Religious experience has rendered atheism null and void to me
I was once strictly focussed on intellectualism with my view on theism being agnostic leaning towards atheism. Remaining on the fence of the argument was the most reasonable position for the God debate it seemed.
However, after I recovered from mental illness I started having profound religious experiences. That were entirely positive.
And now no amount of well-conceived and consistent argument would detract from that. I now know God exists. It's a certainty in my eyes. And there can be no alternate understanding for me any more.
These experiences have rendered the arguments of atheists quite laughable, and almost desperate to me. Where I used to find them somewhat compelling and impressive. Extremely impressive, but never convincing. Very well constructed bullshit basically.
I wish so many well-versed intellectuals wouldn't waste their talent arguing a fundamentally void position here.
God is beautiful..And Richard Dawkins just isn't.
However, after I recovered from mental illness I started having profound religious experiences. That were entirely positive.
And now no amount of well-conceived and consistent argument would detract from that. I now know God exists. It's a certainty in my eyes. And there can be no alternate understanding for me any more.
These experiences have rendered the arguments of atheists quite laughable, and almost desperate to me. Where I used to find them somewhat compelling and impressive. Extremely impressive, but never convincing. Very well constructed bullshit basically.
I wish so many well-versed intellectuals wouldn't waste their talent arguing a fundamentally void position here.
God is beautiful..And Richard Dawkins just isn't.
Comments (779)
The argument is foolish and futile, I think, but arises from the belief that God's existence is something which can, or should be, established in a particular way; through reasoning or something approximating the scientific method. Atheists evidently believe this is the case, but believers do as well, and invite argument by maintaining that God's existence can be so established.
Define God.
Quoting colin
These people haven't presumably had these experiences of yours, so how are you to blame them?
Many of them would likely start believing in what you call God (whatever that is) if they had the same or similar experiences as you have. So the question becomes how one has those experiences and why God appears to be so choosy in who has them. (Hopefully mental illness is not a prerequisite for them!)
That's not certainty. That's a single-minded assertion no matter what.
In other words, you don't care about whether God exists or not, for if you did, then you would at least bother to investigate and argue for that your experience is, indeed, an experience of God, and not something else (e.g. a synaptic screw-up).
Argument is simply providing reason that rational others should accept or reject some proposition. Persuasive reason normally consists in coherent logical analysis and empirical evidence.
First-hand experiences and interpretation of their meaning on the order of "I had profound religious experiences" are notoriously convincing and intractable for the person who actually experiences them, but personal conviction does not constitute sufficient reason that rational others should subscribe to your proposition. Such testimony counts as empirical evidence, but of the weakest, most unreliable kind, and is exactly the same evidence used by others in support of propositions (Ganesh, Horus, Athena ...) that are logically inconsistent with your proposition. If logically inconsistent propositions are based on essentially the same evidence, then such evidence does not provide reason to accept the proposition, and the "argument" fails. This does not demonstrate that the proposition is false, merely that the argument presented in support of it fails to demonstrate that the proposition is true.
Atheist arguments simply are challenges to the logic and evidence offered in theistic arguments.
Why do you say the existence of God is "logically inconsistent" with the existence of "Ganesh, Horus and Athena"?
Reasonable points and well expressed. But another thing to consider is that in today's culture, there is an implicit attitude as to what might be considered as 'evidence' at all. Empricism, for instance, insists that evidence consist of data that can be replicated by others and in that sense, is not something that is dependent on the first-person perspective. I suppose you could say that empiricism attempts as far as possible to bracket out the first-person perspective so as to discover facts that are able to be quantified and replicated in the third person. (This is the basis of the title of Thomas Nagel's book The View from Nowhere).
However, an element which this excludes is the testimony of sages. I suppose that very phrase is redolent of an earlier ages and times. Nevertheless, in the sapiential (i.e. wisdom) traditions, there is an understanding that the wise are able to understand truths which the untrained do not; that is practically a definition of wisdom. Think for example of the lectures of Plotinus, although there are many other examples, such as the dialogues of Plato, and the early Buddhist texts; but this manner of discourse is something found in many schools of traditional philosophy as well as religion ( as discussed by Pierre Hadot.)
Now the point is, much of that kind of testimony is also excluded by modern atheism, regardless of its potential veracity, because it requires and involves a first-person perspective and commitment. So it is excluded as a matter of principle. That is because religious knowledge (if indeed there is such) doesn't concern mathematically-quantifiable objects, forces and relations - which, according to the prevailing scientific worldview, are the only real sources of knowledge. What it does consist of may indeed involve encounters with legendary or archetypal figures.
(Now some of this kind of argument might have been put by Colin, but so far it seems like he might be a 'drive by contributor'.)
My assessment is that, assuming Colin's testament is sincere, he has merely had an experience which he [i]wants[/I] to believe is proof of the existence God i.e. wishful thinking. After all, he has been through a rough patch and has obviously found these "entirely positive" experiences that he claims to have had to be comforting, so he has latched on to them, and is using this as a reason to come out of the closet as a believer. I find it sad that some people feel the need to fantasise about God in order to attain a more optimistic outlook.
Since you mentioned Richard Dawkins, and compared him to God... I find Richard Dawkins much more interesting than this imaginary God character that people take so seriously. I'm looking forward to reading 'The Blind Watchmaker' which was recently given to me as a gift. I expect it to be a much better read than the Bible, which I couldn't bear reading past the first bit, as it was so awfully written, boring and very repetitive.
I haven't read 'The God Delusion' either, but that title seems suitable in Colin's case. Are you sure you have recovered, Colin?
You will find if you read The Blind Watchmaker that it contains a brief precursor to his main argument against God in The God Delusion, to whit: 'a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution ... must already have been vastly complex in the first place.'
But the point is, that doesn't match any conception of deity found in any of the world's religious traditions. Ergo it is a straw man argument, although in this case, probably better named a 'straw god argument'.
Although you probably know a lot more about those religions than I do, I find that doubtful. Are you sure that it's not just that you interpret them in such a way so as to evade Dawkins criticism?
And even if you're right, isn't what people actually believe also very relevant here? I bet a lot of believers would assent to that description of God.
What about this: What verses say that God is omnipotent?
Dawkins tends to portray all religion as fundamentalism, but then accuses that any of its more sensitive intepreters of sophistry or logic-chopping. But I really don't think he understands the subject at all well, his only interest is in attacking it.
Interestingly, in that page you linked to, none of the quoted passages use the term 'omnipotent'. My interpretation is that much of the language in the ancient texts is allegorical, as it belongs to a very different age and had to appeal to a very different mentality; so it requires interpretation.
As I suspected...
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course not, since the term doesn't originate that far back in history.
As a a devout non-atheist, I find the whole certainty thing about God's non- existence as troubling as the certainty espoused by the theists. It's obvious that there is a universe and its obvious we don't know how or why it got here. Some bow down in humility to this fact and some boast that they know our existence is all just meaningless coincidence. I'd say both need to just admit they have no inkling of the answer.
Because the prevailing notion of God is monotheistic--the one and only actually existing deity. So, the mutual existence of the one and only God AND other gods (justified by essentially the same reasoning) is logically inconsistent.
Yes, I agree that what can be considered to be "evidence" at all, as well as whether or not such evidence is sufficient to warrant subscription to the proposition at issue, is at the heart of the matter.
When we ignore the often hostile and confrontational rhetoric, and attend to the substantive content, the atheist challenge to theist propositions (not to mention disputes among theist theologians) is about the kind and sufficiency of the evidence offered. In general, humans have learned over the millennia that propositions that can satisfy rigorous standards of logical analysis and independently observable empirical evidence are the propositions that are far more likely to provide us with predictive reliability.
To be sure, in all kinds of everyday situations, we routinely and automatically count the testimony of others as evidence, often sufficient evidence. Evolution has probably hard-wired us with a tendency to accept the word of others at face value. This is a major way children learn about how the world works from infancy on. And it is how most formal instruction even through grad school works. But we also know that propositions that are supported by testimony alone, and cannot satisfy rigorous standards of logical coherence and independent empirical evidence, are far less likely to prove to be reliably predictive, whether they are from alleged "sages" or not.
So testimony (of alleged "sages" or not) is not excluded as a matter of principle--it is simply judged, implicitly or explicitly, to be insufficient to warrant acceptance of the proposition at issue. A current analogue of the sage, perhaps, is the modern "expert." As with the sages, we still have to judge whether or not their testimony is sufficient to warrant our subscription. In the case of the modern expert. though, we typically assume that the person is somehow vetted by others whose judgment we'd trust, and that the expert opinion is based on the prevailing epistemic standards in his/her field of expertise.
This is not true. There is a long history of "natural theology" which purports to explain the complexity of nature (especially its biological complexity) by appeals to a designing entity. William Paley's Natural Theology (written in the early 19th century) is just such an example of this, now presented in a more technically savvy form by intelligent design creationists (e.g. Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell). You may not agree with these authors' conceptions of God, but they're out there nonetheless. So it's disingenous to claim that Dawkins and company are just strawmanning their opponents.
It's really depressing that I have to keep explaining this to you across multiple threads and multiple forums (PF and here): you just keep adamantly repeating these falsehoods over and over. Whether it's an example of a "No True Scotsman" fallacy or what, I don't know, but you can't just deny those religionists who say things you don't like, and then claim that Dawkins et al are philosophically naive for grappling with their arguments.
A "coincidence" of what?
(In my experience, the people most ardently claiming for humility in the face of the universe are those with the least amount of epistemic humility: it is religious believers, not scientists, who claim to have all of the answers.)
I'll never forget when I was in 4th grade, being around 7 or 8 years old. I was in bed, staring at the ceiling, and remembering how those at church kept saying that I had to ask Jesus and accept him into my heart. And so, that night I tried my very best to ask Jesus to swoop down from the rafters above and snuggle inside my heart. He never showed, though, much to my embarrassment. Even then I felt like an idiot for what I just tried to do.
When someone like the OP brushes by my thoughts, I'm always a bit amused by what they say. And it's not so much that I deny what they've experienced (or what I haven't), but that the assumptions from said experiences are often not justified. I've never had some personal experience with Jesus or a god, but that didn't keep me from believing in the Presbyterian God for quite some time. So, while in one sense a negative experience like mine can keep one's beliefs in check (partially), a positive one can as well, in the case of the OP. However, in both cases, it does not follow that the experience in itself dictates whether one believes in "God." In other words, whether one has such an experience (whatever that is), or in fact never does, is only to judge said experience, not what follows.
It seems something "good" recently happened to the OP, which is great, but I won't ever understand why people like him or her can't just stop with the simple occurrence of something good. y u gotta put yourself in a position to defend a massively complex theology about the source of having a good waiter at a restaurant or getting a bonus from work? Just be glad good things happen to you.
I agree, Arkady.
If the alleged Creator wasn't sufficiently complex enough, as Dawkins infers, to intend, understand, and possess the ability to create the universe just as he wanted it to be, then the non-complex Creator just created a universe he didn't understand and didn't intend via his Special God Magic.
I completely agree that there's a difference between an experience and one's interpretation of that experience.
It is well-documented that a person's interpretation of unusual experiences is a function of their particular historical and social setting. Our evolved brains have an irrepressible tendency to generate some kind of explanation for our experiences, but we have very low default standards for what we're willing to accept as an adequate explanation. It is no more surprising that someone enmeshed in our present culture would interpret certain experiences as experience of God more or less as he is conceived in the culture, than it is that Achilles experiences visitations from Athena, Arjuna encounters Lord Krishna, Moses encounters Yahweh, and various Catholic saints encounter Mary.
Again, what is "coincidental" about that?
Non-sequitur.
I didn't say it did. My response was geared towards your comment about some people "bowing down in humility."
That is, asking where matter came from to begin this long chain of causative events is no more answerable than asking who designed this infinitely complex designer. If every event has a cause, it's impossible to have had a first cause just by definition. If every complex entity had a more complex designer, then it's impossible for there to have been a first designer by definition.
Quoting Hanover
But the argument Dawkins is challenging is the theist argument that complexity entails a designer.
Thus, a complex design such as that of the universe entails an even more complex designer. So either this leads to an infinite regress, or complexity does NOT entail a designer.
Contrary to this, the fact that every event must have a cause necessitates the existence of an uncaused Prime Mover of pure actuality. The trouble with asking "who created God" is that it applies an intra-wordly phenomenon to something that is, by definition, outside of this phenomenon. And the hypothesis that there is something "outside" of this cause and effect chain put forward out of metaphysical necessity. Indeed, infinite regresses and spontaneous creation acts do not seem to make sense, so it is conceptually necessary to postulate the existence of something that is not affected by the normal cause and effect we see every day.
So within our metaphysical framework, we seem to be required to postulate the existence of a Prime Mover, or God. Otherwise we must provide a different framework, or show how God is not necessary in our original framework.
Additionally, God is typically not seen as "complex", but rather necessarily "simple". The Neo-Platonists and their neighbors taught that complexity cannot explain complexity. Simplicity is what does all the explanatory work, for all complex structures can be reduced to their components.
So it is not that every complex entity has a complex designer, but rather every complex entity has a prior simplicity.
And contrariwise, the complex design such as that of the universe entails prior causes (as opposed to designers) leading to its existence. So either this leads to an infinite regress, or complexity does NOT entail a cause at all. That the current universe can rest its existence upon an uncaused cause refutes the basic scientific principle that every event has a cause. What else is God than an uncaused cause?
I don't understand the term in a special light. I just don't see what's "coinciding" here.
Quoting Hanover
If it's not a non-sequitur, please show how my statements implies that I believe all theists to be stupid (my posting history certainly doesn't reflect that; I've even said on more than one occasion that under different historical circumstances I myself would likely be at least a deist).
Quoting Hanover
Again, a non-sequitur. I myself have painted some theists in a positive light, and nothing in my post says otherwise (sounds like you're the one getting personal here...) And defending the "goodness" of atheists per se is also something I certainly never did (there are plenty of virtuous theists and plenty of nonvirtuous atheists).
I don't know that this is a "basic scientific principle" (indeed, it seems to have been more of a philosophical claim than anything else; I'm here thinking of Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason, and similar theses). My understanding of quantum mechanics (which admittedly is about as deep as a puddle) is that there are genuinely stochastic, indeterminate events in nature, i.e. uncaused causes.
Yet that's just not empirically true. My computer, a complex entity, was created by many thousands of people, each extremely more complex than the computer. Paley's argument is embraced because it seems to comport with experience. One would not conclude that a piece of driftwood found on the beach had a designer, but one would conclude that a watch would.
Your comment above is really just a restatement of the scientific/evolutionary position that the theist challenges. I would think a more sophisticated theistic position would accept the evolutionary argument you present, but would then ask the meta question of who or what put in place this extremely sophisticated evolutionary system that turns simple substances into complex organisms.
Been expecting the "God is simple" retort.
Dawkins is challenging the claim that complexity entails a designer.
IF the complexity of the universe entails a designer, as the theist asserts, then the designer's understanding, intentions, and abilities to actually implement his design surely are more complex than the level of complexity apprehended by the theist who asserts that such complexity entails a designer.
The apparent randomness of certain quantum events gets a lot of play in philosophical circles. While I can accept that these events are entirely unpredictable from our standpoint, I cannot comprehend how they could be truly random, to the extent that term is defined as events arising from nothing. It seems quite impossible to me that one could expect different results assuming 100% reproduction of the pre-existent events.
I agree it's counter-intuitive, but there's no reason to expect our evolved intuitions to be a perfect (or even very reliable) guide to how nature operates at the most fundamental levels. And, again, I'm no expert, but my understanding of the current consensus among physicists is that there are genuinely random (i.e. indeterminate) events in nature, and that so-called "hidden variable" theories in QM have not gained widespread acceptance.
I think the theist can persuasively argue that a complex system entails a complex designer, but I don't see how it follows that a designer cannot create a system more complex than himself. That is, I don't see why it's theoretically impossible that one day scientists could create a superhuman, superior in every conceivable way to current humans.
So if you go with Atheism or Catholicism or Intellectualism or any other movement is plain wrong and will never lead you to truth.
Truth is a pathless way, because the journey goes inwardly - ( standing still ), not outwardly - ( where you can follow a direction )
True, but these complex people were not derived from even more complex entities. They exist thanks to a very long process of evolution, which started with simple biochemicals.
Creativity, following Whitehead, is an intrinsic aspect of reality. New and improved things follow naturally from a simple starting block.
Quoting Hanover
The difference is in agency. Clearly we see the watch seemed to be made by an agent. But the piece of driftwood was not, it arose due to natural processes.
Yet were these natural processes, in some sense, "designed"? Or if they evolved from a simpler state, what was this simpler state? Hence why classical theists sometimes called God the One.
Quoting Brainglitch
But this is misunderstanding the argument. The argument is that God is simple, out of necessity. Complexity does not explain complexity. Indeed, if there was a person who designed the universe as it is, then it would also need an explanation. But this doesn't lead to atheism immediately; it merely pushes the explanation back more. It's a caricature to see the classical theistic God as akin to a mega-human with a personality, likes and dislikes, etc. God is theorized out of necessity, a byproduct of the PSR and a certain view of causality.
Reject the PSR and you're left with an irrational universe. We can bite this bullet, for sure. But if we don't bite this bullet, then God becomes a plausible explanation for why things exist. There is reason all the big rationalists in the past have been theists. God helps explain why things are intelligible and reasonable.
No, that would make it merely conventionally inconsistent.
How so? At least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Bible very clearly speaks of God having likes, dislikes, emotions, etc, and engaging with humans (e.g. Moses) in a personal manner.
Indeed, if the Christian story is to be believed, Jesus was God incarnate, and Jesus clearly had emotions, preferences, etc.
And claiming that certain institutions or actions are contrary to God's will (generally with regard to things which religious conservatives dislike, such as same sex marriage) is a depressingly common feature of political discourse in the U.S.
If this is a "caricature," then it is religionists who should be blamed for promulgating these notions.
Right, but the Prime Mover hypothesis was postulated before these religions took off. Aristotle wasn't a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim, for example.
So indeed the "intelligent designer" advocates are philosophically shallow. And I would go on to say that Christianity in general has adopted a metaphysics to justify its rather silly beliefs.
Not so much in the New Testament, which is the only non-Jewish collection of writings that make up the Christian Bible.
You mean the part of the Bible where God assumes human form? That only serves to underscore my point, I should say.
I understand, but you said "classical theistic God," not "the God of the philosophers" or something. Regardless, focusing only on the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is mostly definitely not a caricature to assert that Jews and Christians predicate certain personality characteristics of their God as judged from their holy scriptures (Christians in particular, insofar as Christians qua Christians are committed to the incarnation).
If that's the narrative you would like to think, sure. But the New Testament is starkly different from the Old, which had God specifically talking and acting as though a personal entity.
It's not "the narrative I would like to think": it's what the texts say. Again, God is not only a personal entity in the NT, God is a person!
That's what the God of the philosophers is.
Quoting Arkady
Hence why I think it is shallow to try to combine this concept with the philosophical conception of God.
You're still reading it as though the God of the Old Testament must be the same as the one written of in the New. If you read the Bible and think both Gods sound the same, you're nuts!
The very notion of a "theistic" God is one which interacts with its creation and takes some interest in human welfare or actions, as opposed to a deistic entity (which may be purely a "clockmaker"-style entity). The God of the Judeo-Christian tradition (a God in which the vast majority of the U.S. populaces professes to believe in some form) most definitely does have personality characteristics. Whether you find conflating the religious and the philosophical to be "shallow" or not, it's what people believe: saying otherwise isn't caricaturing said belief.
If your explanation for the existence of the universe allows for the possibility and intelligibility of an "uncaused cause," then the universe itself can be an uncaused cause, and adding something else, such as God is not required.
I don't think they "sound" the same, but Christians believe they are (no mainstream variety of Christianity with which I'm familiar asserts that the God of the OT and the NT are literally different Gods).
Regardless, none of this matters: my point is the that the God of the NT (i.e. Jesus) definitely does have personality characteristics, including emotions and preferences, contra Darthbarracuda's insinuation otherwise (by calling descriptions of such beliefs a caricature).
That's where the conflict lies. You have religious people trying to justify their beliefs by appealing to theistic arguments that argue for a different conception of God than they believe in, and then you have atheists trying to argue against all conceptions of God by appealing to only one particular, and rather shallow, conception of God. The whole thing is mixed up and contradictory.
Bingo. Occam's Razor. (Though theists could perhaps argue that one or more features of the universe other than its mere existence require the intervention of God, e.g. the development of the human moral sense or the coming into being of the first organism.)
Why shouldn't the New Atheists grapple with beliefs "touted around the world"? Because you find such beliefs to be shallow or puerile? Even if they are, that would seem to only make it that much more imperative that they be critiqued, wouldn't you say?
Oh, sure, they can, I don't have a problem with them attacking organized religion. It's when they start claiming that their arguments address all conceptions of God that I have issues with them. That's when they become dogmatic themselves.
Quoting Arkady
Well, considering that we're discussing New Atheists, the only targets they go for are from the Old Testament, which by itself, is Jewish, and not Christian. I think it was the first failure of the Christian tradition to keep the original Jewish texts, which outside of a few books, are worthless. *edit* And have next to no allegorical connection to the New Testament.
If there is equal justification for the existence of the monotheistic deity, and Zeus, and Lord Krishna, ... etc., and the existence of the monotheistic deity is accepted based on such justification, then it is inconsistent to reject Zeus etc. (because there's just as much justification for them as for the monotheistic deity), but it is also inconsistent to accept Zeus etc., because if there exists the one and only deity, then the deity Zeus can't exist.
This is not true. They criticize myriad aspects of the NT, as well (assuming that by the "New Atheists" we mutually understand that we're referring to Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, and company).
But, again, this is irrelevant: I was responding to the claim that it was a caricature of religious belief to describe God as having personality characteristics. This feature obtains whether one is considering the OT or the NT (albeit, as you say, they seem to have different characteristics in those two sections).
Different people have criticized different aspects of religious beliefs, some involving a more "hands-on" theistic conception of God, and others involving a deistic, "clockmaker" God. Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing, for instance, is more directed towards the latter type of "prime mover" God (so is my understanding of his thesis: I haven't read the book), and people like Hitchens and (Sam) Harris seem to grapple more with the perceived absurdity of more theistic-oriented beliefs. Dawkins has levied criticisms of both types of belief, as well (for whatever it's worth, Alvin Plantinga has asserted that God is a person, and he's no stranger to philosophical arguments for the existence of God).
In any case these books by those pop-science superstars are not very well accepted in the philosophical community at large. Krauss's "nothing" is actually "something", despite his pretentious douchebaggery. Hitchens and Harris attack straw-men. None of them seem capable, or willing, to understand religious belief, or theist belief for that matter. It's just a publicity stunt.
Why not, since the "one and only God" is one and only in the sense that He is thought to be in all things or all things are thought to be in Him. Zeus is a relatively minor deity compared to this. The claim is never that Zeus is all things, or that he is in all things or that all things are in him; Zeus is more like a human personality with all its foibles writ large. In Christianity there are Archangels and Angels, and they are minor deities of sorts, deities at least compared to human beings, so there is no reason to say that the monotheistic idea of.God logically excludes the possibility of lesser deities.
I'm beginning to think you have such a stringent notion of "classical theist" that only a very select few can qualify as one. If that's the case, then one can hardly complain if classical theism flies under the New Atheists' radar.
Well, the existence of God is also not widely accepted among the philosophical community. What of it? (And plenty of philosophers are pretentious douchebags: so, of this ad hom, I would also ask what of it?)
Nonsense. Again, simply because they attack beliefs which you don't hold, and which you consider to be shallow or puerile, it doesn't follow that they attack(ed) straw men. They may not attack your notion of theism, but that is a complaint about their interests, priorities, or agenda; it says nothing about the content of their arguments, which is what you purport to do when you claim that they strawman their opponents. Attacking beliefs which people around the world adhere to (as you yourself said) is not strawmanning.
But I am not arguing that there is no God.
The argument I am addressing is simply Dawkins' challenge to the theist assertion that complexity entails a designer. Whether jesuitical contortionists want to characterize their God as Simple or complex is irrelevant here. The intentions, understanding, and capabilities of an entity capable of intending, understanding, and implementing its design of the universe surely are far more complex than the complexity apprehended by the theists, and on which they base their claim that complexity entails a designer. Thus either an infinite regress of designers of designers, or the complexity does not entail a designer. Thus, the theist assertion that complexity entails a designer fails.
Quoting Arkady
True, but not everyone that describes God through personal terms is therefore suggesting that God is actually representative of those terms. Using the terminology that God is thoughtful, or is a male, are simply ways in which, mystics in particular, write about a concept, God, that no words can really adequately represent without saying nothing.
Consider Eckhart, I believe, who wrote,
And so we say that when everything is removed, abstracted and peeled off from the soul so that nothing at all remains but a simple 'is' - that is the proper characteristic of His name.
Do you think that Eckhart is saying that God has a penis and balls, and is just like "us" for possessing a supposed maleness? Not at all. He simply uses words like "His" as a way to talk about something words can't fully describe.
This doesn't work because the Universe is not anything over and above all the finite caused processes that constitute it. If you want to posit 'something' like a virtual 'quantum foam' or whatever that is not itself caused and that gives rise to the universe of things that 'quantum foam' is not part of the universe because it does not exist in spacetime. That 'quantum foam' is starting then to look like the 'unmoved mover' or God.
It is simply logically inconsistent to assert that there exists only one instantiation of the kind of being we call a deity, AND there exist lots of other instantiations of the kind of being we call a deity.
Many people do, so it is perfectly legitimate to address those beliefs. And, again, Christians qua Christians would seemingly necessarily be committed to the veracity of the Incarnation (at a bare minimum), in which case God assumed human form for a time, and most definitely possessed a personality.
Quoting Heister Eggcart
God presumably did have a penis and balls for a time. (I actually do think most people think of God as a male, albeit not an anatomically correct one, presumably. If all of this gendered talk is mere allegory or a placeholder, one wonders why theists don't just say "it"?).
I fully realize that the absolute vast majority of "Christians" are dumber than rocks and hold such a superficial understanding of God as they think "him" to be, although I cannot necessarily blame them. Not everybody can be an Augustine through life.
And with what darth was saying, it's the guys like Eckhart or, in some ways, Augustine as well, that do not see God in such a way as most modern "Christians" do. And it is the irony of many New Atheists that they are as superficially and nuance-blind as those they persecute so vehemently. This is why darth mentioned that they're being stupid for generalizing as if conquering the typical Baptist Christian's theology is a fully encompassing slaying of the Christian God. That isn't the case, which is why I don the facepalm pose when I read or read about fellows like Dawkins.
What's depressing is the condescending manner in which you claim to be 'explaining' something that I understand perfectly well, as if your hard-boiled atheism actually amounts to a source of instruction. There are many things you have 'explained' to me in those previous conversations, which I think you're completely incorrect about.
The depiction of God as a kind of super-human agent is not part of any legitimate theology. I don't think that Stephen Meyer or any of the ID proponents depict God as a super-human agency, and if they do, then I think they're falling into the same kind of error that Dawkins is; which is quite possible, because religious fundamentalism and scientific materialism have a lot in common, and is one of the reasons that Dawkins seems to think that all religion is fundamentalism. (It's significant that the protagonists on the Uncommon Design website often take issue with the theological philosophy of Ed Feser and David Bentley Hart, on account of the classical form of theology they espouse is often incompatible with their literalistic interpretation of Biblical texts.)
But Dawkin's characterisation of God is incorrect in all respects, which is why Terry Eagleton called his review of the book 'Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
But it depends on what is being proposed. Obviously for empiricial questions - the nature of blackbody radiation, how metal fatigue can cause aircraft structures to fail - then someone with expertise in the relevant subject matter is required. What about the question, 'is the Universe an intentional creation, or is it the product of unconscious processes?' Who is an 'expert' on that question? Who would you approach for 'expertise' on that matter? There's are many issues closer to home which involve 'life questions' - questions of the foundation of meaning and value. Who are the experts on those? You might say, moral philosophers. Well, what is the basis of their 'moral philosophy?' Is it Christian? Marxist? Evolutionary naturalism?
It would be logically inconsistent to claim that there are more than one absolute, supreme, all-encompassing deity; but that is not the claim. Zeus, Horus and Athena are not absolute, supreme all-encompassing deities. They could even be thought to be merely aspects, or faces,of such an absolute deity; as it is thought with Hindu deities. Remember that even in the Christian conception God is triune: three in one or one in three. Of course there is no room in present Christianity for Zeus and the others, but that is merely a conventional matter not a logical one. It is perfectly logically possible that Christianity could change and incorporate deities from other pantheons.
Why is it "superficial" to believe the holy texts of one's religion? I don't believe that the rarified air of "sophisticated theologians" is any more worth listening to than personal notions of God (and, again, if one is a Christian of any stripe or level of philosophical sophistication, one is seemingly necessarily committed to the Incarnation at the very least). Indeed, most rebuttals of Dawkins' and company's arguments seem to consist of saying "don't they realize..." and then unleashing a torrent of theological word salad, as if amazed that anyone could be ignorant of such things.
If you consider what the New Atheists do to be persecution, I can only say that you either are prone to extreme hyperbole, or you don't know what "persecution" means.
I'm sorry you feel condescended to. But, I would question which one of us is not doing philosophy, as you never offer any arguments for your viewpoints, and instead only continue to flog the words of your preferred authors (Eagleton, Nagel, and the rest).
Quoting Wayfarer
Not "legitimate theology," is it? Yes, like I said: a No True Scotsman fallacy. Whether it's "legitimate" or not is beside the point: these types of beliefs are real (whether you agree with them or not). To claim that a designer God has had no place in Christian thinking is simply untrue.
To depict God as a designer is most definitely to attribute agency to it (as a designer must have intentions, plans, intelligence, etc). You are free to lump Meyer and Dawkins into the bin of people whose arguments you dislike (and therefore ignore), but this smells like an outgroup homogeneity bias on your part: people with whom you disagree are all the same.
There are tens of millions of fundamentalist religious believers in the world whose behavior is informed by their beliefs. Simple, straightforward readings of their various texts promote and justify violence toward others, even death to the unbeliever.
Harris asserts that such beliefs need to be challenged, rather than given a free pass as off limits just because they're "religious." It is such beliefs and their implications, epistemic warrant, and consequences that he typically addresses.
Quoting Arkady
So you've not read "sophisticated theologians", yet still have the gall to write upon their work as if you do understand what they're saying without having read anything by them? :-}
Ah, so because you can't make sense of the "theological word salad", it's the ones replying to Dawkins that are wrong because they're not understood...yeah, got it... :-}
I have read them in their responses to Dawkins and company (Dawkins seems to draw most of their ire, in my impression). No, I don't understand them, which is why I called it "word salad." As far as I can tell, they throw around meaningless, obscurantist buzzwords such as "ground of all being," and then call it a day, satisfied that they've thereby refuted the New Atheists' claims. I'll say this of theists like Swinburne or Plantinga: they at the very least offer copious, clear arguments for their views, agree or disagree with them.
To the extent that the sample of Sophisticated Theologians' work I've read (in rebutting Dawkins, for instance) is unrepresentative of their oeuvre, I am more than willing to restrict my criticism only to those attempted rebuttals.
Notice, I corrected my statement about what you write to 'not a source of instruction' rather than 'not a philosophy' as I recognise that your ability in debate is considerable! And, I do often quote the same sources on these arguments, as I'm familiar with the niche of literature that has grown up around it. It saves having to repeat it all from scratch.
But this is not a case of 'no true scotsman'. It is a case of understanding the subject properly. I think that the mainly American tendency that has now crystallised around the title of 'intelligent design' is an unfortunate development, in many respects, and is *not* characteristic of the broader Christian tradition. It is a matter of record that neither the Anglican, Catholic, nor Orthodox communions defend or advocate any kind of intelligent design theology. (Yet they do support theistic evolution and natural theology, which are different arguments.)
As you may recall, another of the books I often quote in this matter is Karen Armstrong's A Case for God which is much nearer to my understanding of the issue than either the ID camp or the evangatheists. She points out in that book how 'design arguments' grew out of the early modern conviction that natural laws 'shewed God's handiwork', not realising at the time that this argument could then be used against theology, as knowledge of 'God's handiwork' expanded.
HOWEVER, all of that said, I think the attempt to 'prove that God exists' with reference to empirical facts always amounts to a species of fundamentalism. But the attempt to prove that God doesn't exist, with reference to those same facts, is also a species of fundamentalism, and that on those grounds, Dawkins, et al, amount to a kind of 'secular fundamentalism'.
But one asymmetry in all of this is, that even the most bone-headed young-earth creationist is nevertheless supposed to be bound by a moral code, which requires that he or she tend to the sick, practice charity and mercy, and observe the other elements of Christian morality. Moreover their belief system situates them in a broader context both culturally and spiritually. Whereas, the diehard atheist inhabits a universe that is meaningless and purposeless by definition, where the only kind of purpose or meaning that is available is that generated by the ego, in a Camus-like act of defiance.
Dawkins actually bemoans the adoption of Darwinian principles as the basis for a moral philosophy, wiithout seeming to realise that he has spent the whole second part of his career dissolving the traditional alternative in the acid of 'Darwin's dangerous idea'. Which is one of the reasons he's considered such a klutz.
Sure, our judgment about whether there is or is not sufficient reason to subscribe to a proposition depends on what is being proposed. I wasn't the one to invoke the sages--who allegedly have some kind of special access to some reality beyond the limits of the rest of us, and whose say-so is taken to be sufficient for us to sign on.
It's epistemic judgment all the way down. When we decide for ourselves, we do so based on whether or not we just there to be sufficient reason and evidence, When we accept the opinion of tradition or experts or sages, we do so only if we at least implicitly judge their expertise or sagacity to be sufficient. But regarding the theistic claim of the OP, we have learned long ago that uncorroborated testimony alone about such claims is not sufficient to warrant our subscription to the claim.
The testimony of sages is significant in the context of arguing 'from religious experience', because it is they who are able to speak from such experiences. Sure, one guy turning up on a forum and saying 'hey I've seen the light' adds up to nothing. But if you look at the records from across cultures and across history, of many individuals who claim such insights, then that is a source of information about what is being claimed. That situates such claims within a domain of discourse, and gives you some way of corroborating them against some kind of criteria. But none of those claims will still amount to what many current thinkers would regard as 'empirical' insofar as they don't propose matters of fact which can be measured mathematically and assessed in the third person.
So, again, you've only read rebuttals to a work you're already in agreement with...yipee...
Strange that you seem entirely disinterested in understanding the terminology theologians, and philosophers too, both employ in order to talk about such concepts as being or God. It really does strike me as bizarre as to why are you complaining about not understanding something, yet refuse to be curious enough to seek out the simple meanings of words in order to bring about the understanding you so obviously lack, by even your own admission.
:-d
If we consider the many, many testimonies of those across the world presently and throughout history who've had what the understand to be a religious experience, the most obvious observation we make is, as I've said, that the content is a function of the particular historical and social context.
Not sure what you mean by "only read." I most definitely have read authors with whom I disagree, on matters of philosophy, politics, and religion.
If you have a "simple meaning" for "ground of all being," for instance, I'm all ears. One wonders why the authors who use such terms don't offer "simple meanings" of it. Perhaps because they're engaged in obscurantism?
Except those theologians you don't understand because you've not read them. Those guys are clearly wrong. "Just look at how little I've read them!" >:O
Quoting Arkady
The chemist finds chemistry more simple to understand than the poet. yet does this mean the content of each profession is any easier to grasp? No. But you do have to do the work and delve into the language of the writing concerned if indeed you are interested in fully understanding what someone means. You, however, have shown to not at all be of such an interest, which is why I'm struggling to hold a conversation with you.
I mean, here we are, on a philosophy forum, a discussion board for a field study perhaps the most purposely verbose and nuanced of employers of the human language that there is, and you've not the patience to read some theology in order to understand what someone means. I hope to God that you've not read Dawkins' biology papers, for I must only assume that you would find him entirely wrong because you don't understand the scientific uses of words in his field, >:O
So a Marxist historian would say, or a sociological theorist. But I don't believe it is, and I don't think it is an empirical question in the sense that is nowadays intended.
As far as I can tell (and yes, I admittedly have read a limited amount of certain Sophisticated Theologians) they don't write in a manner in which they want or expect to be understood (which is why I called it "obscurantism"). As for them being "wrong," their claims don't even seem substantive enough to be wrong ("not even wrong" as some theories are described).
Quoting Heister Eggcart
How does your judgment follow from anything I've said? As I said, if you can give me a clear, concise definition of a term of art of Sophisticated Theologians such as "ground of all being," you would have my gratitude.
Insofar as the samples of their work I've read is representative of their work in general, why would I read the obscurantist cant promulgated by Sophisticated Theologians? Piling more nonsense on top of nonsense doesn't yield sense. (Since you're so apparently well-read, again, please do me the favor of explaining what "ground of all being" means.)
Which "biology papers" of Dawkins' do you speak of? As far as I'm aware, it's been decades since he's done original work in biology (and little of it, at that).
Quoting Arkady
No, that sounds more like you.
Quoting Arkady
This isn't about one single thing, you've attempted to rub your boot in the face of all theology, categorizing some book reviews as if they represent anything more than a casual, opinionated response. I'm not going to read books for you. If you want to understand what you don't, read more about it yourself.
Quoting Arkady
More impatience. You haven't told me that you've read any theology, so how you know its nonsense without reading it is beyond me.
Quoting Arkady
Some say my point is still sailing over your head...
Perhaps I should learn how to fly so that I can retrieve it and try again, hummmmm...
It is not controversial that evangelicals report their experiences as encounters with Jesus, God, angels, demons; Catholics as encounters with God, Jesus, Mary, demons and various saints and angels; Hindus as encounters with Ganesh, Krishna, Indra, etc.; Sufis as encounters with their saints; folk religion believers as encounters with their various supernatural beings ... You get the point.
This is simply not true, or at least it is merely a perfunctory truism. Because the writings of mystics and sages, like all writings, are associated with particular historical periods, it certainly does not follow that the content (as opposed to the forms) of the writings are "functions" of those "particular historical and social contexts", at least not in any but the most superficial sense. To say of writings that they are nothing more than functions of the cultures in which they occur is to deny the possibility of any genuine revelation or creativity. This would be a claim which cannot but assume its own conclusion in order to justify itself.
Really? You understand me well enough to engage in a relatively lucid (if somewhat acrimonious) exchange on this forum. Which post(s) of mine did you find difficult to understand (I think I actually speak with an absolute minimum of philosophical jargon or name-dropping, so your claim is quite perplexing to me)...
Quoting Heister Eggcart
More non-sequiturs. I haven't "attempted to rub my boot in the face of all theology." Have I denigrated, for instance, Augustine or Aquinas (yes, I know they were theologically-inclined philosophers rather than pure theologians). I've explicitly praised philosophers of religion such as Plantinga and Swinburne for at least being clear in their writing, and for offering actual arguments.
As for book reviews, whether or not they're "casual or opinionated," why am I not justified in taking a given person's review as representative of their writing style in general? If anything, I should expect a book review to be less technical than a given author's academic work.
And, I know this conversation isn't just about one thing, but it you could explain "ground of all being" for me, please do so. (I haven't asked you to read a book for me, but as you're apparently so well-read, please share your wealth of knowledge.)
Quoting Heister Eggcart
Where did I say that? I said I haven't read "Sophisticated Theologians," who I'd define as a particular strand of early-modern, modern, or post-modern blowhards who espouse obscurantist verbiage (sometimes imported from Heidegger or elsewhere) in lieu of actual argumentation. And, again, insofar as the samples I have read (e.g. in response to The God Delusion) are not representative of a given author's writing in general, then I will restrict my criticism only to that review (though why they would write lucidly in their own works and yet employ word salad in reviewing others' works is beyond me).
Quoting Heister Eggcart
No, I think you're missing my point, actually. You assume that when I read something and encounter a term or 2 which I don't understand, that I thereby dismiss that work. But that's not so: I've encountered many technical (or otherwise unfamiliar) terms in the course of my reading, and either looked them up (if they weren't defined in the text), or tried to glean their meaning from context. When Descartes talked about a chiliagon in Meditations on First Philosophy, I didn't throw down the book in disgust: I simply looked it up.
However, while, for instance, quantum physics is difficult to understand (and chock-full of terms which I don't know), I have the impression that its proponents are writing in as clear and concise a manner as possible without sacrificing their point. I don't get that impression when I read samples of Sophisticated Theologians. I get the impression that they're employing obscurantism in order to mask that nothing of substance is being said.
It is uncontroversially true that the content of the vast majority of reported religious experiences from people throughout history and across the world is a function of their historical and social context. No coincidence that Moses got the Ten Commandments from Yahweh rather than Lord Krishna or Osiris or Jesus or Athena or Uranus or Ishtar or Bigfoot or the wee faeries ...
Note that I never said that what people report as religious experiences is "nothing more than functions of the cultures i which they occur." But it is clear that people draw on content from their own context to explain their experiences. And if we are to take them at their word, then their experiences would justify us in believing in whatever supernatural beings they report encountering. Or, we can accept that they had some kind of powerful experience, but understand their interpretations of them as dependent on their particular historical and social context.
Quoting Arkady
I meant that you don't understand some of the things we've discussed, less that you yourself are not understandable. You write quiet well, better than I, certainly.
Quoting Arkady
Quoting Arkady
Well, if you'd have read someone like Augustine or Aquinas, a phrase like "ground of all being" is pretty understandable. :|
Edit: I forgot to answer, haha. Being in itself. If you want me to explain that, then fuck you! ;)
And, yes, I realize at times modern theologians can read as though they're talking about nothing, but much of their language borrows from medieval scholastics, so if you're going to throw away all of their ideas and perspectives as mere word vomit, okay, but you in essence condemn the men and women who came before them as well.
I'll add that many of the modern theologians that I've read are just poor writers. They'll use terminology with established meanings, yet ruin it with poor writing. It's not so much that they're purposely trying to be allusive, but that they just don't know how to properly get their points across. This is one reason why the olden Christian mystics are the benchmark, because they mastered both what to write and how to write it.
I'm still knee-deep in college, so book reviews are vacuous and unhelpful to me. It's always of more worth to read a well-argued bit of research or the original stuff over a review of popular poop, like Dawkins' books.
With proper philosophy, perhaps, but it seems you'd have thrown down a Summa Theologica or, let's say more contemporarily, any of the more religious works by Kierkegaard. You don't seem to value the nuance in a good chunk of Christian writing, which is why I have this distinct impression, from what you've said, that you haven't given the same amount of patience or care to an Aquinas as you have with a Descartes.
How have you come upon these two impressions? If you've neither read a whole lot of physics, nor much theology, then I can't see how a mere impression should lead you on the slippery slope of condemning far too many in one field for being somehow ill-intending.
Looking for an expert? Look no further. With confidence I'll fill that position.
If you mean, the point of that post, I'm afraid I don't. What I am saying is that to explain religion in historical or sociological terms, rather than its own terms, is reductionist. It is of course true that Christians will describe the Divinity in terms of the Biblical tradition, and Hindus in line with the Vedas; that I regard as a manifestation of what can be called 'archetypal psychology' (pace Jung and Mircea Eliade)
[quote='?????????????"]I think that what is interesting here is that you actually agree with Dawkins, you just do not seem to realise it.[/quote]
Thanks for your comments, I can see you are learned, but I fear we're getting into very substantial topics here.
