Deficiencies of Atheism
It is of course no more the ultimate aim of atheism to disprove the existence of God than it is of theism to prove same but instead the ultimate aim of each philosophy surely is to recommend a solution to the human predicament – inasmuch as each necessarily is constrained by the preconception that a solution is possible – through advocating for a means of reconciliation with our mortality. In the case of religion, such a solution is advocated via the prospect of a meaningful after-life and, in the case of atheism, via the combination of a humanist focus on realising the potential for fulfilment offered by the life experience together with the inculcation of a mature stoicism in the face of our ineluctable demise.
Setting aside the claims of religion, my objection to the prescription of atheism is that, given that the extremes of adversity possible in human life exceed what is vicariously conceivable, so then its recommendation of stoicism as a solution to our predicament is by definition platitudinous – this apart from the inconsistency, in the context of its claim to being rationally based, that it proceeds in common with religion from the fundamental preconception referred to above. The fact that in practice it would be litteraly impossible for any atheistic doctrine to escape its imprisoning adherence to such a preconception and, instead, formulate an attitude of disinterested openess towards the possibility that there may or may not in principle exist a solution to our human predicament via a valid reconciliation towards mortality serves to further undermine the credibility of the atheistic claim that its doctrine is independant of human pschycological need and ultimately rationally based.
The preconception that there must in principle exist a valid means of reconciliation with the fact of our mortality derives of course from the incomprehensibility of the alternative idea - in the face of which it would become impossible for humans to sustain a constructive existence. So it is I think striking to see the accomodations being made in both religious and atheistic arguments, sometimes subliminally, so as to engineer the required answer - that such reconciliation is possible.
But isn't my argument - that it is self-evident we are incapable of comprehending the idea that there exists in principle no way to validly reconcile ourselves to our mortality and that effectively therefore this reduces the prescriptions of atheism to a set of preconceptions - undermined by my own personal capacity here to apparantly comprehend same, in that I am arguing that this nihilism may in principle be the case? Well know, partly because I am rescued by what I privately consider to be evidence for the constructive survival of consciousness after death - but mainly because there exists of course a fundamental distinction between our ability to rationalise something and our ability to pschycologically comprehend same, this then permitting the most indefensible inconsistencies of attitude. Like I am aware, that were I personally to find myself engulfed in a sufficiently terrible predicament then, notwithstanding my absolute rational conviction that the claims of religion are litteraly false, I would nonetheless cry out to God to save me - and that with a desperateness I presently cannot vicariously suspect. If, no matter your convictions, you personally think otherwise of yourself then I would say you are mistaken.
Setting aside the claims of religion, my objection to the prescription of atheism is that, given that the extremes of adversity possible in human life exceed what is vicariously conceivable, so then its recommendation of stoicism as a solution to our predicament is by definition platitudinous – this apart from the inconsistency, in the context of its claim to being rationally based, that it proceeds in common with religion from the fundamental preconception referred to above. The fact that in practice it would be litteraly impossible for any atheistic doctrine to escape its imprisoning adherence to such a preconception and, instead, formulate an attitude of disinterested openess towards the possibility that there may or may not in principle exist a solution to our human predicament via a valid reconciliation towards mortality serves to further undermine the credibility of the atheistic claim that its doctrine is independant of human pschycological need and ultimately rationally based.
The preconception that there must in principle exist a valid means of reconciliation with the fact of our mortality derives of course from the incomprehensibility of the alternative idea - in the face of which it would become impossible for humans to sustain a constructive existence. So it is I think striking to see the accomodations being made in both religious and atheistic arguments, sometimes subliminally, so as to engineer the required answer - that such reconciliation is possible.
But isn't my argument - that it is self-evident we are incapable of comprehending the idea that there exists in principle no way to validly reconcile ourselves to our mortality and that effectively therefore this reduces the prescriptions of atheism to a set of preconceptions - undermined by my own personal capacity here to apparantly comprehend same, in that I am arguing that this nihilism may in principle be the case? Well know, partly because I am rescued by what I privately consider to be evidence for the constructive survival of consciousness after death - but mainly because there exists of course a fundamental distinction between our ability to rationalise something and our ability to pschycologically comprehend same, this then permitting the most indefensible inconsistencies of attitude. Like I am aware, that were I personally to find myself engulfed in a sufficiently terrible predicament then, notwithstanding my absolute rational conviction that the claims of religion are litteraly false, I would nonetheless cry out to God to save me - and that with a desperateness I presently cannot vicariously suspect. If, no matter your convictions, you personally think otherwise of yourself then I would say you are mistaken.
