve the problem of induction:

Two reasons:

1) The uniformity is a non solution because the problem of induction has nothing to do with the assumption of uniformity of nature, it has to do with the problem of making inferences regarding the future - and the UON asssumption is a necesary, but not a sufficient justificationfor such an inference in the first place! So neither would an assumption of a uniformity of god!

Why?

That leads us to point 2

2) As Howson & Urbach point out, assuming a uniformity of nature is a nonsolution, since it's a fairly empty assumption. For how is nature uniform? And what, really, are we talking about. What would really be needed are millions upon millions of uniformity assumptions for each item under discussion. We'd need one for the melting temperature of water, of iron, of nickel, etc, etc. For example "block of ice x will melt at 0 Celsius;" for these types of assumptions actually say something. Furthermore, the uniformity of nature assumptions fall prey to meta-uniformity issues - for how are we to know that nature will always be uniform? Well, we have to assume that too. And how do we know that the uniformity of nature is uniform? Ad infinitum. So, to "solve" induction by uniformity of nature solutions doesn't really work.

So,the presupper doesn't even grasp the actual nature of the problem of induction, most likely because he's never even read Hume.

I demonstrate this in more detail here:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/an_easy_argument_to_refute_van_tillian_calvinist_presuppositionalism

 An actual solution for the problem of induction is Bayesian theory, which gives induction a deductive foundation:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/why_the_problem_of_induction_really_isnt_a_problem_and_why_theists_dont_even_get_it_right

 Not everyone accepts Bayesian theory as "the" solution, but not everyone accepts evolution either....

 

I'm not finding the first link, todangst.

The second one was specifically for this challenge so that's the better one anyway.

I still want my $1,000 for the electricity bill and a party. 

 

Though I have no doubt you can answer the challenge, the post claims the judge will be the philosophy department at Stanford University. Stanford's a great university, wouldn't their philosophy dept. be able to understand your response?

Yep. BYOB though because I don't know what everyone drinks. I'll even get the caterer to include veggie platters.

I think I have a good chance since I used christian-type presuppositionalism and todangst used rational logic. Got to know how to talk to the masses, y'know.

I'm not refering to Stanford, I'm refering to the idiots offering the 1000 dollars.... Stanford has nothing to do with this challenge, all we have is the claim that they will be a judge... they are not presenting the challenge, nor are they involved with the phoney offer of reward......

If you peruse the Stanford philosophy site, you'll not find any reference to presuppositonalism as the response to the problem of induction! The philosophers who discuss the problem all offer coherent (i.e. naturalistic) responses. The debate is over the fact that some still feel there is no one satisfactory response, (think of this akin to the evolution debate)

So we already see one bit of dishonesty in this 'challenge'...

 

Of course. They'd already have my response in fact. But Stanford has nothing to do with the 1000 dollar challenge... so your already falling for this theistic bullshit... they are attempting to get people to believe that Stanford is making this challenge, when in fact I'm not aware of any serious philosphical response to the problem that DOES rely on a 'god' reference. I don't see anyone in the Stanford philosophy department making the argument "god", therefore induction.

From http://i53network.org/The_Stanford_Challenge.html: "The two videos below fill out the details of the challenge. All you need to do in order to collect your $1,000 is get your non-theistic answer published (concerning your epistemological warrant for your inductive inference) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, under its heading The Problem of Induction."

First of all, there is no mention of any such challenge on the Stanford site, especially on the page on "the problem of induction," where such would be expected.

Secondly: at the bottom of the page on "the problem of induction," it reads: "Copyright © 2006 by John Vickers <[email protected]>." The "cgu" in John Vickers' email address indicates that he is the same John Vickers who is the Professor of Philosophy at the Claremont Graduate University. Why would a professor's entry in an encyclopedia be open to amateur contributions? Well, it very likely wouldn't be, because it's not an entry in Wikipedia for fuck sakes, it's an entry in a scholarly source. Additionally, I'm sure the professors on the editorial board don't have time for amateur contributions, as they usually are poor, insignificant, in error, etc., whereas scholarly contributions are likely to be worth the time looking at. Here is a brief description of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

http://plato.stanford.edu/about.html

"From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field."

So, the SEP entries don't appear to be open to contributions from amateurs, yet "The Stanford Challenge" is open to anyone. Additionally, how likely is it that an atheist, logic/philosophy scholar will respond to this poorly-presented challenge, let alone be aware of it in the first place? Obviously the challenge is rigged so no money is really at stake. What's new?

So this is what the logical conclusion is: whoever issued "The Stanford Challenge" did so unilaterally and disingenuously with the purpose of gaining emotional gratification. The person(s?) behind this challenge is a joke.

EDIT:

Good, I'm not the only one who saw through this bullshit challenge.

I'm sure that was the intent.  

More reasons why this challenge is a joke.

I have a challenge for Kelly Tripplehorn: "Produce a statement (dated before the time of this post) from the philosophy department at Stanford University which says they agreed to be 'the disinterested third party judge' in 'The Stanford Challenge.'"

In the video, you Induced that if you dropped a fork it will fall to the ground. Your method of induction was incorrect. What if it was metal and I dropped it in a magnetic field? How's that for uniformity?

 

$1,000 plz

 

 

Lol.

 

Just read the site some more, it's a fountain of ignorance.

 

Here they give the same old, pathetic, argument that abstractions are immaterial:

If you answered that the law of noncontradiction is material, then in order to collect your money, you must give an empirical demonstration

 

 What other types of demonstration are there?

 

of where the law of noncontradiction is located.

 

Simple. In a brain.  The demonstration is that I can provide you with the law by telling you about it.

 

Moreover, you must tell us, in pounds, the exact weight of the law of noncontradiction.

 

The law is encoded, neurochemically, in my brain. The bundle of neurons devoted to the concept are in my cerebral cortex... I don't see the value of weighing these neurons for you... seeing as your arugment is based on a ridiculous strawman fallacy that the idea just exists as a 'concept' floating about without any substance.

 

 

Lastly, if you claim that the law of noncontradiction is located in an object like a symbolic logic textbook, then you must prove that if the textbook was destroyed, the law of noncontradiction would perish with it.

 
The concept is created a priori, whenever a sentient brain  contemplates  existence. Now, you tell me: how can something exist immaterially? How can an idea exist without a brain?

 

I'll add 10k of my own on top of it. Canadian currency. At the rate the economy is moving, we'll be back ahead of the US dollar in no time, so I'm technically offering even more if you choose your timing right.