But I must insist as a matter of principle, apart from fact, that I don't agree with Dawkins. Getting back to the point at issue: Dawkins claims that a God must be larger and more complex than the entire universe, to have created a Universe, and then he says it is ridiculous to believe in such a being. To which a believer will respond: it would be, and we don't!
This view is plainly an anthropomorphic projection, but aside from that, it is also a failure of the imagination. It is the product of a particular kind of mentality, a mind-set, of Enlightenment scientific rationalism, which can only understand a particular kind of causation. I don't think that Dawkins (or his ilk) would comprehend the original philosophical meaning of the term 'first cause'. So whenever he attempts to think of a first cause, he will do so in the terms in which he is expert, which is, in terms of antecedent material factors, terminating in some scientifically understandable physical event. So 'God' can only be a kind of super-designing agent, because he must think in those terms. (There is an agonising video of Dawkins in earnest discussion with his 'friendly adversary' Alistair McGrath, where Dawkins says he can conceive of life as having been created by an advanced interstellar race, but never by such a grotesque creature as his understands God to be, where he's plainly struggling, but failing, to understand McGrath's point.)
So Dawkins is unable to appreciate why such an attitude may be an error, without in some sense rising above, or stepping outside of, the mindset which gave rise to it; which I'm sure Dawkins could never do (or at least he has never demonstrated any ability to do). So given his assumptions, then such a God could never exist. And I agree with that, but I don't think it actually says anything. Yes, there are many fundamentalists, and probably many well-meaning Christians, who believe in an anthropomorphic sky-father, but that doesn't justify his ignorance of the deeper meanings behind the idea.
As to why I would say that 'God is not an existent' - that is a completely different matter. Here I'm referring to the idea of God 'beyond existence', in the traditionalist sense.
As you are probably aware (and not many will be) in traditional philosophical theology, the nature of the reality of the First Cause, is different to the nature of the realiity of phenomenal beings. There is an authoritative statement of such a conception in the writings of John Scotus Eireugena, in his philosophical treatise, The Periphyseon . I'm not able to try and summarise a work of such immense scope in a post, but I refer to it for one reason only, and that is its conception of the fact that there are levels of being or reality, and that things that exist on one level of reality, do not exist on another. A very brief edited excerpt:
I don't want to get into the intricacies of different theological models, but just to illustrate the awareness of these kinds of 'modal metaphysics', which have long since vanished from the domain of discourse in the West. Of course, other philosophies and spiritual systems will have different models, but 'in all of them, there are "levels of being" such that the more real is also the more valuable; these levels appear in both the "external" and the "internal" worlds, "higher" levels of reality without corresponding to "deeper" levels of reality within. On the very lowest level is the material/physical world, which depends for its existence on the higher levels. On the very highest/deepest level is the Infinite or Absolute' (John S Ryan).
Whereas, physicalism, which Dawkins is proposing as the underlying rationale for his view, denies any kind of modal metaphysics - there is only one true existent, namely, matter~energy, and we're all products of that. And this view itself, is actualy a product of the antecedent theological tradition, but transformed, or deformed, virtually beyond recognition, by the dominance of materialism.
Here is a very simple representation (from Integral Philosophy) of the basic idea behind an hierarchical ontology:
Yes, but then everyone else will disagree, and it will be Groundhog Day all over again. ;-)
Quoting Heister Eggcart
It's a real shame to see deep conceptual structures completely ruined, laid to waste, simply through misuse of words. Words of philosophical significance enter the mainstream, and pick up common meaning. Then the philosophical concepts which these words originally signified are completely hidden, lost behind those who use the words in the haphazard way. The ruin is caused by those who are insisting that the words have no meaning deeper than the common meaning, and are not tied to any deeper, foundational conceptual structures.
Of course whatever is communicated must be communicated in the language and the terms of the culture in which it is communicated; but from that obvious fact it does not follow that the content of the experience is a function of the culture. The form the experience takes and the form the communication takes will certainly be mediated by the culture, just as people are; but to say that the experience is a "function" of the culture is to claim that it is exhaustively produced by cultural forces and that claim is yet to be be justified. Even if it is accepted (as would be reasonable) that the way in which experiences of any kind are communicated is a culturally mediated phenomenon that is not enough to show that the communications of experiences are exhaustively determined by culture and certainly not that the experience itself is exhaustively determined by culture.
Well you didn't say originally that they are "in part functions of culture", so what you said did imply that they are nothing more than the functions of culture.
If we take those who report spiritual experiences at their word, then their reports would justify a belief that they were convinced that they had encountered a supernatural or a spiritual (or at least a 'more than empirical') being. Spiritual experiences, and the descriptions of them, do not justify the belief of anyone other than the person who has the experience or another person who has had a similar experience that resonates profoundly with the description of the spiritual experience. Spiritual experiences or intuitions are not like empirical experiences or intuitions; they cannot be demonstrably confirmed or disconfirmed within inter-subjective experience and discourse. And the beings that are to be encountered in such descriptions are not like the determinate entities to be found in descriptions of empirical experiences; so there is really no determinate entity to be believed in in a determinable way. This is why so many theistic/atheistic arguments are exercises in believing there is disagreement on the mistaken basis of talking about different things while all the time imagining that the same things are being talked about in the same way.
Which makes theology all the more confusing, but sometimes it can be fun! O:)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your username makes me think you're some philosophers' hitman, ready to deal a long and excruciatingly complex mental death to any who dare not love the ways of truth >:)
Maybe you bullied him into saying it's the truth, :-O
It is entirely legitimate to explain anything in whatever way such explanation provides insight.
The OP assertion can be expressed as "I experienced God, therefore God exists."
It is this that I've challenged. One of my challenges is that if we accept this argument as sufficient for rational others to subscribe to the existence of God, then we should subscribe to belief in the existence of various other deities and supernatural beings and happenings as similarly reported throughout history and across cultures. And we know that the particular deities, beings and events that people report are a function of their particular context.
Also, note that the OP and the vast majority of reported encounters with the supernatural specify a particular being, not some plastic "Divinity." They encountered Yahweh, or the God of Christianity, or Mary, or the risen Jesus of Nazareth, or Saint X or the Angel Y, or Lord Krishna, etc. Dismissing what they actually report, and saying that they're all really just encounters with the same amorphous "Divinity" is a claim from your theology, not theirs.
I've never read any Kierkegaard (except for the occasional quotation referenced in secondary sources), so I can't comment on that. Though I should point out that I've actually thrown very few books, and only threw away one book out of disgust, to the best of my recollection (the less said about that, the better...I will say only that it was a New Agey-type book which I bought on a whim years ago, and turned out to be one of the worst things I'd ever read).
In respect of the 'plastic divinity' - nice expression, by the way! - it's simply that if one were to accept the claims of all of those who say 'ours alone is the truth', then it is very easy to argue that if they all say that, then they all cancel each other out, there is no truth to be had - which is another common Dawkins style of argument.
So I am referring to the idea of an underlying truth, a philosophia perennis, of which the various specific traditions are instances. I know that claim is contestable, but in a pluralistic society I prefer it to the alternative.
Oh go on, A, what was it....?
Incidentally apropos of your comment on Krauss some pages back, herewith two critical reviews, one from a physicist, one from a philosophical theologian.
The New Agey book wasn't particularly philosophical, so don't worry. Beyond that, the less said about it, the better (though I will say that, beyond the ideas and purported phenomena being discussed, the writing style itself was absolutely atrocious, which added to my disgust).
Yes, I've read the one by Albert. I haven't even read the Krauss book (as I pointed out), much less endorsed it. No doubt I could find laudatory reviews, as well. My point about his book A Universe from Nothing was only the sort of theistic arguments he was attempting to rebut (prime mover-style arguments, in this case). Whether he rebutted them successfully is immaterial here.
Perhaps you could provide a citation showing where a great theologian proposed a model of divinity similar to that critiqued in The God Delusion.
Not at all, I am referring to scientific materialism, scientism, neo-darwinian materialism, and so on, of which these writers are representative. The Enlightenment was obviously multi-faceted.
Fair point.
I had thought, myself, that I don't want to be 'a believer' - I associate that kind of mentality with a certain kind of gullibility or soft-headedness. That is why I investigated religious thought through comparitve religion and anthropology and the like. But as I'm neither materialist, nor atheist, then I have to accept that the alternatives to materialism are in all likelihood regarded 'theistic' or at any rate that is how they are usually described.
But the fact that I think there is anything there to be studied, means I am probably what most would mean by a 'believer'. So obviously I must think there is something to learn in it - and I do.
But it's also a question of there being so many things to study, and so little time. There are areas of modern philosophy I know I will never have neither the time nor motivation for.
Also a fair point. The problem is, in a forum, and in respect of such large issues, one has to use some generalisations, otherwise it would turn into a postgraduate seminar.
Sorry? You think I'm advocating physicalism? I'm sorry if my writing is so atrocious.
It isn't that I don't want to discuss theological points, it's more that once you delve into the details of such arguments, they can become very big topics. But suffice to say, I don't believe in the 'flat physicalist ontology' of the secular intelligentsia. I think that the idea of an 'hierarchy of being' is represented in all the world's cultures and that it represents something of great importance which has generally been forgotten. Sorry if I hadn't made that clear.
Quoting Hanover
But we both know that that ain't the case, right? I mean, not with absolute certainty, but there's no way in hell he'd be able to show you, and I think that the most plausible explanation is that this is because he didn't experience God in the first place, and, at the least, that he didn't experience God in a way similar to seeing your hand.
Quoting Hanover
But we should both be certain of the nonexistence of God in accordance with [I]some[/I] conceptions. I am, at least.
I still find the nonexistence of any God more plausible than the existence of any God, even in accordance with the more plausible conceptions. And I think that consistency, which includes avoiding special pleading, is important, and seems to favour atheism, since questionable exceptions to a more sceptical position often seem to be made by non-atheists with regards to the existence of God.
Yeh, that was my suspicion. That his interpretation was being favoured and used to exclude others - despite their existence, and despite the large number of adherents, and despite any theological literature which seems to accord with such an interpretation - and then blaming Dawkins for not seeing things his way, or for choosing to focus on other theistic positions.
These discussions are more polemics than scholarship.
But please answer me this. You say above that you 'ascribe to a neo-platonic hierarchy'. I presume, therefore, that the passage I quoted previously from Scotus Eiriugena would be meaningful to you.
I ask this, because I think that notion of a hierarchy of being, which is basic to neoplatonism, is generally absent from modern philosophy. Would you agree with that?
//edit//
I have found that reference. (I don't want to read up on Al-Ghazali, as I have no background in Islamic studies.) Berkeley's discussion at this point is about the cause of motion - that motion in nature is a consequence of 'God continuously acting'. However I still don't think there is anything in this discussion which overturns the 'doctrine of divine simplicity', i.e. that depicts God as a complex being or a 'super-manufacturer' in the sense criticized by Dawkins.
That is simply false.
Quoting darthbarracuda
That argument doesn't support your claim. It only supports a weaker revised version which mirrors your use of "it seems to make sense". Although that reduces to the even weaker "it seems to make sense to [i]some[/I] people, [i]but not others[/I]".
Quoting darthbarracuda
Easy. Infinite regress or a first cause without the inappropriate labels of "Prime Mover" or "God".
Quoting darthbarracuda
You might be right, but I find that doubtful, and you'll need more than a reference to the Neo-Platonists and "their neighbours" to back up your claim that this is typical. The omni- attributes are typical, and they seem to imply complexity, as does an intelligent designer. Hard to deny, actually, I'd say. And those Biblical verses I linked to earlier on page one seem to back this up.
Sure, that seems possible. But if the theist-in-question is to go down that route, then he or she mustn't also contradict him or her self by, for example, claiming that this designer is God, as defined in a manner similar to that of Anselm and others, as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. There might be a way around that particular criticism, by, for example, taking advantage of the ambiguity of "greater". But, [I]prima facie[/I], the two seem to clash.
What I think is at issue here is the conventions employed when we describe our experiences. It is by means of these conventions that my description of my experience is consistent with how you would describe your experience, or consistent with an experience which you would think is possible. There are certain conventions whereby "I experienced God" is a perfectly legitimate statement. However, there are atheists who would openly challenge such conventions, claiming that there is no such thing as God, therefore any convention which allows for such a description is illegitimate.
In comparison, consider empirical sciences, and the conventions in play, whereby observations are described. In high energy physics there are conventions whereby certain phenomena are described in terms of elementary particles. There are scores of such "particles", referring to different observations incurred under distinct conditions. But these aren't "particles" in any common sense use of the word "particle", this is something completely different. It is simply the accepted convention, within the field of physics, to refer to "elementary particles" in describing such observations.
Now, just like an atheist would oppose the conventions whereby an individual might refer to an "experience of God", an 'anti-particle physicsist' might oppose the conventions whereby physicists refer to "elementary particles" in describing these observations. There is really no difference here. In theology, the conventions are in place which allow us to say that we have experienced God, in the same way that physicists claim to have observed elementary particles. But just like atheists claim that it is impossible for the individual to experience God, because God does not exist, it is equally justified to claim that it is impossible that physicists have observed elementary particles, because fundamental particles do not exist. Just like the atheist argues that "God" is a misconception, we could equally argue that "elementary particles" is a misconception.
In each case, it is simply a question of whether the person describing one's own experience is doing so in a way which is acceptable to others (conventional). And of course, what is acceptable to some, is not acceptable to others.
If it's legitimate to propose that people's reports of their alleged religious experiences are not really about the particular supernatural beings and events they say they are, but rather are evidence of some kind of "underlying truth, a philosophia perennis, of which the various specific traditions are instances." then why is it not legitimate to simply observe that the actual content they report is a function fo their social and historical context?
Furthermore, given our understanding of the brain's irrepressible tendency to automatically and largely non-consdciously construct some kind of meaningful explanatory narrative for our experiences--often a complete confabulation--I propose that the particular content the brain uses in these constructions would be drawn from the person's own context, and that the "underlying truth" about such reports is that they are fictions generated by brains doing exactly the kind of thing we know brains do.
Really? Do explain.
Quoting Sapientia
You're going to have to argue, then, that infinite regresses or spontaneous creation acts are reasonable. Because if we are arguing from with a certain metaphysical framework, then they are, from what I and many others can tell, are not coherent.
Quoting Sapientia
Infinite regress is incoherent, and labeling something with a different name doesn't change the ontological role it plays.
Quoting Sapientia
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus/#2
Because it is reductionistic, i.e. provides an explanation in terms other than those in which the reports are presented. I have studied comparitive religion, there are entire schools of thought in anthropology and sociology in which these issues are debated. Freud for instance was a convinced atheist, he provided a compelling account of how the Crucifixion myth was really an instance of sublimated Oedipal anxiety. Emile Durkheim believed that Gods represented the collective social order. Max Weber's The Protestant Work Ethic was another very influential essay in sociology of religion. Examples can be multiplied indefinitely, comparative religion is a massive body of literature. Now such arguments often have their merits, I'm not saying that they are to be dismissed, as they often contain important insights and novel perspectives. But I also don't think they do justice to the subject matter when they attempt to 'explain it away' or show that it's 'really' simply a consequence of a socio-economic factor or ingrained cultural conditioning. That is why books like Wiliam James' 'Varieties of Religous Experience' and those of comparative religionists like Mircea Eliade, and first-hand accounts of mystics, are important - they present the reports of experience as real data, not as something to be rationalised or explained away. And they present many things which can't be explained or assimilated by our Western scientific-secular mindset.
Speaking of the way 'the brain constructs', that applies to all of us and to every kind of cultural narrative, including science. We nowadays have this smug sense of modern superiority, but most people's insight into the implications of this fact is skin-deep in my view. It is arguable that contemplative prayer and yogic practices actually work by providing insight into this process of 'world-construction'.
And finally, amongst the varieties of religious experience, one thing not to loose sight of is the understanding that there are insights or visions or states of being which are 'salvific' (in just the way our drive-by contributor says). There really are conversion experiences, sometimes in terms like 'seeing the light', sometimes ineffable or incommunicable, which forever change the understanding and outlook of the subject. That can manifest across a whole spectrum of experiences, such as emotionality or weeping or falling into states of rapture, on the one hand, to a sublime and detached intellectual vision into the eternal order of things, on the other, that you might find in the Western philosophical tradition. And many points in between. All of those states are represented at some point in the Christian tradition as well. But most of us prefer to think about them from our assumed position, the conventional categories into which we have slotted our understanding of 'science' and 'religion' and 'philosophy'.
First, note that the terms in which the reports are presented differ substantively from person to person, and demonstrably are terms from their own particular historical and social contexts.
Second, explanations from perspectives based on premises and concepts other than those used by the people reporting and interpreting their experiences are neither illegitimate nor necessarily reductionist. This is exactly how science hss advanced our understanding of the world, such as when it proposes explanations contrary to the shaman's, that the child's sickness is caused by microbes, rather than by the evil eye from the old lady who lives alone down by the river, and that seizures are caused by neurological malfunction rather than by demon possession.
No jurisdiction?
If there are observable phenomena (the assertions people make about their experiences), and empirical data (the content of their explanations), then it is entirely within the "jurisdiction" of science to propose explanations.
Note that what you call "the angry thunder god hypothesis" quite pointedly reveals that legitimate--not to mention demonstrably reliable--explanations need not be based on the same premises and presuppositions and concepts as explanations "from within"--which is the whole point I was making. I was not equating religion and superstition. (Though now I do have the impression that you want to reject the innunerable superstitious aspects of religion as "not true religion.")
What 'science' deals with that? How do you go about it 'scientifically'? I mentioned before, although apparently I need not have bothered, that I have studied these exact questions through comparative relgion and anthropology, which in regards to this subject, are pretty close to what could be called scientific.
But again, if you're claiming that the variety of religious experiences 'really are' able to be understood through sociological, cultural, psychological, or other such perspectives, then you're implicitly rejecting the idea that there is any valid object of religious cognition.
So - are you?
Your point?
Do you assume that I haven't studied the same subjects, and read the books you mentioned?
What I claim is that there are various ways of looking at, ways of understanding and explaining the phenomena at issue, and it is perfectly legitimate to do this from perspectives outside the perspective "from within"--which you privelege as the only legitimate one. Explanations from other perspectives are based on very different presuppositions and concepts than those used in the ones you characterize as "from within," and, in fact, we have advvanced our understanding of innumerable phenomena throughout history by adopting perspectives from outside the prevailing one.
And since you ask, I am perfectly willing to claim that sociological, cultural, psychological, and other such perspectives also provide much additional understanding about religious belief, behavior, and experience.
As I said, the issue here is one of convention.
Quoting Wayfarer
The convention of natural science is one which takes time for granted. Under this convention, eternality, as understood in theology (outside of time), is not even a possible subject.
Yeah, didn't mean to ignore what you've said, MU, just trying to see how it fits into my understanding.
I surely agree that there's much convention involved in the matter, starting with the particular ccontent of what people report about their experiences. This is pretty much what I meant by the historical and social context. People express their experiences in terms of the conventions of their particular social context.
Indeed, as you've noted, we express our various explanationsdof phenomena in the terms and framework of some set of conventions or other. But not all explanations are equal. Different explanations fulfill different purposes and have different consequences, reliableness, and degrees of confirmability.
But there's also a more general convention at play jere across history and cultures--namely that such experiences are of some kind of breakthrough from some other realm of reality. The particulars of this realm are often understood in terms that reflect the conventions of the particular social context, but the pattern of realm crossover is virtually universal. This, and other patterns that are found across cultures, are taken by some people as evidence of the existence of some other actual realm that's non-physical, and perhaps timeless. But that's just one category of explanation. The various sciences, increasingly the cognitive and evolution sciences, offer alternative, naturalistic explanations for the ubiquity of such patterns.
Sure, but they only provide an understanding of religious belief, behavior and experience 'from without' as they are seen as objectified empirical phenomena.
Maybe that's because they've literally started to see through the space-time matrix which, until now, science has taken for granted.
But I think it needs to be made clear that the attempt to explain what may be called 'questions of ultimate concern' in scientific or naturalistic terms, is inherently reductionist. And why? Because science itself relies on quantification of objective and measurable data. Call that 'objectification'. But such an attitude forgets what has already been excluded in the historical development of scientific method.
Does Reason Know what it is Missing?, Stanley Fish, NY Times.
Now natural sciences might well open up new vistas on the territory previously regarded as being in the domain of philosophy and religion - indeed they already have. But the point about those older discipines is that in them, the subject is also the object. Spiritual philosophies can be quite scientific in a sense - in fact there is traditional term for such an approach, the 'scientia sacra'. But it is not an arms-length, third-person study, in the way that science is, in that it requires rigourous and disciplined self-awareness and moral commitment.
But there are some very insightful scientists whose work is not at all hostile to such perspectives, and many cutting-edge disciplines and fields that draw on both (about which there are many excellent interviews on Closer to Truth. See for instance Donald Hoffman's interviews.)
I see that the OP has never returned.
In Wayfarer's words, "driveby contributor".
Quoting Brainglitch
This statement betrays a slight scientific bent. The term "equal" is inapplicable here, it is derived from a scientific reductionism which intends to reduce all qualities to quantities. When we compare one description, or explanation, to another, we cannot start with any assumptions of equality. Even that a plurality of descriptions might be differing descriptions of the same thing, is something which must be determined, i.e. that they are referring to the same thing. If we enter this process of determination with any premise of equality, such that we assume that two explanations are of the same thing for example, then we allow the possibility of mistake. So we dismiss equality altogether, and move to your second suggestion, which is purpose.
Purpose necessitates inequality in a number of different ways. What is relevant here, is that one's intended purpose influences the aspects of the observable object which, that individual has interest in, thereby influencing one's attention, consequently influencing one's description, explanation, or observation. "Purpose" is highly influenced by, but if you allow free will, not dictated by, social and historical context. The limits to the influence of social and historical context are the extent to which we follow conventions. Of course we must allow that conventions are themselves "becoming", coming into existence and evolving. This is the manifestation of free will, how we are, in actuality unconstrained by conventions. Conventions are the means by which the free willing being constrains the physical world, not vise versa.
Quoting Brainglitch
If you understand what I described in the last paragraph you will see that we must allow as "very real", the expressions of individuals which are completely non-conventional. It is only by allowing the merit of the non-conventional that we allow the constraints of conventions to be transcended, and the evolutionary process to proceed. But the interesting thing here, which you have just pointed to, and which Wayfarer is highly in tune with, is that once we transcend the conventions of the particular culture which we exist within, we approach another layer of much more general conventions which seem to be proper to all of humanity.
There appears to be a true separation between these two layers. This I believe is due to the separation between what is important to us here and now, within an individual's life within a particular culture, and what is important in the very long term, important to life in general. So one set of conventions focuses the attention according to the intentions of here and now, very short term, while the other looks to the most long term intentions, I'll call this the timeless. This creates the separation, as the intermediary intentions become negligible, unimportant.
Quoting Brainglitch
Our terms of description and explanation are proper to the short term conventions, the societal constraints of common communication. That is why, when we move to describe the constraints of the timeless, the descriptions can only be understood according to the conventions of a particular culture. Despite the fact that one tries to explain something which transcends all social contexts, that individual is restricted in this effort by the constraints of a particular social context.
Now we've come full circle back to the concept of "equality". It is concepts such as these, equality, mathematical principles, identity (the notion that we are actually talking about the same thing), which are common to all cultures, that validate and justify the assumption of a non-physical, timeless reality.
Here's the difficulty with respect to purpose. Communication evolves from the very short term intention. Mathematics and other fundamental logical principles strive toward the long term, the timeless, to be always true. Science is relegated to an intermediary position. It tries to uphold and adhere only to the highest standards of timeless principles, but it is nonetheless forced by the particulars of social context to conform to short term principles. This is an act of the materialist short term intentions overwhelming the timeless. In this position science exposes weakness in timeless principles (ones that aren't actually timeless), while also exposing weakness in short term principles (ones which aren't consistent with proper long term principles). As I alluded to above, the intermediate position is somewhat unimportant, expendable, as the evolutionary forces produce the necessity of freeing the timeless from the constraints of social context. The important point being that the constraints of social context (conventions) must be transcended.
Pretty soapboxy.
And mistaken.
All I meant by "not equal" was, as I said, that different explanations have, for example, different purposes, different consequences, different degrees of confirmability. There are many other differences, of course (including explanatory power, predictiveness, logical coherence with other knowledge, falsifiability, etc.) Not only was I not priveleging scientific explanations, I was, in fact, acknowledging the legitimacy of explanations based on presuppositions and concepts different from those of science.
Also, you might note that the mentioned different purposes and different consequences do not entail reducing qualities to quantities, as you mistakenly insist. And though the reliableness of propositions can be measured quantitatively, even reliability is routinely judged qualitatively instead.
Nothing I've said is inconsistent with this.
Well, people's expressions may be "very real," but that doesn't entail that we must accept that what they say is true, or even intelligible, just because they've expressed it, whether what they assert is conventional or not.
And if what someone else happens to care about is pragmatic applicability, or demonstrable predictiveness, or rigorous logical coherence with the rest of what he construes as knowledge, or empirical corroboration, or possible at least in principle to falsify, for example, and the very real expression at issue does not deliver these, then one would reject such expressions at least as irrelevant. On the other hand if, rather than these concerns, what someone cares mostly about is something else, such as, for example, a metaphysical explanation based on different concepts and presuppositions, and unencumbered by requirements of demonstrable predictiveness, falsifiability, etc. then this person will not judge certain of the very real expressions to be irrelevant, but rather as constituting important knowledge.
Gotta stop here, for now at least.
Why? Was it not clear to you from my last post in which I mentioned other possibilities? [i]Given these other possibilities[/I], your assertion is simply false; as would be the assertion that it is necessary to eat with a knife and fork; as would be the assertion that the fact that we eat dinner [i]makes it[/I] necessary.
Quoting darthbarracuda
All I have to do is argue that there are other possibilities, which there are. For there not to be, they'd have to entail a contradiction, which you'd need to demonstrate.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You need to [i]demonstrate[/I] that infinite regress is incoherent, as opposed to simply stating it as if it were an established fact.
And yes, of course, I haven't denied that, but your labels are unclear and may well be inappropriate. So, to be clear, I'm just talking about the possibility of a first cause, not specifically about anything theological, hence my conscious decision not to adopt any theological terms like the ones that you've used.
Quoting darthbarracuda
No, I'm not going to read an encyclopaedia entry about Plotinus. You can quote it if doing so will somehow support your claim that this represents what is [i]typical[/I], and if you don't think that it does, then it was pointless to provide that link.
I think it's quite simply magic. And there will never be a a science for what is magical. There is no way of understanding it well by any means of intellectualism. No matter how hard I try.
I'd say it has to be experienced. But I imagine the default position otherwise would be indifference/ignorance. Seriously some of the replies here give me the impression that a lot of philosophers are emotionally unwell - you're simply missing the point. And somehow getting yourself worked up about it. While under the impression that you can establish yourself as correct, when you simply haven't experienced my experience. It's madness. I did chuckle a bit when someone suggested I was mentally ill in the very same breath as a lot of bitter and resentful shit they'd written.
I think some people might have got the impression I was proposing a position here. The initial post doesn't make good philosophy. But it also doesn't make bad philosophy. It's clearly not a philosophical argument. And while I might have reacted similarly in the past I now find such behaviour baffling. You're simply missing the point. And then getting worked up about it.
Some people are quite intellectually developed. But they seem to lack the emotional maturity to develop a valid viewpoint here.
This doesn't apply to all. A lot of people have had something quite reasonable to say. But I do feel for the others. I've been there. Hopeless and relentless intellecualising in the pursuit of an answer that is really quite simple when you find it. God, that is.
It's important to trust your feelings. They provide much more accurate insight than words ever could. Such is faith.
ply="Sapientia;29005"]
You're the one who seems unwell. That's a very cynical outlook. You logic isn't consistent
Typical. Well, this is a philosophy forum, and your post and attitude are unphilosphical. I don't really care about these experiences of yours that you came here to boast about and use as an excuse to insult others, and which you refuse to even describe in detail so that they can be considered and discussed properly.
Quoting colin
Quoting colin
>:O
Quoting colin
Indeed.
Quoting colin
Yes, it does. We only have your testament to go by, your reasoning is weak at best, and you've left out important details which you refuse to go into.
Quoting colin
Coming from someone who believes in magic, thinks he has had experiences of God, and has a history of mental illness...
What is debatable, though, is your assertion that your experience involved a supernatural being--God--connecting with you, and that this therefore entails that God exists, and atheism is false.
So, your experience is yours, and you are free to interpret it any way you please, but your propositions are on the forum table open for discussion.
One counter to your assertion, for example, is that your own brain generated the experience, and therefore, you have not shown that atheism is false.
When you focus on technicalities you lose sight of what's obvious. I used to crave information that I considered factual to develop my understanding of existence. Now I just go with what I know to be true without reasoning it. Does something have to be technically validated when you know it to be obviously true? Or is that just madness?
I was once a master philosopher. Now I've grown up and can move on with my life. It was kinda fun being right about everything. But it was ultimately quite a sad existence.
The opinions of others on this matter are quite irrelevant to me now that I've had these experiences. That's all I wanted to let you all know. So maybe be wishful and hope that you too might find God. Otherwise, let it go.
Goodbye.
And now it seems that you again think you are right about everything. All that has changed is your belief about what that everything is.
That is where we started! I was arguing that Dawkins' depiction of an 'infinitely complex being' - larger and more complex than the universe itself - is a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of deity. Let's leave it at that.
Sure, that might hold if you are operating under the presupposition that intelligence is mechanistic or modular.
I have no doubt that a Thomist could supply a word salad long enough to feed a billion Cookie Monsters (if Cookie Monsters ate salad, which - sadly - I suspect they don't) to explain why the two are perfectly compatible, but that would do nothing to make the suggestion any less ridiculous to my paltry human imagination.
That is why I keep referring to the scathing critique of his book by Terry Eagleton, aptly called 'Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching'.
"Soapboxy", I like that. Does that mean I have something to stand on?
Quoting Brainglitch
The fact is though, that you used "equal", and so I commented on your use of that word. If you meant something different from "not equal", then the mistake is yours for using that word, which is not the word you should have used. You were talking about qualitative differences, and I was merely pointing out that it is a mistake to even talk in terms of equality. Yes, you are absolutely right to say that different explanations are "not equal", this we can take for granted. All I was pointing out, is that your use of the term betrays a perspective which already assumes an equality, an identity, as "same", such that you had to verbally negate this equality, in order to discuss the fact that there are different ways of explaining things.
My point was, that once you negate this equality, you have no principle of identity whereby you can claim that Colin and you for example, are even talking about the same thing. So as soon as you acknowledge that explanations differ, as you say there are differences between explanations, we need to produce some principles of identity if we want to feel confident that we are describing the same thing. Notice that Colin is crafty, and avoids any specifics concerning the experience, so that we have absolutely nothing to identify with.
Quoting Brainglitch
But we have to first identify what is being referred to by the explanation, or description, before we can make any judgements about the truth or falsity of the description. When the description is a description of one's own personal inner experience, how are you, as another, able to identify that experience in order to verify what is being said about it? The only access which you have, to enable identification, is through the means of the other's description. You can only identify that experience through the other's description of it. The described experience can be assumed to be no other than the description of it, without an accusation of lying. So how could you say that the description is false unless it contained inconsistency, or blatant contradiction? But Colin is careful not to go there.
This leaves me wondering what you think personhood consists in.
I get that. I think the bottom line is, that the 'fundamental ground' - that from which everything is derived - is not an 'it', any kind of stuff, energy, or material substance, but is in some sense alive - like sentient energy (although words and images fail here).
Right - he only understands it in terms of fundamentalism, because he himself is a type of fundamentalist. That is where Karen Armstrong's response to Dawkins is useful - she shows the history of how this widespread misconception became common currency.
I don't believe such fundamentalist notions are either widespread or widely preached. I would say that if you don't go to fundamentalist churches or mosques or listen to teleevangelists then you will be unlikely to encounter fundamentalist teachings.
I found God (and thus, joy and fulfillment) when, and only when, I opened myself to it. That is, when I really embraced positive behaviour to connect with others. Often at my own discomfort. But I was determined to at least know that I tried my best and couldn't find God. That is, before I discarded the idea that gave many millions such a seemingly profound sense of joy, that deep down I knew I was just envious of. My point is, it takes work. You have to earn enlightenment. Otherwise, it would lack any meaning.
After years of laughing at religious people, and condescending them from way up on my high horse, I came to learn that I was no cleverer than any of them. Much stupider actually! Although I was a much more fluent communicator than most of these people, and my competence in debate was far more advanced... I had obsessively developed these skills to distract from my own insecurity.
These people were bright enough to simply know what is obvious to me now. They're wired correctly. They simply know what feels good and keep at it. They can see it without figuring it out. They know what's right without having to spend much time or effort justifying it. And really, it is so simple.
An example of my past intellectual delusion is that I used to think emotive language was for morons. Now I know better. I don't make the strongest arguments any more. But my viewpoint is far more contagious. And I'm far more loved for it.
So... try to be positive in your thinking and behaviour. Really try. Until you've learned these behaviours. And I'm sure you too will then see enlightenment. The mindstate that knows no definitive description.
Its just, some of us have learned to know better, while others are still searching. And I guess that's all there is to it.
Kind wishes to all.
The widely preached fundamentalist Chridstian ID reasoning is that the complexity we observe in the world cannot possibly exist unless if was intended--designed, comprehended in its infinite details, created, and actively sustained by an intelligence capable of doing such a thing. By which they mean God as they conceive of him.
Dawkins is responding to these widespread notions of "Intelligent Design," and couches his response to them in the language and concepts of their widely preached and published notions of God.
As I said to Colin, no one is challenging his claim to have had a powerful experience. What we are able to address in such instances, though, is the propositional content of what a person has put on the table.
Consider this less contentious analogue: Grandma reports to us that she awoke in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom last might, and her cat, Mister Paws, was waiting for her on the bed when she got back. He purred and snuggled her, and somehow communicated to her that he was doing fine, and didn't hold a grudge against the guy who flattened him with the cement truck last week.
Do we believe that Mr. Paws is alive and well in the great beyond and broke through and made contact with Granny, who is intransigently convinced, or do we think the more likely explanation for Granny's experience is that Granny's grieving brain generated the whole incident?
In this case, Granny has offered us some specifics. Mister Paws was on her bed. But we might know Mister Paws was buried in the ground, dead, with a cement block on top. So with a few other premises we can deductively conclude that for some reason granny is not giving us accurate information.
Colin hasn't given us such specifics. All Colin said in the op is that he had "profound religious experiences", and he now knows that God exists. We cannot disprove the descriptions of his experiences because he hasn't provided any. All we can do is to attack the claim that he knows that God exists, if we happen to believe otherwise. But unless we have some proof that God does not exist we have no justification for attacking Colin's claim of profound religious experience, nor his claim to know that God exists. It is completely logical that someone else could know something which is contrary to your belief, if there is no evidence to back up your belief.
Quoting colin
I empathize with this experience. For much of my life I scoffed at the idea of God, and especially religion. I never went to church, and as a child I considered that to be a ridiculous exercise. But of course I heard mention of God, and in the back of my mind there was insecurity in my atheist practise, a feeling of "what if" God was real. I knew that I needed reason to truly reject God. So I worked hard to find that reason, read the Bible, studied religious materials, and guess what? It didn't work. All that hard work, to find reason to reject God only allowed me to find God.
It would seem that your experience(s) is more an immense feeling rather than an intellectual enlightenment.
Truth is best wrestled with, not embraced. The coming upon what may be right should bring about a journey, a journey of exhaustively flagellating and fighting with a profoundly unsettling idea that could, in time, deeply shape the living of one's future life. In contrast, it would seem that you, Colin, have come upon something very easy, something distinctly simple. And this is why your testimony leaves me slightly off put, for even if I believed in a God, such belief would never leave me assured or content. As I sit here, if I dedicate enough time to it I will be reminded of my sin, and will invariably be distressed and disgusted by it. Such a feeling brings me to humble thoughts, however, not to thoughts of pride, as though I am not a sinful wretch like any other, that I've what others do not.
Quoting colin
Indeed. I suggest you move your searching for humility from this forum to another, so that you might then find more members keen enough to massage your current ego. I myself will remain here, assured only in the fact that I will never be of such a wisdom to suggest that I know better.
Tell me you're right and I'll tell you you're wrong. Tell me you're wrong, and I'll tell you you're right.
Okay, but especially as someone who was an atheist, I'm wondering why you're interpreting your experiences as something other than simply unusual brain states. If you were to detail just what the experiences were, that might make it clearer why you've settled upon the interpretation that you have.
From my perspective, it's difficult for me to imagine what would possibly count in my interpretation as me having an experience of external-to-me religious phenomena rather than just figuring that my brain was doing strange (even if enjoyable) things.
Why do you think Colin came upon this "something" very easily? That's not what he said:
Quoting colin
He experienced something, and therefore holds to be true whatever he now does. This is simplicity almost by definition. What struggle was there? If truth ceases to concern you, or challenge you, or demands you to rethink upon what you do think to be true, then truth is a liar.
I'm not doubting that you were an atheist, but you were definitely a very different sort of atheist than I am, you probably came to atheism from a different background than I did (I simply wasn't at all socialized into any religious beliefs; in fact, I had almost zero familiarity with religious beliefs until I was in my mid teens), and you probably had different motivations/justifications than I do for your atheism.
The point is more or less that Colin's enlightenment is simplistic-- all you have to do is feel God. Questions of what is ethical, work to discover or produce a good outcome, keeping logical rigour are all irrelevant. Just "feel God" and you will be wise. A distinctly reductive and simple account of what it means to understand, relate and respect yourself and the world.
But saying, "I know what that was" is precisely what Colin has said, which is why I find his opining frivolous and entirely boring.
Indeed I have. He writes,
"They simply know what feels good and keep at it. They can see it without figuring it out. They know what's right without having to spend much time or effort justifying it. And really, it is so simple."
If this sentiment strikes you as evidence for a man that has suffered, and still suffers, after the truth, I must assume you to be as intellectually vapid as he is. He has just embraced those who " just know" what's "right" simply because something "feels good" and so this therefore excludes he and them from "having to spend much time justifying."
>:O
"Colin" is pulling your legs, guys.
That would seem more reasonable at least.
Yes, but I only started posting there this past April or May. I know we interacted in a couple different threads.
I'm pretty sure you were telling me how much you agreed with me, but I suggested you just send money instead.
Or maybe that was just that dream I had.
Willkommen.
But remember way back a post or two, when you said;
And you surely realize that Granny was talking about a risen-from-the-dead supernauiral visiting-from- the-great-beyond version of Mr. Paws, right? So your attempted dodge about Mr. Paws being buried and covered with a cement block on top is irrelevant. Not to mention tjat since it was a cement truck that did him in, it's in plain bad taste to allege that's how they'd covered his grave.
What you've demonstrated here is that you really think that if we think we have sufficient eason to reject a person's claims about contact from the supernatural, then we reject their claim, and explain what they say they experienced according to our own alternative explanation.
But that isn't atheism. That is consistent with atheism, but it isn't atheism itself. And it is misleading to say that all of those things that you mentioned just appeared from nowhere, since it is possible that with some of those things, it was a long and gradual process of development.
I don't find any theory about where everything came from entirely plausible either. I accept the Big Bang theory, but even experts seem to have trouble answering the question of what was before that, and whether that question even makes sense. But I find atheism [i]more[/I] plausible than the alternatives.
Quoting Brainglitch
The point being, that in the case of Colin's op there was no sufficient reason for rejection, only a bias concerning the nature of the thing which Colin referred to as "God".
Your response here has me slightly peeved, I must admit. You've cleverly set up the onus to be on me for having to rehash and redress what I've already said, but I'm not going to do that. If you think I'm wrong, then give me more than an essential, "no". I've given you and Colin the time of day so far, now it's your turn to care enough to prove me wrong. If you can't do that, then I shall toodles and away.
You've said both (1) that unless there's internal inconsistency or blatant contradiction in what a person claims, the experience can be assumed to be no other than the description of it, and we have no grounds for saying it's false, AND (2) that we can reject a person's claim if we think we have "sufficient reason" to reject it.
So which is it?
Note that when I suggested an alternative explanation--since we know full well that brains are prone to generate just such kinds of experiences, (especially in certain situations, such as emotional stress) and that the particulars the brain constructs the narrative with are those it's familiar with from its own particular social context (God or Jesus or Krishna or Mary or Athena or the Great Witch, etc.)--you insisted that we have no grounds for rejecting the claim, but rather, since we have no access to their experience, we must accept what the person has told us.
Your argument strikes me as ad hoc. Seems to be that if the report is about God in some sense, then we accept it, and have no grounds other (than the obviousd one of internal contradiction) for rejecting it. But for reports other than about God we can propose "sufficient reason" to reject it.
Your assessment of my position isn't too far off. What I call atheism is broad enough to include a sort agnosticism as well as stronger forms of atheism.
Application of my epistemological standard produces different results depending on context, so I do have firm justification in some contexts, depending on what we're talking about, and in other contexts, less so. If we don't even know what we're talking about, then I'll probably be more sceptical by default, but I do abide by standards along the lines of belief being proportional to evidence, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and what can be claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. So Colin's claims don't fare well. He obviously can't produce any evidence other than his own testimony, which is virtually worthless.
I think that my position is both less problematic [i]and[/I] more plausible than alternatives, after weighing them. Although whether or not I'd say that it is correct would depend on what that means.
Ah... so after reading further into the discussion, it seems you had already conceded one of your claims I took issue with:
Quoting darthbarracuda
So, unless you claim that the conception of God referred to in the first quote is also simple, then you seem to have contradicted yourself. I thought you were contrasting your simple conception vs. a complex conception. You seem confused about which one is typical and which one isn't. I think it's the complex one that is typical and your simple one is not, which would make your statement in the second quote false.
Quoting Arkady
Yeah, and it's all the more amusing given that, as you can see, he started out by claiming that this is the typical stance.
I find it best to label myself an Ignostic, for mere agnosticism or atheism doesn't quite encompass all of my leanings. Have you considered this position?
Yeh right. That's either a lie or you're incompetent. Your OP used provocative language directed towards atheists, and I think that it was deliberate.
I suspected from the start that you might be a troll, and I'm not the only one to have thought this, since at least one other poster has said as much. I wouldn't be surprised if your OP is just "copypasta".
Yes, I have, and I can relate to it inasmuch as I also tend to reserve judgement to some extent because of a lack of clarity in the meaning of certain terms - "God" being a prime example. But I don't use that term to describe my stance, since I prefer more well-known terms. I identify as an atheist, because I think that the term, given its meaning, best conveys my position. My views fit commonly used definitions. I don't believe in God - I never have - and I know that God, in accordance with some conceptions, does not exist. In the relevant contexts, I fit both types of atheism: weak and strong. I'm not really on the fence or haven't thought it through, so the term "agnostic" can give the wrong impression, but I am agnostic too in some contexts, so I don't wholly reject that term.
Q: As long as you are accepting the image of Jesus or Allah or any other prophet or son of god, you are blocking the actual GOD itself from your perception, because you come with a predefined GOD, that you know stuff about and can recognize it. Am I wrong?
Quoting Benjamin Dovano
It might be possible to experience the presence of God, and it might be possible not to experience the presence of God; but it would not seem to be possible to experience the absence of God.
The consciousness, self-consciousness and non-predictable responses I can understand. Are you saying, though, that if someone possessed no emotions or preferences and or did not plan for the future, that they would not be a person?
Gautama recommends non-attachment to (which amounts to non-possession of) emotions and preferences.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
Would you say Christ and Buddha are exhorting us to become non-persons?