Comments (280)
1. Fundamentalism primarily uses philosophical rationalism to justify their belief.
2. Atheism primarily uses philosophical rationalism to justify their belief.
Instead of using rationalism or a priori logic, I think the smarter person or more intuitive person will use inductive reasoning in order to tip the scales in favor of a Deity.
The obvious deficiency of positive Atheism is that it's just another dogmatic religious paradigm.
Though there is the prescriptions of individuals atheists (often of the social justice, multiculti, feminist type in recent years) there is no prescriptions of atheism as such.
Here in America I don't think the term pernicious is completely accurate. Christian philosophy would suggest the opposite. Generally speaking Christian philosophy heloed to make America value freedom of choice, the Golden rule, Christmas and Thanksgiving, virtuous ethical practices (OT Wisdom Books) and other virtuous teachings of Jesus..
However that doesn't mean the Bible is free from error. Early church politics; interpretation issues, translations, lost Gospels, and all the rest still doesn't mean one should throw the baby out with the bathwater. Accordingly, the Book tips the scales in favor of thought provoking goodness.
Beyond that it leaves unanswered existential questions. One might then ask : What does atheism have to offer? Freedom to choose nihilism?
Does the paradigm of meaninglessness help the human condition?
I have no idea what you mean by 'the human condition' except perhaps as one of continuous competition and tribal strife, fuelled from time to time by parochial 'convictions', an example of which can be religious. If 'atheism' is an escape from being mentally saddled with that, so be it.
Well, that ends the conversation right there when you claim you know what the other person is actually thinking without them being aware of it themselves.
Such hubris.
Say what? What in the world is "validly reconciling oneself with the prospect of one's mentality"?
The term doesn't conventionally refer to something other than the dictionary definition, though.
If you want to make a claim about atheists often having such and such additional view that's fine, although one should probably be able to point at enough examples of it to justify "often"
The hubris in assume our predicament can be overcome just because we want it has always astonished me.
Hmmm.......I guess my predicaments weren’t sufficiently terrible? Sure seemed that way at the time.
Just how terrible does a situation have to be to demonstrate your claim that I would call out for saving?
Athiesm is not offering solutions to existential problems, nor is it an attempt at being pragmatic. Religion is not necessary for answering existential problems, any insistence on that is meaningless.
In the same light... offering solutions is not quite right either. It seems that there is a basic assumption of cohesiveness, a solidified doctrine of the atheist, so to speak. There is not. This is an error made by theists, who strive to compare/contrast and exalt various doctrines within their specific religious affiliation. Theistic existence revolves around the acceptance and internalizarion of doctrine, scripture and sp forth... various unifying elements. Atheism has no such doctrine. It is, simply put, a rejection of deity-centered beliefs and the subsequent ad nauseum doctrine that goes with said beliefs. The existence of an atheist philosopher is not the same as having a guiding belief system that is adopted, or even known, by even a fraction of atheists. It simply isn’t the same. Name an atheist philosopher and then start polling the public, how many atheists can you find that have a) heard of said philosopher and b) know and agree with their tehoretical musing. It won’t result in any unifying principles.
Without any form of representational ideology, beyond simply NOT believing in something, it cannot be said that atheists or atheism offers anything ideological, solution or otherwise. Perhaps it would be better to restate the position and refer to a specific atheist or group.
- Got to go! :)
Relevant!
That's an entirely different process from simply being atheist.
The atheist recognizes the absence of a god and an afterlife.
After that the atheist has a lot of choices about how to deal with mortality. Humanism, as you point out, is one of them. Stoicism another. Existential crisis would be another.
Personally, I don't think I'm stoical about death. I don't see it as a reason to be afraid or stoical. Being dead is being nothing, and so there's nothing to fear.