It doesn't seem that way to me. Experiencing absence is part of one of the most powerful human emotions there is, as it is what makes the premature death of a loved one so terrible. I can't remember where but I seem to remember at least one very moving passage in literature where a deeply faithful person has 'realised' that there is nobody there listening to their prayers.
One can of course say 'but they might be mistaken about the absence' or 'God is hiding', but one can say exactly the same thing about the experience of the presence of God. It might be Descartes' evil demon tormenting us by creating an illusion of the presence of a God.
It seems to me that the absence of God is experienced frequently, and traumatically, by people in desperate circumstances.
For someone who has palpably experienced the absence of God, there is no God. For someone who has palbably experienced the existence of God, there is one. And sometimes people have both experiences (but not at the same time).
No, I think that it is you who has misunderstood. I agree that he didn't present it in the form of an argument, but in it he revealed his process of reasoning, which is what we have been criticising. How exactly does he expect us to invite that kind of experience into our lives? He hasn't even described it, so it could have been virtually anything. And even if I did have such an experience, it seems I'd have to have poor critical thinking skills like Colin, the former self-styled master philosopher, in order to jump to his conclusion. Are we supposed to guess? Maybe if I go to church on drugs, my senses will be heightened, and I'll have a similar experience, and I'll be sufficiently stupefied to think that it is God, but that isn't at the top of my to do list.
Perhaps the word 'absence' creates confusion here. We may experience the existence of God, as palpably as we experience the existence of a tree. But we cannot experience the non-existence of God just as we cannot experience the nonexistence of a tree. We can posit that a tree of some very precise description does not exists anywhere in the universe, but we cannot experience its non-existence.
I cannot see anywhere in the OP where he gives a process of reasoning for his belief in God. He specifically says his belief is simply on account of experience.
Your second sentence describes at least a minimal process of reasoning, and we can infer other things about his process of reasoning from that and other comments of his, like that he has probably considered - however briefly - alternative explanations, and has ultimately ruled them out.
Quoting colin
How can you not see what his comments indicate about his process of reasoning? Are we seeing the same thing? He is clearly stating conclusions that he has reached through a process of reasoning after having had these experiences, assessed them, and compared his explanation with others ("there can be no alternate understanding for me any more").
No, I don't read it that way. I would say that, if the honesty of his account be granted, he became utterly convinced at the moment of experience, and that his testimony is merely a retrospective account of that. Other possibilities are ruled out simply because the utter conviction that had its inception with the experience remains, and the other possibilities pale into insignificance for Colin, on account of the strength of that conviction.
His account is still not a good reason for others to believe in God; but it is a good reason to be open to the possibility of transformative experiences as foundations of the deepest kinds of conviction.
But even [i]your[/I] interpretation implies a minimal process of reasoning, and whether we address his process of reasoning or the standard that he has used in order to have ruled out [i]every single[/I] alternative explanation, the point is, there is something there to criticise, and much of this criticism is warranted.
Quoting John
It's not a good reason for [i]him[/I] to believe in God either, for a number of reasons, and especially given that, by his own admission, he has a history of mental illness, and he has not given any further details. He says that he has recovered, but you seem to just be taking that for granted, despite the fact that, whether you like it or not, the claim that one has experienced God is commonly made by people with one or more of a range of mental illnesses, and despite the fact that someone with a history of mental illness is more likely to relapse or mistakenly believe that they are well/recovered than others without such a history.
Quoting John
I find your rather flowery way of putting it quite amusing. As others have pointed out, no one has denied that there can be powerful experiences that can affect and alter one's world view - drastically in some cases. But this is merely the testimony of one stranger on the internet, and he hasn't given me any good reason to change my views. I'm about as open to experiences of God as experiences of other extraordinary nonsense and fantasy and myths and magic. Are you similarly encouraging of openness to the possibility of encountering Big Foot or the Lock Ness monster? No? What if some random online stranger was to claim that he has encountered them? Perhaps then? But what if he told you he has just recovered from Schizophrenia? Ah, but that's alright, because he says he was formerly a master philosopher, so he must be pretty credible. Troll you say? No, surely not. He came here to spread [i]positive feeling[/I].
I was just interested in what the experience was. And a lot of my curiosity simply has to do with the fact that I can't even imagine what sort of experience I would require to change my mind about this issue.
Quoting Brainglitch
With respect to (1), what I said is that the experience must be identified. We have only the person's words to go by in identifying the experience. So we cannot simply reject the experience per se, as unidentifiable, or unintelligible unless the identifying words are inconsistent or contradictory. And, we cannot proceed to reject on the basis of sufficient reason unless a particular experience has been identified.
In the example you gave, a particular experience of a particular cat has been identified. We can reject based on (2), sufficient reason, but sufficient reason requires that the claimed experience be identified. Without identifying what has been claimed to have been experienced, how can you have sufficient reason to reject the claim?
Here's the difficulty. We have only the person's words to refer to in order to make that identification. The person said "I had an experience which makes me know that God exists". The experience has been identified as the experience which has resulted in me knowing that God exists. The person has only given us, as a description, or identifying features, that the said experience makes him know that God exists. All we have is the outcome of the experience, the result, the effect, we have absolutely no description of the experience itself. It is impossible that we have sufficient reason to reject the description of the experience, because we have no description of the experience. What we have is a description of the effects of the experience.
The effects of the experience are described as "I know that God exists". The only way that we have sufficient reason to reject the claim that an experience could cause one to know that God exists, is if we know that God does not exist, or if God's existence is something which cannot be known from experience. Then we could say that no possible experience could cause one to know that God exists. Therefore we could reject the identified experience, the one which results in the individual knowing that God exists, as impossible.
I agree, in the case of a tree, provided we have not witnessed the destruction of the tree*. And I agree in the case of an uninterested God, like the one that is associated with some varieties of Deism.
But when it comes to a God that loves us, listens to our prayers and grants what they request, is all-powerful and all-knowing, one can experience the non-existence of such a God because, by dint of those particular properties, it would make itself known to the individual in a situation where it was so desperately needed and wanted. One can experience the non-existence of such a God as palpably as one can experience the existence of a tree.
* We had a large, old, greatly beloved gum tree in our garden that we had to have removed because it had an incurable fungus and was becoming dangerous. I experienced the non-existence of that tree very powerfully for a long time after it was gone, as I went through the mourning process.
Yes, unless you have had such an experience, you understandably would not be able to imagine it. It would be like a man deaf from birth trying to imagine music.
Your examples and attitude seems so typical of what I call the 'intellectual mediocracy' as to be somewhat laughable. Although I have to say I find mediocrity more tragic than laughable especially when it comes to good intellects.
If Colin's own experience is not the best foundation for his beliefs then what is? The opinions of others who don't even know the nature of his experience? The opinions of the majority or "common sense"? There's mediocrity and its intellectual mediocracy in operation right there!
:-} :-d
:-d
Quoting John
It's not about his experience, it's about his judgement. The sooner you understand that, the better. And I've already explained to you why his own judgement in this case is questionable and unreliable. His experience could be explained by any number of alternative explanations. [i]Before[/I] reasonably concluding that it was an experience of God, one must rule out all of these alternative explanations, and the basis on which this has been done by Colin is remarkably weak. Moreover, if he (or you, if you're going to attempt to defend his stance) do not [i]want[/I] to be reasonable, as he has suggested more than once, then this discussion seems pretty pointless. Colin has merely emphasised the intensity of the experience, but that does [i]nothing[/I], since that fails to rule out the numerous alternative explanations.
Quoting John
Reason and evidence. It shouldn't come as a shock. This is fairly basic stuff, but Colin clearly doesn't even care about applying an iota of such a standard before lurching towards his precious God conclusion, and that you would defend this exceptional lack of any critical thinking doesn't do much for your credibility.
One can imagine what he [i]might[/I] have experienced, and one can reasonably assess what he [i]could[/I] and [i]could not[/I] have experienced, and one can reasonably assess the range of possible explanations, and compare them, and determine that some are more credible than others.
One can also relate to his experience insofar as one has also had experiences which can be described using some of the same adjectives that he has used. He might say that his experience is somehow greater or more profound, but I don't see why I should necessarily take that for granted. He equally hasn't experienced my experiences, and if I made the same claim of one or more of my experiences, it would just be his word against mine.
Furthermore, it is possible - perhaps likely - that we have even had the [i]same kind[/I] of experience, but have reached [i]different[/I] conclusions. It shouldn't just be taken for granted that Colin's experience was supernatural. Again, his testomy is woefully insufficient grounds, and this is an academic philosophy forum, so it isn't always appropriate to be polite and give him the benefit of the doubt, as we might do in other contexts. Especially since he has not given others that same courtesy: "laughable", "desperate", "bull shit", and "waste of talent" were the some of the terms he picked, apparently to "spread positive feeling".
Perhaps we're all deaf, so to speak, but some of us convince ourselves that we can hear music.
Little, if anything is more compelling than first-hand personal experience. Tenacious conviction of the truth of our own experiences (and memories) is universal, whether the experience is routine and uncontroversial, or radically divergent from normalcy and highly controversial--we are intractably convinced that we KNOW what we saw, heard, felt, etc.
But, though automatically and non-reflectively trusting our own experiences clearly works sufficiently well in everyday life, we also have much reason to be highly skeptical about certain experiences--our own or others'--that are outside the normal. And we know fully-well that brains sometimes radically misinterpret interactions with the world, can be tricked (for example by animals' protective coloration, as well as by stage magic and perception experiments), generate false memories, generate realistic dreams, and generate outlandish delusional beliefs (including, but not limited to those of paranoid psychotics). Additionally, we know that the tendency for the brain to generate abnormal experiences correlates with emotional stress, as well as with certain other contextual conditions, such as religious rituals, mucic, dance, and trance-inducing contexts.
We also know, as I've noted, that the content of such religious experiences correlates almost perfectly with the particular culture the person is embedded in. So, either the beings who populate all such experiences just happen to contact people who already believe in them, or people's brains are producing the experience and casting it with beings they already believe in.
Again, the point is that, irrespective of how compelling they are, we have much reason to be skeptical of claims and beliefs in certain kinds of experiences, whether they're our own or others'.
You are in effect, saying, "you should be worried about, consumed by, these kinds of epistemic issues like I am". The question is: why should they be concerned with such issues, when such issues no longer matter to them at all? What do you actually think these people are losing? Not everyone is obsessed with the idea of avoiding being 'hoodwinked'; if you are like that then you will likely never have such an experience to be in the position to feel and assess firsthand its power to convince you. You will remain forever on the outside looking in, so to speak.
:’(
So, his judgement is not a matter for him, but rather
a matter for... who?,,,You?
Quoting Sapientia
Whose reason? What kind of evidence? This is hilarious! :s >:O :D X-) >:) ;) :-} :-d
That isn't what I said. What does that even mean? He has made his judgement, and his judgement is a matter up for discussion. We are all entitled to assess it, question it, criticise it, and so on. This is a public philosophy forum after all. And he himself created this discussion knowing that.
Quoting John
Your first question doesn't make sense. Reason. As in, what is reasonable. And it isn't reasonable to jump to a conclusion.
What kind of evidence? Well, I could go into details, but one thing is for sure: if all he has is his own testimony, and it is testimony of an extraordinary or supernatural event, then obviously that is very weak evidence, and insufficient evidence, since, as I said, it fails to rule out alternative explanations. Given that this is obvious, why are you questioning me? I would genuinely be surprised if you thought otherwise, because, with the exception of your last post, and in other discussions, you seemed quite intelligent.
I don't know why you find this hilarious. You've come across as quite shallow and immature in your last short and ill-considered reply. And if you're going to ignore large parts of my posts, then don't expect me to do any different when it comes to your posts.
No, he posted here to let would-be philosophers know that he has come to a belief which is precisely not up for discussion because it has not been arrived at by a process of deduction, induction or abduction but rather by a leap of faith based directly on experiences he has had. If he presents a deductive, inductive or abductive argument then for sure he would be open to critique. But as it stands, with the information he has given, any attempted critique will necessarily be 'talking out of an arse'.
What is reasonable? Reason, thought as logic, must be valid. But arguments are always based on premises, which cannot themselves be demonstrated.
People may believe for reasons; that is a different matter. Instead of taking an unsupported premise, and assuming that, constructing a valid argument from it, one can simply take an experience, an intuitive feeling and count that as a reason for belief; in fact one can be so certain of a belief on this kind of basis that they cannot be touched by the doubts of others, Others simply don't know the experience and the intuition on which the certainty is based.
But, you probably won't experience this kind of certainty, because you seem to be desperately worried about the possibility that if you veer form the dictates of mediocratic 'reason' a terrible tragedy might occur; you might actually turn out to have been wrong! ;)
I'm rather pleased to think that you consider me "immature"; I have no aspirations towards embodying the type of 'maturity' that you seem to represent.
>:O
Of course his belief is up for discussion. If he didn't want it discussed, then he shouldn't have created this discussion.
You may notice that much of my criticism has been conditional upon being reasonable. I made sure to qualify, but perhaps you overlooked that in your haste to criticise. As I said, if he doesn't want to be reasonable, as in 'a leap of faith', then this discussion seems pretty pointless. But that is just the interpretation that you favour. It isn't necessarily the correct one. Some of his other comments seem to conflict with such an interpretation, and there are other reasons to think that it might be something other than- or more than- that. But I put in my two pennies worth earlier, and I don't want to go round in circles.
So, that doesn't mean that I've been 'talking out of my arse', it might just mean that you haven't been paying close enough attention to what I've been saying before diving in head first.
Quoting John
Look, can we cut to the chase? Are you, or are you not, going to claim that jumping to a conclusion is reasonable?
Quoting John
Yes, people believe things for reasons, and yes, that certainly is a different matter, and clearly not what I was talking about when I brought up reason.
As I've tried to explain to you, my issue isn't with the experience itself, but with his certainty that this was an experience of God. I challenge either you or Colin to come up with any possible experience of which one can reasonably be certain that it was an experience of God, and which cannot be explained just as good, if not better, without God. And either you or Colin are free to decline to be reasonable, but that would likely bring our discussion to an end.
As for intuition, that does not make the position that you're defending any stronger when compared with alternatives, since intuition is well known to be unreliable, and has frequently lead to mistakes in numerous cases. Furthermore, as with testimony, intuition is effectively made redundant when countered by contrary intuition. That is one reason why these are weak forms of evidence. Hardly a smoking gun; far from it.
Quoting John
No, I am not desperately worried about veering from the dictates of reason. I just have a natural disinclination from jumping to extraordinary conclusions when there are ordinary explanations which can better explain something. Hence, if I'm in a forest, and I see what appears to be a deer track, I'm not inclined to jump to the conclusion that it was [i]certainly[/I] left by a fairy or some other magical being that I can conjure up in my imagination - [i]so certain[/I], in fact, that any other suggestion, such as that it was actually left by a deer, is rendered laughable, desperate, and bull shit.
But wait, Sapientia, what if you had a deeply profound and highly flowery, transformative, powerful, intuitive experience that blew your mind? Well, maybe I have a brain tumour or maybe I simply endured what was hopefully just a momentary uncharacteristic state of stupefaction. People have been known to 'come to their senses' and retract past claims of supernatural experiences as mistaken or even fabricated. And there are many psychological explanations as to why some people make these claims and interpret certain experiences in these ways. Like I said in my first reply, I think that one big reason why many people end up attributing certain experiences to (or of) God is due more to wishful thinking than plausibility - and I get that impression to some extent from Colin, too, although his case is made more complicated by factors such as a history of some unspecified mental illness.
I haven't said that "we have sufficient reason to reject the claim that an experience could cause one to know that God exists." Clearly there have been innumerable cases of people having experiences that caused them to believe that God exists. As well as Jesus, Mary, Satan, witches, demons, angels, Krishna, their deceased spouse, aliens who perform anal probes, or a cat named Mr. Paws
Rather, I have offered an alternative explanation for the experience, in which people's brains are producing the experience and casting it with beings they already believe in.
We have, as I argued in some detail a post or two ago, much reason to be highly skeptical of such claims.
I have repeatedly acknowledged the fact that such experiences are compelling, and intractably convincing to the person who's had one. As far as they are concerned it's: "I KNOW what I experienced, case closed."
And I have explained why we have much reason to be highly skeptical of such experiences, whether our own or others'.
Surely you are skeptical of uncountable reports of such experiences--those, for instance that don't feature your own favorite supernatural characters?
I brought this up as well, but it didn't get addressed. I first brought it up in my reply to Hanover on page 6:
Quoting Sapientia
And then I brought it up again in the form of a direct question in reply to John on the last page:
Quoting Sapientia
Quoting Brainglitch
That sounds like a brain glitch for a supposed "master philosopher" ;)
But who's really doing the ignoring here? I already explained, against this very kind of point, that the mistake you guys are making lies in thinking that spiritual realities must be either the same as empirical realities or else not realities at all, but instead the same kind of thing as you would conceive dreams and fantasies to be, as the Lochness and Bigfoot examples attest.
What precludes that there might be a plurality of spiritual beings, or that the reality of those beings might be linked to the different spirits of different cultures? Your thinking is still of the "it must be either this or that" variety. This means you are not open to spiritual experience at all, and so could have no grounds for any opinion about its power to convince and even radically transform lives in ways that merely empirical experiences never can.
Even space aliens who do anal probes?
Are space aliens purportedly empirical entities?
Certainly not the ones who've done anal probes.
How are you distinguishing between spiritual and empirical? And how is this distinction relevant? If God can be experienced, isn't God empirical by definition? And I'm guessing that God counts as spiritual, so God would be both spiritual and empirical, as would fairies, assuming that they can also be experienced. So, can you confirm whether or not you apply the same standard of judgement in both cases?
The way that you're making use of this distinction arouses my suspicion. It's like, I could come up with the most ridiculous fantastical imaginings, but so long as they are given the label "spiritual", then we can apply a special exceptional standard, in which we can be less critical.
Quoting Sapientia
I don't think more philosophical Christians would say that you can directly experience God. They would hold, rather, that in so far as our own imperfect beings are, we can, therefore, and only in part, relate ourselves to God, who is being itself. I suppose to put that a more mundane way, consider someone who has perfect vision, and another who does not. Would the latter ever say that they've experienced the same sight as the former? No, but they do both see, thus they share a similar relationship of understanding, just not perfectly. That said, not all Christians would affiliate with that sort of dichotomy, however intelligible "being in itself" may or may not be, but I suppose you have to clarify which sort of Christian you're speaking to. Conceptions of God range widely among Christians, this I'm sure you know.
I must admit that the OP does not strike me as one who is wrestling with the quite poetic and nuanced scholastic understanding of the Christian God. This is why many here find him to be either a troll or simply, and somehow, both aloof and mean-spirited. Protestants can be the haughtiest of Christians, at times.
But don't you think that there's a difference between believing something and knowing something? I don't think that anyone here doubts that Colin had an experience which made him believe that God exists. The contentious point is that he claims that the experience has allowed him to know that God exist.
Do you think that experience itself is sufficient for knowing? It seems to me, like experience must be interpreted, and knowing is conditional on interpretation. So experience itself is not sufficient for knowing, knowledge is related to how the experience is interpreted.
Quoting Brainglitch
I would say that these cases are most likely a misinterpretation of one's experience. It's not that the entire experience is produced by the individual's brain, but there is some real input, something real is going on, which perhaps triggers the wrong thoughts of interpretation. This would be like an hallucination, the mind doesn't completely make up the experience which is going on, but it distorts what is being sensed, to such an extent, that the interpretation is far out.
When we experience something, we often claim "I know X is the case, because I saw it", or something like that. But it is always possible that one misinterpreted what one experienced, so I really don't think that experience justifies the claim of "I know".
Splendid question. However in the realms of 'experience of the numinous', one often encounters paradoxes; by its very nature, that kind of experience is - what's the word? - ecstatic. And 'ecstatic' means 'outside of stasis', stasis being the ordinary state. This is characteristic of certain kinds of mystical experiences. Mystical traditions also often figure individuals who fall into trance states, something which is more characteristic of Eastern religions, but is still found in the contemplative aspects of Western religions. Arguably, such practices were derived from shamanism, rather than from deity-worship.
In any case, lots of this discussion about 'what Colin experienced' don't necessarily take into account that a spiritual epiphany might actually consist of seeing the whole world in a new light. There are plenty of examples of that from the romantic poets. And in the reports on these 'encounters with the Sacred', it might appear as a figure, form, image, or nothing at all; German protestant mystic Jacob Boehme's vision was triggered by the glimpse of sunlight reflecting off a pewter dish. So there is an element of the 'transformative vision': seeing things in a new light, or suddenly understanding life in a different way. Accounts of these can be found in the literature of religious conversions.
But dismissing all such accounts as being in the same class as encounters with mythical creatures, seeing fairies in the bottom of the garden, doesn't do justice to the amount of literature that is out there on these subjects.
And personal, first-hand experience is the epistemic gold standard--"I KNOW what I experienced."
Only problem is that there is much reason to be skeptical about certain kinds of beliefs, even if they are based on personal, first-hand experience. The uncontroversial fact that brains routinely generate convincing, realistic-seeming dreams demonstrates that brains are capable of generating fictional experiences, so generating an experience starring a being we already believe in, or are familiar with, is a piece of cake.
The reality-check centers of the brain that normally moderate thought content are known to be inactive during dreaming, which is how it is that the normal laws of reality can be violated in dreams. Seems to me that if these areas of the brain were suppressed while we're awake, then we would readily be convinced of the truth of a narrative involving some supernatural agent or other making contact with us from some other realm.
I don't agree, I think we ask others to corroborate, and this is the epistemic gold standard. I realize that in common experience there is a tendency to claim that I know it because I experienced it, but I think that this is hasty sloppiness in relation to true epistemic principles. Justification requires that the correctness of the belief be demonstrated, and justification is essential to knowledge under most epistemologies. This is the power of communication. If we can describe our experiences in a way which makes sense to others, we can justify our beliefs concerning these experiences. If others are unaccepting, there is no justification for those beliefs.
Quoting Brainglitch
I think that this is very sketchy, and not a quality principle, to say that we should be skeptical of certain kinds of beliefs. The problem is that that all individuals are different, having vast differences in their perceptive capacities. Some have better ears, some have better eyes, and these qualitative differences extent right into the capacities of the brain. So the type of belief which we should be skeptical of in one person is different from the type of belief which we would be skeptical of in another. And we couldn't ever really know a person's strengths and weaknesses in this regard, until we moved to have that person justify those different types of beliefs. Therefore I think that any first-hand experience must be subjected to justification before it cam be classified as knowledge in any formal sense.
I agree with you though, that when a person is convinced of one's belief, that individual will claim to know. But this is not knowledge according to any formal epistemology, it is just belief. There are differences in how strongly we will cling to our various beliefs. But the strength of this clinging is deeply psychological, often stemming from long ago experiences, even instincts, such that the clinging to beliefs (being convinced), is often irrational. So as much as we say, in common vernacular, "I know", when we are deeply convinced, this really has very little epistemic value.
I say this because during a mystical experience aspects of the self which one is not aware of, but which are nethertheless a part of the living self, have the experience too, or are altered by the experience. Such aspects might be entirely unknown to humanity, including for example, the noumenon.
What I don't understand is why anyone wouldn't think that it's simply their brain "behaving" differently.
Again, I can't imagine anything like that where I wouldn't simply assume that something unusual (even if maybe very pleasant) is going on with my brain.
Right, if what we want, as in science, etc. are reliability and predictiveness, we have come to understand that independent intersubjective corroboration is the gold standard.
What I meant, though, and should have said, is that as far as most people are converned, their own personal experience is the gold standard--"Seeing is believing." It is notoriously difficult, to the point of impossible, to change some people's minds about certain beliefs, particularly of the kind that are not repeatable, even if others who witnessed the incident contradict the belief. Disoutes about remembered events are a common example.
Agreement among a favored group also us a powerful fact in both creating and sustaining belief--as in creationism, for instance--in the face of complete lack of supporting data, mountains of contrary data, and complete lack of corroboration by the informed judgment of scientists.
Actually, like Heister Eggcart noted in the comment just before yours, there are some of us here who do doubt that, on account of him being a suspected troll. But that is a minor point. We can assume that he is sincere for sake of discussion.
Quoting Wayfarer
What is the supposed paradox? I'm not seeing it.
In other - plainer - words, these sorts of experiences are extraordinary. They are extraordinary in that they are presumably more intense and rare than ordinary day-to-day experiences. And they would certainly be extraordinary if they are what they're claimed to be by believers, as in this case, to be experiences of God. But it is this second sense of extraordinary which I doubt, and believe there to be good reason to doubt - even for those who have themselves had these experiences. Contrarily, it might not in fact be a supernatural experience at all, nor an experience of God, but rather a phenomenon that can be better explained naturally, and as mistakenly attributed or misinterpreted.
I have never felt compelled to make a leap of faith in this context, as I am interested in getting to the truth of the matter (and if that cannot be determined, then scepticism is the reasonable default), rather than what I find emotionally appealing. And the former seems more about what one finds emotionally appealing: what one might find comforting, inspiring, hopeful, and so on. But I actually find that rather depressing, because I think that in many cases, it is based on a false dichotomy or a choice between making the most of what we've got or clinging to what may well be nothing but a pipe dream.
Quoting Wayfarer
There might be merit in those sorts of experiences, but I don't think that theism is necessary in order to have or appreciate such experiences, nor am I convinced that theism can be reasonably concluded from such experiences. (And I'm simply not interested in [i]unreasonably[/I] arriving at a conclusion. Even if I was, why would I narrow my options down to God? If we're disregarding reason, then there are innumerable possible explanations to choose from, and no reasonable means of discriminating between them all).
Quoting Wayfarer
That's in the list of possibilities, but I don't buy it. And if so, then he should've been clearer. He didn't say that he experienced a glimpse of sunlight reflecting off of a pewter dish or anything like that. He said he experienced God.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, if Colin won't come forward with more details in order to rectify this possible misunderstanding, then why shouldn't I make my own assumptions about what he might have experienced, based on what little he has told us, and based on what I know, and make comparisons with claims based on a similarly poor epistemological standard, like claims of faeries and such? I'm not ruling them out without good enough reason, and I don't believe that that has been provided. You're free to cite this literature you refer to if you think it will do so, but I don't want to read through poetic accounts of the same sort of thing, as that ain't gonna do jack. I'm here for philosophy, not poetry, and not flowery or obscure literature that doesn't get to the epistemological point.
So, just a feeling and an abstract concept. Weak. Very weak. And from this alone, Colin is certain that he has had an experience of God, as opposed to innumerable alternative explanations which he has ruled out. That says a lot more about Colin than anything else.
The answer is actually very straightforward: people can be unreasonable.
You're obviously not going to get it; but most likely that's what you want anyway, so that's OK. Better not to fret over it.
There's a difference between getting it and being uncritical. How do you know I'm not God appearing to you in the form of someone who doesn't just lap it up, but instead applies a little scrutiny? You haven't passed the test, but don't fret. What do you have to fear? It's only an eternity of fire and brimstone.
Blasphemy!
Quoting John
Relax, it was tongue-in-cheek. (And obviously went over your head).
So, you think I'm a mind-reader now.
No. I don't think that you are gifted with godlike abilities like I am.
Yeah, right.
:-d
See. I knew you wouldn't be consistent. You reject my claim in disbelief, but not Colin's. Yet, what is it that differentiates them? Funny how your openness has evaporated. Is it because Colin hasn't rubbed you up the wrong way like I seem to have done?
I guess we're pretty much in agreement then, but this "seeing is believing" thing is a little bit disturbing. It seems quite selfish to hold this perspective, though it is rampant in our society. We really do tend to insist that things are as "I saw them", despite the fact that others may dispute this. We might have a better time cooperating if we weren't so convinced that our powers of observation are infallible.
The conversation has the implication of 'you're trying to convert me'. I'm not, although I am beginning to realise that because I was always open to the possibility of the reality of spiritual experiences, that maybe that what is really meant by 'belief'. My view used to be that understanding the nature of spiritual experiences was a more philosophically mature attitude than simply 'believing what we're told', but I'm starting to see that an element of belief, or at least an openness to the possibility, is required to even investigate the issue. Otherwise all these red flags come up: 'Religion! Don't go there!'
In any case, the last thing I will say to you is that religious revelation and spiritual insights are fundamental to all the world's cultures, and to believe they're all delusional is like the mother of all conspiracy theories.
If everything is 'brain behaviour', that also applies to the explanation 'this is brain behaviour'. And something that explains everything, explains nothing.
Anyway, I'm checking out for a while to do some more reading and reflection. Please carry on.
I did say "might"...
One can have an element of openness whilst maintaining an appropriate degree of scepticism; remain open whilst being critical; and remain open whilst taking claims with a pinch of salt. There is definitely a difference between being open and letting one's guard down, and between being open and opening the floodgates. But if nothing in one's experience, or to one's knowledge, up to the present date, has ever constituted sufficient grounds for belief, then I think it understandable if one is inclined to the opinion that these claims are false, or prone to treat them as if they are.
Quoting Wayfarer
Depends somewhat on the details. But this reasoning of yours is fallacious, as has been pointed out to you by myself and others in the past, since there is no logical relationship to what is considered to be fundamental and what is true, such that the former entails the latter. And this can quite easily be shown by analogous counterexamples, such as, for example, how geocentricism was once held to be fundamental, but has long since been discredited.
As I think I mentioned, I did approach the subject of 'the nature of spiritual experience' through a tertiary degree in the subject. And that does require critical appraisal, it is not Bible College, where the students are all expected to be believers. But I was open about the fact that I was also seeking to have such experiences, and to understand their significance - that was discouraged in religious studies, although things have changed since my time in that there is now more recognition of scholar-practitioners, i.e. those with academic skills in a religion they actually practice
When I say 'fundamental to the world's cultures', I'm not engaging in hyperbole. Western culture was founded on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it used to be called 'Christendom'. Midde-eastern cultures were founded on Islam, Indian on Vedic religion, China on Taoism and Buddhism, and so on. So here I'm referring to the foundational role of religious revelation in cultural history. I'm not saying that this proves anything about the validity of this or that individual claim. But what I am saying is that if you dismiss religious claims generally - and many do! - then you're actually dismissing a foundational element of culture itself, and also saying that to that extent, world cultures were founded on hallucinations or delusions. (I'm sure Dawkins' ideas entail this, even if he would not be prepared to admit it.) And that is something that is actually happening, on a very large scale, in Western culture. There are literally libraries of books written on that topic. As you know, my major pre-occupation on this and other forums is arguing against materialism, on the basis that scientific materialism has morphed into a kind of pseudo-religious attitude to life.
In that case, it would be useful if one could demonstrate it. X-)
It seemed obvious to me that you were joking this time, so it wasn't a case of rejecting anything.
In my assessment or his? >:)
How about instead of pointing something out, I thumb it out, like politicians are wont to do? Would that be better?
The only part of my comment that is arguable, and somewhat reliant on interpretation, was, admittedly, whether or not you had committed the fallacy. The fallacy itself can't reasonably be argued against. But you did seem to suggest that what is considered fundamental by the populace is therefore credible or true - which, whether you like it or not, is indeed fallacious, and has been shown to lead to false conclusions in some cases.
Quoting Wayfarer
I haven't denied any of that, but I do question its presumed relevance.
Quoting Wayfarer
Good.
Quoting Wayfarer
The devil is in the details. But even if I did, what is the presumed [i]relevance[/I], if, like you say, you acknowledge that there is no logical link between a beliefs consequences and its truth-value? You can't have your cake and eat it - which is, in this case, to say that you can't, on the one hand, acknowledge this fallacy; and, on the other, continue to use it against me. If that is not what you're doing, then you're still not out of the water, as you may instead be committing a fallacy of relevance.
But no, my issue is more specifically with theistic or supernatural claims, including those which fall under the religious category, rather than religious claims in general - which is a much broader category. I have no qualms in dismissing these specific kind of claims, after due consideration, on account of weak evidence or poor reasoning; and I similarly have no qualms in acknowledging the possibility or likelihood that a large number of people have been - or are - deluded in that respect, just as they have been deluded in other analogous respects, as in the example of geocentricism.
Quoting Wayfarer
I believe I have: by not taking a stronger stance where I believe it would be unwarranted to do so. It might not be the openness that you expect or desire of me, but it is openness nonetheless.
I sometimes make serious points and criticisms through the use of irony, or in amongst what might appear to the less discerning reader to be just a joke, but they can be overlooked or dismissed as mere facetiousness.
In this case, to reiterate, how [i]do[/I] you know I'm not God appearing to you in the form in which I am represented to you? How can you ever tell, with regards to anyone or anything, in any possible scenario?
And, secondly, how [I]can[/I] you justify, if at all, your rejection of my claim, if you do indeed reject it, [i]assuming sincerity[/I], that I have a special ability which, say, allows me to read peoples minds, or see ghosts, or communicate with aliens, or experience faerie magic... yet not Colin's claim that he has had experiences of God? What is it that differentiates them, if anything? Or do you not reject such claims at all and bite this ridiculous bullet? (And if you're going to bring up this category of 'spiritual', then I refer you back to my previous questions and criticisms, which I don't think have been adequately addressed).
Culture is not "founded" on religion any more than it's founded on social relationships and power structures and food production and law and economics and technology and tribal allegiance and interaction with other cultures. Religion is a integral aspect of culture that arises with and evolves along with and influences and is influenced by other aspects. It arises in and evolves with the culture.
If as is often argued, the particular beings who populate the various religious experiences across different cultures are just the way people in a given culture understand the spiritual, then you have admitted that these people's brains filled in all those details with notions they were already familiar with, but you hang on to the claim that the source of the experiences is spiritual rather than the brain doing exactly the kind of thing we know brains do--generating narratives.
Or any less. It arises within and evolves with it, but it also guides it. Many of the earliest archeological relics from the paleo- and neolithic periods have religious significance, such as the ubiquotious large-breasted fertility goddess figurines, and the relics of ceremonial items buried in graves (even neanderthal graves).
What we now identify as 'religion' was often not understood or described as such in pre-modern cultures; there was simply 'the law', which was underwritten by both gods and kings. But the point I'm making is simply to dismiss the accounts of religious experience as hallucinatory or delusional, is to undermine the foundational role of religious ideas in cultures. And this is something that is visibly happening in Western culture, leading to widespread feeings of alientation, anomie, nihilism, and the like. This is what Nietszche foresaw as the 'rise of nihilism' - something which he was both responsible for and a victim of. Many people who turn up on these forums post threads along the lines of the notion that life has no meaning and no value, we're all the products of a meaningless universe, and so on. This can have real consequences.
Many of the atheists who preach against religion, will often themselves admit that their beliefs undermine social values. Daniel Dennett, one of the 'new atheists', has himself admitted that, and said that 'the people' need to be able to 'believe' in their illusory gods (even if the intelligentsia, such as himself, realise that it's all brain-chemistry). Dawkins will say that Darwinism is a terrible basis for a social philosophy, without seeming to realise that he has devoted considerable vitriol to attempting to undermine the alternatives. But that's just typical of the confusion of modern culture.
Indeed, beliefs have consequences--both positive and negative.
But it is a logical fallacy to accept or reject a proposition because we like or don't like the consequences of people's belief or disbelief in the proposition.
You said such "divine watchmaker" notions of God "doesn't match any conception of deity found in any of the world's religious traditions." I pointed out that it does, for instance, in the tradition of natural theology. You then dismiss that by saying it's "a case of understanding the subject properly." So, yes, this is pretty much a textbook instance of No True Scotsman.
Again, No True Scotsman. Whether ID is "characteristic of the broader Christian traditions" is not really relevant, only that such notions do in fact have a longstanding history in religion. And what is theistic evolution but the belief that God somehow guided the evolutionary process? That's pretty close to executing a "design" as far as I'm concerned. And no less than the the head of the NIH (Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian) has expressed his belief that the human moral sense was instilled by God, which, again, sounds a lot like design to me (and the fact that such sentiments were expressed by the leader of one of the largest biomedical research centers and funders in the United States is worrying to me, as it should be to anyone who cares about scientific rationalism).
It's no wonder that you accuse Dawkins et al of grappling only with fundamentalism, given that you have such an overbroad definition of that term! I understand fundamentalism to be a literalistic or overly-strict adherence to the dogma, texts, or teachings of a particular religion, often accompanied by a desire to force such adherence upon others. Appealing to empiricism to demonstrate the existence of God doesn't fall into that camp, in my opinion.
However, you are aware that Dawkins has also criticized a priori arguments for the existence of God, such as the ontological argument? If so, do you maintain that he switches from criticizing mainstream theology when dealing with the OA to criticizing only fundamentalism when he turns his fire upon, say, the cosmological argument?
Even assuming any of this is true, it is yet another fallacious appeal to consequences on your part. As Sam Harris said, no society has ever suffered from being too rational. If you have a counter-example to this, I'd love to hear it.
Just want to note that Dawkins' argument that an intelligence capable of designing and implementing something as complex as the universe would have to be more complex than the complexity it allegedly explains, is specifically a response to the widespread fundamentalist assertion that the complexity of the universe entails a "designer"--wink-wink: God as they conceive of him.
And also note that, contra John's assertion a ways back, these fundamentalists exist in the tens of millions. The 2011 Pew Forum study on global Christianity puts the evangelical population at 285,480,000, over 94 million of which are in the U.S. Strictly speaking, fundamentalists are a subset of evangelicals, but, as evangelicals themselves note, the differences are more differences of style than doctrinal substance, and fundamentalists are more literalist. In any case, evangelicals unanimously assert that the Bible is inerrant, and overwhelmingly subscribe to ID.
ID is a relatively theologically stripped-down version of creationism, at least with regard to its published theories. Though I don't have any polling data on this readily at hand, I would think that evangelicals lean more towards Young- or Old Earth Creationism than ID.
I might also disagree that fundamentalists are just a subset of evangelicals, especially if we broaden the scope to include non-Christians. Not all religions are inherently evangelical (e.g. Judaism), and yet some non-evangelical religions have followers who can reasonably be called fundamentalists (e.g. the Ultra-Orthodox Jews).
As I wonder what on Earth could actually be the argument for that--how is he quantifying complexity exactly? How is he determining how complex something has to be to create something of a particular complexity? Etc.
It's probably too much to type out a summary of whatever Dawkins' argument is, but is there maybe someplace online that I could read it? Even just on Google Books or via Amazon's "Look Inside" or something?
Yeah. Same ol' jeeprs, same ol' fallacies, eh?
[Quote="Wayfarer;29179"]Moreover their belief system situates them in a broader context both culturally and spiritually. Whereas, the diehard atheist inhabits a universe that is meaningless and purposeless by definition, where the only kind of purpose or meaning that is available is that generated by the ego, in a Camus-like act of defiance.[/quote]
This part in particular. I mean, what is your point? You take the time and effort to go into detail on this subject, but you have not made your point explicit, leaving us to try to read between the lines. It looks very much to me like you are contrasting the two based on how appealing you consider them to be, with the implication being that it is a matter of preference, rather than weighing the two based on evidence. Is that what you think?
Yes, ID transparently is repackaged Creationism. When several court decisions about the teaching of "Creation Science" in U.S. public schools came down against Creationism as a legitimate science, evangelicals repackaged it. ID was a rhetorical ploy to avoid mentioning God so as to appear to be a legitimate alternative scientific theory that should be taught in the schools along with evolution. "Teach the Controversy" was one of their slogans. But ID, too, was defeated in the courts. Scratch an evangelical and find a creationist, ID smokescreen notwithstanding.
Sure. The term "fundamentalist" is somewhat plastic. There are fundamentalists in many religions. As a group across religions, we can identify certain common characteristics.
And fundamentalists across religions may well subscribe to ID. But the ID arguments Dawkins was responding to was a widely circulated Protestant Christian fundamentalist argument.
Dawkins expressed the argument in The Blind Watchmaker.
His primary argument is the positive one that natural selection can explain the complex adaptations of organisms, and he does this in great detail.
Then, as WIKI says:
He's just dismissing the ID argument by showing that by using the same reasoning about what counts as "complex" they used, he can postulate that a designer of their complexity must be "complex."
Note that the title The Blind Watchmaker alludes to the old watchmaker argument, but it is exactly this argument that ID revived in principle, and often used word-for-word in their presentations because of its commonsense appeal. Dawkins specifically addressed fundamentalist Christian ID in debates, some of which are probably still available online.
I don't disagree, but I would question how many evangelicals subscribe to ID per se, which, as I pointed out, is largely shorn of theological doctrine. I think most evangelicals would as a group hold more of a literalistic "Goddidit" set of beliefs, with an explicit appeal to the Judeo-Christian-style creator of Genesis.
Young-Earth Creationism, for instance, is not really compatible with ID as most commonly presented (though, at least some proponents of ID, e.g. Paul Nelson, are YEC's).
A pertinent distinction can be made between current popular "ID" and the more academic and centuries-old "argument from design."
In current popular ID, the "Designer" is code for "God." God as current ID evangelical proponents conceive of him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
I am disputing Dawkins' understanding of God as 'super-engineer'. I say that every description of God that Dawkins provides, indicates misunderstanding of the term even from a viewpoint of the philosophy of religion.
The difference between 'intelligent design theology' and theistic evolution, is that the ID intends to demonstrate, with reference to specific details, exactly what God is purported to have done, precisely the way in which 'divine intervention' must have been required for specific things to occur.
BioLogos, which subscribes to theistic evolution, and not ID, says:
Source
Whereas the atheist argument is that the sequence of events culminating in intelligent life, arose in an important sense purely as a consequence of chemical and physical necessity, and in that sense are an accident or a vagary; 'without cause' in the sense of without purpose, telos or intention. This attitude is implicit throughout the writings of modern atheism.
It depends. I think the anthropic or fine-tuning types of argument are persuasive, but they are also more suggestive than conclusive; they leave the possibility open. Indeed I think it is absolutely untenable to argue that they 'prove' that a naturalistic account is self-sufficient. But as soon as you try and use God as a term in an empirical argument, or the termination in a chain of efficient causes, and to 'prove' it in the sense that you prove a natural hypothesis, then you're overstepping the limits of knowledge (as argued by Kant). You're also reducing God to a factor among other factors, a being among other beings. That is why scholastic philosophers of religion, such as Ed Feser and David Bentley Hart, abjure Intelligent Design arguments, but are nonetheless theistic philosophers. (Now they're true Scotsmen!)
I am indeed, and it was this very point that Thomas Nagel mentioned in his review of The God Delusion:
The Fear of Religion, Thomas Nagel, New Repubic, 23 Oct 2006
And this is a problem - why? I have notes on exchanges between you and I in years past, where I asked, regarding materialist explanations of life, does this mean life is simply a complex chemical reaction. And your response was - what else could it be? I asked how it would be possible for evolution to have given rise to a moral sense - you acknowledge it doesn't deal with the problem at all.
The new atheists will gladly argue that Christian faith and morals have been dissolved in the 'acid of Darwin's dangerous idea', but what have they got to replace it with, apart from half-baked pop philosophy and scientism? I don't see any of them as being capable of undergraduate philosophy but as contributors to the general moral decline of Western culture.
None of that seems to be saying "would have to be more complex than the complexity it allegedly explains" though.
I doubt religious folks would object to saying that God must be complex, by the way.
Then you are apparently unacquainted with the notion of "divine simplicity..."
You're right.
In the Blind Watchmaker, he does not specify that the designer would have to be more complex than his design, but rather would be "vastly complex." He may have said "more complex" elsewhere, perhaps in one of his many debates, or I may just be mistaken.
However, whether the designer is more complex or not is irrelevant to his argument.