Dying, on the other hand, is kinda scary. I don't like pain and I don't like lots of the things that happen during the dying process. I'm hoping for a quick death when the time comes. Somehow I think most theists (except maybe those who think they need to practice some voodoo before death to get wherever they want to go?) would agree with me there.
In my view there are a lot of problems with this including that "everything that x represents" is every way every single individual has ever thought about x . . . which obviously isn't possible to know.
Also, I don't buy the dichotomy you're setting up between meaning and accident.
Human condition: being and becoming, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict, striving, temporalness, faith, interconnectiveness, consciousness, pacifism, wonderment, spirituality, finitude, sickness, mortality so on and so forth.
The rejection of unexplained system-wide premises degenerates in the complete inability of building systems or deriving conclusions in such system.
For example, if you do not accept the unexplained axiomatic premises of a theory of arithmetic, such as Dedekind-Peano, Robinson, Presburger, Skolem, and so on, you cannot calculate anything. Furthermore, these rules do not correspond to anything in the real, physical world. They are completely abstract and Platonic.
So, an atheist would say, "I do not believe in the existence of a successor function". Fine, but how do you generate natural numbers in that case? Atheists are completely correct to point out that there is no evidence for the existence of such successor function. That is ompletely true. However, without that kind of unexplained beliefs you will end up without theory and without any ability to reason in it.
Every criticism that atheists may have on religious systems perfectly apply to any other theoretical system. Since every axiomatic system ultimately rests on unexplained beliefs, and since science extensively uses them to maintain consistency in its own theories, the rejection of the notion of axiomatization also constitutes an implicit rejection of science.
The idea that someone refuses to accept any kind of premises to start reasoning for, constitutes in effect a complete rejection of the concept of reason itself. Atheists mistakenly believe that their views are reasonable, while they are absolutely not.
God is a system-wide premise in a religious system, i.e. a religious theory. Atheists do not seem to grok the concept of "system" or do not even understand what could be legitimate criticism of a system.
Criticizing the fact that every possible system ultimately rests on an unexplained construction logic is nonsensical and even absurd. Atheists criticize a premise simply for the mere fact of being a premise. What kind of nonsense is that?
You need to look at systemic properties such as consistency, completeness, and so on. A legitimate remark about a system could be, for example, that it is non-ergodic, or compact, or isomorphic with another system, and so on.
Atheists do not seem to be capable to reason at that level either within a system or about a system.
That is why atheist remarks are invariably dumb, unwarranted, anti-intellectual, and ultimately even an attack on reason itself. Reason is simply not possible without axiomatizing basic beliefs. Get over it!
Yes, agnostic on this and all else, thus only probability estimates remain, which may be higher for non invisibles.
But in fact God does exist. And I can prove it to all who undertake to reason ruthlessly.
For instance, would you acknowledge that there are prescriptions of reason? Would you acknowledge that this argument form is valid:
1. P
2. Q
3. Therefore P and Q
And that the validity of this argument consists of no more or less than a prescription of reason to believe 3 if 1 and 2 are true?
It requires a system of 14 axioms, i.e. 14 unexplained beliefs, to make propositional logic possible in the first place. Without such system of unexplained beliefs, there simply is no logic. Any attempt at further justifying these 14 unexplained beliefs must be deemed ridiculous, pointless, and utmost ineffective. The construction logic of logic itself, i.e. the metalogic, simply materializes out of the blue. Since atheists reject the very principle of unexplained belief, they also reject logic. Hence, atheists are not logical.
There is nothing more stupid than attacking a system merely because it ultimately rests on unexplained beliefs, given the fact that all systems are like that, including logic itself.
Atheists (any I know about) don't reject the very principle of unexplained belief. Atheists don't believe in God. It's as simple as that. You don't believe in God (some of them) too I take it. No one is rejecting all beliefs, simply the ones which they do not find useful, compelling, coherent, or appealing in any way.
Truth ain't a democracy.
Say what?
Indeed! I too, don't understand that rationale. I mean, there is plenty in the world that is unexplainable...including our own conscious existence. There does seem to be some commonalities though:
Fundamentalism: condemnatory extreme
Atheism (positive): condemnatory extreme
Since we're talking about 'deficiencies', it's certainly ok to critique things. In the alternative, I would think Agnosticism would be more of an 'intellectual' pursuit than positive Atheism and/or extreme Fundamentalism.