Sure, the believer in the pew readily accepts that God is complex, but some theologians insist that God is simple. Though using this notion of simplicity as a counter to what is meant by complex in Dawkins' argument strikes me as equivocation.
This is the basis of the argument that is elaborated in The God Delusion.
It's also very important to understand that far more Americans believe in God, than in the literal account of evolution. And I think this is a real problem - it is one of the indicators of the general decline in general critical thinking ability. But that is at least partially because the evangelical atheists - and you can't deny they exist - use the arguments we are discussing here to 'prove' that God doesn't exist. This is not only unjustifiable on any scientific grounds, but it is dangerous to the social fabric.
On this point, it is well worth reading Michael Ruse. He is a philosopher of science and has been called as an expert witness at various court proceedings about teaching evolution and ID. He is a conscientious atheist, but he has been in effect black-banned by the 'new atheist' movement for being 'accomodationist'; he is said to be ideologically unsound, for having had the temerity to write about whether evolution was indeed a 'secular religion'.
Likewise, Lloyd Rees, Astronomer Royal in the United Kingdrom, was castigated by Dawkins and Jerry Coyne in 2012, for recieving the Templeton Prize, awarded by the foundation of that name, which is associated with promotion of dialogue between science and religion. Richard Dawkins compared Rees to 'Quisling', the notorious Norwegian Nazi collaborator.
Just be careful on which side you think the 'fanatics' are in these arguments.
The "Watchmaker" argument, a Christian apologetics argument, is widely rehearsed by contemporary apologists defending ID.
It's this argument that Dawkins' specifically disputed. Note that his book was titled "The Blind Watchmaker."
I dispute your charge that Dawkins and company allege to "prove" that God doesn't exist. Any citations?
And your charge that the decline in Americans' general critical thinking ability is partly because of their arguments is preposterous.
We could explore that a little further. A lot of the philosophy that became incorporated into Christian theology in the early part of the Christian era, was Platonistic and neo-Platonist. In fact it was in the Timeaus that Plato posited the 'divine architect' or 'demiurge'. But I think, from memory, this architect was not 'the Good' or 'the One'. Such ideas were also found in gnosticism - that the 'creator-god' was actually an evil tyrant, whereas 'the One' was beyond all manifest form.
But another influential model for the Christian doctrine of creation was Plotinus. In his philosophy, which is of course impossible to summarise, the One, which is beyond all comprehension, is indeed entirely simple - as ''one' must be! How this gives rise to the manifold forms of creation is not by any kind of action, but by the super-abundance of dvine power, which simply emanates forms that then 'descend' through the various levels of the hierarchy to assume the shapes that we see. But the shapes we see are really only the facsimiles or instantiations of ideas in the divine intellect.
I don't propose to open a debate or discussion on that topic, as apart from anything else, I know I don't understand it very well. But I know enough about both sides of the argument to state confidently that Richard Dawkins doesn't understand it in the least. As many of the reviews of The God Delusion stated at the time, Dawkins doesn't display any familiarity with philosophy or even theology. I used to bring up such points on the actual Dawkins forum. The answer was 'well, you can't expect Richard to be an expert in these matters, after all he's a biologist'.
Stating that there probably is no God is not alleging to have proven that God doesn't exist.
Secondly, I think that the new atheists are doing terrible political damage to the cause of Creationism fighting. Americans are religious people. You may not like this fact. But they are. Not all are fanatics. Survey after survey shows that most American Christians (and Jews and others) fall in the middle on social issues like abortion and gay marriage as well as on science. They want to be science-friendly, although it is certainly true that many have been seduced by the Creationists. We evolutionists have got to speak to these people. We have got to show them that Darwinism is their friend not their enemy.[/quote]
Michael Ruse, Why I Think the New Atheists are a Bloody Disaster
The new atheists have made this position impossible: their entire shtick is that science and religion are mortal enemies in a total war, in which only one side can be a winner - which in my opinion is a kind of sublimated religious fanaticism.
Incidentally I noticed a current title by Michael Ruse - Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution
The number of outspoken "New Atheists" can be counted on one hand.
Meanwhils, literally thousands of sermons, Sunday school lessons, Bible College lectures, book and tract piblications, radio and TV broadcasts and internet sites regularly disparage science (from biology to astrophysics to anthropology to geology to climate science to archeology to psychology to textual criticism ... that they judge to be inconsistent with their dogma. There is, and has always been, a characteristic strain of anti-intellectualism in American evangelicalism--they use the word "expert" disparagingly. They annoint their own experts (often self-appointed wannabe pseudo scholars, or sometimes off-the-chart outliers in secular sdcholardship) in various fields, and repeatedly allege widespread conspiracy among the conventional experts in any given field when they inevitably reject the claims of the annointed experts.
Someone else on this thread referred to what the New Atheists do as "persecution," to which I replied that that poster is either prone to extreme hyperbole, or doesn't know what "persecution" means.
As for the stable of "New Atheists," their enemies can take comfort in the fact that Hitchens is gone, and Sam Harris's recent concerns over religion seem to pertain exclusively to radical Islam (or Islam in general). So, their ranks are fairly depleted (and Dawkins' latest books were memoirs. For all of the near-hysterical vitriol levied against him in some quarters, relatively little of his writings are directly concerned with religious belief).
I don't know if I call it persecution per se, but the do take a strong stance against participating in religion. They form a cultural force which would like humanity to eschew religious belief to one degree or another. In terms of their approach to creating an ethical society, they don't say: "People believe what you want, so long as you're not doing XYZ harm," let alone advocate the respect and prominence that people like Wayfarer want to give to religious belief.
In some respects, they "New Atheists" are more political, concerned about the prevalence of religous belief, than atheist. Some of their arguments against deities are too weak, particularly around falsification and the idea of an "invisible God."
(the bus advertisement is a actually a pretty good demonstration of this. Notice it's not really based on the question of God's existence or coherency, but rather on an idea that belief in God is damaging-- something that just creates unnecessary worry or prevents enjoyment of life).
I bet most religious folks I know would be unacquainted with that, too.
Yeah, portraying themselves as "persecuted" by some secular humanist position or other is a continually repeated rhetorical ploy among American evangelicals.
And they long enjoyed priveleged immunity from any pushback regarding their claims. One of the points of teh New Atheists was that religious propositions are not priveleged, and should be submitted to the same kind of scrutiny, open discussion, and challenge as any other propositions. So, of course, the evangelicals portray challenge as religious "persecution."
Indeed.
What the believers in the pews actually reveal they believe is notoriously at odds with the theologians. One fascinating book about this is "Theological Incorrectness--Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't" By "shouldn't" here, he means what is inconsistent with the formal theology and even doctrines of their faith
Ah, a middle path.
As in "The New Atheists Are a Bloody Disaster" and "the decline in Americans' general critical thinking ability is partly because of New Atheist arguments" (which you misrepresent as alleging to "prove" God doesn't exist.)
For the record, I find the New Atheist debates, with the possible exception of Sam Harris, quite off-putting, even obnoxious, discourteous, and disrespectful. But this refers to personality and rhetorical style, not substantive content.
And that's definitely it from me for Colin's Omnibus Thread.
That is quite a remarkable claim right there. (As well as a straw man, as Brainglitch noted, and which you have presumably conceded).
Are you seriously blaming dogmatic atheists - which is what I assume you meant by your oxymoronic term "evangelical atheists", whose existence can indeed be denied on that basis - for the fact that far more Americans believe in God than evolution?
The OP referenced both 'conviction on the basis of religious experience' and 'Richard Dawkins'. So how is that 'a straw man'?
That summary is very misleading. From the article (bolding mine):
"The Religion Among Scientists in International Context (RASIC) study includes a survey of over 20,000 scientists from eight countries. [b]In the United Kingdom, 1,581 randomly sampled scientists participated in the survey, and 137 of them also participated in in-depth interviews.
Although the researchers did not ask questions about Dawkins, 48 scientists mentioned him during in-depth interviews without prompting, and nearly 80 percent of those scientists believe that he misrepresents science and scientists in his books and public engagements.[/b] This group included 23 nonreligious scientists and 15 religious scientists. Approximately 20 percent of scientists interviewed – 10 scientists all identifying as nonreligious – said that he plays an important role in asserting the cultural authority of science in the public sphere. One biologist surveyed said Dawkins has “quite an important place in society” in his criticism of creationism and intelligent design."
So, in other words, of 1,581 surveyed scientists (in the UK), 137 participated in in-depth interviews, 48 of whom mentioned Dawkins without prompting, 80% of whom held a negative view of him. So, of 1,581 surveyed UK scientists,
So, you have changed your mind? If not, I find that odd, and would ask that you please explain that part of your quote where you appeared to do just that:
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
But remember that that is only relevant to the topic of Dawkins if he has actually made that argument. [I]That[/I] claim has been disputed, and it seemed that after one failed attempt to show that that is representative of Dawkins' argument, you had given up.
And how can you square the above quote with your denial that you are blaming dogmatic atheists? (Blaming in part is still blaming, if that is your issue. Or perhaps it is that you are just blaming [I]some[/I] dogmatic atheists, namely those who make the sort of argument you have described).
Quoting Wayfarer
It might be an interesting and worthwhile read, but you seem to have trouble with relevancy. You posted it in reply to a comment with which it seems to bear no relevance. The challenge was to show that you are not guilty of attacking a straw man, and I don't see how quoting a review will successfully meet that challenge. You should instead quote Dawkins.
Quoting Wayfarer
Talk about taking things out of context!
But this is what Dawkins believes. What should he do: lie in order not to scare the rubes away? He's a scientist (or at least a science writer), not a politician. (By the way, you continually misrepresent Dawkins's view by saying he believes that science "proves" that God doesn't exist: for someone who's seemingly obsessed with his misrepresenting the notion of God and religious practice, you're notably sloppy in summarizing his positions.)
I am not saying 'dogmatic atheists are responsible for the non-acceptance of evolution by many Americans'. But I am saying, the Dawkins/Dennett/Coyne style of argument contributes to that, by making false claims that the empirical evidence proves the case one way or the other.
The only thing that the fossil evidence proves is that biblical creationism can't be true. But if you've never believed biblical creationism to be true, then the fact that it's not true has no bearing on whether God exists or not.
But they think that religious belief does cause harm (Hitchens rather stridently thought that "religion poisoned everything").
As for "respecting" religious beliefs, please spare me this baloney. Beliefs are not deserving of "respect" (assuming that they're even the sort of thing which can be "respected"). Beliefs are either believed for good reasons or for bad reasons, and every belief put forward in the public square is fair game for critique in an open society, religious beliefs included. Anyone who doesn't like that should go find a nice theocracy to move to.
I read that as: [I]my[/I] preferred notion of God is one in which science has no say!
Well, as I have said before, the devil is in the details. It will depend, will it not, on the particular conception of God or divine intelligence that is being considered? And, reading between the lines, you think that this should be [i]your[/I] preferred conception to the exclusion of others.
You know, when you don't quote comments via the more convenient 'highlight and quote button' method, the person you're quoting won't automatically be notified of your reply, and it is therefore more likely for that person to be unaware that you have replied, and means that they have to manually keep track of your activity in order to check for replies from you.
Anyway, I guess "style" is the key word in the quote above which allows you to evade a charge of attacking a straw man. Well played.
The question is, can you [I]show[/I] that this is a contributing factor, or is it just your opinion? In any case, it doesn't seem entirely implausible to me, but I do question the significance of the extent to which this effects nonacceptance of evolution by Americans.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think that it proves more than that, but thinking in terms of proof might be to miss the point - whether it be these unnamed atheists who allegedly make arguments in the style of others and which haven't been presented here, or ID proponents, or people like Colin who claim to have experienced God, or self-identified agnostics who arrogantly think of themselves as free from the follies of both sides, or whoever.
Well, if you plan on posting here, please: one full stop is sufficient. I don't want to keep editing your posts.
Are you saying that the empirical evidence (fom biology, chemistry, physics, genetics, geology, climate science, oceanography, radioactive dating, paleontology, anthropology, molecular biology, etc.) is insufficient to warrant subscription to the theory of evolution as the best explanation of species, or are you saying that they do not "prove" evolution in some absolutist sense?
But, as I've already noted, one of Dawkins' primary targets is Biblical creationism. His book is titled "The Blind Watchmaker," remember? Realize that the context in the U.S. is one in which creationists have repeatedly attempted to get creation taught in the public school as a scientifically legitimate alternative to evolution.
The recalcitrance of evangelicals to accept evolution is transparently because they don't like what it entails about their literalistic reading of the Bible, especially the Book of Genesis. The existence of all the world's species, in their worldview, is evidence for the existence of the biblical Creator. So, if, as evolution demonstrates, no creator is required, then they have much less evidence for their religious beliefs, and must either reject the science, or reject or significantly reinterpret what their Bible says. Ultimately, they surely will eventually morph into reinterpreting Genesis less literally, and redefine the Creator as one who intervenes and directs evolution--as, in, fact, some have already done.
The expressed certainty ought to warrant some caution and some attempt to minimize bias, though; especially since what you claim implicitly applies equally to everyone (and more or less literally everything, for that matter).
Recall, purely phenomenological experiences are part of the experiencer, not something else. That's also the reason there's no such thing as telepathy, and why these "special" experiences are private.
[quote=Searle (paraphrased)]if anything significant differentiates perception and hallucination, then it must be the perceived[/quote]
Personal revelations are notoriously incompatible and incoherent, yet sometimes engender making quite extraordinary (or universal) claims. Say, if someone claimed they were abducted by aliens, would you then take their word for it (you might think they were lying or being honest about their belief alike)?
We already know that some kinds of experiences can be induced by a variety of simple means. We also know that mere inwards self-examination has inherent limits. We're hardly perfect perception-organisms (and cats jump at shadows).
I suppose relevant questions might include if these experiences directly influence your decision-making and social interaction? And why you think there's a personified (extra-self) being of sorts involved? How did these experiences inform you, and of what...? (Have you honestly given other options a chance? Compared them with your current thinking? Perhaps spoken with various other people?)
In my experience many have had epic experiences (including me). :)
I can't tell what colin's experiences were, though.
Quoting colin
Quoting colin
Quoting colin
Except, strongly emotional it seems.
What was it that Brainglitch said? Ah yes, "one of the most common ways to deal with cognitive dissonance is to ignore questions that cause it".
Quoting Punshhh
Why, or how, would reading this thread affirm his "discovery"? That just doesn't follow.
Quoting Punshhh
And, pray tell, how do you know that Colin has experienced God? :-}
Because he said so? Because you have as well? Pffft! And I see dead people. Are you happy for [i]me[/I]?
http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/487/the-kalamcosmological-argument-pros-and-cons/
Of course I agree that creationism ought not to be taught as science, but neither should the science be presented as 'proving' anything about the existence or otherwise of God. 'There is a separation between Church and state, but none between science and state', observed Paul Feyerabend.
If I was to teach evolutionary biology or paleontology I would never have reason to even discuss religious beliefs about the issue, but if it came up, I would make it clear that the accounts operate on different levels; that the religious accounts are intended to convey moral and existential truths about life, which are not dependent on them being literally true, in the way the scientific account is. If the students can't understand that, they've got problems, but the science classroom would not be a place to address them.
Here's my personal background in this debate. Grew up in the 1960's in Australia, on a solid digest of Time Life books about nature. I was always fascinated by dinosaurs, fossils, 'cave men' and evolution. It never occured to me for a single second that Bible stories were literally true. I didn't hear of the existence of 'creationism' until I was an adult, and just thought it was idiotic, and also pathetic. My first reaction was, how sad it is that people have to believe in the literal truth of those ancient myths and that they must have a very insecure faith.
It wasn't until people like Dawkins started tub-thumping that I paid any attention to the issue, as it has never been prominent in Australia. (Ken Ham, the notorious young-earth creationist, is from Australia, but notice he had to re-locate to Kentucky to find an audience.) But my reaction to Dawkins is that he is just about as silly as the creationists. If you understand that 'creation mythology' is just that - mythology - then the fact that it didn't literally occur has practically zero bearing on the religious account.
I don't know if I mentioned it before, but the early Church fathers were dismissive of biblical literalism. Origen said there were three levels of meaning in the texts, Augustine was scathing in his dismissal of anything like 'creation science' - and that was in 400 A.D. But of course this is all invisible to those who see the whole thing as the titanic battle of Enlightened Science vs Supersitious Religion.
Sure, but it does have impact.
[quote=William Lane Craig]
But why take the lives of innocent children?
[...]
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
[/quote]
A doctrinal problem with Christianity and Islam?
1. killing an infant should give the infant safe passage to heaven
2. so the killer would be doing a major self sacrifice ("thou shall not kill"), for the sake of the infant
3. the killer did a selfless act to save someone else
4. the killer did good (we can assume the infant was at no time in pain)
5. you ought kill infants, sending them off to eternal bliss, saved (might even be a win-win)
The dark side of Pascal's Wager? You know, just a matter of being on the safe side?
And this is just one class of examples.
Where did we see that?
Again I refer you to the context in the U.S., where evolution is a hot-button political issue in which creationists are numerous, sometimes the majority, and wield power and influence. Besides what I've already noted about the incessant parade of creationist publications, sermons, and media presentations, there are uncounted public schools in the U.S. where to avoid conflict, the teachers minimize or entirely avoid teahing evolution. In fact, it is not unheard of that science teachers disparage evolution and express sympathy for creationism in some places. It is not uncommon for college students in some parts of the country to walk out of class at the very mention of evolution. Politicians roitinely waffle on, or deny belief in evolution. Past President G.W. Bush is on record as saying: "Atheists should not be considered citizens." No admitted atheist holds an elected high office in the national government. No admitted atheist would be nominated by a president or approved by Ccngress for the position of Supreme Court Justice.
Since Dawkins was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science, it was his job to push back against the popular ignorance of creationism.
One of the issues The New Atheists repeatedly speak to is epistemological--the problem of justification for belief without evidence. Religion both explicitly and tacitly teaches people to accept authority, claims of spontaneous revelation, and faith, rather than evidence. Dawkins and company see this epistemic failure, and it's attendant distrust and repression of science, as one of the world's great evils, with innumerable negative consequences for society.
This does not even address the question I asked in response to your assertion that Dawkins et al are "making false claims that the empirical evidence proves the case one way or the other."
I said that on the one side, 'intelligent design' arguments attempt to use empirical arguments to justify belief in God. On the other side, 'scientific materialist' arguments attempt to use empirical arguments against belief in God. But if the nature of God is transcendent, then it's a misapplication of empirical arguments. It is all based on a literal intepretation of Genesis. If you interpret texts such as Genesis allegorically, then they can still be regarded as meaningful, and not 'faux science'.
Have a look at Aquinas vs Intelligent Designers for an example of an argument which recognises this. It explains how Catholic philosophy differs with Intelligent Design philosophy. Also see these citations in another thread on this forum.
Oh, please. I've already responded to this baloney (for your convenience, I repeat it, below, since you apparently didn't read it the first time, or just ignored it). Please at least do the intellectually honest thing and respond to my criticism instead of just repeating your confirmation bias error.
The other philosophical point that is interesting is this: in what other sphere of debate, would the argument that 'something arises by chance', be regarded as a scientific hypothesis'?
I'm sorry, but this is just not true. Hardly three posts ago, you (again) linked to this article as evidence that "many scientists" believe that Dawkins misrepresents science (vis a vis its relationship to religion). And lo and behold, 38 scientists in the UK have made negative comments about Dawkins, in a survey which wasn't even about his views. If you agree with some of the criticisms of Dawkins (which, IMO are quite poor, and are just more of the special pleading afforded only to religious belief), that's fine, but please don't inaccurately represent this as some sort of representative sample of scientists (in the UK or certainly worldwide) who dislike Dawkins's work.
Uh, what? Stochasticity and randomness are hugely important concepts in all of the sciences, including biology. (You do realize that, in statistical hypothesis testing, chance is the null hypothesis, which is only rejected if the results meet a certain threshold of statistical significance, as determined by p-values or some other measure?)
Isn't that what apologists try to do?
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting your Catholics link, underline emphasis mine:
Some theologians seems to be trying to marry up science.
Yes, I'm reading a history of quantum physics at the moment, and am just up to all the debates about statistical analysis of molecular motion and what was behind 'the quantum leap', about which Einstein said, 'I refuse to believe God plays dice'.
But in the case of the process of evolution, 'chance' is assigned a different kind of role, namely, as an alternative to the presumed 'intentionality' of divine creation. So, whereas in classical Western thought, there was a presumption that life was in a sense purposeful or intentional, the widespread view arising from the discoveries of 20th Century science is that 'life arose by chance', i.e. as the 'outcome of the accidental collocation of atoms'.
That is the sense in which I'm saying that 'chance' is being provided as an explanatory hypothesis.
How dare they! There ought to be an inquisition!
Ok now.
Quoting Wayfarer
But virtually any naturalistic phenomenon could be termed an "alternative to the presumed intentionality of divine creation," wouldn't you say? (Hippocrates, for instance, complained that people believed epilepsy to be divine, merely because they didn't understand it. We now understand epilepsy differently.)
But scientific theories do not claim to be true nor false, rather, they are tools. Tools can't be true or false, rather they have degrees of usefulness under differing conditions. Discussing whether the theories are true or not is not the function or task of science, it's philosophy. Compare Newtonian with Quantum physics, is one theory more 'true' than the other? No. Each is a tool which has differing predictive value under different conditions. We don't use Newtonian physics when engineering a bridge, because it's literally a true description of an external world. Rather we use it in that situation because it's a more useful tool than quantum physics in achieving the goal of the engineer (eg, building a bridge which doesn't collapse). It is not the task of science to talk about whether Newtonian physics corresponds to an external world or not. Of course you can do this, but you'd be doing philosophy - discussing and describing the nature of reality. When you start saying eg, quantum physics is a more accurate (i.e. true) description of the physical world, you're doing ontology. Which is beyond the scope and task of science. People often think that because a scientific theory has predictive value, it *therefore* must be an accurate description of reality. Theory of evolution has an astonishing predictive value, but so say that because it's so useful in making predictions (and explaining our various observations) it *therefore* must be a highly accurate/true description of reality, is to extend beyond science and into philosophy (to cross domains). This may or may not be the case but regardless it's not science. At that point you're doing philosophy - you're making claims about the nature of the world.
I do not literally believe evolution happened in the past, in the same way a Christian believes the account in Genesis is a true account of the past. The theory of evolution is a tool used in the scientific method to produce predictions about future observations, and to weave a cohesive narrative around our various present observations (of fossils, genetics, biodiversity, etc) in order to make sense of them. Whether this narrative corresponds to an external world or not is beyond the scope of science. Dawkins doesn't grasp this. He thinks evolution should be taught to our children in the same way a Christian teaches his son the account in genesis. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method. People commonly make the same mistake with the big bang theory, or plate tectonics, treating these *tools* which have uses in particular contexts, as if they operate in the same manner as a religious creation account.
At least that's my understanding of science. You can be a biblical literalist and still use the theory of evolution to explain scientific observations. Because the facticity of that explanation is beyond the scope of science. Whether truth value even applies to scientific explanations is a philosophical issue.
By Jove, no. Already had some. Big mistake. :)
Apologists are busy trying to marrying science and religion; some theists are busy trying to deny evolution (and whatever else they don't like) when they find it incompatible with their theism.
Quoting Punshhh
"Why, you stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder!" :)
Quoting Punshhh
No, not (necessarily) delusional; I personally know people of a whole variety of outlooks, that are just ordinary folks.
Conversely, I'm not going to lie, or encourage/reinforce any.
Scientific laws themselves, which arise from the observation of regularities and their translation into principles, are not themselves explainable by science. Science assumes the existence of such lawful regularities, indeed can't do otherwise. But it doesn't explain them.
TLP 6:371
Now what is beyond scientific laws is in some sense un-knowable. That is why conjecture about an ultimate origin is just that - it's conjecture. That's also why I don't buy inteligent design arguments insofar as they purport to prove some extra-scientific conclusion. I think they're interesting and suggestive, philosophically - but we really don't know, and as a consequence, they're not scientific arguments, per se. But that might simply be a consequence of the limits of science, which Dawkins is now saying is also a limit in reality.
That's why evolutionary biology has to leave some space - it really has nothing to say about why life exists in the philosophical sense. When Dawkins is asked something like that, he doesn't understand the question. 'You're playing with words', he will say. He doesn't get it - basically his entire philosophical attitude is that of positivism.
But anyway, what I've said above is quite in keeping with Kant. His whole project was demonstrating the limits to knowledge, what presuppositions there must be for us to be able to say 'I know that'. And as Kant says, things beyond that are conjectural. If both ID and materialism understood that, the whole problem would go away (not that they ever will).
I am quite sure that at least Harris, whom I've heard speak to the issue, and the others are not so benighted as not to understand that science theories are simply our best current constructs and models consistent with the data, and subject to revision.
What do you think "explain" entails beyond reliable and predictive descriptions of observed regularities and properties and interactions?
Now more jarringly he advocates killing people for thought crime, talks of "moral geniuses", and tells us that science can tell use what to do.
He also recounts this one time, he was in a hotel with his fiance or wife or whatever, and they're just enjoying the view when they both realize (not just him, surely!), that they're so relaxed when they could be suicide bombed at any moment! That's a thing now, you know.
His arguments tend to be that there is clearly a difference between pleasure and suffering, things being good for you, bad for you, sickness and health, and demonstrates this be pointing out extreme cases of either, but then says nothing for their subtleties, or where the difficulties actually lie.
The only thing he has on the other guys, is that he knows that believing stuff usually indicates that you do stuff about it.
Ehm...
Suppose I was to proudly proclaim "there was snow on the peak of Mount Everest last Wednesday localtime". What, then, would it take for my claim to hold? Why that would be existence of snow up there back then of course, regardless of what you or I may (or may not) think.
Certainty and knowledge are not the same. (For some proposition, p, certainty that p means you'd also have to know that you know p, ad infinitum.) The hard part of epistemology is justification. And with all the problems (induction, the diallelus, biases, etc) a strong methodology/standard is required.
Science is fallible model ? evidence convergence; empirical, self-critical, bias-minimizing. The convergence methodologies are commonly inductive, but deductive reasoning is of course used.
Does your relativization of science also extend to medicine (and your family doctor)?
I long ago left my house in search of home (it sounds cool when I say it like that, but I'm pretty young).
Theistic evolution differs from 'intelligent design' in that it doesn't appeal to a God as part of a scientific hypothesis. Believers obviously accept that God is the reason that there is a world in the first place but that itself is not something that can be proven or disproven by science. That is why, contrary to all the bitter new atheists polemics, it is possible to be both a religious believer and a natural scientist. Only fundamentalists cannot accept that.
Of course, it is possible to be a religious believer and a scientist.
The question is: Is it epistemically consistent to be a believer and a scientist?
Indeed. It's possible to be a Catholic priest who molests children and a law enforcement officer who breaks the law: it doesn't follow that those activities can be reasonably reconciled. It only points out humans' capacity to rationalize (or not), compartmentalize, or explain away their quirks, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies.
The desperate need for slaves in the south was also due to a new invention. Something that like sorted cotton super fast, meaning that they needed a super fast supply, and the emancipating of the slaves was more an economic move than anything...
I don't think this article is saying quite what you think it says. For instance (bolding added):
"ID theorists are often perplexed—and even a bit put out—that Thomists do not acknowledge the cogency of Behe’s argument. After all, Thomists are quite open to the notion that Creation provides evidence for the existence of the Creator—cosmological arguments for the existence of God based on the order and operation of nature have long been the special preserve of Thomism."
In other words, even if Thomists are not on board with intelligent design creationism with regard to biological systems, they are quite happy to appeal to other facets of nature to argue for the existence of God. That is, their arguments are at least partly based on empiricism, a tact which you excoriate above.
http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/aquinas-vs-intelligent-design
Try jumping out of a window and then tell me about the "myth" of gravity. :D
Nope: this is almost exactly backwards. Scientists make their bones by refuting the superstars.
I hear that immortality is just around the corner too. That's usually a good sign that everything's legit.
Nope. That would be gravity. You can read all about the scientific studies of this amazing force, which can tell you just how fast and how hard you'll hit the ground if and when you take the plunge out of that window.
Hmm, I wouldn't hold your breath for that last one. (I sense some implicit criticism of science here, but I'm not sure which scientists are claiming this. You aren't confusing, say, Ray Kurzweil for a scientist are you?).
Really now, then I suggest that you undertake your own suggestion. Take the plunge, and then tell me that science told you anything remotely as informative.
The only real problem of science is that it doesn't exist. It is a top down idea of a special path, or way which leads to truth. Except that that's not the thing it is, it's about testing, and collecting data, and then trying to make sense of that data (often entirely different disciplines), and money talks, as it always has. Scientists need funding, so they make promises that they cannot possibly deliver on (like cancer research), rather than just funding a wide variety of smaller projects. Sagan made this point, I believe that it was part of the last speech he gave.
I find the new cosmos (the like two episodes I watched) offensive compared to the original, particularly head by an idiot and a liar. Tyson the first time I saw him was criticism Dawkins for being too much of a dick, and now is all trying to be cool and witty, can't beat 'em join 'em. More significantly though, he claims a relationship with Sagan he never had, and blatantly lied in a letter he sent to him claiming he was getting his PHD when by that time he would have been fully aware that he wasn't...
Scientists are not objective truth machines, they're human beings. Some are better than others, and just like with everything else, revolutions begin to take hold when enough of the old fuckers in the way die already.
Aquinas's theological proofs of God's existence were not intended as polemical devices to convert unbelievers, but as theological exercises for the faithful. Aquinas would always say that one must have faith at the outset.
I personally find the cosmological argument philosophically persuasive, but I would never suggest it amounts to an empirical hypothesis. How could it? How could you empirically validate such an idea?
It seems to me that it's implicit throughout the thread. I haven't read the whole thread though, so I don't know if it has been stated bluntly.
Is this not a double standard? If science has 'no jurisdiction' when it comes to religion, then why is it okay for religion to stick it's oar in on science?
Quoting Wayfarer
Then perhaps what you should do is realise that evolutionary biology, palaeontology, and other branches of science, are not a matter for religion.
Quoting Wayfarer
[Quote=Wikipedia]Supporters of theistic evolution generally harmonize evolutionary thought with belief in God, rejecting the conflict thesis regarding the relationship between religion and science...[/Quote]
Yet [i]you[/I], on the other hand, [i]accept[/I] the conflict thesis. Trying to have it both ways?
Quoting Wayfarer
By the way, it's nice to see you concede, rather than evade.
[i]Ad hominem[/I] followed by [I]straw man[/I]. Nice contribution to the discussion.
So, being an atheist in combination with being a scientific realist makes one a fundamentalist atheist? I don't think so. The philosophical debate of scientific realism vs. scientific anti-realism is far from settled.
Nor do I think that having a stance based on philosophy [I]as well as[/I] science makes one a fundamentalist. And if so, then scientific anti-realists would be likewise fundamentalist.
Your assessment of Dawkins is not impartial.
No, no. That's just a myth. I prefer the one about the Minotaur. ;)
Quoting Wosret
This is very funny stuff, Wosret.
Oh, it [i]seems to you[/I], does it...?
Quoting Punshhh
I have. Allow me to inform you. No. It has not. Feel free to check.
Your understanding of science is mistaken. You're describing instrumentalism, which is a philosophical interpretation of claims such as scientific claims. Science itself (that is, the received view, or the vast majority consensus in the field) has no commitment to an instrumentalist interpretation versus a realist/truth-bearing/ontological-commitment interpretation.
Scientists tend to have the latter (realist etc.) interpretation of many claims, although they'll easily focus on pragmatism instead in some situations, with that pragmatism not being exactly the same as an instrumentalist interpretation. For example, they tend to see Newtonian mechanics as "correct in some situations," or as "close to true, and close enough for this situation."
Most scientists seem put off by a strictly instrumentalist approach, and a strictly instrumentalist approach usually has to be explained to them, as the idea is odd to them (and they also do not typically recognize the term "instrumentalism").
Heck, it even seems like a majority of scientists are mathematical platonists.
How does one validate any idea except empirically?
The cosmological argument has the same problem as any other God hypothesis. It doesn't explain why God isn't dependent on something else where everything else is. Like the "Complex Design" argument that says that complex designs require a designer, it creates an infinite regress that is halted in it's tracks by the existence of something that defies the logic that created the infinite regress in the first place (if everything has a designer then why doesn't God have a designer?).
The popular way around that lately is to treat that objection as naive, sophomoric, or at least hackneyed enough that you should feel embarrassed for bringing it up. The hope is that you won't want to be seen as any of those things, so you'll just drop it.
One small area that might require another thread is to observe how (in my view) their approach to religion bypasses the sociological and anthropological work that has been going on for a couple of centuries; as if the social sciences weren't scientific. The wave of physicalism that has swept through philosophy while I was alive and busy with other things seem to make observers like them think they're looking with exciting fresh neuro-enlightened eyes at matters that have been studied far more carefully and sensitively for a long time across the campus - where those pesky relativists believe everything is just social, ungodammit...
True that.
"science" is a hyperobject, or is an umbrella term for a large conglomerate of institutions, individuals, and practices. It subsumes, implicitly whatever anyone thinks it does when they hear the word, and also connotes different things depending on which camp you're allied with.
Which philosophers of science have you read? I'm thinking of Feyerabend and Kuhn respectively. The former for my view that "science" cannot be demarcated from any form of problem solving activity in any substantial way, and Kuhn with respect to the history of science, and the methodological trends, and theoretical frameworks operated within as "normal science", kind of drudgery, and then there is revolutionary extraordinary science which makes and breaks the rules, rather than follows them.
There was also a super awesome book that I forget the title and author of now (herhaps someone will know?), but it was written by a journalist, about the history of scientists themselves, what quirky crazy fucks most of them were, and how much infighting posturing, and tribalism is present among scientists, for some reason I remember the author being on a plain... or something... but anyway, it was a sweet counter-balance to the distancing/denotative/former language scientists like to use by focusing on the people themselves.
Your hypothesis would hold if there was a convergence of observations (eg, memories, weather reports for that day, snow which doesn't appear fresh being observed on mt. Everest, etc) could best be explained by the hypothesis and no other. What makes an explanation the best, is one that cohesively accounts for the widest array of observations, and has the best predictive value.
Your conceiving of the past is something which exists independent of the present, and contains a sort of linear progression of facts/truth-values to which our statements about the past correspond (Or not) to. This is confused - there is no past full of facts to which our statements can correspond. At the very least there's certainly no evidence of one. We perpetually inhabit the present - the past is unobservable.
Quoting jorndoe
Yes.
Did the religious experience simply 'feel' more real/true?
Seems to me that one could substitute the term "religion" for "science" here, and it would fit quite seamlessly--including "the quirky crazy fucks most of them were, and how much infighting posturing, and tribalism is present."
Who? Me? Oh, I've read them all. They all [i]just love[/I] talking about something which doesn't exist. Almost as much as religious folks. Except that in the former case, it obviously does exist, and some variation of the continuum fallacy won't change that.
Excellent.
People commonly come to the logically fallacious conclusion that if one's view of science is not that it is about the Real Truth, it's, therefore, anything-goes-relativism.
More people talk about God. Yup, love me some sacred cow. Yum yum yum.
In order to be epistemically consistent, a scientist's religious beliefs would have to satisfy the same criteria he requires his science claims to satisfy.
The epistemic criteria for scientific claims typically require independently observable empirical corroboration, specifically rule out intervention by supernatural agents, and entail independently observable predictions.
If the religious claims a scientist believes in do not satisfy these standards, then his epistemic standards for accepting or rejecting religious claims is inconsistent with his epistemic standards for science claims.
Perhaps we do perpetually inhabit the present, but we arguably only experience the past, given that our sensory organs and brain require a nonzero amount of time in which to receive and process information from our environment. We experience the world not as it is, but as it was.
I also find people like Dennett, Dawkins & Co. somewhat insensitive. But I don't think that their dismissal of religion is a dismissal of spiritual experiences. Neither religion nor art have a monopoly on spiritual experiences, they occur in many different domains: e.g. sports, sciences or in one's relation to other people, animals, or other things.
Perhaps you're thinking of Laboratory Life by Latour and Woolgar.
In any event, is it any surprise that scientists are humans? Did anyone really think they were some kind of emotionless robots who valiantly strive for an understanding of nature, completely devoid of the human passions which are part of every other aspect of life?
Yes, they wish to remove the person and render everything in the third person, which is why they use the language that they use. At work now, I'll have to look up the book when I get home. T'was good.
I doubt that Behe and company also look to ID to "validate" their belief in God. They likely believed in God long before the ID movement began. They probably believe in God for the same reason(s) that most anyone else believes in it. They use irreducible complexity and the other accoutrements of ID to try to convince others, including (presumably) nonbelievers.
But when someone deploys the cosmological argument for God's existence (or really any argument whatsoever), they do so with the intent to prove (deductively) or make probable (inductively or abductively) the conclusion of their argument, i.e. the existence of God. That's what arguments are for: they're intended to convert. Whether Thomists believe that God can be "known" through faith alone, they also believe that God's existence can be demonstrated by appeals to observable features of the universe. They thereby appeal to empiricism, in other words, something you've claimed that "real" believers don't do.
Well, this is part of the problem with these families of arguments (the argument from design, the cosmological argument, etc), as pointed out by Hume and others: we have no experience with a range of universes, some of which are created and some which are uncreated, in order to calibrate our notions of designedness vs. lack of design. We have to muddle through with resort to analogies with manmade artifacts (clocks, watches, and the like).
Then you and I have a different notion of empiricism and rationalism.
Well, I may well be mistaken.
Can you explain?
Because the arguments appeal to observable aspects of nature in order to bolster their case for the existence of God (as opposed to relying upon revelation or pure logic-chopping as with the ontological argument and its ilk), something Wayfarer claimed that "real" believers don't do.
Hypotheses or theories, not arguments, make (or entail) testable predictions. Arguments simply purport to derive a conclusion from one or more premises, which is what those propounding the cosmological argument and the others attempt to do.
I think the distinction you're making between argument and hypothesis here is a red herring.
A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for phenomena. For a hypothesis to be empirical, it has to be observable or testable. In these arguments, God is the hypothesis proposed as the logically necessary explanation for nature.
P1: Nature
P2: Nature entails a supernatural Designer/Creator
C1: Therefore, a supernatural Designer/Creator
P3: The only supernatural Designer/Creator is God
C2: Therefore God
The alleged knowledge of the conclusion is arrived at by armchair deductive reasoning devoid of empirical data--rationalist knowledge.
Double up good.
One would first accept some sort of validity to the religious experiences described, as a premiss to a claim, if that were the basis of the dispute.
[quote="Brainglitch]The epistemic criteria for scientific claims typically require independently observable empirical corroboration, specifically rule out intervention by supernatural agents, and entail independently observable predictions.[/quote]
Isn't this an idealised version of scientific claims? I'm just studying a module on metaphysics of mind, for instance, where the claims for 'physicalism' and 'causal closure of the physical' are extrapolations from metaphysical claims arising from studies other than the one in hand. This is not to knock extrapolation as such: i we weren't often using extrapolation, in biology for instance, we'd never get things done.
Sure, we take the person's word for it that he had what he believes to have been a religious experience.
Quoting mcdoodle
Perhaps idealized, but I think the vast majority of established scientific claims satisfy those criteria. That's how they got to be "established."
Yep. That's the right way to word it, as well as the right approach. If you want more than that, then you'll have to provide stronger grounds.
@mcdoodle, it's not really a matter of being more or less sympathetic to Colin, more or less sensitive or appreciative, or of being more or less equipped at imagining similar experiences for comparison. When it comes down to it, it is about applying a reasonable standard and assessing the available evidence; or, like some seem to have opted, one could discard reason because it is a fawn in the side of wishful thinking and might just cause one to wake up to harsh reality. Are we here to ascertain the truth or to give each other a pat on the back?
It isn't but it can point out the ways that moral judgements made on ostensibly scientific grounds have overstepped the mark.
They're not, but when they are used to define human identity, then again, they're no longer simply scientific judgements. To say that they are, would be rather like saying that your medical records constitute your biography.
I don't accept a necessary conflict between religion and science. I think there's an obvious conflict between scientific materialism and religious fundamentalism.
I haven't been 'evading' anything, although my meaning often seems to be misunderstood.
From what I have read of your posts, you don't understand the distinction between empirical and a priori, which is philosophy 101.
Not if the first cause is defined as an 'uncreated creator' - but you had better get your head around the other point first.
Not The Sleepwalkers, by Arthur Koestler? Excellent book, in any case.
I would be glad to be in a corner with adversaries as intelligent as yourself, McDoodle!
That doesn't stop the theorists from trying! In fact, irony of ironies, one of the main drivers behind the 'multiverse conjecture' is to defuse the appearance of a 'fine-tuned universe'.
Don't you love the idea that 10^500 universes is considered a 'tidy explanation'? I wonder what 'an untidy explanation' would look like? (considering that this number is larger than the number of atoms in the universe we do know about).
And in fact, they're having exactly the same argument about what constitutes empiricism, in regards to whether speculations about multiple universes amount to a scientific hypothesis. (In the yay side, Sean Carroll, the nay side, George Ellis.)
Current physics makes medieval theology seem timid.
Not at all. There are plenty of religious scientists who have no trouble recognising the different domains of the two.
(Wikipedia).
There was a very interesting article on The New Atlantis not long ago about the religious lives of Faraday and Maxwell. Max Planck was an non-orthodox Christian and passionate critic of scientific materialism. Albert Einstein eschewed organised religion but always denied being atheist. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely.
It was A Short History of Nearly Everything. I remember it fondly, and fairly well I believe, it had lots of dirt on a lot of histories greatest scientists, it was great.
I would prefer to triple up excellently.
Can you give an example? Do you think that Dawkins has done this?
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm interested in whether you think that Dawkins has done this. Like I mentioned, I plan on reading 'The Blind Watchmaker' in the near future, so I am glad that this subject has come up, and I'll try to bear these things in mind when reading it.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think that that was clear from some of your earlier comments, but thanks for clarifying.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hmm. Maybe it's just me, but on several occasions in which you were challenged on something, you seemed to either change the subject or go silent.
Dawkins appeared here in Australia on a panel discussion a couple of years back, and he was asked 'Do you think Darwinian principles ought to be used to organise society?' And he said, to his great credit, heavens no, it's a horrible principle for organising a social philosophy, we have to get away from that.
But he honestly doesn't seem to realise that, in the very next breath, he will condemn the Christian tradition as being a pernicious delusion and a threat to civilization. As an opinion piece on Dawkins said:
Eleanor Robertson
His philosophy of biology is built around 'the selfish gene', which proposes that humans are like robots who are driven by a genetic programme to propogate the genome. Yet he doesn't seem to realise the profoundly anti-humanistic implications of this view. I think that's because, as many of the reviewers of The God Delusion have said (including Michael Ruse, who really ought to be one of his natural allies), his grasp of philosophy and ethical theory is less than undergraduate.
But he seems to feel this urge to go on a crusade, pardon the irony, against all forms of religion.
I recommend Karen Armstrong and Mary Midgley on these topics, they're both capable scholars and neither represent themselves as theistic apologists but as humanists in the true sense 1, 2.
But his biological writing is said to be very good, if he hadn't launched himself into a holy war I would probably read more of it myself.
Quoting Wayfarer
In other words, you can just make stuff up that can't be falsified or validated and it should be accepted to be as valid as any other idea that has been falsified and validated.
Conflict between science and religious fundamentalism arises over conflicting explanations for certain phenomena--such as species, in the current ID v evolution dispute. But there are other conflicts, and they're not limited to fundamentalism.
Conflict arises whenever science proposes naturalistic explanations for phenomena that religion explains via supernatural agency of some kind. Historically, such conflict has occurred numerous times, (as I've already noted somewhere upthread) from the dreaded thunder god and other meteorological events, to disease and healing, to famine, warfare, to the divine right of kings, to astronomical events, to demon possession, etc. Presently, and surely in the future, science proposes alternative naturalistic explanations for morality/ethics, allegations of supernatural encounters (including visitations, revelations, inspirations, prophecies, ecstacies ...)--essentially any experiences people report and understand to be religious or spiritual.
What science can address and propose is--not information about the alleged supernatural agent or ineffable mystery itself--but, rather, naturalistic causes and conditions for such experiences, for how it comes to be that people believe such experiences are of the supernatural. And such naturalistic explanations are inherently in conflict with religion's supernatural explanations.
You don't seem to have the slightest familiarity with the discipline of philosophy, otherwise you would understand that the concept of 'uncreated creator' has been part of the subject for millennia. You will understand why I'm no longer going to reply to your posts.
That is the essence of 'the conflict thesis':
~Wikipedia
There are conflicts between religious authorities and scientists about all kinds of things. But as you note, 'What science can address and propose is--not information about the alleged supernatural agent or ineffable mystery itself--but, rather, naturalistic causes and conditions for such experiences.'
But on purely philosophical grounds it can be argued that 'naturalistic explanations' will never necessarily culminate in discovery of any kind of fundamental ground or first cause for the phenomena we observe.
For instance, above, there was some debate about what 'scientific laws' are. What scientific laws are, is not a scientific question at all! There are some science popularisers around, like Lawrence Krauss, who appear not to realise this, and instead get themselves into a complete muddle attempting to explain how science explains everything (for which read David Albert's review of his book.) But the bottom line is that, science is limited in scope, method and outcome; it has to be, because scientific method operates by exclusion.
Hence the deficiency of naturalism as a philosophy: it treats humans as only parts of nature, i.e. basically as a species. And then the only basis for ethical principles becomes one or another form of utilitarianism, what is 'useful' for that species in terms of surviving and getting along. Sam Harris has demonstrated that, in his forays into ethical philosophy (and kudos to him for trying.) But it amounts to declaring that the only real good is 'human floushing' because there is no conception of a higher or absolute good, knowledge of which is salvific, as found in all of the religous cultures; it can't encompass such ideas, for obvious reasons.
If naturalistic explanations cannot explain something, then what else is there besides (1) it goes unexplained, or (2) we subscribe to some hypothesis that's unverifiable, unfalsifiable, untestable, and offers no independebtly confirmable predictions--and provides no way, even in principle, to resolve dispute with other such unverifiable hypotheses that explain the matter differently?
Of course science is limited in scope, method and outcome.
What's your point?
Right, science cannot identify, explain, or prove an asdolute good.
And neither can you or anybody else. You can just express your opinion, your own value judgement that something is an absolute good. And your defense of your belief can consist in nothing more than reasoned argument--which, by the way, is also part of what science does.
I just want to point out that this conflict only arises if one subscribes to a non-instrumentalist view of science. If you take scientific instrumentalism to be the case, then there is no conflict between say believing god created the world in seven days, and using the theory of evolution to explain the biodiversity in the world.
But I think the issue is whether or not there is an absolute good, not exactly what such a good would be. If we are of the opinion that there is an absolute good, we can forever seek higher goods, always in pursuit of that absolute good. But if we are of the opinion that there is no absolute good, then the good determined today, or yesterday, as the highest good, might be continually forced upon us, into the future, as the highest good, denying the possibility that we could discover higher goods, And if we allow that there are higher goods, how would we create any hierarchical system without any direction toward an assumed absolute good?
So you beieve that nothing that can't be explained by science, is a factor or cause in human's lives?
I have tried to analyse the significance of religious experience in a broader way than that offered by religious apologetics, by saying that it is indicative of a core of insight into areas that can't be plumbed by naturalism, which is found in many diverse wisdom traditions. And your answer is given in terms of 'scientism' and moral relativism, which I see as the exact predicament of the modern secular intelligentsia. That's my point. So thanks, I think we've cleared that up.
If there are factors or causes in human lives that science can't explain, even in principle, then what else is there besides (1) they remain unexplained, or (2) you subscribe to some hypothesis that's unverifiable, unfalsifiable, untestable, and offers no independebtly confirmable predictions--and provides no way, even in principle, to resolve dispute with other such unverifiable hypotheses that explain the matter differently?
What does asserting that there really are absolute values achieve if all you can do is express your opinion that the particular value at issue really is one of those absolutes?
So you subscribe to some hypothesis that's unverifiable, unfalsifiable, untestable, and offers no independebtly confirmable predictions--and provides no way, even in principle, to resolve dispute with other such unverifiable hypotheses that explain the matter differently.
When people say things like this, they seem to be saying that there are organs and faculties that apprehend things that are silent, unmoving, insubstantial, and invisible. Science can't observe or understand these mysterious emanations of the divine, but ordinary people can--and believers can not explain how.
First-hand experience of religion tells me that we imagine that we have got hold of these emanations of the divine. If we don't recognize the imagined, then we think it real. The same thing happens when someone who is afraid of the dark fears the horrid things that are lurking there. They run in terror, because they don't 'imagine' that they are 'imagining' the monsters, they think them real.
The reverse is the same: If we don't recognize a swelling heart, and feelings of elation as the imagined movement of the Holy Spirit, then we are filled with confidence about the reality of all the things of the spirit.
It's not a simple trick we play on ourselves, it's a very complicated ritual that when done properly helps those who desire the divine feel like they have touched the divine. Is this harmful? No -- generally not. Indeed, I would think it was an enormous comfort. But that doesn't make it real. Those who are afraid of the dark and what might be lurking there (devils and monsters of various kinds) have completed a ritual too that leads to highly unpleasant results that aren't real, but the unreality doesn't help those who are hyperventilating with fear. What relieves their fear is the recognition that imagined monsters are "nothings" that we can and ought to dismiss.
Religious comforts are as "nothing" as monstrous fears, they are just more pleasant -- but no more real.
What is science anyway? It is a way of abstracting mathematical and measurable regularities discoverable through observation and reasoning, and also the principles that lie under them, so as to make predictions and create mathematical models. It is hugely effective across all kinds of domains. But it is not all-knowing, and I don't mean that in any mysterious sense beyond the fact that it is a process of mathematical abstraction and quantification. And as one of the best in that game said
But the point is, 'scientific thinking' has now occupied the place formerly occupied by religion. It tells educated people how they ought to think. Steve Pinker's New Republic essay of a couple of years back Science is Not Your Enemy was a perfect statement of that. But that understanding doesn't see how historically conditioned that attitude is. It's actually an attitude, an intellectual structure, which pervades the entire culture. We see things from that, or rather, it provides the spectacles through which we see everything. Whereas I think a critical philosophy says you have to look at those spectacles, instead of only through them.
That is basically a psychoanalytical account; instead of 'angry-sky-father' god, it is 'unconscious-fear-abatement' god, of the kind suggested by Sigmund Freud. But it is still basically reductive or dismissive.
I think people certainly have religious visions of sacred figures and deities and it's true that some of those people might be suffering from delusions. But again, as I have said throughout this thread, I don't think on those grounds that it is at adequate to simply dismiss mankind's religious heritage as a product of delusion. It does no justice to the foundational role of religious ideas in culture. (Note that when I said that, it was also dismissed as 'mere apologetics'.) I think, from shall we say an anthropological perspective, that many such visions can be interpreted as representations of the archetypes coming from the collective unconscious. That doesn't mean they're simply hallucinations or delusions, but neither are they physically real; they are, you might say, psychically real.
So the responses I have been giving throughout this thread are not 'religious' in the sense implied by BitterCranks' posts. My interests are more concerned with a kind of critical spiritual enquiry into the nature of being. Nowadays we will automatically say 'ah, nature of reality you mean. Isn't that the domain of physics or at least natural philosophy?' So I am criticizing that attitude on the basis that in this kind of matter, it reveals more than it conceals.
That sounds to me a matter for psychiatry.
I haven't been referring to the (now mythical) founder of this thread, but the general idea of 'the varieties of religious experience'. Actually the first thing I said in this thread was 'that OP doesn't constitute an argument', but it's a topic that interests me, so that is why I have contributed to it. But I agree that the OP is a flimsy reed on which to argue.
I think in the case of meeting persons who are esteemed as possessing religious insights, generally they don't appear mad. Some of them might be eccentric, and some religious cultures may accomodate behaviours considered strange, but I never encountered much literature about such cases when I studied the subject. So, maybe there are some cases where it's hard to determine whether a subject is religiously inspired or psychotic, but I don't think they're common. In the case that was mentioned before, if it did involve murder of an infant by its mother - I didn't read it - then I would be surprised if it were anything other than criminality or insanity.
No, I don't agree with that, because it's reductive - it is basically saying that the social consensus of what constitutes 'normal behaviour' or 'beneficial behaviour' is the measure. Actually I think it is very rare to encounter those who really have such experiences, especially in modern culture, but it would have to be dealt with case by case. But that is why I referred to William James' book, Varieties of Religious Experience, which is considered a classic in the area (although I read it about 40 years ago). But I did study Comparative Religion, and quite a lot of that subject is concerned with how to appraise, understand or classify those experiences. The tendency I am critical of, is the tendency to assume that such experiences can be explained in psychological, cultural or social terms, as that is invariably reductive; it is always saying that the primary datum of the experience is something other than what the subject claims it to be.
Because Mengele was a doctor, therefore doctors are evil. Scientists create weapons, so science is evil.
If what you're asking is, what is done for supposedly religious reasons, ought to be judged according to whether it doesn't harm another - then, the answer would be 'yes of course'.
//edit// - I'm not sure how to respond to this question, or what it is asking.
Have you ever met a charismatic spiritual teacher?
If the question is, 'how do we determine whether a person who claims to have had a religious vision/experience is bona fide?', then the answer would be, ask them questions, investigate what others say about them, generally scrutinize the person and try and assess their claims.
However, persons who have undergone a genuine spiritual experience are sometimes possessed of a quality, called 'charisma'. It is obviously a difficult characteristic to quantify or measure.
So overall, it's a difficult question to answer.
Or, I reject naturalistic explanations of such experiences, because they are among many examples of the kinds of things for which naturalistic explanations are insufficient.
But the same could be said of many areas of human endeavour. Are there naturalistic criteria for determining who is a superior historian? Pianist? Artist? How are we to judge such cases? So the same caveats apply to many aspects of human experience, not just religious experience. But many would like single out religious experience, because it is obviously contradictory to naturalism, insofar as it suggest the reality of what is called (and dismissed as) 'supernatural'. So if religious experiences have real referents, then woe betide naturalism.
Incidentally I looked up the etymological definition of Charisma, which is interesting:
If you deny the possibility that we could discover higher goods, in light of the discovery of this highest good, then that can only reasonably mean that you either think that this highest good is an absolute good, or that there is, or might be, an absolute good which we can't discover. But both of those contradict the opinion that there is no absolute good. So, if that was intended as a criticism of the position that there is no absolute good, then it is a very poor one, since it is easy to avoid making such a contradiction.
And, in answer to your last question, the ability to judge and to form hierarchies are natural human abilities that don't depend on there [i]being[/I] an absolute of any kind whatsoever, nor even on it [i]being possible[/I], which is all that really matters.
If you are of the opinion that there is an absolute good, then you can never reasonably seek goods higher than that. But you can seek goods higher than others whether you believe that there is an absolute good or not.
http://youtu.be/83GgOhBhxqI
Quoting Wayfarer
Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, ain't it, Wayfarer?
I'd like to mention, too, that though we are attracted to and readily influenced by charismatic personalities, a charasmatic personality is not an indicator of the truth of the charismatic person's beliefs and claims--as we can see in numerous cases of such personalities in history, politics, business, entertainment, and religious leadership. As a matter of fact, sociopaths often have a charismatic personality.
Seems to me that if it is not logically possible to subscribe to both explanations, then they are in conflict.
Either one subscribes to the explanation that God created all the various species in one day (and brought them before Adam to name them), or one subscribes to evolution, or neither. But not both. These explanations strike me as mutually exclusive, conflicting.
And similarly for all cases in which one explanation posits the cause to be a supernatural agent, and another explanation posits only naturalistic causes. I don't see how the conflict is resolved just because the naturalistic argument is apprehended as instrumental.
Amen. But the alternative of being consistent by biting the bullet and including them is also pretty dire, so it's a lose/lose situation.
Quoting Brainglitch
As explanations, they are in conflict. As beliefs, they would also be in conflict. But if one is merely using one of the explanations for some other purpose, then they are not necessarily in conflict. Although, if this purpose is not made explicit, then it can be misleading. And if it is used as if one [i]did[/I] actually believe it, then that can seem disingenuous or intellectually dishonest.
This reasoning strikes me as an appeal to consequences.
Sure, our beliefs have consequences, sometimes consequences that are widely judged to be positive, inspiring, life enhancing--as indeed many religious beliefs are. But desirable consequences do not entail that the proposition driving the behaviors is true, they indicate simply that belief that the proposition is true motivates behavior.
Their responses are instructive, and perhaps can be generalized so they apply to other conflicts between supernatural agent vs. naturalist explanations.
One avenue of resolving the conflict is simply to deny the naturalistic explanation--deny evolution. Either attack it epistemically, denying the validity of the evidence and logic, or just ignore the actual argument presented, and wave the very notion away wholesale as the absurd imaginings of deceived secularists under the influence of "the enemy" (that is, Satan.)
Another move is to acquiesce to some degree. This is the "Well, micro-evolution occurs, but not macro evolution" crowd.
Another move is to accept evolution as proposed by science, and simply assert that evolution is just a description of God's method, a process which he drives and intervenes in. This does not save the assertion that God created the species in one day as narrated in Genesis, but it saves the existence of God the Creator and Designer. Though one attempt to save the Genesis account involves a favorite apologist rhetorical more--redefine the terms. Such as "day," in which a day for God is not a human day, so when Genesis says God created all the various species in one "day" that doesn't mean a 24-hour period, it should be understood to mean an undefined stretch of God-time. And "Adam" who named teh animals doesn't mean one guy, it means all of humankind over the ages.
In general this entails a shift to a more metaphorical, less literal, interpretation of the scriptures, which fundamentalists see as the dreaded "slippery slope" that can ultimately result only in anything goes interpretations, rather than the plain Truth, so they resist it, and characterize it as "liberal" theology.
Note that regarding descriptions of spiritual experiences, we see both literalistic and metaphorical descriptions, in which God is portrayed in some as the Yahweh of the Old Testament, or as "a loving presence" or "the ground of being" and the like.
Because if you take scientific instrumentalism to be the case, then you wouldn't 'subscribe to evolution'/take evolution to be true, because scientific theories for you are not true or false descriptions of reality.
At the same time you could also be religious and take the account in genesis to be true/believe in it.
I'm not actually religious I'm just pointing out that a lot of what's being argued in this thread rests on an unstated subscription to a non-instrumentalist view of science. The conflict between evolution and creation only comes about when one subscribes to scientific realism.
I read it about 40 years ago too. What I mostly remember are his thoughts about finding a psychological equivalent to war. I don't remember whether he talked about this, but one of the Varieties of Religious Experiences is losing one's former secure faith.
Like having faith, losing it comes in a variety pack. Honestly, losing my Protestant flavored faith in God was a far more strenuous spiritual experience then getting or keeping it in the first place. It took a good 20 years of serious effort. What I settled upon was that 'faith in the existence of god'--religion--is our most distinguished cultural achievement. In the beginning we took mud and we fashioned gods after our own likeness, and imagined a cosmos over which god(s) ruled, and it was good.
It was, to be more precise, both good and bad, because we are both good and bad. We were proud enough of bashing the heads of infants against the stones to have God instruct us to do it. That's one version of the gods. Jesus and Buddha were kinder, representing the less bellicose angels of our character.
Believing that God is real is a great cultural achievement--and I say that without sarcasm. Faith is one of the great jewels in our cultural crown. I am willing to credit faith, ritual, prayer, contemplation, sacrifice, as very valuable cultural property. I can't credit them with being our creations and being independently real at the same time. We can cast wonderful idols out of gold, but believing the idol is a god requires delusion. Madness isn't required; all we need is ordinary, earnest delusory thinking.
Moses' encounter with God on Mount Sinai came from the same foundry as Baal. Same goes for Aeron, Ahura Mazda, Apollo, Artemis, Athena, Belatucadros, Dionysus, Freyja, Frigg, Heimdall, Hera, Yggdrasil, Zeus, et al. We could suppose (it has been supposed) that the numerous gods of many peoples are all reflections of one cosmos-pervading divinity.
Of course, we have more cultural achievements than just religion. Some say science ties with religion for largest cultural crown jewel, some say it exceeds it. I don't know. Both science and religion offer a way of apprehending the world, though on very different terms, and to some extent they are not mutually exclusive--unless one is a fundamentalist. But even fundamentalists generally prefer to be healed by doctors who studied science, rather than by a ranting preacher casting out malignant devils.
Yeah, most creationists seem to subscribe to scientific realism, hence the conflict. I'm just saying it's not mandatory, and you can resolve the conflict another way - subscribing to scientific instrumentalism.
So, being a creationist you'd take religious accounts to be true/false. Whereas you wouldn't take scientific theories to be true/false descriptions of reality. Therefore there's no conflict.
Now I understand what you're saying. No, it's not a double standard, it's a judgement.
Have you heard the expression 'the devil's advocate'? That office originated in proceedings of the Catholic church to determine the suitability of candidates for canonization. In order to be canonized, there need to be two bona fide reports of miracles. And the devil's advocate role was precisely to cast doubt on supernatural or miraculous explanations for the miracles or other elements of the candidates' life. So the Catholic Church goes through a very rigorous process of assessing whether such claims of supernatural causation can be validated. They will call on medical and other scientific experts to validate or refute the claims.
Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World , Jacalyn Duffin
See the above. They're not mutually exclusive, but as a matter of historical fact, science has tended to replace religion as a guide to what intelligent people ought to believe. Which is all well and good, up to a point, that point being that science excludes, not just what is obviously 'supernatural or religious' but a good deal else besides. Scientific materialism is the de facto philosophy in the secular academies, and I think it operates as a form of cultural dogma.
Theistic evolution asks the question, why did life evolve in the first place? You have a basically inert planet orbiting the sun, and then over several billions of years, progressively more intelligent forms of life evolve, to the point of rational self-awareness. Is that something that can be understood wholly and solely through the lens of evolutionary biology? This is where perfectly respectable science becomes reductionist philosophy, and you don't have a to be a creationist to say that.
There are different layers or levels of both meaning and interpretation in religious texts. Not understanding that is one of the main causes of 'literalistic' interpretations which try and interpret such accounts as a literal scientific theory.
Yes, it's a judgment.
And judgments are based on... drum roll... some standard or other.
In one case you judged according to a naturalistic standard, and explain that the woman's religious experience was caused by a psychiatric pathology, but in other cases that you approve of as genuinely religious, you dismiss the naturalistic standard as "insufficient" and judge by some other standard.
Thus, a double standard. One standard for some cases and a different standard for others.
In Western culture, moral philosophies coalesced around the Bible which certainly does embody moral standards. 'Do to others as you would have them do to you', 'love neighbour as self', 'care for the poor and needy', to mention only a few. What are the naturalist equivalents for them? Recall, upthread, the discussion about how Richard Dawkins on the one hand, laments the implications of Darwinian theory on moral philosophy, but then has devoted considerable time to attacking the traditional sources of morality. Leaving us with - what, exactly? Grayling and Harris as new moral exemplars?
What's your suggestion to resolve this dilemma?
This may be the case, that we can make such subjective judgements without the need for an absolute, but that's not "all that really matters". What really matters is the capacity to make objective judgements, and it is the absolute which allows such judgements to be objective rather than subjective.
So take for example, temperature, we can subjectively judge something as warm or cold, but not until we produce a scale, which is an absolute, do we have an objective judgement of temperature. Likewise with any measurement, we make a subjective judgement of big or small, but when we produce a scale, we have an absolute which acts to give us objectivity.
Quoting Sapientia
How would you know whether one good is really higher than another, unless you assume a principle for comparison? Such a principle is an absolute, and it is the assumption of the absolute which allows you to know that one is higher than the other. Otherwise it is just your subjective opinion that one good is higher than the other.
Quoting Brainglitch
Isn't that what morality is all about, consequences? I think it would be odd to attempt to base moral principles on something other than an appeal to consequences. Don't you?
Quoting Brainglitch
Well, you and I both know that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether any particular belief is actually "true". We can justify a belief, but this doesn't necessarily mean that it is true. The scientific method is to accept the theories which have favourable results, predictability. It would be a demonstration of inconsistency if we were to dismiss ethical beliefs which have a favourable result but a possibility of falsity, while keeping scientific beliefs which produce favourable results, but may not be true.
It seems to me, that if a belief is producing favourable results, then we need something more than the possibility that the belief is false, in order to reject that belief.
Sure.
But neither do we know that the belief is true in any sense other than that it works. Thus, all we need (and imo all we acrually have access to) are beliefs that work to achieve our purposes. Whether or not any such belief also is absolute is not something that we can determine, even in principle.
Hard to keep up with your non seqs sometimes.
We were talking about epistemic standards by which to judge whether the source of an reported religious experience is natural or supernatural. The charge against what you'd said was that you applied naturalistic epistemic standards in one case of a reported religious experience, but rejected naturalistic epistemic standards as insufficient for other cases, which you judged to be authentically religious. I understand what naturalistic epistemic standards are, but I don't know what standards you employed in your judgment that certain cases really are authentically religious. So I can't answer your question about what the other standard you used would be.
Well, my meta-ethical position is moral nihilism. I think what people call morals are just societal norms they've adopted. And these are historically and culturally situated and parsed, rather than absolute in any sense.
And I think that characterizing your examples as rooted in revealed scripture has it backwards. Such moral notions made it into scripture in the first place in those societies becasue they arose out of those societies (and many other societies) and were subsequently ascribed to Yahweh or whoever.
A morality doesn't have to be divinely revealed, it just has to work to promote the kind of society the people want, as evolution in moral beliefs about slavery, women, sexual orientation, politics, economics, religious toleration, etc. over the ages resdily reveals,
That stands to reason. It is just what Nietzsche correctly predicted all those years ago.
If they're authentically religious, then they're not amenable to a naturalistic explanation, right? And the example I provided was the case of the Vatican examinations of purported miracles, which proceed by attempting to discredit the miracle by providing a naturalistic explanation for it, and, only when that fails, declares that 'supernatural intervention' has occured. Now you may think Catholicism a crock, but that is not the point; these are clear cases of 'judging spiritual experiences according to both naturalistic and supernatural explanations'.
No, that isn't what really matters. It doesn't really matter if it can't be knowingly applied, and it can't be knowingly applied if all you know is [I]that[/I] there is an absolute good, or [I]that[/I] there is an objective standard, without knowing [i]what[/I] it is, or [i]how[/I] to make comparisons to it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, [I]if[/I] you can produce such a scale. But that is a big if. The temperature scales we use are scientific, and, the last time I checked, ethics wasn't. So this analogy of yours only goes so far.
Another point is that the concept of an absolute can form part of a scale, but need not exist in actuality. In fact, it can even be the case that, not only does it not actually exist, but it cannot possibly exist in actuality. Consider a perfect circle, for example. Perhaps God, like a perfect circle, doesn't actually exist - even if we can use the concept as part of an objective scale.
And, like Brainglitch rightly noted, and which should not be glossed over, the desirability or benefit that having recourse to such a scale would bring about [i]cannot[/I] be a reasonable basis upon which to judge the truth of the matter. That is a known fallacy.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, such a principle need not be absolute. It can be fallible, and it can be conditional. And the [I]assumption[/I] of the absolute does not allow you to [i]know[/I] that one is higher than the other. That would be begging the question. It only really allows you to [i]assume[/I] that one is higher than the other.
Subjective standards may well be all we have recourse to in contexts such as moral judgement. If so, then your criticising it in comparison to a purely hypothetical alternative would be rather pointless.
Blatant non seq.
The fact that a naturalistic explanation is not known does not entail that therefore Goddidit. And the claim that Goddidit is a blatant logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam--as the Catholic scholars would say.
This is a ridiculous epistemic standard.
I can follow your reasoning, but please do not condescend by saying that a perfectly sound argument is a non sequitur simply because it offends your anti-religious sensibilites.
There might still be a conflict of a different kind: between professed belief/disbelief and behavioural expectation. In other words, there might be a performative contradiction at play. If you believe creationism, then act like it, and if you don't believe scientific theories, then act like it. Otherwise, it is suspicious, and might understandably lead to accusations of disingenuity.
There is a difference between consequentialism and the fallacy of appealing to the consequences. Consequentialism is a normative ethical theory for determining the moral value of an act, whereas you were talking about the truth value of meta-ethical theories.
It us a fallacious argument because it violates the rules of logic.
It does not logically follow that if we don't have a naruralistic explanation for something, then, therefore Goddidit.
So it doesn't violate any rules of logic. What it challenges is your nihilistic sense of what is or isn't possible, because, according to you, no such thing ought to be possible. In fact you're prepared to say that without even considering any evidence, as for you it's an a priori truth, right?
Huh? How does that relate to what I said? Are you saying that the thermometer is useless if you don't know how to read it? I think that's kind of obvious, and it's equally obvious that ethical standards are useless if you don't know the language which they're communicated in
Quoting Sapientia
I don't see the basis of your claimed difference. Scales, codes, and rules are produced by human beings as principles to be followed. Why would you say that we should follow scientific rules, but not follow ethical rules. Your insinuation, that rules for measuring temperature are somehow better than ethical rules, because they are "scientific", doesn't make sense.
Quoting Sapientia
Of course, the ideal, or absolute, doesn't exist in such a limited sense of the word "exist", it only exists through definition, but this doesn't make the absolute any less necessary. Pi is defined as the ratio of the circumference of the circle to the diameter of the circle. It cannot be given in its exact numerical form, because it is an irrational ratio, but that doesn't mean that it is not necessary. This point you make does nothing to deny the necessity of God.
Quoting Sapientia
And as I replied to brainglitch, we are not judging truth here, we are judging justification, so this point is irrelevant.
Quoting Sapientia
Why do you think that an absolute is necessarily infallible? That doesn't make sense. What about being absolutely fallible? But if absolutes help us reduce fallibility, why deny them?
And, yes the absolute does allow you to know that one is higher than another, just like you can know that 3 is higher than 2, by means of knowing number, which is an absolute. When there is an absolute, then if any given good is described, it can be known by means of that description to be higher or lower than another described good, just like the number which is described as 3 can be known to be higher than the number described as 2. When there is an absolute, then each good receives its definition, and description as "good", by being related to the absolute, like 3 receives its definition by being related to the absolute. By your argument, the absolute of number only allows you to assume that 3 is higher than 2, and it is begging the question to say that 3 is actually higher than 2.
As I just said, I don't think we were discussing truth values at all. This claim of "truth value" is a diversion from the subject.
Each time the devil's advocate concluded that since there is no known naturalistic explanation for the healing, then the healing was a confirmed miracle, he committed the logical fallacy, becasue it does not logically follow that if we don't have a naruralistic explanation for something, then, therefore Goddidit
I don't think there would be this conflict because for the scientific instrumentalist, scientific theories are simply not truth-apt. He doesn't not 'believe' in evolution because he thinks it's false, rather he doesn't believe in it because for him scientific theories are simply not the type of thing one believes (or not) in. There is no particular way the creationist here ought act in respect to what scientific theories he takes to be true or not, because for him they are not the kind of thing which are truth apt.
A tool is neither right or wrong so there can not be a contradiction with something which is.
Isn't a miracle just something which doesn't have a naturalistic explanation? Claiming its a fallacy to invoke god to explain something which doesn't have a naturalistic explanation seems wrong. What principle of logic/reasoning is being violated here?
You said, only a few pages back, that you "think the issue is whether or not there is an absolute good, not exactly what such a good would be". I have argued otherwise, but now you seem to have forgotten what you said.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You have misunderstood, and then attacked your own misunderstanding. I am not saying that we should not follow ethical rules. But I am saying that the case for considering temperature to be objective is stronger than the case for considering morality to be objective, because the former has been demonstrated scientifically, and the latter has not, and therefore they are not analogous in that way. If not science, then what else? Because human judgement varies considerably on this, unlike with regards to temperature via temperature scales. A 'moral scale' equivalent to, or even comparable to, the temperature scales that we use has not, to my knowledge, been produced.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't really care whether or not God is necessary if God is just a definition or a concept. I care whether or not God actually exists.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Justification for what?! It is just as fallacious as a justification for reasonable acceptance over an alternative, even if we put truth to one side. So, basically, if you're trying to be reasonable, then no, it isn't irrelevant at all. It is very relevant.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Jesus Christ. Did I say that? No. Go and look again and see for yourself. I said what I said because the term 'absolute' is ambiguous, and one possible interpretation is that it is infallible.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What about it?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I am not simply denying absolutes. Please stop with these straw men. The specific context in which I have discussed absolutes, or one or more particular absolute, is important. I have not denied the use of the concept, or that it may be beneficial. I have just suggested that there is reason to believe that in at least some cases, such as that of a perfect circle, they might not actually exist, and that the same might be true of God, if conceived of in this way.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And all of that can be dismissed because, once again, you're not responding to what I actually said, which is quite annoying and a waste of both of our time. I was directly addressing your own wording, which was not about the absolute, but rather about the [I]assumption[/I] of the absolute. Missing out that important detail changes everything. Why would you do that? Perhaps you regret wording it that way, but that is not my problem. You can't just switch to a different, perhaps more preferable, wording when that is not what I was addressing.
That is a statement of belief, or should we say 'un-belief'; because, according to you there is no God, so there must be a 'natural explanation' which simply hasn't been found in these cases.
That nicely illustrates that it is impossible for anyone to answer your question as to how to differentiate between natural and other kinds of explanation. Your view is: there are no other kinds of explanation; the only possible kinds of explanation must be natural. If science hasn't found them yet, then it will one day. More of the 'promissory notes of materialism'.
The following article was what drew my attention to the book mentioned previously:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/opinion/pondering-miracles-medical-and-religious.html
If they act like someone who believes that scientific theories are true, then that is reason to doubt their professed absence of belief. How do people who believe that scientific theories are true act? Well, for one thing, they tend to [i]use[/I] scientific theories [i]as explanations[/I].
If the creationist believes creationism, but does not believe in scientific theories (and that they don't believe them to be false is irrelevant, and doesn't change that, by the way), and he was asked how the universe came to be, then he should explain how the universe came to be through creationism, and not through any scientific theory, which he would never have any reason to [i]use[/I] as an [i]explanation[/I] for anything - except, for example, when playing devil's advocate or being ironic or otherwise insincere - but only ever to [i]mention[/I] it and what it purports to explain.
At least you're not accusing me of straw manning.
Quoting Sapientia
Oh, I take that back.
Quoting Sapientia
Science is objective, and ethics is not. Could you justify that assertion?
Quoting Sapientia
OK, so explain to me, how truth, which deals with "what is", is relevant to ethics, which deals with what ought to be.
Quoting Sapientia
All you are doing is defining "exists" in such a way that things like circles, squares, numbers, and all concepts in general, immaterial things, do not exist.
Quoting Sapientia
Since God is known to have the same type of existence as these things which your definition of "exists" excludes, i.e. immaterial things like concepts, then I think it is quite clear that God does not exist. That is, unless you are ready to change your definition of "exists", to allow that things like circles, squares, numbers, and other concepts actually exist. If you're ready to change your definition of existence, then the question of whether God actually exists might become meaningful.
The same as we always had: knowledge of ethics, expressed in particular cultural discourses (e.g. various religious traditions, social movements, ethical concepts themselves, etc., etc.) over human history.
Ethical nihilism is actually an extension of the traditional understanding of ethics. One which views the world to be innately lacking in moral significance, until some presence (e.g. God, nature) adds it to the world.
The concern of "but what are we left with?" shows the poverty of the traditional understanding of ethics. A stance which is wholly sceptical of ethical significance, which denies there is any expressed by the world, to a point where there must be the force of God or else there are no ethics. It treats ethical significance like it were a state of the world, something to be added or lost on the whim of a force-- nothing more than a cultural norm that lives or dies by the presence and command of God.
There is no understanding of ethics themselves. The traditional understanding fails to recognise ethical significance is necessary, true regardless of what exists or is present (either in our world or any other realm). Thus, we get this absurd situation where we have the traditionalist demands ethics won't be true if the presence they claim isn't so.
It's worse. "God did it" is a "natural" explanation. If (unobserved or not) God changed the world, then God is causal. Causality cannot function outside itself. "Supernatural explanations" are incoherent by definition. If present theories do not describe how an event occurred, then how it happened has another description. Something else happened in reality. If "God did it," then that's what the world does.
Miracles and magic are entirely possible, but they are always only "nature": the world acting how it does. What logically follows is that if a "naturalistic"explanation is not accurate (e.g. it's a hallucination), then a different "naturalistic" explanation will be (e.g. an experience which is an ad hoc reduction of the world to a concept of "God," an entity of God speaking to someone, etc., etc.).
It's not just an accusation though, and I challenge you to show otherwise. I haven't even had much reason to accuse anyone of committing that fallacy lately, but then someone like you comes along with a post like that...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You see?! You've just done it again! Why would you ask me to justify an assertion that I haven't made? Is that what I said? Yes or no? The answer is no. It is a simplified, weaker version of what I said, which is that the case for considering temperature to be objective is stronger than the case for considering morality to be objective.
Now, anyone - yourself included - can see what I said and what I didn't say, and I invite them to do so. You might not think that these details are important, but I think that they are, and it shouldn't be too much to ask of you to not misrepresent what I have claimed in such a way. It's not difficult. Don't you have the copy and paste functions on your computer?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is relevant to meta-ethics, which is what we were discussing. Moral objectivism and moral subjectivism are meta-ethical positions. I have explained that once already.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I'm specifying that I'm talking about what exists in actuality, rather than in any other sense.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I dispute your premise. That is, I don't agree that God is known to have the same type of existence as immaterial things like concepts. But I do accept that God, defined that way, does not exist in actuality.
[Quote="Metaphysician Undercover;31079"]That is, unless you are ready to change your definition of "exists", to allow that things like circles, squares, numbers, and other concepts actually exist. If you're ready to change your definition of existence, then the question of whether God actually exists might become meaningful.[/quote]
Why would I do that? Actuality is what distinguishes other things from those things and vice versa. And, on the contrary, that would lose a vital distinction and trivialise the question.
The negative reactions to this are a pretty good example of how advocates of "subjective" ethics can be frequently misread as nihilists. What is Sapientia saying here? Is there a claim that ethics are somehow untrue? Or even that ethical responsibility does not apply in some cases? The objectors claiming of "objective" morality say so, but it's not actually in Sapientia's words.
Rather Sapientia is drawing the distinction between empirical and ethical knowledge. In this context, "objective " means "observed in the world." Instead of saying there are no ethics or arguing a contradiction of ethics, Sapientia is pointing out ethical knowledge is not a question of observation. We can't look at the world, at a holy book, at the God shouting at us and simply say: "Ah, that means the ethical." Ethics are not like measuring temperature or describing what someone has said to you.
Here to say "ethics are subjective" means we need something other than the observed to understand ethics: ethical knowledge.
It was perhaps unwise of you to challenge me in this way, because, unlike you, I have been paying close attention to what my interlocutor has been saying.
Let's take a look, for example, at the first post of yours that I replied to, which began our discussion:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Now, let's compare that to your own claim about what truth deals with:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Furthermore, I already said that this criticism about appealing to the consequences stands - [i]even if it isn't about truth[/I], but instead about a reasonable means of accepting one over the other, in the meta-ethical context of our discussion - but you haven't addressed this counter point. Either your intention is to be reasonable, in which case you would have failed, or your intention is not to be reasonable, but instead go with whichever one you prefer based on how appealing you find the consequences, which you're free to do, but which would be no good reason for any reasonable person to do likewise.
If that means that I won't have to read any more of your ad hoc hypotheses to prevent your failing explanations from being falsified, then good riddance.
Seems harsh, but I can see why you'd say that.
The trouble with this discussion is that if there is a God, the world would be identical in every way as it would if there is no God, namely as we find it. So if there is a God, some people who experience revelation or epiphany might well be experiencing, or witnessing god. Alternatively if there is no God, those same people are mistaken. There is no way to determine if someone claiming to know god, actually does know God. So the only alternative solution is to say there is no God. But this also fails because it can't be proved that there is no God either.
So as has been pointed out repeatedly through the thread, Colin's experience has to be taken on faith. Either in the acceptance of God, or in the denial of God.
Quoting Sapientia
This is what you did claim:
Quoting Sapientia
Clearly your claim is that science is objective, and ethics is not. So I asked you to justify this claim. If you meant something other, than justify what you meant. Can I assume that you mean that science is more objective than ethics? Then justify this. If this is not what you mean, then tell me what you do mean, and justify that.
Quoting Sapientia
Right, I was talking about "goods".
Quoting Sapientia
Right, truth has not been shown by you, or me, to be related to "good". Yet you seem to be somehow linking the two. What's your point?
Quoting Sapientia
When we are discussing "goods", we are necessarily discussing consequences, so I really don't see what you are criticizing. It appears like you would like to dismiss "consequences" in favour of "truth". But we are talking about "goods", and I see how consequences are related to goods, but I don't see how truth is related to goods. So I wish you would stop trying to change the subject, and then telling me that I am the one straw manning.
Right! This is actually the basis of Hume's famous 'is/ought' problem
Which is central to the entire debate about naturalism and ethics. Basically it is the 'fact-value' dichotomy; that matters of fact are amenable to precise measurement and public agreement, where matters of value - what one ought to so - are not.
Religious ethics are oriented around a 'supreme good', whether that be expressed in theistic terms (such as in Christianity) or non-theistic religions such as Buddhism where the highest good is depicted as a state (namely, Nirv??a). This provides an overall rationale for a code of ethics, embodied in the corresponding way of life.
In Plato, the contemplation of the true and the good is the highest state of felicity. Again, the philosopher's life is oriented around this state, so that whatever wants he or she has are subordinated to the higher cause of the 'pursuit of the good'.
I am saying that the conclusion is not logically entailed by the premise. That is, just because we don't have a naturalistic explanation for something does not logically entail that Goddidit.
Further, if you say it's logical to conclude that Goddidit, then it's just as logical to say that the deity of any religion did it, or to say that witches did it, or the shaman's spell did it, or undertectable beams from the Andromeda galaxy did it, good vibes and positive thinking did it, etc. Thus, a conclusion that Goddidit has no more epistemic warrant than any of these others. One invisible cause would be logically as valid as another.
Note, also, that if it's logical to say that if we don't know the cause of something, then Goddidit, then it's logical to say that since we don't know the cause of cancer, then Goddidit, and if we don't know the cause of sudden infant death, then Goddidit, if we don't know the cause of x, then Goddidit. How many uncounted times throughout history was the notion that Goddidit eventually replaced with a naturalistic explanation, particularly as tigorous epistemic methods were developed and implemented?
If a conclusion is logically valid, then it is not posssible that the premises be true and the conclusion false. But, since it is entirely possible that natural processes caused the healing, but we have not been able to identify them, it is possible that the conclusdion that Goddidit is false. Thus the reasoning is logically fallacious.
My view is that I may well be mistaken about virtually anything I say.
And I am eager to hear reasoned analyses of, and counter-arguments to, the substantive content of claims I've presented a case for. Note that reasoned analyses and counter-arguments are different form ascriptions of motive and bias, as well as your opinion of my meta-ethical stance.
Anyway, the reasoning you presented about the epistemically rigorous Devil's Advocate process seems to be this:
Can't imagine why anybody would object to such compelling, rigorous logic and empirical methodology.
But gotta wonder: What's the explanation when subsequently, people pray to that dead guy for other patients but they die anyway? Does the sainted guy get demoted back to being just a regular dead guy?
And, since God is omniscient, and thus already knoes about the sick patients, why does it take some dead guy interceding to effect the cure? What's God's game here? I don't understand the logic of it.
The point of the book that I provided a link to, is that it documents the procedures involved in declaring supernatural intervention. Part of these procedures are to rigourously contest any such claims. To this end, an ecclesiastical panel is convened, which issues evidence such as medical and pathological reports to expert witnesses who are not associated with the case. A recent NYTimes column was where I read about this particular author. The 'devil's advocacy' role is required to be sceptical and critical of the evidence. Indeed the (atheist) author of the book in question, was surprised by the degree of apparent cynicism and willingness to discount favourable evidence:
But, according to your pre-existing belief, divine intervention simply could not happen, regardless of what evidence there might be.
I am not suggesting that you ought to believe anything. This is a philosophy forum, so the philosophical approach is not to say whether or what you believe about it. The philosophical argument is that if such claims were to be validated, then it would answer the question that was asked, specifically "by what criteria are 'natural' and 'supernatural' causes differentiated?"
If you can't find the words to justify your assertion then why cling so strongly to that belief?
No, yet again, you have misunderstood. That is one of the reasons why I just can't bear to continue this discussion with you. So, please, don't tempt me to reply, as I'm now doing, unless you can demonstrate an improvement.
I fear that if I say "black", you might just interpret that as "white" (or "yes" as "no", "up" as "down", and so and on, and so forth). Not only do you misunderstand what I'm saying, you are adamant that you have got it right. It is that part in particular which makes me averse to attempting to explain myself to you. Not to mention the fact that the difference between what I have said and what you have misinterpreted me as saying is obvious and self-explanatory, and that the former cannot logically be reduced to the latter should be clear. But perhaps logic just isn't your strong suit. Or perhaps you just can't get past your apparent desire to attack a weaker, more simplistic version of what I say.
I'm not even saying anything that is difficult to understand, or easy to misinterpret. I would bet on most other people in this discussion getting it right where you have failed.
You also seem to have a knack for failing to grasp the simple logic behind my arguments, and for conjuring up responses that miss the point.
There. You asked for it.
What seems to have entirely escaped your understanding is that we can analyse the logic of an argument independently of what we may believe about the truth of either the argument's premises or conclusion. Thus, our pre-existing belief or disbelief in supernatural agents and their habits is irrelevant to whether or not the reasoning is logically valid.
And it is logically fallacious to conclude that if we don't know the cause of something, then the cause therefore must be whatever card somebody pulls out of their vest pocket--or their ecclesiastical robes. (Talk about bias toward pre-existing belief!!!) Such a conclusion is logically invalid irrespective of whether it posits a naturalistic or a supernatiral cause.
As I responded to dukkha a couple of posts back, if the content of whatever card somebody pulls out of their vest pocket constitutes a valid conclusion, then you'd jave to allow that any number of other conclusions are just as logically valid as yours--including, that the cause of the healing is invisible, undetectable rays from the Andromeda Galaxy, and the like.
Furthermore, if you say it's logically valid to conclude that God must be the cause of something for which we have no naturalistic explanation, then it's just as logically valid to conclude that God is the cause of cancer, sudden infant death, and every unexplained accident and sickness, pain, and suffering in the world.
BTW, besides being a logically fallacious argument from ignorance, note that positing God as the cause for things we have no naturalistic explanation for, is just another example of invoking the infamous God of the Gaps.