In other words, if all one is doing is attacking the Ontological argument, that's really not too smart.
What do the Atheist's think about Taoism?
Agreed, and the worst is that they think that they are going to use logic for that, which is a system of which we cannot possibly explain the reason for its basic rules. The axioms of logic just appear out of the fricking blue.
The same problem occurs in standard arithmetic, where we simply assume the 9 unexplained, speculative, unjustifiable and highly arbitrary axiomatic rules of Dedekind-Peano. They just happen to land out of nowhere!
We assume so many things, and we simply cannot explain why we do that. Seriously, these people adopt that rationale only because they don't know what they are talking about. It is sheer ignorance!
My thoughts exactly. And I was already thinking about mathematics and abstract concepts. Nobody knows why they are so effective in cosmology and science, yet we just assume...………what?
Plato already complained about that. So, he wrote that allegory of the cave. There may be a good reason why we only see Platonic-cave shadows. It may even be necessary to maintain our sanity:
If, however, we were to miraculously escape our bondage, we would find a world that we could not understand—the sun is incomprehensible for someone who has never seen it. In other words, we would encounter another "realm", a place incomprehensible because, theoretically, it is the source of a higher reality than the one we have always known; it is the realm of pure Form, pure fact.
Mathematics has highly-Platonic ontological elements but the link with our reality is not particularly understood. That is one reason why we avoid using it directly in reference to the real, physical world. Dealing with that, is the job of downstream users of mathematics, such as science (undoubtedly the flagship user of mathematics). Of course, these downstream users will ultimately not be able to avoid the problem either.
You're trying to logic your way out of logic. It's not going to work.
Well no. It is possible to talk about logic as an abstract system. You can certainly look at what happens when you change the axioms of logic. That is in fact what the Hilbert calculi do.
Of course, at that point you will end up with the same problem as in Gödel's work, i.e. the fact that you must carefully distinguish between the rules of the system being studied versus the rules of the system with which you study it (the meta-system); which is incredibly tricky:
Metamathematics is the study of mathematics itself using mathematical methods. This study produces metatheories, which are mathematical theories about other mathematical theories. Emphasis on metamathematics (and perhaps the creation of the term itself) owes itself to David Hilbert's attempt to secure the foundations of mathematics in the early part of the 20th century. Metamathematics provides "a rigorous mathematical technique for investigating a great variety of foundation problems for mathematics and logic" (Kleene 1952, p. 59). An important feature of metamathematics is its emphasis on differentiating between reasoning from inside a system and from outside a system.
So, it can be done, and it has been done extensively, but it is indeed full of gotchas.
Arguing against logic using logic will inevitably lead to the equivalent of saying "this sentence is a lie."
Artemis! Are you saying that there is unresolved paradox in the world?
Why would you say such a thing?
Just a quirk of the abstract and constructed nature of language. You can say a lot of paradoxical things, and none of them actually exist, because paradoxes cannot exist. Like pink, invisible unicorns.
How do you know pink unicorns don't exist in some other world?
Ok, using your logic, which statement do you believe is true:
1. All events must have a cause
2. This statement is a lie
They don't exist, because they would be paradoxical.
1. Is true. And before you get all "Critique of Pure Reason" on me, the limits of our perception/understanding as to how far back time and events go is a reason for further scientific inquiry, not for tossing logic out the window. Occam's Razor and all.
Artemis, have you read alcontali's Philosophy of Mathematics link? What do you think?
Wow, that's progress! So 1. You're saying is true. Can you tell me why you are wondering that?
Lol on the Kantian joke :)
I think whether you're talking about logic or metalogic, you're still forced to employ logic.
I'm not opposed to finding flaws in parts of the system. But some basics are irrefutable. A is A, and A is not not-A, etc.
Of course, those flaws would only be found with logic, the flaw would be shown to be not-logic, and the solution or fix would again be logic.
This is false. In my case, at least. I use rational thinking to prove TENETS, particular tenets, and the teaching of the Scriptures to prove they are wrong. I point at self-contradictions.
But a god belief I can't disprove. Nor can any theist prove a god existence.That is a futile task.