If a conclusion is logically valid, then it is not posssible that the premises be true and the conclusion false. But, since it is entirely possible that natural processes caused the healing, but we have not been able to identify them, it is entirely possible that the conclusion that Goddidit is mistaken, that is, false. Thus the reasoning that concluded that Goddidit is logically fallacious.
The Devil's Advocates at best may do a rigorous job of eliminating known naturalistic causes for the healing at issue, but that's the end of their rigor. Their conclusion that therefore the dead guy must've gotten God ti do it, and therefore this proves the dead guy is in heaven, and therefore passes their test for canonization is logically fallacious, for the reasons I've given, and rather than logically and empirically rigorous as you claim, is the height of illogic and fanciful imagination.
Quite, there is no way to establish the presence of God even when you are the one experiencing the epiphany. However having experienced epiphany of various kinds myself, it is clear to me that some such experiences are utterly transformative, transformative to an unnatural degree(I do realise that there can be the same transformation in the development of mental illness). Also the nature, or content of the message can be considered. For example in the case of St Francis, the nature of the epiphany resulted in Christ like behaviour (following the epiphany) and the gift of communion with animals. The content can often contain information which is beyond human conception. An example of this is an experience I have had of a transcendence of time, time becoming viewed like a landscape, in which as I turned to look, I was looking into the past, or future. Such phenomena imply the existence in some unknown way of differing mental and experiential states, to what are provided in the world of the senses.
Thanks for your appreciation of Robbie Basho, I came across his music many years ago, through a chance and fortuitous event.
The defining distinction that differentiates naturalistic from supernatural explanations is that supernatural explanations posit a supernatural agent as the cause, and naturaliistic explanations don't.
It's not logically fallacious, you're just saying that as far as you're concerned, it's unbelievable. You have a 'will not to believe'. Incidentally, the point about theistic belief systems is that the saints are not dead, and are spiritually efficacious.
Of course not, but I still answered the question.
[quote="?????????????] "supernatural explanation" seem to be an incoherent concept since, in the end, it is always a natural explanation at play. [/quote]
That's a belief system at work right there. You presume that 'science' knows enough about nature to say what is 'super' to it.
As regards what is natural and what is not - 'naturalism' nowadays is bounded by physicalist explanations. But there is an approach called 'religious naturalism' - that religious phenomena, such as prophecy, esctacy and the like, are naturally-occurring states, albeit rare. However they reveal other realms or domains of being which the ordinary intelligence doesn't see. In which case, religious traditions are simply the records of those who have encountered or happened on those 'higher states of being'. It depends on what you regard as the scope of 'natural law'. Presently 'natural law' is strongly identified with the so-called 'laws of physics', hence physicalism, which is the basis of the 'religion of scientism', so called. But what if there are mental fields and biological fields of fields of an unknown kind, in addition to the electrical and magnetic fields which current sciences recognise?
That is true, but note the quotation I provided upthread about the nature and origin of 'charisma'. Besides such things have often occured with the context of a 'domain of discourse' which provides an intepretive framework. Obviously, there is scope for misjudgement, delusion, chicanery, and the like but as the old saying has it 'there would be no fool's gold if there were no gold'.
No kidding! Here's the thing - you put all explanations of a particular kind in a box, and put a big rubber stamp on it, saying Religion, or something equivalent. Then whatever explanation you are inclined to, won't include anything in that box.
Case in point. Popular physicists now routinely employ the speculation that perhaps the entire universe is 'a simulation' that has been generated by some super-advanced species, in which we're all artificial creations. They say, of course, we may never know whether it's true, but it is felt to be a 'scientific' kind of thing to say. You might object to it on various grounds, but not because it sounds 'religious'. But if you spoke instead in terms of a 'higher intelligence' which is the source of the universe, then that is a no-go because it sounds too much like religion.
That's why naturalism has developed by defining what kinds of understanding it will reject; it is defined by what it denies.
They have protocols. The 'Lives of Saints' provide an archive of such materials, what criteria they use to make judgements, and so on, going back hundreds of years. The author I referred to, Jacalyn Duffin, is a Canadian hemotologist who was sent pathology reports for her judgement; she says, she couldn't provide a scientific reason for why this relapse had occurred, that's what she reported. She also points out the clerics are very sceptical, they set the bar high.
My feeling is about all these things: I don't rule them out. As I'm not a materialist, then I don't regard them as impossible in principle. It doesn't mean I am going to be impressed by stories of weeping icons.
it's not just science but philosophy as well...
Recall Kant's saying that he had to declare a limit to knowledge to make room for faith. I see it like that. Naturalism as we know it is a product of an historical epoch, the European Enlightenment. It prepared the broad outlines of what is to be considered natural and what is not. Catholic Church is virtually the definition of 'what is not to be considered scientific', from the positivist's point of view. The Vienna Circle, behaviourism, scientific materialism, logical positivism, Marxism, evolutionary materialism - all of these intellectual movements are profoundly hostile to anything religious. We're sorrounded by that, materialism is the de facto attitude in the secular academy. But I've never accepted it.
I have very distinctly said that the reasoning is logically fallacious and explained this in detail. And I explained that my belief or unbelief in the truth of the premises or conclusion is entirrely irrelevant to whethr or not the reasoning is logically valid.
What is logically fallaious--as I explained in detail--is the conclusion that since there's no known naturalistic explanation, therefore, the cause must be x. In your particular case, x is Goddidit in the somewhat convoluted way via prayer to the dead guy, but the particulars of what's on the card you pulled out of your vest pocket are irrelevant to what renders the logic invalid. I explained why the logic is invalid.
You cynicism speaks louder than your logic. But in any case I didn't actually invent the Catholic Church, or write the book I'm referring to - just so long as we're clear on that.
My view is that Western secularism as an ideological movement is caught up in a centuries-long reaction against its previous religious history. That plays out over centuries as an Hegelian dialectic. The thesis was the classical theological tradition, the anti-thesis is scientific materialism. A new synthesis is emerging - biosemiotics and 'the new physics', and other diverse movements which are neither classically theistic, nor materialistic. That is visibly happening. But we also have to have a broad enough vision to re-interpret and re-integrate the traditions, otherwise we're 'marooned in the present'.
I know. My point is that's incoherent. Any cause is, by definition, a part of nature, a state of the world which results in another. The "supernatural cause" is only ever a state of the world which does something. With respect to curing a disease, for example, a drug is no less "magic" or "miraculous" than the command of God to be healed. Both are states of the world which result in the disease being cured. If it's true, the "supernatural" is just the world.
That's the exact problem. If God is going to be coherent as a force or presence, they must make a difference. The world of God must be different than the world without. To make sense God must be worldly, else the God makes no difference. Unless God is worldly, we are just calling the same place different names-- the "miraculous cure" would only be a different name for something a person's body did. God would not be there at all.
When God is not worldly, the inability to give any sort of answer on their existence is not a coincidence. Since the presence of such a God makes no difference to the world, there is nothing to know about it as a presence or force. Evidence and knowledge of it, in this sense, are impossible.
Asking the question of whether this God exists or not doesn't makes sense. If God is Real (infinite) rather than illusion (finite), then God cannot exist and so makes no difference to the world (finite).
To take the existence of this God on faith doesn't even make sense. Since God is infinite, we know God isn't troubled by existing or not. We know God to be necessary regardless of whatever the world does-- just as such a God makes no difference to the world, the world can make no difference to God, meaning God is beyond any change, restriction or controlling force. There is nothing to doubt about God.
If God is Real (infinite-i.e. not an illusionary finite state), we know the atheists are right.
Ok, let me try again. You said that something which is demonstrated scientifically has a better chance of being objective, than ethics. You say that "because" it is demonstrated scientifically, it has a better chance of being objective than ethics, which is not demonstrated scientifically. You imply that it is the scientific demonstration which causes objectivity.
So I ask, can you justify this? Can you demonstrate to me why a scientific demonstration would cause something to be more objective than ethical principles are?
Following from my earlier response on ethics, Hume's is ought/is problem is a call to moral knowledge. An understanding of ethics which discards the idea morally is given by observing of listening to some part of the world. It discards the idea of ethical nihilism, that the world is absent ethical significance, such that some force (e.g. God, nature) has to introduce it.
Hume's is/ought problem is not moral scepticism. It's a call to recognise ethical significance itself. That the ethical is not given by the empirical we "objectively" observe (e.g. someone's command, the text of a book, the exist hence of some state), but rather by ethical significance itself.
For a proposition, hypothesis, etc. to be demonstrated scientifically typically means something along the lines of presenting logically rigorous argument (possibly incuding the math) and methodologically robust empirical data from which any independent observer can judge for themselves whether or not the propositions, hypotheses, etc. are sound. It is this, more or less, that people mean by "objective."
On the other hand, the proposition, hypothesis, etc. that some prescription for behavior is an ethical principle cannot be demonstrated in such a way.
I think this is very simplistic and all wrong. Nature is conceived by modern science as a law-governed causal nexus. The nature of causality is understood to be either rigidly deterministic or more loosely probabilistically emergent.
If it is the latter then the standard understanding is that there is a virtual acausal world out of which the probabilistically causal world somehow emerges.
So, nature just is the causal nexus; where every event has a cause. Where there is no cause there is no nature, because the very idea of being or having a nature just is the idea of regularity or invariance.
If there is a spiritual order or a God that influences or even manifests the world of nature, that order or God cannot coherently be said to be merely a part of the causal nexus which is nature. Rather nature itself is a manifestation or a symbol of the higher order. The posited relationship between a purported spiritual order or God cannot itself ever be modeled in terms of efficient causality.
I disagree that any cause is, by definition, a part of nature, a state of the world which results in another.
So-called supernatural causes are outside of nature by definition. Operationally, they are equivalemnt to magic. They can impact the natrual world, but they are not subject to the ordinary rules and constraints of the naturlal world, and are not "states" of the natural world.
Now, if you want to deny that there are such things as supernatural causes, and explain all so-called supernatural causes as actually natural causes we just haven't identified, then sure--by your own definition, all causes are natural.
This is an attempt to bring laws into the possibility of the caused world. You want to say that, when a casual relationship occurs, it happened because virtual acausal world forced it to happen. Emergence turned from a lawless possibility back into the a rigid predeterministic relationship.
Instead of understanding causality as an expression of freedom, that there is no reason any particular casual relationships occurs (which is why it is possibility), you still want to treat causality like a predetermined nexus, constrained to perform what ever is set out by the virtual acasual world.
Nature is not just a casual nexus. Causality doesn't have a cause. There is no state, rule or constraint which means one set of causes emerges over another. Every single state of causality is, in this sense, acasual. It's not there by some logical constraint. It was only caused because it exists. Nature not just a model, regularity or invariance. It means "to be part of what exists."-- to be something which emerged out of the lawless possibility of casuality.
The "spiritual order," the acausal logical nature of every state, is expressed by causality itself, an expression of the states which play out the lawless freedom of causality. There is no "higher order" because nature is the only (and highest) order. Every state is an emergence out of possibility. All states emerge without the action of a (pre)determining constraining law or force-- that's why states are but one of many possibilities; there is no "reason" dictating they are necessary. The acasual is not casual.
That discussion is between myself, Metaphysician Undercover, and whoever else wants to get involved. No one is unwelcome.
Yeah thanks, I saw your post. What I'm wondering is how knowledge of what is is supposed to be more "objective" than knowledge of ought.
Quoting Brainglitch
I don't think that this is at all what people mean by "objective". I think Sapientia, and now you, are trying to create a new definition of "objective", one that suits the purpose of the claim that science is more objective than ethics. "Objective" generally means of the object, the external, as opposed to of the subjective, the internal. Ethics deals with how we ought to behave in relation to others, within the community, so it is clearly something external to the individual subject, and therefore objective.
ob·jec·tive
adjective
1.
(of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.
"historians try to be objective and impartial"
synonyms: impartial, unbiased, unprejudiced, nonpartisan, disinterested, neutral, uninvolved, even-handed, equitable, fair, fair-minded, just, open-minded, dispassionate, detached, neutral
I agree that objective refers to the external vs. internal, and this is consistent with what I said about the scientific argument and data being put on the table so that any independent observer can judge for themselves.
People's behavior is indeed external, but any claim that behavior is or is not ethical is a value judgment. And value judgments are decidedly internal. We can express our value judgments in language and share them with others, but we cannot show them any entity that they can observe for themselves. They can only observe the behavior and make their own internal value judgement about whether that behavior is ethical or not.
I don't know why you feel the need to reword it. What was wrong with the way that I put it? But anyway, yes, that is more or less correct, and is certainly much less objectionable than your original attempt.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The normal boiling point for various substances has been scientifically tested to such a high standard that we can objectively predict at what temperature a particular substance, under normal conditions, will boil. We know, for example, that the normal boiling point of water is 100°C. It is objective because it doesn't depend on how you feel about it or what you think about it and so on. If you disagree, it can be put to the test, and you will be proven wrong. That is arguably not the case with ethical principles. If it is, then do you have any analogous method or basis for making the case for objectivity? If so, please explain. If not, perhaps it is because, as I said, the case for objectivity is stronger with regards to things such as temperature than with regards to things such as ethics.
Note that I have not said at any point in this discussion that ethics is not objective. Nor even that is has a lesser chance of being so. Rather, my point is about the strength of the case for objectivity for each respective claim.
But the reason this is such an important issue in current ethical theory, is because of how objectiivity is held to be normative with respect to judgements of facts. What kinds of facts? one might ask. Well, there's facts which are amenable to precise objective measurement - the distance from the Sun to the Earth, the boiling point of water at sea level. But are the facts of such a kind when it comes to moral and ethical judgements? That is where the difficulty resides.
source
Hence, we seek to explain ethical judgements, etc, in terms of evolutionary theory, which purportedly provides an objective reference frame. So within this attitude, there is the belief, implicit or explicit, that the scientifically-disclosed body of facts - 'natural explanations' - are the agreed basis for objective judgements.
Within that, we have some latitude, in the form of 'freedom of conscience'. But there is no real scientific criterion for ethical judgements inherent in that framework. So by default, it seems that ethical judgements are a matter of private opinion; which is the basis of ethical relativism. Or there are various forms of utilitarianism, 'the greatest good for the greatest number', human flourishing, etc.
In that absence of an agreed moral framework, like that provided by the Judeo-Christian tradition, then that is about the best we can do.
It can mean different things in different contexts. I'm not trying to create a new definition of "objective". I am using it in a similar way to you. But you haven't provided any good reason to conclude that ethics is objective, because how we ought to behave in relation to others is arguably a subjective matter, and you're merely begging the question.
Even when there's an agreed moral framework, there is still much disagreement about whether given behaviors are moral or immoral, as well-knowm divides between certain fundamentalist groups and more liberal groups reveals. We can readily see this in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
But now I understand why he said that a little better. Death Monkey was a physicist, and as far as he was concerned whatever is real consists of the fundamental particles, forces, and so on, as described by physics. So ultimately they're the only things we can be objective about! And they have no intrinsic value, the universe is simply an aggregation of those forces and things - that's 'reality' according to physics.
But I think this is also an historically-conditioned attitude rather than a scientific judgement, as such. It's not a religion, in the sense that it eschews religious ideas, but it is normative in the same sense as what Steve Pinker says upthread, it 'hems the possibilities' - so it acts in the place formerly assigned to religion.
You are mindlessly contradicting yourself over and over. In effect you are saying without any supporting reason at all that what is acausal is causal and that what is causal is acausal, thus dissolving any useful distinction. What you present here is essentially meaningless philosobabble.
It is an amorphous mass of mere assertions that don't actually assert anything. It is a verbal ratatouille which just allows your little mantric nuggets of dogma to glisten suggestively for a few brief moments before they sink back into the stew of incoherence.
I did not dissolve the distinction. My claim was not that the causal was a a casual, but that the casual expressed the acausal. Extension (casual) expresses thought (acasual). States of the world cause each other, but they are always logically given in themselves. Causality is deterministic (X causes has Y effect), but never constraining (X and Y are defined in-themslves, not by an outside realm or state).
Indeed, the entire point here is the acasual is not the casual. An acausal force cannot do anything in the world. The logic discintion: "The disease is cured" doesn't make it so. The world needs to actually do it if it is to happen.
Logic cannot act to define the 'miracle" because that would amount to pre(determinism). The account you gave had the acasual (God/supernatural) acting to force what would occur in the world, constrain it to the "miracle cure," as if it were of (pre)deterministic causality. Rather than the world-- the emergence of a cured state out of possibility-- the cure is said to be necessary and really a result of this acausal force.
This is a contradiction and violates the possibility of emergence. If a hidden realm was always going to act to (intentionally?) constrain the world to a cure, there is no freedom in the cure. It's predetermined: caused (supposedly) by the acasual.
By and large, religious beliefs presuppose moral realism, but moral realism does not entail religious belief. So, It is certainly possible to be a moral realist, but not religious.
The moral realist, though, seems at a loss about how to resolve dispute about whether a given behavior really is moral or immoral. At a loss about how to resolve dispute about whether or not a given claim is a moral fact or not. If there allegedly are moral facts of some kind somewhere, but we cannot actually access them to resolve such dispute, then the notion of moral fact is useless, if not vacuous. And then, of course, there's always Mackie's "queerness" argument about the alleged reality of moral facts.
We can predict what temperature water boils at, because the scale is built around that. When water boils, this is one hundred degrees, by definition. So it is true by definition, just like it is true by definition that murder and theft are wrong. That murder is wrong does not depend on how you feel about it, it is defined as wrongfully killing, just like one hundred degrees is defined as the temperature water boils at.
Quoting Brainglitch
Your argument doesn't make sense. Scientific judgements are "internal", and value judgements just as much as ethical judgements are. The difference is in the value system used. Scientific judgements use numerical values, reducing qualities to quantities. Ethical judgement judges quality directly without converting the quality to quantity. This extra step, of conversion, whereby quality is converted to quantity, is an extra internal judgement process. Therefore scientific judgement is likely less objective than ethical judgement because it requires a twofold internal judgement system. The more internal judgements required to decide something should make that decision more subjective.
Quoting BrainglitchAll these scientific terms you refer to, volt, newton, etc., are true by definition. There are many acts such as murder and theft, which are wrong by definition. To argue against the fact that these acts are wrong is to go against the convention, just like arguing that an object which everyone says weighs 50 kilos, does not weigh 50 kilos.
It isn't a matter of reducing qualities to quantities, but of quantitative measurement. Whenever you wish to subject a question to scientific analysis, you need to be able to quantify it. 'Show me the data', will be the response from a scientist. Whatever is going to be studied or analysed must be amenable to quantification in that sense. What quality has been reduced to quantity in that step?
'That killing is wrong' is a completely different kind of question. Certainly every culture thinks that murder is wrong - but what about killing in self-defense? As an act of war? To prevent someone kllling someone else? What about all the legally prohibited acts other than killing? There are countless ethical and moral judgement that need to be made in law and other non-scientific subjects. It is the basis of those judgements which are problematical nowadays, insofar as if cultural norms are deprecated for various reasons, and only science remains authoritative, then it does inevitably entail some form of moral relativism, it seems to me.
So I have to agree with your opponents on this score. I think there really is a 'fact-value' dichotomy, that is deeply part of modern cultural discourse, but you're not going to come to terms with it by saying there's 'no real difference' between quantitive and qualitative judgement. Making a scientific observation and an ethical judgement are very different kinds of acts.
At a certain point you have to nail your colours to the mast, you have to declare what you believe is moral or immoral. As you've said you're meta-ethical nihilist, presumably this doesn't come up for you.
But that is just what I said, and yet you sounded as if you wanted to disagree. :s
The causal can be thought to express (in the sense of being an expression that emerges out of) the acausal thought of either as the virtual or as the spiritual.
In the former case it is a meaningless emergence, and hence you have nihilism. In the latter case you have the order of nature understood as being meaningfully symbolic of a spiritual order.
Discursive rationality, either alone or working with empirical observation, can never tell you which is the case, so you must find some other way to decide or else sit on the fence.
The thing being measured is a quality of the physical world. The act of measuring is to represent that quality as a quantity. The size of an object is a sensible quality of that object, it appears to be either big or small. To measure it is to represent the size in an intelligible form, as a quantity
Quoting Wayfarer
But I didn't say "killing", I said "murder". That's the point. To assign a word to an act, is to represent that act in an intelligible form, just like assigning a number to an object in measurement. To say "murder" is to indicate that the act being described has been judged, (or "measured") as wrong, just like to say the object is 25 centimeters is to indicate that the object has been measured. If the act is murder, it is by definition, wrong.
Quoting Wayfarer
The point is, that any act of judgement is an act of applying a value system, whether that value system is numerical or ethical. There is no "fact-value dichotomy", because whether or not a fact is produced is dependent upon the method by which the value system is applied. If I make a faulty measurement, then the measurement which I give is not fact. If I incorrectly judge a killing as a murder, then it is not a fact that the act was murder. But if I carry out those judgements correctly, then the measurement can be said to be a fact, and that the killing is a murder can be said to be a fact.
Producing a fact is to use the proper symbols or signification to represent the object, or act. What makes the application of numbers to measure the object more "objective" than the application of ethical words "wrong and right", or "good and bad", as a form of measurement?
Yes I agree the Willow's point about the supernatural. The grey area here is in the word"natural", or nature. Nature can be a catch all phrase for the supernatural, the empirical and the scientifically understood and an infinity of the unknown. So it should be specified how it is being used. Also the divine, or spiritual in all its glory need not be supernatural, it's just nature.
I don't think you covered the point I made about the transformative nature of epiphany, or perhaps I should say revelation here. My point is that the experience includes phenomena beyond the capacity, and conception of the human mind and body, it is an intervention from something else(a superior mind and body), so cannot be generated by the body or mind, even though such effects may appear to be replicated through the use of hallucinogenic substances, or in mental disorder.
Let me explain, in the experience I had which I discribed in which I transcended time. This is not the only thing that happened. In the vision, I was lifted up by a being who I interpreted as the Christ. This is the key to my point. I was lifted up in reality(not my physical body, it was in a dream), metaphorically, subjectively. So was taken out of my/this world and hosted by this being, in his/her world, this world, or phenomenological reality was transcendent in time and space. So I was a witness to a greater, transcendent, but also orthogonal reality for the duration of the hosting in the world of this other being.
So what this illustrates is;
I experienced something beyond what my body and mind is equipped to experience.
I was a witness to something which I could not conceive of, or conceptualise with my intellectual mind.
I had a vivid experience of being lifted out of this world in the presence of a being.
I experienced the presence and phenomenological world of this being.
Materialistic naturalistic explanations of what happened are inadequate to explain this, or to consider it as evidence, because, it can't be understood external to the experience itself.
Yes, Robbie Basho was a deeply spiritual artist. For me his music is transcendent similarly to my experience of this being I mention above. He has channeled, or revealed a deeper sense of being in this piece of music.
(I will link it again, if anyone else want to hear it, http://youtu.be/83GgOhBhxqI)
I like the other piece you linked to, this kind of country music is new to me, an exiting new direction to explore.
Apologies if you explained this already, but I don't see how one could conclude that one is having an experience that is beyond the capacity and conception of the human mind and body. In fact, "beyond the capacity of" I'd say is contradictory; otherwise, you wouldn't be capable of having that experience.
But a moral realist is not just declaring that you believe a given behavior to be moral or immoral. A moral relativist does this too. (As for that matter, does a moral irrealist, in the sense of expressing approval or disapproval of the behavior and/or supporting condemnation, punishment or reward.)
A moral realist holds that there is a moral fact about the matter that's indepemdent of his, or anyone else's, belief one way or the other. Presumably, his belief is informed by this fact. But the problem, as I've noted, is that he cannot produce this fact, cannot even intelligibly explain what kind of thing this independently existing moral fact thingy is, and cannot even use it to resolve dispute that challenges the alleged factuality that a given behavior is moral or immoral.
Yes, I agree, well apart from the assumption that god does not exist, for these reasons. We cannot say this, we just don't know. Also yes the atheists may be right, while naive.
Anyway, this is irrelevant if one is considering what actually exists, rather than what we can say exists, or conceive of as existing. What actually exists and what form it takes may be entirely unknown to us, or inconceivable to us. Thus, we cannot determine what difference God makes, or not, from our limited position. It doesn't follow that because we can't find a difference, that it is not there.
The difference is that scientific "judgments" are based on clearly defined, universally agreed upon criteria, and are publicly observable. This includes the various units of measurement, and whether or not the instrument readings are consistent with the claim at issue, as well as more straightforward, uncontroversial observation, such as after introduction of the new compound, the microbes in the dish rapidly died off, or after following the exercise protocol, subjects were able to run the distance faster than the control group, or when you refrigerate the food, it lasts longer than unrefrigerated food. etc.
Whereas, in the case of moral/ethical judgments, there may or may not be agreement about the criteria for judging the begavior as moral or immoral, there may or may not be agreement that the behavior at issue is an instance of the behavior covered by the criteria, and there is no way to publically demonstrate that the behavior really is moral or immoral. The behavior itself may be public, but the judgment that it is moral or immoral is not based on publically observable and agreed upon criteria.
In science, dispute about whether or not the item at issue weighs 50 kilos, or that the test subjects run faster than the controls, or that the microbes died is resolved "objectively" by observation. But there is no "objective" way to resolve dispute about whether or not a given behavior is moral. Note that dispute about whether or not the behavior is considered moral or immoral according to the conventions of a given society can be objectively resolved, but not dispute about whether or not it really is moral or immoral in some sense that transcends a particular sdociety's conventions and applies to all societies. Determination that a given behavior is considered moral or immoral in a given society is an observable sociological fact, not an observable moral fact.
Ah, I can see that making some sense from a much different ontological perspective than my own (well, and as long as I ignore thinking about details of how it could work). You see it as kind of being (at least temporarily) gifted capacities you don't normally possess.
No, we can predict what temperature water boils at, but not because the scale is built around that. It is because it has been successfully tested. It is possible that if you go to boil water under normal conditions, it will boil at 30°C. But that is extremely unlikely.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it isn't. It would then be impossible for water to boil at any other temperature. But that isn't impossible.
Water was discovered to boil at a precise moment under certain conditions, and these conditions can be recreated and tested, and it is possible, but extremely unlikely, that the outcome will be different. We know what does and doesn't effect the outcome, and we know that subjective qualities like how you feel or what you think are included in the list of factors which do not effect the outcome. That's why it is objective.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a bad argument, because there are other definitions for murder and theft, and they don't have to be defined that way. (And to rule out one possible interpretation, I'll note that we are talking about science vs. ethics, not science vs. the law). So, that [i]you[/I] have chosen to define them that way is trivial. And even if murder and theft [i]were[/I] immoral by definition, that in itself would trivialise the ethics of it, as we would just need to learn the meaning of the words to know that murder and theft are immoral - irrespective of anything else, which misses out the whole importance of ethics. And you yourself have said that ethics is about [i]consequences[/I], so this would lead you once again into contradiction.
And, like I said, 100°C is the temperature at which water boils under normal conditions, but it [i]isn't[/I] defined as the temperature at which water boils under normal conditions, unless you are defining it that way, but then that'd be your problem, not mine.
>:O
Are we talking about science fiction now?
But we know it doesn't make sense by the nature of God.
If God were the cause or presence behind the curtain, an existing state of some realm, they would be sullied. God would not be the Real and unchanging infinite. In existing, God would just be another illusion of the world, which comes and goes on a whim.
To suggest God might or might not exist is to insult God. It is to ignore that God is logically necesary and treat them like a finite illusion.
So objectivity is defined by agreement?
Quoting Sapientia
I disagree. I think it has been demonstrated and learnt, that water boils under similar conditions. These conditions are described as the same temperature at the same pressure. That temperature is designated as 100 degrees Celsius at average sea level pressure. We could designate something else as the temperature which water boils at, like 212 degrees. So the reason why we can say what temperature water boils at is because we have designated specific numbers to represent the temperature which water boils and freezes at, and built a scale around it. We could take something like alcohol, and determine what temperature it boils at, and this would be an act of comparing it to the temperature which water boils and freezes at, placing it within that scale.
Quoting Sapientia
Actually, it's yours, which is the bad argument. By the same principle that you can define "murder" in another way, which is according to some other convention, I can say that according to some other convention, water doesn't boil at a hundred degrees, it boils at two hundred and twelve. All you are doing is saying that I'm going to define "murder" according to another convention, in which murder is not necessarily wrong, then you provide your convention, your definition, just like I would say that according to the Fahrenheit convention, water does not boil; at one hundred degrees. So, to match your claim, that my defining murder as wrong, is trivial, I would likewise have to say that the fact you've chosen to say that water boils at 100 Celsius is just as trivial. One difference though, unlike you I don't believe these choices to be trivial. One might just as well define the boiling point of water in another way, like you would define murder in another way, but that doesn't mean that these choices are trivial. I think such choices have great consequences.
Quoting Sapientia
Yes, this is exactly the case, we learn the meaning of these words, "murder" and "theft", what it means to murder and to steal, and in doing so we learn that these are wrong. That's how we learn ethics. Why do you think that this is trivial and misses the importance of ethics? We must learn which behaviours are wrong, so we have words for them, and meanings for those words, which indicate not only what the behaviour is, but also that it is wrong. The meaning of the moral word does two things for us, describes the action and tells us whether it is a virtue or a vice. So we have other words like temperance, honesty, courage, etc., which refer to good character, and these are likely to lead to good actions. Many ethicists would argue that we should focus on the words which have meanings that are understood as good character, rather than the bad, as this will encourage good behaviour. Why does this lead me into contradiction, with respect to consequences? The consequence of learning these words is that we avoid doing the things which are defined as being bad and move toward doing things which are defined as being good.
If the truth or falsity of a claim can be determined objectively, I think this means that it'ds available for indpendent inspection and judgement.
The claims of established science are either presented as logically rigorous arguments (including the data and math) and/or as empirically observable. The criteria for someone's judgment of the truth or falsdity of such claims are explicitly defined and universally agreed upon.
This is not the case in judgments about the truth or falsity of moral claims.
I think it's important to realize that there isn't universal agreement on the vast majority of claims about objective, factual matters.
"Objective" doesn't imply agreement, and "subjective" doesn't imply disagreement, even though that's a common misconception.
Well, I think there is not literally unanimous agreement, but surely is virtually universal agreement about the vast majority of claims about factual natters-that's how something gets widely established as a "fact."
Anyway, I think the central issue in the difference between claims about religious experience vs. claims about temperatures, weights, cats on mats, etc. is a difference in whether or not the phenomena are publically observable such that independent observers are more or less agreed on the criteria, and can judge the truth of falsity of the claim for themselves. It's patently obvious that a claim such as "Water boils at 100 degrees C" and "The door is open" are readily confirmable by independent observers, whereas "The Blessed Mother appeared to me last night and told me to make a shrine here" and "My sister's cancer was healed because we prayed to Saint Jude" are not.
"Fact," in philosophy, and more generally in an academic context, doesn't refer to anything about agreement either, though. "Fact" is a word for "states of affairs (in the world)." And it's generally distinguished from opinion, where that's referring to someone's personal assessment of something, so that "fact" has a "mind-independent" connotation. (Although that's not a strict characteristic of it, because for example, we say, "It's a fact that Joe is of the opinion that Justin Bieber sucks" and so on.)
There are surely some facts about which there is near-universal agreement, though that's often limited to social milieus with tighter "controls"--such as academic disciplines and professional associations. There are probably more facts that we concern ourselves with about which there isn't near-universal agreement, which is why everyone is always debating about everything so much (including again within academic discplines, where these sorts of things are often carried out in journals and so on).
Re the other part, I agree with you for the most part, although I think it's quite a bit messier than you do, both because (a) I have a bit of a Feyerabendian bent, and (b) my thoroughgoing ontological relativism combined with my nominalism means that no objective phenomena are actually the same for any two observers (or for the "same" observer at two different times), which is one of the sources of disagreements about facts. It's not just the observers that differ on my view. The phenomena themselves are actually different at each reference point.
I also think that science is somewhat flawed foundationally, in that it must necessarily reject one-off, especially aberrant phenomena--objective or not, and of course it can't deal very well with phenomena strictly from a first-person perspective . . . this is part of my Feyerabendian bent though.
Actually, I think science, philosophy, language, concepts, life, and, of course, forum discussions ... are quite messy.
You can say what you like, but that won't change the fact that it is not impossible for water to boil at a different temperature. And because your position entails otherwise, it is therefore false.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That would either be equivalent to 100°C or it would be demonstrably false. But you can't demonstrate that moral subjectivism is false in the same way. If I say that murder is, as it is taken to be by many, the killing of one or more person under certain circumstances, such as the intent to kill or to cause grievous bodily harm, then how can you demonstrate that that is objectively wrong? You haven't done so thus far, but have merely opted to point out that a definition that we need not accept, and have good reason not to accept, which includes a conclusion which you conveniently happen to agree with, unsurprisingly leads to that very conclusion. Well done, Metaphysician Undercover. Your debate skills are clearly superior to mine.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course I reject your definition. Otherwise there wouldn't even be any need for a debate. I've seen you use this tactic before, and you don't seem to realise how pointless it is.
And no, it isn't just like if you were to say that water doesn't boil at one hundred degrees according to the Fahrenheit scale, because degrees in Fahrenheit have an equivalent in Celsius. I accept that, and it is completely irrelevant, and not at all analogous to our disagreement.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, it is indeed trivial, in [i]both[/I] cases. But [i]more so[/I] in the former, as it does nothing, other than beg the question and try to shut down the debate without having to argue your case - which would at least be understandable, because there is reason to believe that you don't have a strong case.
The latter is trivial, because my choice to express the temperature at which water boils under normal conditions in degrees Celsius, rather than, say, degrees Fahrenheit, was arbitrary. And because it is a difference which makes no difference.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have made the point that they are trivial in a particular context. Arguing that they are not trivial in a different context would miss the point.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, that's not at all how we learn about ethics. What world are you living in? Not this one it seems. We obviously learn, especially in relation to ethics, through empathy and experience, not just by learning the meaning of words, and this happens at a very young age. Your [I]a priori[/I] argument would lead to the trivialisation of ethics, because it would render that redundant and nonsensical, and, like I said, it contradicts your earlier stance.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We judge behaviours as right or wrong based on experience of those behaviours. That's a fact. If I was a moral realist, I might say instead that we [i]discover[/I] which behaviours [i]are[/I] right and wrong. But that doesn't change the way in which we do so, which isn't typically [I]a priori[/I], or, specifically, by learning the meaning of words.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Good for you and your so-called moral word. But here in reality, there are countless ethical issues on topics in which key words relating to where the disagreement arises obviously do not contain in their definition that they are moral or immoral, or a virtue or vice. If they did, then it would be pointless to even have those debates, but it isn't. The word "abortion", for example, does not contain in the definition that it is moral or immoral.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
None of that is relevant or supports your position, since [i]how[/I] those terms are rightly applied is open to debate, and you haven't made a case for a means of rightly applying them in accordance with an objective standard, unless you are suggesting that your own judgement is objective, which wouldn't be a strong case at all.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is taking my comment out of context. I never said that it was [I]that[/I] that lead you into contradiction, with respect to consequences. It is your [I]a priori[/I] argument about X being moral/immoral by definition, in combination with your earlier comments about consequences, which results in contradiction. Any form of consequentialism is logically incompatible with your current position, since it entails that whether X is moral/immoral is determined by its consequences, and not irrespective of them, as your current position entails.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think that that doesn't give people enough credit. If we learnt, by some realisation that had been hitherto unrealised, that by virtue of the meaning of the word, murder was in fact good, then there would be a whole load of people that would reject it nevertheless, and certainly not go out and murder people. Would you? I want you to answer that question, because it is very important. And bear in mind that it is a thought experiment.
In my assessment, you are in effect nothing other than a moral subjectivist yourself. You merely add "moral" or "immoral" to the definition of a word relating to something with which you judge, in accordance with your own subjective sensibilities, to be good or bad. What distinguishes us is that you end up wishfully thinking that this is objective, whereas I acknowledge that this is a poor reason for thinking that.
Q.E.D.
(Your arguments, if they can be called that, frequently contain fallacies, Metaphysician Undercover: whether it be straw men, contradictions, missing the point, quoting out of context, false analogies, begging the question, wishful thinking, [I]non sequiturs[/I]...)
Logically, God cannot exist if they are Real. To exist is to be an illusion, only a finite state. It would take away what makes God God.
For us to suggest God exists is like arguing the transcendent is worldly. The point of God is they are the infinte beyond the finite world. For God to exist, to be of the finite flux, is to reduce God to man. God becomes not the Real beyond the world, but just another material actor.
Is there any difference between God being the "Real beyond the world" and God not being the "Real beyond the world"? Or perhaps I should have asked whether there is any difference between the "Real beyond the world" being God, or not being God. Or even whether there is any difference between there being a "Real beyond the world" or there not being a "Real beyond the world".
The lack of worldly difference and so anything "to know about" in that sense is the point. The Real is the infinite. God which is the same regardless of what happens in the world.
This is the difference/distinction of Real and the only thing to know about God.
Didn't I tell you that the boiling temperature of water is dependent on the pressure? Where do you get these strange ideas of what my position entails?
Quoting Sapientia
Thank you, I'll take that as a compliment, though it really doesn't say much.
Quoting Sapientia
Wow! What's with the inconsistency?
Quoting Sapientia
We learn about ethics through empathy?
Quoting Sapientia
Are you saying that I have to experience murder before I can judge it as wrong? No one that I have ever been close to has been murdered, yet I still judge murder as wrong. Why do you think that is?
Quoting Sapientia
Since murder is defined as wrong, how could one ever learn that murder is good by learning the meaning of the word? You have just proposed a contradiction. So if the meaning of "murder" was such that it is defined as a good action, of course I would murder, but this action would be something very different from what that word refers to now. Maybe it would mean the same thing as "generous" means right now, so I would attempt to be murderous as much as possible.
Yes, I know the rationale, I just don't buy it. Logic is a human invention. It works in reference to the world and the known and the known unknown, but not in reference to beyond the world and the unknown unknown. We just can't presume to say anything about that.
Yes, I understand your point and it is rational, but I have considered this at a deeper level of complexity. Namely, one can consider god to be outside the world, but also in it in the being of the beings in the world, imminent, the transcendence of being and the transcendence outside the world.So is both outside the world and inside the world.
I would also say the "infinite" is also a human invention, and can not be applied to the beyond the world, or the unknown unknown. So this so called infinite transcendence, might not be infinite at all, just eternal( relatively transcendent). I don't see why eternity cannot be in the world, even if infinity cannot.
I disagree with you because I believe some differences that are not 'worldly' can be known intuitively. This is what enables the knowing of aesthetic, ethical and religious differences. You have to free yourself from the demand that such things be matters of precise science, though.
You say the Real is the infinite. I could agree with you, but it depends on what you mean by 'real'. If the infinite cannot ever be anything for us, then why think about it? On the other hand, if it can be something for us, then how? Not through demonstrable rational/empirical thought, that's for sure.
Explain why you think that that is relevant to my criticism.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You find it strange that I take what you have said and draw logical conclusions? You said that it is true by definition that water boils at 100°C. If so, then it logically follows that water cannot boil at any other temperature. Just like how it is impossible for a right angle to have any other angle than 90°. But it [i]is[/I] possible for water to boil at a different temperature. Therefore, what you said must be false.
These are two fundamentally different things here. Your attempt to argue that what is evidently the result of applying a scientific method - that what is synthetic [I]a posteriori[/I] - is actually true by definition - just like an analytic [I]a priori[/I] truth - is comical.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's not the first time that you have taken something I said in a way in which it wasn't intended, and I doubt it'll be the last.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We obviously learn, especially in relation to ethics, through empathy and experience. That's what I said, isn't it? Do you have a sensible question?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, that's not what I'm saying. You've taken what I said out of context. [I]Again![/I] Obviously I mentioned empathy as well as experience. But it is more complex than that, and I'm not here to present a dissertation.
What I said is true, it's just that you have uncharitably interpreted it. I didn't mean it in an absolute sense. It was more of a generalisation. We judge behaviours as right or wrong based on experience of those behaviours. That's still a fact.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"Since murder is defined as wrong"...?! Begging the question. [I]Again![/I]
And a loaded question.
And missing the point as well. [I]Again![/I]
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, [i]you[/I] have. And it doesn't apply to my position, or my thought experiment, because it is based on [i]your[/I] premise, which I have rejected, as you should know.
You're just wasting time, which could be better spent on learning ways to improve your debate skills. I recommend learning about logical fallacies. That way, you might not commit them as much.
Your reply to my thought experiment is tedious, misguided, and predicable. You simply don't seem to understand how these things work, or don't want to. Obviously, it is pointless to bring your own definition into the thought experiment.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
[I]Aaaaaaand[/I] you're back to missing the point. No, in this thought experiment, the meaning of "murder" [i]can't be anything you want it to be[/I]. It means, as it means today, in our world, something along the lines of one person killing another person in an attempt to kill or cause harm. And [I]without the assumption that this act is necessarily immoral![/I] Which would obviously defeat the purpose of the thought experiment.
The question relating to the thought experiment is whether or not you would kill another person, under the same conditions which would count as murder in a court of law in our world, if that was good by definition. The [i]only[/I] addition to the meaning of murder, as it is defined in the thought experiment, is that it is good.
Let's say that the hypothetical scenario is, [i]all else being equal[/I], that you're armed, and within distance of a young girl, and the question is whether or not you would approach this young girl out of the blue and fatally shoot her. Bearing in mind that, as part of the thought experiment, murder is good by definition. (And also bearing in mind the use of the phrase "all else being equal", which is intended to bar exceptions which would miss the point, such as, "ah, but what if the young girl posed a threat, or deserved to die because she had killed your entire family, or carries a highly infectious virus which will wipe out humanity unless you kill her?").
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Sapientia
Do you really believe that we learn ethics through empathy?
Quoting Sapientia
I'm not interested in debating, it's not something I would enjoy, so I think that learning debating skills would be a waste of my time.
Quoting Sapientia
As I said, this proposition is contradictory. You propose that the meaning of "murder" is the same, but different. That renders your thought experiment nonsensical.
Just quoting yourself again isn't helpful. You need to explain why you think that that is relevant to my criticism.
I'm saying that under those same conditions, it is possible for water to boil at a different temperature on the same scale, say, 30°C, for example. So, for example, if the room temperature was 21°C, and heat was applied to the water, then it is possible that it boils when it reaches 30°C, rather than the usual 100°C.
This would mean that under those same conditions, an extremely unusual result was produced. But your claim entails that that is impossible. I have taken your claim, and shown that this logically follows. You can't reasonably argue against a valid logical argument just by expressing bewilderment, as you have done thus far. Quit stalling and produce a reasonable and substantive response, assuming you are capable of doing so.
And you can't just claim that whatever temperature water boils at under those conditions will, by definition, be 100 degrees Celsius, because that would be equivocation, which is a logical fallacy. (If you've done your homework, you'll know what that means).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm still waiting for a sensible question. How long are you going to make me wait?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then what the hell are you doing here? You do realise that you're currently engaged in a debate, and that debate is a big part of what we do here, don't you? You've been here long enough to have realised that by now.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As you said. But I have explained why what you said is erroneous. And yet, you have chosen not to address that, but to pointlessly repeat yourself instead.
I have proposed that the meaning of "murder" [i]would[/I] be the same as a meaning commonly used and understood today, in our world, which is amoral - except that in the thought experiment, it isn't amoral, but moral by definition. The definition, as I've already explained, would be something along the lines of one person killing another person with intent to kill or cause harm, and which is moral. There is no contradiction in that, and it isn't nonsensical.
[I]You[/I] mistakenly posit a contradiction because you break the rules of the thought experiment by misinterpreting the meaning of "murder" in the thought experiment to include "and is immoral".
And lastly, I think it is telling that you've [i]avoided[/I] addressing parts of my posts, and [i]avoided[/I] properly engaging with the thought experiment, and [i]avoided[/I] asking sensible questions, and [I]avoided[/I] explaining yourself, and so on.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
>:O >:O >:O
Really? I didn't think it was possible to get water to boil at a temperature other than 100, other than by changing the pressure. Actually I don't really believe you, have you ever tried, and had success at this before?
Quoting SapientiaWell, good luck then. Until you actually prove to me that you can make water boil at 30 degrees without lowering the pressure, I'll continue to express bewilderment. You can claim whatever you want is possible, that it's possible for you to jump over the moon, or that you're omnipotent, if you like. I'll just express bewilderment, without bothering to make any logical argument against this. Evidence speaks for itself.
Quoting Sapientia
Well, it should be obvious that the things you say leave me totally bewildered, including your thought experiment, which has contradictory premises, and that's why I don't bother to reply to much of your posts. The bewilderment leaves me unable to explain myself.
Of course I haven't had success. Jesus Christ. Do I have to explain possibility to you now as well? I have said that it would be extremely unlikely if that happened. But extremely unlikely is not the same as impossible. Why do you think that it's impossible? Even if it has never happened before, and never will happen, that still wouldn't make it impossible. Possibility is about what [i]can[/I] happen.
You should read Hume on this topic, by the way.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't have to do that. You have to show that it is impossible. It is possible unless there's a contradiction. Show me where you think there is a contradiction or concede. Anything else from you is unreasonable clap trap.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's possible unless there is a contradiction.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you just express bewilderment, then you're being unreasonable. You should look up the fallacy known as an argument from incredulity. Yes, the evidence speaks for itself. I agree. And the evidence doesn't show that it is impossible. It shows that it is extremely unlikely.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your bewilderment suggests something other than that to me, actually. It think it says more about you than me or anything that I have said.
You haven't shown that my thought experiment has contradictory premises, nor have you even bothered to address my correction of your misunderstanding, but you have instead just repeated your mistaken bare assertion. That is unreasonable.
In fact, I think that our discussion could serve as a useful lesson to others, given the fallacies and misunderstandings contained in your part of it, and given my adeptness in recognising them and pointing them out.
And, in fact, I think I might just end my involvement in our discussion here. I can think of better ways to spend my time.
It's quite obvious, and I'm amazed that you still haven't caught on. One hundred degrees Celsius is, by definition the temperature which water boils at, at seal level pressure. To say that water could boil at another temperature, at sea level pressure, contradicts this. Therefore it's impossible. If what you have, boils at a different temperature, then either it's not water, or you're not assigning the temperature
number right, or it's not the right pressure, or something like that. It is impossible. Try this, blue is the colour of the clear sky, by definition. Therefore it is impossible that the clear sky could be a colour other than blue, that would be contradictory. If it's not blue, then it's not a clear sky, or you are assigning the name "blue" wrong or something like that.
Quoting Sapientia
There is contradiction! That's what I've been trying to tell you. What do you believe, words are not defined, so that you can use words however you please without contradicting yourself? Would you say that it's possible that black could be white, or that a circle could be square, because you happen to enjoy using words in a way that's free from the confines of conventions?
Quoting Sapientia
And I suppose the evidence shows that it's extremely unlikely that a circle might be square?
Quoting Sapientia
You asked me to consider the word "murder" with the same definition which it currently has, but with a different definition. If that's not contradictory, I don't know what is.
?
Right, but that's a daft way to define it, and amounts to the fallacy of equivocation. You then can't have water boiling at 30 degrees Celsuis, even though you actually can. It's as daft as arguing that it's impossible to turn right, by ruling it out by definition. Right turns become "left turns".
It seemed like we were making some progress, but perhaps that was wishful thinking on my part.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I was talking about the boiling point of water under normal conditions, as I have been from the start. So, no, it can't be a different substance, and it can't have boiled under different conditions, by, for example, altering the pressure.
But it [i]can[/I] be a different temperature, because it isn't necessarily the case that water will boil at 100 degrees Celsius. All your argument shows is that [i]if[/I] water necessarily boils at 100 degrees Celsius, and we boil water, then it will boil at 100 degrees Celsius. But water [i]doesn't[/I] necessarily boil at 100 degrees Celsius.
That you define it that way doesn't make it so, except in a trivial, superficial semantic way for anyone foolish enough to adopt that use of language. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and water boiling at 30 degrees Celsius, or 40 degrees Celsius, or 50 degrees Celsius, or 60 degrees Celsius, or 70 degrees Celsius, under normal conditions, would, in each case, be nonidentical to water boiling at 100 degrees Celsius, even if you call each one of those events "water boiling at 100 degrees Celsius".
For example, one could have heated a volume of water for 3 minutes, until it reached 100 degrees Celsius, at which point it boiled. But the second time around, the same volume of water, heated under the same conditions as before, might take 30 seconds to reach 30 degrees Celsius, and boil at that point instead.
Now, that is extremely unlikely, as I have said from the start, but it is indeed possible, and your argument is merely sophistry which attempts to use word play to reach a different conclusion.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Okay, I will try that now.
I have tried it, and I have concluded that that too is a good reason to reject the premise that blue is the colour of the clear sky, by definition, since it erroneously rules out the possibility of a clear sky which is not blue. It is erroneous because, however unlikely, it is possible that tomorrow we will discover that the clear sky is not blue.
Association is one thing, definitions are another. We associate the two, but it is a mistake to define the one as the other - thereby ruling out certain possibilities without warrant.
Is that all?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, the contradiction [i]only[/I] arises if I were to accept your premise, which would also mean committing the fallacy of equivocation by inappropriately defining any temperature at which water boils to be 100 degrees Celsius.
But I haven't done so! The bait that you've laid remains untouched, yet you have preemptively pulled the leaver, the cage has dropped down as a result, and - lo and behold! - the cage is empty (besides the bait)! You haven't caught anything.
You need to take off your blinkers, and then you might see clearly. I have not restricted myself in the same manner as you have done, for good reason, and I don't intend to.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Don't be silly. I am arguing in favour of a more sensible use of language, and it isn't idiosyncratic or unconventional. People associate 100 degrees Celsius with the temperature at which water boils, because, that has been found to be the temperature at which water boils in innumerable cases, under the same conditions. But - and if you've read Hume, then you might already be aware of his insights on this subject - there is nothing to prove that the next time, it will certainly be 100 degrees Celsius. That is only probable at best, leaving open the possibility that it will not, however improbable that may be. And that is why it's misguided to define it as such, so as to render impossible what is in fact possible.
I feel like I'm teaching you some basic shizzle, here. Have you read about Hume in relation to this subject? How much do you know about the scientific method?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, don't be silly. Those are false analogies. I myself gave an example of that kind earlier, and contrasted it with what we are discussing: a right angle triangle is 90 degrees by definition. It can't be 110 degrees. But you are muddling up two fundamentally different things. The results of scientific experiments are not like analytic [I]a priori[/I] truths.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. That would be to muddle up two fundamentally different things. They aren't analogous. I recognise that it is a fallacy to make false analogies like that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Talk about selective reading! That is beyond uncharitable. Look again at the details of what I said. Try harder. Get back to me when you can show me some improvement.
I feel like I have gone to great lengths to explain this - as well as other things - to you. God knows why...
I think it went from God in relation to science, to science in relation to ethics, and then there was an analogy about temperature, which lead to this discussion about Metaphysician Undercover's sophistry vs. my well-reasoned rebuttal.
Basically, is it possible for water to boil at any other temperature than 100 degrees Celsius? I say yes, he says no. I could be wrong, but I find his argument poor and unconvincing.
Care to add your two cents?
I meant the boiling point of water under [i]normal conditions[/I]: at sea level, and any other such factors.
Well, a watched pot never boils... so I think that if you just keep staring at it, it will feel too awkward and creeped out, and not be able to perform.
:D
Ah, why didn't I think of that?
Were you watching me?
Wait, I'm not a pot.
Unless I call you black.
...And you're a kettle.
I mean, is it possible for the boiling point of water under normal conditions (at sea level, under normal atmospheric pressure, and all that jazz) to vary from 100 degrees Celsius? Yes or no?
What is so funny?
Wouldn't it be unscientific to answer no? This is nothing more than an inference based on past repeated experimentation, is it not? It isn't a proof. Metaphysician Undercover's answer doesn't really count, as it is merely wordplay - sophistry.
Yes, that is what I meant.
So... Is anyone else here going to answer the question?
I've kinda lost sight of how it relates back to the original topic, but what the hey. Maybe if 100 degrees Celsius is defined as the boiling point of water under normal conditions, then God exists, and we can call it a day.
And so far as I can remember, whether water can boil depends solely on temperature. If you want water to boil, you have to reach the boiling point. You can, of course, "boil" water without affecting temperature, but that's not under normal conditions.
More importantly, what if it's not water, but 'water' from Hilary Putnam's Twin Earth?
The boiling point. Boiling. Point.
Does anyone have an answer which doesn't exploit my imprecise wording?
Quoting Heister Eggcart
But the question wasn't about whether water can boil. And I think that it is pretty self-explanatory that if you want water to boil, you have to reach the boiling point. That isn't relevant either. Nor is anything that doesn't come under normal conditions.
I'm not sure how serious your reply is. I'm talking about repeating an experiment under the same conditions. In this case, whether, all else being equal, the boiling point can vary. If I do the test today, is it impossible to get a different result tomorrow by recreating the experiment under the same conditions? Does the number of past results of the same boiling point ever make a different future result impossible?
I don't think that your reply addresses this issue.
Quoting andrewk
Don't know enough about that. How about we assume for the sake of argument that it's just water?
What's daft is you saying that you actually can have water boiling at 30 degrees, at sea level pressure.
Quoting Sapientia
What I've said is that this is what defines "100 degrees Celsius", the boiling point of water at average sea level pressure. If you really believe that there is another definition of 100 degrees Celsius, then why don't you produce it?
Quoting Sapientia
Have you tried that yet, to get that water to boil at 30 degrees? I bet it won't work.
Quoting Sapientia
The point, which I told you, way back, is that the temperature scale is created around certain things, like the boiling and freezing point of water. such that these temperatures, 100 degrees, and 0 degrees Celsius, are defined by these things. Therefore it is impossible that water could boil at a different number of degrees Celsius, because this would render that temperature scale invalid. It would be contradiction. Why do you find that so hard to believe? Can you suggest something else that the scale is built around?
Quoting Sapientia
Really, you've seen the light and are ready to believe in God?
How it relates to what we were talking about, is that you said science is more likely to be objective than ethics. I said that ethics might be just as objective as science because murder is defined as being wrong, just like 100 degrees is defined as the boiling point of water. Then you took exception to both of these proposed definitions.
So we haven't really made any progress in determining what constitutes objectivity. Brainglitch seemed to say that some type of agreement constitutes objectivity, which seems reasonable. But you and I, Sapientia, can't seem to agree on anything. So I guess for us there is no such thing as objectivity.
This is where I was going to start another thread, but as the conversation has continued, I will respond here.
I don't agree with the above analysis, because the whole point about the measurement of physical attributes, is that there can be no room for opinion. Regardless of all of the obfuscation around the boiling point of water, it is 100 degrees c at sea level and normal pressure. Weights, measures, intervals of time, and other fundamental units of measurement, are defined nowadays in terms of the attributes of particular materials and are invariant, i.e. same for all observers.
Certainly, there could be room for re-naming the terms, or for dividing up the scale differently. So to that extent, measurables also constitute an 'inter-subjective agreement' or convention, but given that convention, then the results of measurement will be the same for all observers.
As soon as you start dealing with questions such as 'murder', you're in a different territory. It might be ethical theory or jurisprudence, but you can't arrive at a 'degree of certainty' beyond such bald statements as murder being wrong. And in actual fact, there's no scientific reason why 'murder is wrong'; that is part of the point at issue. I'm sure there have been cultures in which murder is sanctioned. Whether it is or not, is not a scientific matter at all.
But the fact that scientific judgement constitutes a normative standard for matters of fact, doesn't address the problem of what moral norms there can or ought to be at all. That is one of the major problems of modern ethical philosophy. Many naturalists would like to ground morality in evolutionary biology, but that can only amount to some version or another of 'utilitarianism'.
I think what is necessary, is to agree that there is a real good. I seem to recall @metaphysician undercover disputing why any such conception is necessary at all. The answer is, as a foundation for ethical judgement.
I've given considerable thought in the past few days, along with suggestions from this thread, to the question of what makes science more objective then ethics. What I've realized is that we place identified things in relationships of comparison in our efforts to understand them. In science we compare objects to other objects, and this is what produces objectivity. The only subjective aspect in science is that act of comparison. In ethics, the objects are acts, which in themselves are objective, but they are not compared to other acts, they are related directly to a system of values, which is inherently subjective. So to state it simply, in science we have objects related to other objects, while in ethics we have objects (acts) related to subjects, therefore subjectivity necessarily enters into ethics.
Quoting Wayfarer
Actually, I think that's where I started in this thread. But what I think I said, is just like what you say above, it is necessary to agree that there is a real good ( I think it was actually "absolute good" which was referred to). But what I said is that it is not necessary to agree on the actual conception of this real good, exactly what the real good is, only to agree that there is such a thing.
To talk meaningfully about repeating an experiment, one needs to specify exactly what those conditions are and what tolerances of deviation must be met for each one.
I am inclined to agree.
what I said is that it is not necessary to agree on the actual conception of this real good, exactly what the real good is, only to agree that there is such a thing.
Well, the point about religions of all kinds is that they are a kind of formal proscription of what ought to be considered good. We might take issue with their judgements, or even, as many people have, abandon them altogether, but if you do, then what other basis can one adopt? I'm not arguing for a 'return to a religious past' - my view is more that religious traditions embody important moral truths. But the reason they're not objective, is because in such cases, we ourselves are both the object and the subject!
The point about a spiritual discipline (even some schools of philosophy would constitute that) is that it produces evidence, but of a kind that is internal to one's character, behaviour and attitude. A spiritual discipline produces a change of attitude, known in Greek philosophy as metanoia; the aim being 'to see the world aright'
Whereas, in the modern 'post-religious' West, such matters are internal, private and subjective. I think that stems from Protestantism, whereby one's religious commitment was between the individual and God; post Death of God, only the individual remains, and his/her ethical philosophy is a private matter, but with no foundation beyond or outside the self or the social consensus.
If water suddenly started boiling at 30 degrees at sea level most life on Earth would be dead real quick.
I see religion as a process whereby agreement is created. This is accomplished through communion and the respect for authority. Of course people will point to divisiveness between distinct religions, and between religious and non-religious as evidence that religion does not create such agreement. But this gives us a question similar to yours, without religion, what can create such an agreement.
So I see the loss of a united religion as far more significant than what you describe. When disagreement concerning moral (subjective) issues is allowed to permeate through society, it will fester, and undermine all forms of agreement. As we've seen in this thread, objectivity is based in agreement.
From Plato's Republic, the good is what makes intelligible objects intelligible, like the sun makes visible objects visible. So if we lose "the good", we lose intelligibility.
Just as the sleep-inducing properties of opium stem from its "virtus dormitiva".
If you've seen that in this thread, this thread has problems.
That's not daft. You can, so long as you don't define yourself into contradiction.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But it isn't. That is just what temperature it happens to boil at. And because of that, we associate the one with the other. But there are other things with a temperature of 100 degrees Celsius, and if water boiled at 30 degrees Celsius, then, under your system, one would have to then redefine that as 100 degrees Celsius, even though it is really 30 degrees Celsius, and all of those other temperatures would no longer be 100 degrees Celsius, as 100 degrees Celsius would now mean 30 degrees Celsius, and they aren't 30 degrees Celsius. That is why your position is false or misleading at best. This is where equivocation gets you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's not a definition. It's a point on a scale. So you're mistaken from the get go.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, I don't need to. You just don't get it, do you? What more can I do if you fail to even understand the concept of possibility? Once you have learned what that means, get back to me, and perhaps we can try again.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have explained why your interpretation should be rejected. It leads to false or misleading conclusions. I have nothing more to add.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If that is what I said, then you should be able to quote me saying just that, rather than something else. Go ahead and try.
But you can't, can you?
I'm going to put an end to this now. You are so incompetent that you can't even get what I said right, despite repeated corrections.
Yes, I agree. I almost said "similar" rather than "the same", but I thought that you'd know what I meant, and so overlook it, rather than pedantically correct it.
Quoting andrewk
No, I don't think we need to go into details. The point isn't to pick apart what I said to seek out trivial exceptions which miss the point. My point is about the shortcomings of induction, and it can be traced back hundreds of years to David Hume (1711-76), and, before him, to Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
No matter how controlled the experiment, or how many times it has produced "the same" result, induction can only ever justify a probabilistic conclusion; not a certain one. Which is why it is only [i]probable[/I], as opposed to certain, that the boiling point of water will be 100 degrees Celsius, the same as it has been innumerable times in the past. If it is only probable, then it isn't impossible for the boiling point of water to be a different temperature the next time, under conditions as close as possible to any previous experiment. And that includes a temperature which is drastically different.
Ah, so someone else has (implicitly) acknowledged that it is at least possible (which is my position), and not a contradiction in terms (which is Metaphysician Undercover's position).
Quoting Wayfarer
And that makes two, provided you weren't [i]completely[/I] joking.
OK Sapientia, believe what you want, water just happens to boil at 100 degrees, by some sort of chance coincidence. Do you mean by this, that the scale of temperature, Celsius, existed, and people were using it to measure temperature, then at some point they boiled water and found that water boiled at 100 degrees?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yeah, I think you're new to this thread, it does have some real problems. What's your opinion, may I ask? How do we determine whether one belief is more objective than the other?
Quoting Sapientia
You already asked me to do this, so I already reproduced that quote.
Quoting Sapientia
Of course I didn't exactly quote you, I paraphrased: Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting andrewk
Ever use a candy thermometer, or boil water with sugar? There's soft ball, hard ball, soft crack, hard crack, etc.. Maple syrup is in its finished state of 67 brix (67%sugar), when boiling at 104.2 degrees Celsius, sea level pressure. But that's not water, that's maple syrup.
Quoting andrewk
How about Kurt Vonnegut's ice-nine?
I commented a number times earlier in the thread, but I didn't comment much and there are so many pages . . . it kind of got buried.
Anyway, "objective beliefs" is a category error in my view. Beliefs are subjective.
To not make this too long (because I'd go into that truth is subjective on my view, too, and so on), I'll try to get to the "heart" of what you're asking, and that's how we determine what to believe when it comes to objective matters. We use, and should use, in my opinion, a combo of empirical evidence, which includes phenomena data, reasoning especially with respect to coherency--in other words, so that our beliefs are consistent and make sense with respect to our other beliefs as well as with respect to empirical evidence, and pragmatism Those factors simply come down to reasons we have to believe one possibility versus a contradictory possibility.
No. This demonstrates a failure on your part in understanding what it is that I do and don't dispute.
And no, it isn't "some sort of chance coincidence". That is not my position. That is a straw man. My position is that there is a scientific explanation for why water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, and that it is extremely likely to do so. There is still an element of chance, but it would be highly misleading to characterise it in that way.
What I mean is that we have learnt that water boils at a particular temperature, and, thus far, this temperature has been found to be the same temperature at which it was originally designated on the Celsius scale: 100 degrees Celsius. But it isn't set in stone. It isn't necessarily the case that water will boil at the same point on the scale at which it was originally designated, and which it has been found to boil at in countless past cases.
If you accept that much, but think that if a different result is produced, then this new point on the scale should then be defined as 100 degrees Celsius, or that it [i]has to be so[/I], then I have provided an argument for why that would be a mistake too.
You seem to care more about what you might have read in a dictionary or an encyclopaedia, and taking that as the be-all-and-end-all, than a well-reasoned argument against doing so.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That quote doesn't say the same thing. It isn't doing what I asked.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your "paraphrase" has a different meaning which misrepresents what I said, which makes it a straw man, which is a logical fallacy.
So stop doing that.
I don't know why you would persist in doing that, knowing that I have objected more than once, and knowing that I have spelled out to you exactly what I mean.
Do you [i]want to be[/I] unreasonable? Is that it?
It's certainly not logically impossible per se but if the laws of nature form a unified and interrelated whole then it is impossible without the complete breakdown of what we have come to understand as reality, and indeed the destruction of what we have come to understand as nature; it would mean the annihilation of ourselves and most of the rest of life as we know it.
Why should we believe that is a real possibility as opposed to a merely 'in principle' one? For all we know it may indeed be ontologically impossible, and if so its being logically possible would be merely a vacuous artifact of the nature of abstract thought.
It's all about what you can reasonably rule out as impossible. And I'm just saying that we can't do that with regards to what we've been discussing in this case and many others like it. We can only reasonably go as far as setting it aside as a very remote possibility. I never claimed that it wouldn't completely turn upside down our current understanding. It definitely would. It would throw a great big spanner in the works. It is just that our current understanding is fallible, and our knowledge is limited.
Our current understanding (taken as a whole and not in regard to details) may or may not be fallible. You need to make a distinction between knowing and knowing that you know. What we think of as our knowledge may indeed be really be knowledge because it may indeed reflect absolute reality, or it may not. So our knowing about our knowing is indeed uncertain, but our knowing itself may or may not be fallible.
So what do you think could cause this to change, i.e. that water could suddenly start boiling at a different temperature? And, if you think that it could suddenly change, how is our knowledge that water boils at 100, objective knowledge? Or do you think that all knowledge is subjective?
Quoting John
I think it is logically impossible, because if the substance started boiling at a temperature other than 100, it would either not be water, or not be degrees celsius.
Quoting Sapientia
Do you think that it's possible that the thing which we know as "water" is not really water as we know it? If so, then what makes our scientific knowledge "objective"? Or, is all knowledge subjective?
Quoting Terrapin Station
What do you think constitutes an "objective matter". What would distinguish an objective matter from a subjective matter?
Or the laws of nature could have suddenly changed in which case nothing would be what it had been any more. That this might happen is not from a purely logical point of view, impossible, because it involves no purely logical contradiction. But, in any case, it is a trivial point because, although we cannot be certain, we have very good reasons to believe that such a thing is not, in fact actually, as opposed to merely logically, possible.
Subjective = mental phenomena, that is, brains functioning in mental ways.
Objective = the complement of mental phenomena, or in other words--"everything else," everything that isn't a brain functioning in a mental way.
If this occurs, then the substance is not water anymore, due to the different laws of nature, so it would not be the case that water would be boiling at a different temperature. That's the point in maintaining the principles of identity, and non-contradiction. If the substance does not behave like water, then its not water. If the laws of nature change in such a way as you suggest, then we no longer have water in existence, nature has changed to get rid of water.
Quoting John
It's not completely trivial, because it's relevant to the question of what is and is not logically possible. To maintain the power of logic, for understanding the world which we live in, it must be held to strict principles. These are the fundamental laws. If we allow that it is logically possible that the subject which is identified as "water", could be other than as it is identified (it boils at 100 and freezes at 0, etc.), we allow the logical possibility of the complete failure of all logic. Logic becomes illogical if it does not abide by its own principles. How is it not contradictory to say that it is logically possible that logic could be illogical?
In any case, there's another thread about subjective and objective.
Whose understanding? If it isn't fallible, then it can't possibly be mistaken. But we are human, and thus not just capable of error, but prone to error.
You think it's possible that someone somewhere has a current understanding of the world that cannot possibly be mistaken? I think that I would have to accept that that is possible, but extremely unlikely, much like water boiling at 30 degrees Celsius under normal conditions. Both propositions go against our current understanding of nature, and are, to my knowledge, without precedent.
Quoting John
I acknowledge that distinction. I also note that you're making a distinction between what we think of as our knowledge, and our knowledge. That makes sense.
I agree with all of that, although I'm contemplating that last part: that our knowing itself may or may not be fallible. There are different conceptions of knowledge. So I think the meaning of "knowledge" is important here.
Exactly.
Quoting John
We have very good reasons to believe that such a thing is in fact extremely unlikely. What are these very good reasons to believe that such a thing is in fact impossible, rather than just extremely unlikely?
I thought you weren't replying to me any longer?
Do you believe that for some reason I'm defining things in terms of experience per se? Why?
Yes, insofar as we're talking about anything other than a brain functioning in a mental way, we're talking about something objective.
So, for example, when we talk about brains functioning in non-mental ways, we're talking about objective things.
I'd certainly not agree with that. Ethical judgments are necessarily mental. How would we make sense out of saying that there are nonmental judgments?
On my kindle, that aligns as if you're linking to Harry Hindu's post, but I'm guessing you're instead linking to my post above it. I just don't know why you're linking to that post. (Or why you'd alternately be linking to Harry Hindu's post for that matter, if that isn't just a quirk of the kindle.) . . . Okay, I guess it doesn't matter since you deleted that comment.
Haha, okay
That could be any unknown or mistakenly ruled out factor. So, virtually anything. And it doesn't have to be plausible or fit in with our current understanding; it only has to be possible.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't get the connection you're attempting to make. There is a difference between objective, as I have defined it, and absolute. If it couldn't change, then it would be absolute. If it doesn't depend on what you feel or think etc., then it is objective.
And careful not to confuse metaphysics and epistemology. My point in relation to objectivity is metaphysical, rather than epistemological. Whether or not water boils at 100 degrees Celsius is both metaphysical and (arguably) objective. I have said that there is a stronger case that this sort of thing is objective than that morality is objective. I have not said that our knowledge of anything is objective, let alone our knowledge of water boiling at 100 degrees.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, I'm not sure what that means. In one sense it is, since it comes from a subject after all. And it does also seem to depend on what one believes.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
[U]That's not a valid counterargument[/u], because, as I explained, we aren't just talking about a substance; we are talking about water in particular. So it cannot not be water. So, that only leaves you with one possibility.
But I think that that's wrong, because it could be something other than 100 degrees Celsius on the Celsius scale, since 100 degrees Celsius is just what the boiling point of water was originally designated as, and what it has consistently been demonstrated to accord with, and what it currently is, and most likely will be, but, importantly, not what it necessarily will be. Of course, it necessarily will be for you, because you have defined it that way, against my advice.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. Why not? But possibilities can be trivial in comparison to what the evidence suggests.
That last part is funny. This is a good example of how a muddled premise can lead you down the wrong path. You go wrong from the start when you set in stone what can vary.
Of course, if you restrict yourself in that way and then try to break those restrictions, then you'll have a problem. The solution is simple: don't restrict yourself in that way.
"Which is why it is only probable, as opposed to certain, that the boiling point of water will be 100 degrees Celsius, the same as it has been innumerable times in the past."
In fact we can not even say it is probable. To do that we would need to make some assumptions about regularity, which we have no ground for making.
"under conditions as close as possible to any previous experiment"
There's no such thing as 'conditions as close as possible'. This is fundamental and crucial. It cannot be dismissed by claims of pedantry.
Also, I suspect that I may (perhaps for the first time?!?) agree with MU. If, as it seems to be, the Celsius scale is defined by a temperature of 100 being the temperature at which pure water boils at 1060 kPa then by definition, whenever pure water boils at 1060 kPa, the temperature is 100C, regardless of what a thermometer says, and regardless of what the value of 1/(dS/dE) may be. What we would learn from such an interesting development is that the Celsius scale is context-dependent, contrary to what had been previously supposed.
[For some reason the quote facility does not work on this computer]
No, I wasn't talking about ethical judgements, I was talking about ethical matters. Ethical matters are matters of human behaviours, human beings acting amongst others. These would be the matters which are judged in ethical judgements, and are not themselves matters of mental activity. Therefore according to your distinction ethical matters are objective matters.
Then you're not talking about ethics. You don't have ethics if you don't have judgments about behavior.
If you're just saying that, say, someone stabbing someone else is a behavior that doesn't require mentality (which is actually only true if we're either talking about it being purely accidental or we're talking about robots; it's not true if we're talking about someone intentionally stabbing someone else*) then sure, I'd agree with that.
*I'd agree, though, that even then we could talk about it simply in terms of (observable) behavior, which would be objective, but again that would have nothing to do with ethics. You only get ethics with judgments about behavior.
I don't recall that you defined "objective", care to restate your definition?
Quoting SapientiaIt's not I who established the Celsius scale, and the convention which holds that necessity, so it's not I who "defined it that way". You advise me to reject that convention, but you haven't justified your advice. So I take it as bad advice. If your desire is to counter that convention, with a new proposal, that it's possible for the temperature of boiling water to be other than those covered by the Celsius convention, then go ahead put forth your proposal.
Quoting Sapientia
That's the way logic works though, through restrictions. You throw away all restrictions, leaving yourself with no logic. This leaves your claims completely illogical. Then you offer me advice?
Ethics is rules, a code for human behaviour. We have two things here, human behaviour, and a code of rules. Judgements about behaviour is something completely different. Judgements come when someone looks at the behaviour, and looks at the rules, making a comparison. From your perspective, that judgements are the subjective aspect, do you agree that both the behavior, and the rules (ethics) are objective?
Good point. That is even more sceptical than my initial position. I will give it some thought.
Quoting andrewk
Why not? But if that's going to be a problem for you, I guess I could just copy and paste your own way of putting it: to conduct a similar experiment in which certain specified conditions are managed to be as close as possible to those of the earlier experiment. Although that is a bit of a mouthful.
Surely we can just assume for the sake of argument what these conditions are, rather than specifying them? I do think that that would be pedantic. If it matters that much to you, go ahead and specify any conditions you think need to be specified. I think the rest of us can continue the discussion using the shorthand "under normal conditions" with the assumption that, in the example being discussed, this includes things like "at sea level" and "at normal atmospheric pressure" and "without adding salt to the solution" and so on, without listing every single one.
Quoting andrewk
That is a surprise for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because it is MU ( :D ). And secondly, because, based on the above, it seemed as though your position was going to be even further from his position than mine was.
Quoting andrewk
Well, it was only ever meant as an example of a more general point which I have explained separately. If what you say is correct, then I would just have to use something else as an example or express the current example differently. There are plenty of examples to choose from. I think that getting bogged down in semantics has just been one big diversion.
My original point was something along the lines that the scientific method has been put to the test, and has proven to be a superior means of identifying and ruling out subjective factors as inconsequential, in contrast to certain alternatives, and, specifically, in this case, moral judgement, which is itself subjective, and often seems to be influenced by emotion, and plays a big role in ethics. And that there is therefore a stronger case for objectivity with regards to the former than with regards to the later.
No. What I'm referring to is such as "One shouldn't murder," or "It is wrong to murder." That is a judgment about behavior.
At any rate, whether you call that a judgment or simply a rule, there's nothing objective about it. There's no such thing as objective rules in general.
And I explained in the post you're responding to that we can talk about behavior "from an objective perspective," but from that perspective, it has nothing at all to do with ethics.
That's not a judgement about behaviour, it's a simple statement. "A judgement about behaviour" implies that there is a particular instance of behaviour which is being judged. So until "murder" is defined as a particular behaviour, or a particular type of behaviour, there is no judgement about behaviour here. "It is wrong to murder" is meaningless, unless "murder" is described.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Here is the question I posed earlier. Let's say someone suggested that 100 would be the temperature assigned to the boiling point of water, and all the people agreed to that convention, and started using this scale, so that it"s considered a fact that water boils at 100. In comparison, let's say that someone suggested that it is wrong to murder, describing a particular act, saying that this described act is wrong, and assigning "murder" to it. So all the people agreed to this convention, the described act is wrong, and it's called "murder". Under these conditions, would you say "water boils at 100" is more objective than "it is wrong to murder"?
Why?
If we believe that nature is governed by laws then I would say we have very good reason to think it is actually impossible for those laws to suddenly change.
If we think that nature is not governed by laws but merely gratuitously happens to currently appear as though it is due to pure chance then I would say that we have no good reason to think that anything is either likely or unlikely.
Committing murder is behavior, for example. It's not like it's not behavior just because we're talking about it in general rather than a particular instance of it.
Yes, the problem with long debates in very long threads like this is that it's very hard to get, and keep, a fix on what exactly the claim and counter-claim are. I thought 'this looks interesting' and traced it back for at least three pages and could not find a definitive statement of the respective positions, but only skirmishing on what may well have been tangential issues.
Perhaps it would be good to have a recap of exactly what the dispute is. Or maybe even a formal debate, if that's the sort of thing this platform can support.
I explained this already. By judging that murder, in general, is wrong, or that one shouldn't murder.
I also didn't define "one" in "one shouldn't murder."
Do I need to because you're going to pretend to not know what "one" refers to?
I mean what the heck are you doing now re pretending to not know what "murder" refers to? What the heck does that have to do with understanding that "Murder is wrong" or "One shouldn't murder" is a judgment about behavior?
Can you elaborate on what that good reason is? It seems to me that it runs directly into Hume's problem of induction.
My position is that I believe that there are patterns in nature, that can be used to our advantage to make predictions about what might happen next. But I cannot logically ground that belief in anything, and I accept that everything may change tomorrow - the sun not rise, people start floating in the air, pencils spontaneously combusting, enormous otters dancing the can-can inside a thimble, etc.
So, I plan and act as if things will continue to follow the pattern, but I stand ready to be surprised! As Christopher Hitchens said 'I like surprises' (mostly).
If I believe nature is governed by laws then I believe that the existence of anything at all, otters, thimbles or whatever you like, and the possible relations between, would cease the moment the laws that enable their existence ceased to govern.
What would that have to do with "oughts"? Is it some kind of joke about "oughters" ("oughtas")? ;-)
Do you see my point? You've offered "One shouldn't murder" as a judgement about human actions. But there is no judgement being expressed here unless there is a described act which is being judged not just a name, "murder", and the claim that this name refers to that which one should not do. What kind of judgement is that, to judge a name? Otherwise anytime you accuse someone of murder, that individual would say, I didn't murder, show me what "murder" means, and how my action is consistent with that, or else you have no case against me. Unless murder has a definition how can you be judging it as wrong?
If you do not say what type of act "murder" refers to, how can you claim to have made a judgement about human behaviours? "Murder" could refer to absolutely any behaviour.
Seems like a really large bullet to bite just to avoid supposing there is some sort of unobservable causality we infer from the patterns we do perceive. Also, I kind of wonder what's special about the future such that we could suppose it to be radically different than the past. Is it just because we haven't experienced it yet?
What if it's the relationship between things, events, patterns which are the laws, and not something making anything behave or exist? If things are related in a certain way, then things can't help but be that way. The sun will shine tomorrow because of the relationship between matter, gravity and energy in the nucleus of hydrogen and helium atoms. It can't cease to shine until that relationship changes (conversion to heavier elements).
We haven't experienced the future yet because it hasn't happened yet. It's impossible to have experienced something which hasn't occurred. Is it difficult to fathom the meaning of "hasn't occurred"? It's just like non-existent. See, the past has occurred, and that's why the future is so radically different from the past, it has not.
Why would you be pretending that you don't know what murder refers to as a behavior and be pretending that we're just saying something about a name per se? I mean what the fnck? If you're not interested n a serious discussion I won't bother. I'm not here for your trolling practice,and if you're not trolling, there's something seriously wrong with you. Anyway, if I were to indulge you, play "Let's imagine he's an alien" game, and give you a definition of murder, why would I believe that you wouldn't simply read it as a laundry list of words, where you have no idea what any of them mean? I have no doubts that one could troll indefinitely in that vein.
Anyway, the future having not occurred is just an epistemic situation for us. It's not because the future is radically different. It's because we haven't perceived it yet. Today isn't radically different than yesterday or five years ago. Those were all future days at one point.
If the frozen block interpretation of relativity is correct, then the future, past and present all exist the same, ontologically speaking. We just experience the illusion of time flowing.
In that case things must have invariant natures, no? I would count that invariance as natural law. Or perhaps you are thinking of the laws as explanations for how things are invariant; as being the origin of the invariance. But then what would be the origin of the laws?
No one claimed the future must be radically different, only that it's always possible: there are no "laws" which govern what occurs. The world only works in some way for as long as it does. "Laws" do not constrain the world to any one set of particular outcomes. Our shining sun is only given, with its relationship of mass, energy, hydrogen and helium atoms, for so long as it is given. At some point, one or more of those aspects might change and leave use without a shining sun, at least as we know it now.
The point is that, at any time, it is possible, that the world may be radically different. But that doesn't mean that it it is.
But we have never observed this to be the case, so it could be just our imagination at work. Hume did point out a real problem with induction, but that doesn't mean nature has that problem. It could just be our epistemic limitations, and not something ontologically fundamental about the world. It's easy to imagine the sun ceasing to shine tomorrow, but what would that actually mean for nature?
That's a category error. Possibility is not an empirical state. One does not observe it to confirm or falsify it's presence. It's not a state. In this sense, it has no presence.
One might say it is, indeed, our imagination at work. The world as it occurs doesn't present possibility. Each state is, by definition, itself and can never be anything else. Possibility plays out in the realm of imagination, in representation and logic. It's an awareness about how the meaning of things relate to each other.
When we talk about possibility, we are discussing what's beyond the empirical, what the world cannot and cannot do based on logical reasoning, as a way of discounting the incoherent states which cannot (as opposed to "do not" ) exist.
Indeed, nature does not have the problem, but that's sort of beside the point. We do-- and that's where it matters, for possibility is us trying to give an account of how logic (NOT nature) relates to what occurs in the world.
Yeah, and our imaginations are not constrained by what nature can or can't do. We can imagine a perpetual motion machine (and people try to claim they've invented one), but nature allows for no such thing. Just like we can imagine FTL or time travel to the past, but we might never be able to accomplish either.
In fact, that's a problem for the Humeans. Why can't we do those things?
The point is that, at any time, it is possible, that the world may be radically different. But that doesn't mean that it it is.
— TheWillowOfDarkness
But we have never observed this to be the case
— Marchesk
I have. Up until last Tuesday, the USA had operated as a reasonably well-intentioned, albeit heavily flawed, democracy and world citizen. Then it suddenly elected a fascist as president.
But that gets it backwards. A perpetual motion machine is entirely possible-- all it would take is a machine that kept moving itself.
Sure, it impossible by our models which currently fit with the world we have observed, but those models (the "Laws" ) are only our imagination. The world may have different ideas at any point. It may change such that the present rule of conservation of energy is no longer expressed. Nature is allowed such a machine. It's possible. So far as we have observed, it is just not actual.
Non-zero probability of multiverse interference? Human free will violating laws of nature? Trump campaign got hold of Man in the High Castle video reels?
Possibility is not actuality. There is no problem for the Humeans. They never claimed radical difference has occurred or must occur, only that it might. We can't do those things becasue, so far as we've encountered, they are only a possibility. To do them, they would have to be actual.
And indeed, this means we might never do them at all.
>:O
The problem is the lack of explanation for why they might never be actual. Or more fundamentally, all the patterns we observe are brute. There's no reason the universe appears ordered. It just so happens to be that way, at least in our region of space, for the past few billion years. That's an awful lot of contingency.
Exactly. That's what it means to be material. Since imagination is not enough to amount to existence, the whims of imagination can never amount to the definition of an existing state.
If there were an "explanation," some idea, some meaning imagined, would have to mean the given state must occur. All we would have to to is imagine FLT and it would happen necessarily.
But that's not how the world works. Existing states are not mere representation. Logically, there can to be no "reason" for the order of the universe because that amounts to saying imagination (the meaning of the "order" ) is enough to make it exist. Radical contingency is not a "problem." It is the only position which respects that imagination does not define existence.
This Humean can't see any problem, because we don't know that we can't do those things. All we know is that nobody has managed to do them so far - from which we can infer nothing about what might happen in the future.
Does physics admit to the possibility of making a perpetual motion machine at some point in the future, or is it ruled out as impossible? There are different categories of things that haven't been done yet. Some we know can be done, like setting foot on Mars. Some we think can be done, such as terraforming Mars to be self-sustainable for Earth life. Some we don't know, like cold fusion. Some we think impossible, such as FTL. And some are known to be impossible, like knowing the exact position and momentum of a particle.
How does a Humean explain the differences? It's one thing to say that I will never walk from the northernmost tip of North America to the southernmost tip of South America, and another that it's impossible for me to walk from here to the Moon. Why the difference?
"Does physics admit to the possibility of making a perpetual motion machine at some point in the future, or is it ruled out as impossible?"
The current theory of Thermodynamics says it is impossible. But one thing we mostly believe is that all of our current theories are wrong, and will be replaced by newer, better theories over time.
"How does a Humean explain the differences?"
This Humean doesn't accept that there are differences, because we don't 'know' anything, so there is nothing to explain.
Wrong or incomplete? Newtonian gravity is incomplete, not wrong in the sense that Relativity invalidates everything laid down by Newton. I guess it's a question of whether science is mostly building on and refining an edifice of knowledge, or completing restarting every big discovery (or paradigm shift, to use an abused term).
On the first view, we're not mostly wrong, we're just somewhat ignorant. We have a lot of the fundamentals in place, and now we're slowly learning how they fit together. We don't expect radical changes to the fundamentals in a thousand years, we just expect a far more complete structure of knowledge.
On the second view, science in a thousand years is radically different. We're not much different than medieval scholars in that regard. Our entire scientific understanding of the cosmos is way off, waiting to be eliminated in favor of better models.
If a Humean is asked why the galaxy isn't colonized, they will say that our future civilization just didn't do it. A necessitarian (pro causality) will say they didn't do it because FTL proved to be impossible, and the generation ships were just too slow to be worth it. The second explanation is more plausible, because if FTL is doable, then it would have been invented over a billion years. They just didn't do it isn't an explanation. But it works for the generation ships, which would be doable, but perhaps not worth it.
On the Humean view, neither is strictly impossible, as there are no laws ruling out galactic colonization. It just doesn't happen. On the necessitarian side, one is impossible and the other is not, but the second is a poor means of galactic travel, so it's not done, whereas FTL would be a great means of travel, but it can't be done, and thus the galaxy isn't colonized.
And maybe that's why we haven't received any alien visitors yet, or didn't find ourselves already part of a galactic civilization (this is basically Frank Drake's answer to the Fermi Paradox).
A Humean would just say that any aliens out there haven't bothered. A necessitarian would say they can't go fast enough to make it worth the effort.
I'm not pretending. But the whole disagreement I had with Sapientia revolved around the fact that I said "murder" is defined as being wrong. If this is the case, then "murder is wrong" is just a statement of redundancy. There is no judgement here, because the judgement is already inherent within the definition of murder. There was a judgement made in deciding to define this particular type of act, "murder" as wrong, and there is a judgement made when one decides to call an observed, or described act "murder". But if we assume, as you do, when you make your statement "murder is wrong", that "murder" has already been defined, and we assume, as I do, that murder is defined as being wrong, then your statement does not express any judgement. It just expresses redundancy, or at most, it indicates that you know what murder is. Therefore your claim that "it is wrong to murder" expresses a (subjective) ethical judgement is false. All that this statement expresses is that you know the objective meaning of "murder", just like saying "water boils at 100 degrees Celsius" expresses that you know the objective meaning of "100 degrees Celsius".
And you base this claim on a science fiction movie? Is that supposed to incline me toward believing you?
Quoting Marchesk
If science fiction is believed as correct, then a lot of absurd consequences follow.
Okay, but then if you are ignorant enough to not even know what behavior "murder" refers to, you are not qualified to have a conversation such as this.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If you have some idea of how murder is defined, then you're pretending if you say that you have no idea how to define it. What you'd do is just come forward with the point you want to make rather than pretending that you have no idea what we're even referring to and pretending that we're just saying something about a name per se.
At that, "'murder' is defined as being wrong" is actually incorrect. Use a dictionary for once.
Frozen block-time comes from the physicist Brian Greene. I don't know whether he came up with the interpretation, or just wrote about it in one of his books.
Not quite. The block-universe is a stationary space-time which must exist according to Relativity. So its originator was Einstein.
Quantum mechanics and General Relativity disagree with each other on this. According to QM, there are an infinite number of slightly interacting space-time blocks, and the one you will find yourself in next is in principle unknowable (even by God).
But sure, time doesn't flow in either of these structures.
Yes, I pretty much agree. :)
Is that inference an inductive one based on what has been observed to happen with some past scientific theories?
;)
I think we will never have exhaustive knowledge of the laws of nature, and even if we did this would tell us nothing about their origin. Whether they have gratuitously evolved as 'material habits' or whether they are expressions or symbols of a spiritual order; how we answer that question will always come down to faith and intuition, not to discursive knowledge, in my view.
Figures like Christ and the Buddha are purported to have "known the nature of reality", but since we do not know, isn't it always going to come down to intuition and faith as to whether we believe what they tell us? I suppose if we were to personally witness them performing undoubted miracles, then that might change the situation somewhat.
No, because I did so in that same short paragraph.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I provided an argument. You can argue that it isn't justified, but to state that I haven't provided an argument would be to state a falsehood.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have been disputing [i]your understanding[/I] of the convention, not the convention itself, as I understand it. But perhaps the convention itself is problematic as well.
I have further looked into it, and my current understanding is that the scale was originally based, in part, on the boiling point of water, but that this wasn't even represented on the scale as 100 degrees Celsius by the man himself, Anders Celsius. 100 degrees Celsius represented the freezing point of water. It wasn't until a year later that someone else, Jean-Pierre Christin, decided that 100 degrees Celsius would represent the boiling point of water.
And nowadays, by international agreement, the Celsius scale is defined by two different temperatures: absolute zero, and the triple point of Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water (VSMOW). Meaning that neither the melting nor boiling point of water under one standard atmosphere remains a defining point for the Celsius scale.
So, if that is the case, then both you and @andrewk are wrong.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's funny coming from you of all people, Metaphysician Undercover.
Your second sentence in the quote above is false, and so it cannot form part of a sound logical argument. Even if your third sentence logically follows from the second, this is trivial in light of the fact that your second sentence is false.
How's that for a bit of logic?
Yes, it does come down to intuition and faith to a large degree, I think. And yes miracles, or signs would be more convincing. As I see it while the receiver or witness of the information is in a normal day to day state of consciousness, there would not be conviction in what was being conveyed, there might be some intellectual understanding, or flash of insight. But this is in contrast to what is understood in revelation of the witness being in some way, transported, or transformed by the experience, such that there is no doubt of the truth, or reality of was is witnessed.
I can illustrate the problems around this with a thought experiment. Say God appeared to humanity in person, there would be a problem of identification, that it is God, wheather the experience of the witnesses is sufficient that they believe it themselves, such that there is no doubt. If someone did doubt it, how would the purported God, prove, or convince the witness? Etc... The God, might well be an imposter etc.
I think that that's a false dichotomy. My position is similar to andrewk's, and differs from both of the above.
I guess it depends on how you define "normal state of consciousness". Is the normal state of consciousness a state of skepticism or openness. The heightened state you allude to may just come to a person, I believe, without them having previously cultivated intuition and faith; but it is more likely to come to someone who has cultivated those things.
If God appeared as a human person (as He is supposed to have done 2000 years ago) then presumably some would believe on the basis of intuition, others might experience a profoundly convincing vision and many would be skeptical and even disbelieve. Two thousand years ago, if undoubtable miracles were witnessed, many might have judged it to be case of witchcraft or possession by demons. Ironically a performance of genuine miracles would probably be far more convincing today in our scientifically skeptical age.
If nature is bound by laws, what imaginable (and obviously outside those laws) force could cause them to suddenly change?
Yes! Someone who gets it. And, of course, an event doesn't have to occur in order for it to be possible, nor does one have to do some particular thing to demonstrate that that thing is possible. It's possible that if I jump off a cliff, I will float to safety rather than fall to my death, but no, I'm not going to attempt it: I don't have to. And even if I did attempt it and fell to my death, that wouldn't prove that the aforementioned alternative is impossible.
Are you reading this, @Metaphysician Undercover?
Nothing.
That's the problem with law. It doesn't allow freedom. If everything is destined to follow the law and there is no possibility. Without law, every event becomes a possibility, a state which may or may not occurred, allowing the space for states themselves to determine what happens, including our decisions (free will).
Part of the point is we can't say, absolutely, that anything is "likely" or "unlikely," for that would require the world to work to a system which supposedly shows us a pre-determined future.
Without law, causality becomes about what happens and what is chosen, rather than narrative speculation which is (usually) presented to proclaim whatever we prefer must occur. We can't use logic as a shortcut to knowledge about the world. We have to address states themselves.
I don't think it is. There is more than one theory about so-called laws of nature. There are the two competing metaphysical theories: the Regularity Theory and the Necessitarian Theory. And there is a distinction which can be made between laws of nature and scientific laws.
No, it may be possible that you would not fall or it may not be possible; the thing is, you don't know which, and it is the context of that lack of knowledge that makes it logically possible. So logical possibility is really vacuous in the sense that it lacks any contextuality other than that of ignorance.
You need to explain the differences and what relevance you think they might have to what I said if you want me to respond to this.
OED: murder, "the unlawful premeditated killing of a human being by another".
I assume that "unlawful" necessarily implies wrong.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Clearly, the way I define "murder" is significantly different from the way you define it. You were using the word, in your example. I had a feeling your were using it in a way which was different from the way that I understand it, because as I explained, with the way that I understand the word (which is the way it's defined above from the OED), your example does not support your claim.
Therefore, I concluded that you have your own personal definition of "murder", which is not consistent with the one I quoted from the OED, and this personal definition is the one which supports your claim. That's why I said your example is meaningless unless you provide a definition.
Quoting Marchesk
Were his books science fiction?
Quoting Sapientia
See, you learn something new everyday. When I was young we called it "centigrade". The Kelvin scale introduces absolute zero, but uses the same Celsius scale. Finding absolute zero at -273 degrees Celsius, Kelvin puts this as zero, so zero degrees Celsius is 273 degrees kelvin.
Quoting Sapientia
Did you verify what the triple point of VSMOW refers to? Triple point refers to the pressure point which the various stages, gas liquid and solid may coexist, and VSMOW is purified ocean water, to exclude the possibility of heavier or lighter water. And, from Wikipedia "The value of the triple point of water is fixed by definition, rather than measured." These measures were introduced to increase accuracy, the scale is still the same old centigrade scale, meaning one hundred degrees between the melting and boiling point of water.
Quoting Sapientia
Judging from what you've said, you do throw away all restrictions. Nothing can be impossible, not even contradiction represents impossibility for you. You claim to respect that contradiction represents impossibility, but in practise you change definitions at will, so contradiction may be avoided. You have no respect for contradiction in practise, Your claim is hollow, which generally indicates dishonesty. So where are your restrictions if nothing is impossible? My second sentence is true.
.
Either it is or it isn't. The former is the default position absent any contradiction. If there's a contradiction, state it.
I don't need to explain the differences. You could look it up.
The relevance is that your question seemed to be assuming one theory over alternatives.
Whether or not you decide to respond is up to you. It's no skin off my back.
Newton's theory of gravity is wrong in the sense that it makes predictions that are demonstrably incorrect - for instance about the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. Under certain circumstances, Newton's theory is a good approximation.
That could turn out to be the case for any of our scientific theories. They may turn out to be generally far from accurate, and only reasonable approximations in a narrow set of conditions that includes those that have been observed by humans.
I got halfway through writing a follow-on para describing what I think an 'incomplete' theory is, in order to contrast it with a wrong/falsified one. But then I got myself in a muddle and, on reflection, realised that every theory is incomplete, because there will always be things that are unexplained. Theories start with postulates - statements of rules - that are presented as brute facts. So they are incomplete in that they do not explain why those postulates hold.
That's wrong. "May be" is a reflection of might or might be actual.
It is possible they would (or wouldn't) fall. Possibility isn't actuality. An event occurring isn't a measure of what's possible. Doubts or uncertainty over what occurs (i.e. what is actual) have no impact on possibility.
Quoting John
You appear to have been thinking along the same lines as I was when I wrote that sentence. It started out as saying 'All of our current theories are wrong...', which would indeed have been an inference. But I had the same concern as you expressed: for all we know, there may be one or more of our theories that is exactly correct. So I changed it to 'we mostly believe', so that it became an observation about a belief rather than a claim about our theories.
Newton's theory is wrong because it is a false explanation. It could be (and indeed was) protected from problematic observations by making ad-hoc modifications.
There is no force of gravity, let alone a force which instantaneously acts at a distance.
Under certain circumstances, Kepler's theory is a good approximation, as is geocentrism, or the flat earth.
Sorry, but absent a parachute, that is impossible.
Yes.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But isn't that to define the scale based on the melting and boiling point of water, which would contradict what the Wikipedia article says? Do you reject that part?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's not what I have said that is the big problem. It's your judgement. I don't throw away all restrictions, and nothing I have said warrants that uncharitable interpretation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
False.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. Let's take "murder" for example. You define it as immoral. But that is just one of multiple definitions. I haven't changed the definition at all, let alone to avoid contradiction. My definition was never that one to begin with. Moreover, my definition is in common usage, and has been for a long time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
False.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Arguable.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Generally. But first you must show that my claim is hollow, so you're getting ahead of yourself. Anyway, you're being uncharitable, [i]again[/I]. You should focus on the argument, not the person.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Straw man and loaded question.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
False.
Okay, well, if you [i]say[/I] so... :-}
[I][url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipse_dixit]Ipse dixit[/URL][/I]
"Unlawful" simply implies that something is against the law; it's illegal; it's been officially declared that if one does the action in question, one can be prosecuted, fined, possibly imprisoned, etc. for it.
The reason that it's illegal is that the folks who have influenced legislation have judged that it's morally wrong. But that's not what "unlawful" implies. Plenty of things are unlawful that are not generally considered ethically wrong. For example, in my area, it's unlawful to park on certain sides of the street at certain times during certain days. Not many people would say that the fact that that's unlawful implies that it's ethically wrong to park on those sides of the street during those times on those days.
Wow. He actually did it. I precautioned him against this five days ago, back on page 26:
Quoting Sapientia
Unlawful doesn't necessarily imply immoral, and the latter is the only interpretation of "wrong" that would be relevant.
You are missing the point. There may be constraints on what could ever be actual (possibility), apart from the obvious purely logical ones, that are absolutely inherent in reality.
In other words there may be things we can imagine as possibilities which are not actual possibilities at all, and never could have been.
Yes either it is or it isn't possible, and you don't know which. This is just what I said. The default position may be for you to believe it is possible but this doesn't make it so. See the crucial difference now?
I saw it from the start. I don't know why you keep bringing it up. Obviously I'm going to say what I believe, and make comments consistent with my position.
Great, we wouldn't want you to be losing that oh-so-precious skin off your back, now would we?
For me it's really all just like water off a duck's nose. Or, in a different mood perhaps a bit more like snot on a chicken's lip.
Oh, yeah, right so your "default" belief is based on self-acknowledged ignorance?
So it is nothing more than a baseless leap of faith just like its opposite would be?
It is based on good reason. For example, Hume has some good arguments which are relevant in that regard. Although I do acknowledge that I am to some extent ignorant, as I expect you do.
Quoting John
No. That question suggests that you have jumped to a conclusion.
Well, then I'm still completely in the dark as to what the "good reason" for your belief is...
For me the situation as outlined provides good reason for either suspending judgement or taking the leap of faith, and acknowledging the ensuing belief as being based on that faith, and/or on intuition or else on mere preference.
In case you forgot how to read, I said that "unlawful" necessarily implies "wrong". We were discussing ethics, which I referred to as rules for human actions. I do believe that laws fall into this category.
See what I mean, you just define words as you please, in order to avoid facing the objective fact that you're wrong. When you can define words willy-nilly there are no objective facts, and you can never be proven wrong. But what's the point in such a semantic exercise?
Haha, no, but I see he said almost the same thing that I did.
So would you say that it's morally wrong to park on a particular side of the street for a couple hours a couple days per week?
Yes if it's cultivated perhaps. What I am referring to is not a heightened state, although that might accompany it. Rather it is a transformation in the consciousness of the witness. This in my experience involves a change, development, or journey in one's intellectual state, this probably involves a realisation of something not previously thought to be possible, again, something is revealed. So for example in the case of the Buddha this transformation revealed the reality of a transcendent state and realm, by the removal of a veil in his being. The removal of an impediment, so rather than seeing only the impediment, the Buddha saw the true reality.
Yes, although there were some witnesses who experienced a revelation as I described it above, principally the disciples, along with some of the people who were healed. Regarding miracles, yes they might be more convincing today, but what would they be convinced of I wonder. Most people would suspect, I expect that the miracle is some kind of extraterrestrial technology and that God is some kind of alien. So we are confronted with regression, maybe it isn't God, just a more advanced being, and God is still hidden, but maybe it is a far more advanced being than that, with a far more convincing miracle, but maybe God is still hidden and this is an imposter and so on.
I suppose what I am homing in on is that in a person there is a process in the mind, which happens when a belief is formed. Resulting in a held belief, a conviction of the truth of something. It is a psychological process resulting in a persistent or deeply held conviction in someone's mind. This might also be accompanied by a process in which information(which may seem fantastical) can be implanted in the mind which is persistently or deeply known, or understood.
So the notional advanced being coming along and telling us the truth of reality, might just simply manipulate these capacities in us, transfer the information, or conviction and we would be in possession of the truth. There are many testimonies of such events in religious material.
And this might be what happened to Colin, the OP.
Nowadays, 'belief' is shorthand for 'believing an empirical proposition for which there is no evidence'. Whereas, as Armstrong says, what it originally meant:
So my take is that what is of value from religion, doesn't reside in a belief, but what belief leads to. Belief in that sense is instrumental in leading to right action, not so much a matter of 'ortho doxa', or 'having the right belief'.
If it's not legal to park there, of course it's morally wrong to park there.
Do you understand that "moral" is defined as concerned with the distinction between good and bad, or right and wrong. This means that all instances of judging between right and wrong are moral cases. Any time that someone makes a judgement of right or wrong, this is by definition, a moral judgement.
Morality is concerned with our ability to make good judgements, in general, that is why good moral principles are fundamental in society.
Are you claiming that people think about law and morality that way, or are you doing a functional analysis of what law is (per how I described this earlier) where your conclusion is contrary to how most folks think about law and morality?
The fact is that the faculty of decision making, in human beings is the same faculty whether or not they are judging not to steal, or to park on the wrong side of the street, or whether it is true that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. These are all judgements as to what is right or wrong. How could we single out one type of judgement, and attempt to claim that it is radically different from others, when they are all instances of human beings making judgements?
Morality deals with this faculty of deciding what is right and wrong, and to build a good character in a human being is to produce good decision making capacities within that person. The ability of a scientist, to make good objective decisions concerning the empirical evidence, is a moral capacity.
What I'm asking you about is your analysis of "law." Are you claiming that you're appealing to some common way in academic philosophy of defining "law" as being necessarily moral?
What's at issue in this tangent with Metaphysician Undercover, though, is whether "illegal" necessarily implies "immoral" or "morally wrong."
What I'm saying is that morality deals with our capacity to differentiate between good and bad, right and wrong. So, it follows that any type of decision making which is such as to distinguish between right and wrong, and this includes correct and incorrect, is inherently a subject of morality. Therefore all legal issues which distinguish between right and wrong are moral issues, and even the principles of mathematics and logic, where it is considered that there is a right answer, are issues of morality. Have you read Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" where he discusses the intellectual virtues, and contemplation as the highest virtue?
Any judgement of "wrong" necessarily implies morally wrong, because that's what a judgement of right or wrong is, a moral judgement.
Are there "legal issues" (what we're actually talking about is legislation, but maybe that's a "legal issue") that do not distinguish between right and wrong and thus are not moral issues?
(Also, I'm not forgetting that you didn't answer the earlier question yet, but I'll ask you the above before getting back to the earlier question.)
The good reason is all of the evidence which suggests that it is not impossible. (I referred to some of Hume's arguments in that regard, so you shouldn't be completely in the dark, and if you are, then there's something that you can do about it). There is evidence which suggests that it is conditionally impossible, but there is good reason to doubt the presumed absoluteness of what it is conditional upon. And if it isn't absolute, then exceptions are possible.
Quoting John
For you...
But I proportion my belief to the evidence, and the evidence suggests that it is possible.
No, we most definitely are not. He has said some things which I strongly disagree with, and I have made that clear. But he seems like a smart chap, and I agree with him on that point and on others. I'm glad that I'm not the only one calling you out on this kind of thing.
And I said that unlawful doesn't necessarily imply immoral, and that the latter is the only interpretation of "wrong" that would be relevant.
Why are you making us go around in circles?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is an unsophisticated and overly broad categorisation which is problematic.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:-d
Let me guess... you're going to treat that as [i]the single absolute interpretation[/I], and anyone who deviates from it - even if for good reason - is changing the definitions, and defining words will-nilly, as they please, in order to avoid contradiction and [i]the objective fact[/I] that you, Metaphysician Undercover, are always right, and they, therefore, are wrong.
But, if it wasn't for those meddling folks, like myself, and Terrapin Station, and many, many others who prefer a more sensible and sophisticated interpretation to your one, then you would've been able to catch them out and prove them wrong on their own terms! You seem to want us to accept your definition or interpretation, even though we have argued against it, just so you can relish in proving us wrong, and yourself right. But it isn't going to be that easy.
Outside of your protective little bubble, that is a non sequitur and a category error. But I get it, you prefer your protective little bubble, where the line is blurred, and the two do not just partially overlap, but are necessarily connected and entirely overlap - even though there is no shortage of counterexamples which highlight that this leads to bad moral judgement in those cases.
*facepalm*
:-} Appeals to authority, as if I'm going to go off and search Hume's works! It's like trying to get blood out of a stone...what is the evidence...????
I agree in part, but not with the italicized passage. Again I think you're blurring the distinction between facts and values, and I think it is a legitimate distinction. Bertrand Russell discusses the issue in the concluding chapter of HIstory of Western Philosophy - how science gives great powers, but which can be used for either good or evil. There are right and wrong answers to mathematical problems, but getting a maths problem wrong is not normally regarded as morally culpable. Nor are legal issues always questions of morality, you might have an ownership dispute between two parties who are both fine upstanding citizens, or absolute scoundrels, as far as the law is concerned it doesn't matter.
(I think a key text on this issue as Alisdair McIntyre's After Virtue, which laments the 'fracturing of moral discourse' which has happened in Western culture. There is no recognised common source of moral truths. It is significant that after writing it, McIntyre converted to Catholicism.)
Anyway, that gets back to what I was saying before about there being real or ultimate goods. To utilize an old image, the ultimate truth is the pole towards which the moral compass points. If you are Christian, say, then your judgements are based on Biblical principles, which are in turn underwritten, if you like, by divine command. Similarly if you're Buddhist, then your actions are hopefully in conformity with the Dharma.
It is the absence of those kinds of moral codes that gives rise to today's relativism and subjectivism, or BrainGlitch's 'meta-ethical nihilism'. That really amounts to saying that all such judgements are ultimately personal or subjective, which again implies that there is no objective morality. By contrast, I think an objective morality is to believe that there are real moral consequences.
Perhaps, I don't know law very well.
Quoting andrewk
Those who had respect for that law clearly would have believed that they were acting wrongly, and therefore immorally, by disobeying the law, but here we approach the issue of subjectivity. There's lots of laws which I believe are wrong, therefore I believe they're immoral. But that's the thing with morality what I say is wrong, someone else might say is right. When the law says "it's morally wrong to do X", (park on that side of the street), I do not necessarily believe that X is morally wrong, that's free will.
Quoting SapientiaI haven't seen any good reasons here yet, just a whole lot of assertions, along with the odd facepalm.
So how about it, where are the good reasons? Why should any judgement, of good or bad, right or wrong, correct or incorrect, be outside the category of morality?
It's not an appeal to authority. You asked, so I referred to some of his arguments which I think are both relevant and good arguments. You don't have to look into it, just as I don't have to reproduce them here for your sake. But I will consider it.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. If you don't see it, you don't see it. I doubt anything I say will change that.
The point though, is that it is through the very same type of training process whereby we learn to judge all the different types of correctness. This is entirely a matter of learning the relevant conventions. So if all forms of learning how to judge correctness can be classed together like this, we need a name for this classification. This judging of correctness is what we call, morality.
There is very little difference between learning to judge Johnny's politeness as correct behaviour, and learning to judge "4" as the correct answer to "2+2". You learn to recognize "2+2=4" and apply the symbol "correct". Likewise, you learn to recognize the appropriate behaviour and apply "good". Yes, while I agree that one deals with the behaviour of the subject, so it is subjective, and the other deals with an assumed objective reality, I believe the process of judging X as correct, or incorrect, is very similar. So if the subject here is this judgement process itself, whereby we judge between right and wrong, not the judgements being made, then these two, objective and subjective judgements should be classed together.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, so that's the point, all judgements are inherently subjective. That is why we can class all forms of judgements in one category, as human judgements. Objectivity, we can see, comes about through producing conventions and adhering to them. It is through this adhering to the meaning of the symbols "2", "+", "=", etc., that mathematics gives us objectivity. And other forms of logic operate in the same way, there is a need to adhere to conventions. So we can extend that need, to adhere to conventions, right down to issues of human behaviour.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What? So, if it's illegal, then it's immoral. Even if the law itself is immoral. So, if the law says it's illegal not to kill someone who insults your family, then it is immoral not to kill that person. But you don't have to believe that, even though it would be irrational not to, given your premise.
Or, if it's illegal, then it's immoral, even if you [i]believe[/I] otherwise. But then, you also believe that if it's illegal, then it's immoral. So that would result in contradictory beliefs.
I've provide my definition of moral, as concerning goodness or badness, right or wrong, of human behaviour, in all forms of right or wrong. You appear to be using "immoral" in a different way, which is very confusing.
Look, if it's illegal, then from the perspective of those who uphold the law, it is immoral. If you think that this law is immoral, then from your perspective, the illegal act is morally correct.
So, you're now changing from "if it's illegal, then it's immoral" to "if it's illegal, then it's immoral from the perspective of those who uphold the law"? That's a big difference.
Okay. It seems like it would be important to know this, though, if we're going to claim that "illegal" necessarily implies "morally wrong."
We can readily see though, that we can differentiate two distinct categories of conventions relevant to this discussion:
(1) conventions that are established across cultural and societal bounds, such as those we invoke when we judge the truth or falsity of math and logic and science and everyday empirical claims and ...
(2) conventions that are situated historically and culturally, such as those we invoke when we judge the morality or immorality of a given behavior.
There's a world of difference. You're obfuscating a really basic difference in moral philosophy in a way that will inevitably entail relativism. It's like saying 'there's no difference between novels and history, they're both simply types of books'.
Objectivity doesn't obtain via conventions. If anything about mathematics is objective, it's because it's mind-independent.
I'm not sure whether he stands by that claim or whether he has abandoned it. If he stands by it, then I find his position difficult to make sense of in light of his recent reply to me.
It depends what the dependence/independence is regarding. It doesn't have to be about intelligibility. It might be about truth, for example.
Yes, and like I was saying, the relevance of any attempted counterargument to a realism of some sort will depend on the context of the dependence/independence claim. The context might be metaphysical or epistemological. But if the claim was in a metaphysical context, then an epistemological counterargument might miss the point. For example, if the claim is about truth or existence, then countering that it wouldn't be intelligible, perceivable, or known can miss the point, since the claim isn't about that. I have seen that [I]a lot[/I] in those sorts of discussions.
Right, they're both books. So how do you justify "there's a world of difference"? You could just as well say they have different titles, or different covers, how does that entail a world of difference?
When we define or describe something, we move from the most well known (the more particular) to the less well known (the more general). So for instance, a human being is an animal, is a living thing, is an existing thing. The most particular "human being" is the most well known because the particular is present to our senses, while the more general is abstract, and often difficult to grasp. Despite this fact, that the abstract, the general, is less well known, it still serves as the defining feature.
You may claim that there's a world of difference between a book of fiction, and a book of fact, but the defining feature of each, is that it is a book, so I think your claim is unjustified. Books are all written by human beings, so they're all classed as artefacts, and that's a big similarity in the world. And that they are of the same type of artefact, a book, is an even bigger similarity. Your claim is like claiming that there is a world of difference between a human being and another animal. There is not. That they are both living is a big similarity, and that they are both animals is an even bigger similarity. We have to pass through all these categories before we get to the most general. And even of two existing things, if "existing thing" is the most general category, there is not a world of difference between them, because they necessarily have that in common.
Well I've been trying to get a good description of what constitutes "objectivity". I think we've all agreed that it has to do with being external to the mind. How is mathematics mind-independent? Doesn't mathematics consist of humanly produced symbols, and rules? Either you must believe that the human beings didn't produce these symbols, or you believe that what is symbolized is not humanly produced. The former appears to be clearly false. And with respect to the latter, when I write an equation, doesn't it symbolize what I am thinking? How could the equation symbolize something other than what I am thinking?
OK, I think I see what you mean, some conventions are more universal than others. There are some conventions such as those of mathematics and logic which are accepted by the vast majority of humanity, while other conventions are accepted by a smaller proportion, and some by an even smaller proportion, and some which might only be accepted by a few people.
But this appears to assume a static point in time, at which time the conventions are judged for universality. X convention is accepted a by certain population at time T, and Y convention by a certain population at time T, etc. Don't you think that we need to add a temporal dimension? Say Z convention is a newly discovered mathematical principle. Since it is new, it is only accepted by a few. It doesn't fulfill the conditions for universality, it is just being accepted by a very particular, and extremely limited culture, despite the fact that within a hundred years or so, it might obtain universality.
So I don't think that explaining the difference between mathematical and moral conventions, in this way, properly represents reality. By looking at a static point in time, and judging the universality of a convention, one doesn't account for the evolving nature of conventions. I think that we should establish universality by referring to temporal extension, the longevity of the convention, rather than by looking at how widespread a convention is at any particular time. In this way, we don't get fooled by fads and fashions, which appear to have great universality, but from the perspective of temporal extension, they do not.
Moral conventions demonstrably are culturally and historically situated.
Historically situated means operant in a given culture during a given time span.
On the other hand, the conventions for judging the truth or falsity of arithmetic, as well as other well-established math, logic, and science operate cross culturally, and are not likely to change, precisely because these conventions are clearly specified and universally agreed upon.
For heaven's sake, because 'literature' and 'history' are different subjects. Imagine enrolling in Eng. Lit. and on your first class, the lecturer says, right, today we commence on the History of the American Civil War. Don't you think you might feel you were in the wrong class? Or would you say, 'hey, what's the difference, it's all just literature anyway'?
What you actually have is a belief that god exists from personal experiences.
Knowledge would be results others could reproduce and confirm.
That's what monasteries are for.
But, consider the context. This was an article that Karen Armstrong wrote for a popular newspaper, not for a religious studies journal (although, having said that, Armstrong is quite a competent scholar in that field).
Bear in mind, Armstrong's response was to the question 'should we believe in belief?', which was also put to four other columnists, one of whom was the evangelical atheist Dennett, and about whose polemics the question was posed. Armstrong's point is one that was elaborated much more fully in her book of around the same time, called A Case for God.
That book was intended mainly as a propaedeutic, not as a comprehensive 'theory of religion'. Her point is that in the context of the bitter criticisms of religion by the popular atheists, and the 'culture wars' sorrounding them, that 'belief' has been rendered into a kind of pseudo-scientific gobbleddegook that no right-thinking person would believe. And as I said weeks ago now in this same thread, if religion was as stupid as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett said it was, then you would be stupid to believe in it. So Armstrong is trying to retrace the steps by which Western culture got into what she considers a false dichotomy between fundamentalism on the one side, and militant atheism on the other.
Now, I have considerable respect for Greek Orthodox theology. But I don't think Armstrong is trying to undermine it nor trying to replace it with a kind of sloppy ecumenism. She's trying to make the point that you have to enter into the imaginative domain the great traditions to understand their meaning, and that you're not going to do that by entertaining 'beliefs as propositions' (especially dubious propositions about 'creation science'.) To put it idiomatically, you have to 'walk the talk'! She's trying to get that difficult point across in a popular newspaper article, and I really don't think she does too bad a job of it. I'm not uncritical of Armstrong, but I think she provides a much-needed historical and cross-cultural perspective on some vexed issues. Have a read of Alain Du Bouton's review of her Case for God, published a week later, in the same newspaper.
We know that mathematical conventions come into existence. There was a time when there was no zero, no algebra, no calculus. So it's not true to say that they are not likely to change, because evidence demonstrates that they do change. What I suggested is that we could look for particular fundamental principles which persist through time. But couldn't we also find some fundamental moral principles which are cross-cultural, and persist through time? If some mathematical principles are cross-cultural, and persist through time, and some moral principles are cross-cultural and persist through time, how does this proposal provide a valid method for differentiating between the two?
Quoting Wayfarer
Why do you insist on focusing on the differences rather than the similarities? "Wayfarer" and "Metaphysician Undercover" are two distinct subjects, but within the category of moral responsibility, we are the same, that's what gives rise to the concept of human equality. Within the context of morality, what validates your claim of difference between the subjects "literature" and "history" ? This principle of difference which you are proposing is that wich supports "might is right".
If you assign difference to subjects such as mathematics and science, as a separation from ethics and
philosophy, you allow the possibility that one is superior to the other. Are you ready to accept the consequences of such a proposed differentiation? I do not think that the belief that science is superior to ethics is a healthy belief, and I think you're with me on that. So if you desire to maintain equality between the subjects, why do you propose such a separation without also proposing a means for maintaining equality?
That is why I say that we focus on similarity rather than difference. It is by establishing individual subjects as the same, members within the category, that we establish equality. Once equality is firmly established as the principal, we can consider the differences, all the time maintaining the primary principle that the two are the same, but with differences. If we approach from the perspective of assumed difference, we will never find a principle of equality, and due to the natural inclination of human beings to judge with respect to value, one will be judged as superior to the other.
Because the ability to make distinctions is fundamental to being able to argue a case. You've been arguing this up hill and down dale for days already, it's going nowhere.
In my view it isn't. Mathematics, like logic, is a way that we think about relations, in this case, unlike logic, focused on "unit" type abstractions and the idea of quantification of the same. The relations we're thinking about are objective initially, but then we extrapolate from that, so that a lot of mathematics is "thinking about (our) thinking about relations." So mathematics isn't mind-independent. It isn't objective. It wouldn't exist without people thinking in that way.
This can work both ways, and in other contexts. Hence my point about it not being impossible for anomalies to arise with regards to established scientific conventions or laws of nature.
I don't have a stake in the mathematical realism vs. mathematical anti-realism debate, but I don't think that your above argument against the former is a good one, since it seems to miss the point. What has been humanly produced can be mind-independent. It isn't about origin, it's about either the present or a hypothetical future state of affairs. Does (not "did") a mathematical truth obtaining depend on any mind? What would happen to mathematical truths if there were no longer any minds? These are the sort of questions that matter in that debate.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it symbolises what your isolated thinking symbolised. You have to switch to past tense unless you are literally constantly thinking about nothing other than this mathematical equation, which would be ridiculous and obviously false.
This is a false equivalency.
Saying that some math principles persist through time sidesteps the fact that the vast majority of established math principles persist, and will continue to persist. That new math knowledge such as zero, calculus, non-euclidian geometries, etc are added to the math corpus is not the same phenomenon as the demonstrable evolution of moral conventions (such as slavery, divine right of kings, stoning adulterers and homosexuals, burning heretics at the stake ... .)
As I've argued, there are clearly specified, universally agreed upon criteria for judging the truth or falsity of established math, science, and logic claims independently of culture, religion, race, gender, social status ... But not for moral claims.
Your position is very predicable, so I didn't really need you to state it. Your sort of relativism is self-defeating, but that's another kettle of fish.
The idea that it's self-defeating is sophomoric, although admittedly, people who espouse sophomoric brands of relativism online don't help in this regard.
You don't help yourself, then.
Yeah, I'm sure you could give a nutshell summary of my views on this issue (so that I'd agree that your summary captures my views).
Yes, I [I]could[/I] give you a nutshell.
Here.
Here is a nutshell.
As requested.
As expected, you did an impressive job with that. That's a sound basis for critiquing/characterizing my views.
The other point is, I generally agree with her 'logos/mythos' distinction, if only as an heuristic. Scientific realism has become the de facto outlook of today's secular intelligentsia - there is a deep sense, for many people, that the 'world revealed by science' is the real world, and that all forms of spirituality are outmoded superstitions. Dennett, whom she was responding to in that article, publishes books about it. So I believe, as she says, that the modern mentality is the consequence of a particular kind of cognitive mode which makes no room for the imaginative and spiritual aspects of existence. Actually it's deeply de-humanising, as evidenced by Dennett's anti-humanist polemics, such as humans being 'moist robots'.
The curious thing is that the educated materialists see the world as if they're intelligent animals - which is what their philosophy says they are - rather than as rational beings (in the Greek sense). For them, 'rationality' is restricted to only what can be demonstrated with respect to mathematically-quantifiable data, in the framework of the universe as understood through mathematical physics, devoid of intelligence and intention.
How about D.M. Armstrong?
. . . which would make it far more disingenuous that you sometimes act as if you're not familiar with any physicalists/materailists who are not eliminativists.
I respect that you almost always present aspects of the "tool paradigm" even though you feel I don't present "coherent arguments" (and in a simple comment about Armstrong and whether you'd be familiar with non-eliminativist physicalism at that).
Similarity is a combination of sameness and difference; it cannot be derived just from sameness.
The conventions by which we judge the truth or falsity of established math, logic, and science claims are universally agreed upon and once established persist. The conventions by which we judge the morality or immorality of behaviors are not universally agreed upon, but rather are situated historically and culturally, and are disputed between social groups, and demonstrably can evolve from being moral to immoral and vice versa.
Quoting John
Yes, I agree. He's wrong yet again. The one wouldn't make any sense without the other. Similarity wouldn't make any sense without difference. What he is saying is nonsense.
__//|\\__
It generated a remarkable number of replies for what wasn't much more than a 'drive-by' OP! I would have felt more satisfied if Colin had engaged some more, since there were a few respondents who were sympathetic with his position.
:)
I know very well what that's like.
Yes, that would be bad. :-$
For myself, I can't see an overburden of negatives that come with posting on these forums as long as it doesn't take up too much time, and leave too little for reading and other important pursuits. At least it sharpens both the mental and the physical writing skills. (Y)
OK, let's assume that you've created a proper equivalency here. Let's say that conventions which are universally agreed upon are necessarily of one category (math science logic category), while conventions which are commonly debated are placed in another category, moral category. Since they are all of the same essential character, as conventions, we can say that there is likely a scale of degree separating these, such that the boundary is a sort of grey area. Or, as I prefer, some of the moral conventions such as those concerning murder and stealing, approach the level of universal acceptance, and some of the mathematical conventions, such as "imaginary numbers" are quite debatable.
If some mathematical conventions are debatable, and some moral conventions are not, as I believe from those examples, then your equivalence is not valid, and this is not what truly characterizes the categorical separation between math and morality. But let me put that issue aside, to focus on that "grey area", which makes the boundary between "universally agreed" and "debatable", because I think that determining the nature of the boundary will expose the true nature of the categories.
The grey area consists of conventions which are neither universally accepted, nor are they commonly debated. These are the conventions of common language use. They are not universally accepted, because they vary across languages, yet we simply use the ones which we are familiar with, without commonly debating them. (They are debatable though, as the discourse between Sapientia and I indicates).
Do you agree that when we accept conventions without debating them, these conventions are the ones which pass into the category of universal acceptance, and this is generally speaking, the category of math, science, logic? When we are inclined to dispute and debate conventions, these are conventions of the moral type. Does this indicate to you, as it does to me, that the conventions of the moral category are more important to us than those of the other category? We perceive them as having more influence over our lives, affecting us more, having bearing on our own personal freedoms, thus we are more inclined to dispute and debate them. So the fact that the conventions of the math category are universally accepted, is a reflection of the fact that they are inherently unimportant to us individually. Our acceptance of them has very little impact on our daily lives, so we accept them, as they are offered, without dispute. Moral conventions, on the other hand, appear to us as to have great significance over our daily lives, so we debate and dispute them, not wanting to allow someone else's principles to have control over our own lives.
So this is what I see as the true nature of these categories. One, the moral, consists of conventions which appear to have significant influence over us, and therefore we are inclined to debate them at any opportunity, and not accept them openly. The other, the science, math, logic conventions do not appear to have significant influence over our personal freedoms, they only affect the way we intellectualize, therefore we freely accept them. Then, what has happened in reality, is that the conventions of the science, math, logic category have been so universally accepted, that they have been empowered, by this universal acceptance, to actually have significant impact over us.
Yes, categories have fuzzy bounfaries. (I don't think imaginary nymbers is anywhere near such a boundary, btw.)
A major indicator of the categorical difference between established math, logic, and science claims on the one hand, and moral claims on the other, is that dispute about the truth or falsity of a math, logic, science claim, is readily resolvable by appeal to the clear, universally agreed-upon rules and standards, but there is no resolution, even in principle, for dispute about the truth or falsity of whether or not most actual instances of given behaviors are moral or immoral.
The fact that some moral prescriptions and proscriptions, such as murder and stealing, are found across many societies does not provide a way to judge whether a given instance of killing counts as "murder" or not, whether the killing was justified or not, whether there are there are mitigating factors that reduce the immorality or obviate it entirely or not, whether a preventive strike is morally warranted or not, whether a revenge murder is immoral or not, whether an instance of the taking of property counts as stealing or not, whether such taking is morally permissible or not, the cobditions under which it is morally permissable to take without permission.
Furthermore, there is unresolved dispute about whether the remedy for such behaviors is moral or not. Is it mroal to cut off the hand of a thief? Put him in prison? For how long? Hang him? Transport him to the wilds of America or Australia? Is it moral for the murderer to surrender a daughter to the family of the victim in recompense?
Dispute about any of this is not resolved by invoking a univrsally established set of rules and standards, such as those used to resolve dispute about the truth or falsity of established claims in math, logic, science.
Although it might not seem like it, I am one of those respondents who is sympathetic with his position, because I was secretly abducted by aliens only last week, and I know that for certain, but lots of people don't believe me either. I too laugh at those people, and look down upon them.
Aliens are beautiful, and Ellen Ripley just isn't.
Are all of your views based on ancient outdated philosophy? Or just some?
OK, so let's take imaginary numbers for example. I think that this is a convention which is disputable. You seem to think otherwise. Therefore it would seem that you think that my disputing them is unreasonable.
Quoting Brainglitch
To justify your claim, it should be the case that we can resolve our difference concerning imaginary numbers, by appealing to universally agreed upon standards. So let's see if we can. The square of 4 is 16. The square of -4 is 16. The square of i4 (imaginary 4) is -16. The mathematical principles and universal standards, which I go by, deny the possibility that there can be a square root of a negative number. That is because any time that a negative number is multiplied by a negative number, the result is a positive number. There is very simple logic behind this. You take a negative number, a negative amount of times, and you are always going to end up with a positive. Therefore it is impossible that a negative number has a square root, and the principle of imaginary numbers is contrary to universally agreed upon standards, and should be rejected.
However, for some reason unknown to me, some mathematicians allow this convention of imaginary numbers, which is contradictory to universally agreed upon conventions, to exist. Here's the issue, one mathematical, logical, or scientific convention may be contradictory to another convention, yet they are allowed to coexist, being used in different applications. Sure, we can appeal to universally accepted standards, and readily demonstrate contradictions, in such standards, from one field of study to another, but this will not convince those who maintain the contradictory conventions to resolve the differences, they will just claim some other reason why contradictory principles are allowed to coexist in different fields of study. Different applications require different conventions, and it doesn't matter if the conventions contradict, as long as the applications stay separate.
Quoting Brainglitch
Well that is the way such judgements are made, we have to keep referring to further principles to determine the exact specifics of any situation. Some acts of killing might not be clear cut cases of murder or not-murder, so we have to turn to further principles. It is no different in science, with the acts of measurement. If I have a hundred grams of water, this will not indicate precisely, without possibility of error, how many molecules I have. I have to turn to a more precise form of measurement, moles. But measuring the moles won't indicate without the possibility of error, how many electrons are there. So in each case, moral judgement, and scientific measurement, there are borderline cases which cause us to seek further defining principles.
Quoting Brainglitch
I think that this is a slightly different issue, it is the question of how to produce morality, the purpose of punishment. This would be similar to the question of the application of mathematical and scientific principles, the conventions by which these are applied. But contrary principles for application, in varying fields of study, would be comparable to varying punishments for the same crime.
If only monks can reproduce and confirm then that is not knowledge.
Knowledge would indicate that any person can conduct the experiment and produce the same results.
Not just monks.
My point was that there exists no method for demonstrating religious claims.
With science the reasonable skeptic can reproduce results by applying the method.
With religion the same is not true.
For example the skeptic does not necessarily have god appear before him through prayer.
It is why when you become ill or injured you go to a hospital to be treated with science rather than a monastery to be treated with prayer.
One method produces reliable results.
The other...significantly less so.
If religious methodologies were effective in reproducing results then there would be something interesting to debate.
But that this is not the case there is nothing interesting to debate.
Of course. But hospitals were originally created by religious orders.
It disagree, it is not western thinking that has honed in on such things, it is practical necessity.
This is a problem only if you are essentialist about the mathematics of complex numbers. Or - you could treat it as a consistent formalism and give it a geometric interpretation.
And at least one of those religious orders was of fighting men who trained to kill and did kill.
As valid or invalid a point as the one you brought up.
How can that be? The greatest honours go to the scientists who overthrow the most established theories. Einstein was not a heretic. Newton was not a dishonoured charlatan. Both are in the pantheon.
Give it a geometric interpretation? What do you mean by that?
Look at "Geometric interpretation" in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_number
In a formalism, the terms don't refer to anything in particular. What is important is how they relate to each other and the rules related to what sentences you can form with them. There is no "articifial" in formalisms. They just need to be consistent. They become interesting when they can be applied, like in this case to geometry. They (complex numbers) are an integral part of quantum mechanics.
In formalisms, there are no assumptions.
What they have are axioms and postulates.
Euclidean and non-euclidean geometry are both valid formalisms.
They differ over one axiom. The versions actually contradict each other. That is why "assumption" is not the word used and "axiom"/"postulate" are used instead.
In the case of geometry, is the parallel postulate false?
Give an example of a philosophical axiom that is not also a logical or mathematical axiom.
Has the parallel postulate (in geometry) been verified? Or is it false?
I see no reason to assume that the parallel postulate is false.
Quoting Frederick KOH
Not all logical axioms are mathematical axioms. The parallel postulate might be a self-evident truth, and it might be a logical axiom, but it is not mathematical, it is geometrical. Do you recognize the difference between mathematics and geometry?
What is the status then of mathematics that replace the parallel postulate with something that contradicts it?
I asked for an example of a philosophical axiom that is not also a logical or mathematical axiom. Not only do I not see the example, I see the words "logical axiom" and "mathematical axiom" in your response but no mention of philosophical axioms.
I take my leave here.