Now if you talk about the Bible, and the Christian god, it and his descriptions are so full of holes and self-contradictions that in my opinion only a fool (not an idiot, but a fool) would believe in the existence of a god Christianity describes.
Aside from that, I state that religions need to make scientific findings that are undeniable by even the most fundamental believers, compatible with the scriptures. The solution? Dumbing down the science teaching in the world's technologically most advanced nation, because it happens to be the largest body of most concentrated Christian believers. THIS IS ONE MORE REASON I FIGHT AGAINST RELIGIONISM.
A priori proofs only exist in atheist thinking when the atheist points at bible self-contradictions. In a way, the bible says "X is X and not X", and the astute atheist only has to have a superficial reading and he can point these a priori falsehoods out.
Easy does it.
Or there could be a metaphysical logic ( only concept that makes sense there) that exists in the form of a novel formula.
P and-p describes how consciousness and subconsciousness works together no?
No.
It would still have to be logical.
Quoting 3017amen
No.
Jinx! :wink:
You're using rationalism to disprove EOG no?
And self reference unresolved paradox exist yes?
A-ah. No speaking in tongues around here, please.
Paradox is singular. Therefore your verb should have the form "exists".
P and-p describes how consciousness and subconsciousness works together no?
— 3017amen
No.
Really, please explain consciousness then LOL
We're waiting????
You're using rationalism to disprove EOG no?
And self reference unresolved paradox exists yes?
As long as you explain first the unification theory between quantum mechanics and relativity theory.
Who the hell are you to tell me what to do? Are you my boss? No. So I do expect the courtesy and respect that you don't treat me like I were your subordinate.
Don't task me, please.
Are you angry now?
Consciousness and subconsciousness are as non-contradictory as a duck swimming on a lake. The legs are moving, but you can't see them, all you see is the body. It's still a unified whole.
There is no love. God is love.
Therefore I have faith. Therefore I practice.
This is called 'practical reason'. Lawyers and judges believe in law and order despite, and because of, knowing that the world is chaotic and anarchic. Doctors seek to preserve life, despite and because of knowing that all men are mortal.
Atheism is inadequate because it is not worth dying for.
I wouldn't die for your god, either. It's not worth it.
Quoting unenlightened
The world WOULD be chaotic and anarchic without law and order.
Quoting unenlightened
I am not sure if all doctors have the same motivation to practice medicine. I see a lot of deaths in the United States that could have been prevented by proper medical care, which would have happened if the doctors actually practiced what YOU preach.
There is love. If you don't find it outside of God, it's not god's fault or the atheists'. Others do have love without involving god or the notion of a god image. You extrapolated from yourself, and at the same time admitted that you are not a loving person, or wouldn't be, if you did not believe in god. That is a pretty strong statement of your natural abilities and the lack of your inclination for compassion.
Fine, die for nothing, then.
Sorry, that sounds a bit harsh, doesn't it. but I don't know how to put it kindly.
Are you sure? No one can seem to resolve this paradox, using your logic:
Socrates: " What Plato is about to say is false."
Plato: "Socrates has just spoken truly."
Which statement is true?
Seems like a false dichotomy to me. Either god or nothing is worth dying for?
The people you love are worth living and dying for to most people, I would think.
That's not a paradox. It just means one of them is mistaken or lying.
Edit: misread it.
I already answered that: it's just a linguistic quirk that you can say all sorts of crazy things that have no bearing on reality.
Are you sure? When a person daydreams while driving, causing a crash, how does that happen?
Was their subconscious daydreaming, or was it their conscious?
Probably a bit of both.
Oh I see.
1. Is this statement a lie?
How does that work? Both suggests P and -P.
I must be mistaken...
That's not a statement, it's a question.
Erm, can I just highlight the 'love' there? Did you think I was talking about some ectoplasmic emanation?
1. This statement is a lie.
Is that better?
No, it doesn't. The brain multi-tasks. It can do many things at once. Like I can rub my belly and pat my head at the same time. Or play the melody and bass line on the piano at the same time.
Love doesn't entail god.
Ok, then answer this: did my consciousness daydream or my subconsciousness daydream, while driving the car?
You keep on doing the same thing, so I'll jus shorthand it for ya: linguistic quirk.
I answered that: probably a bit of both. They work together.
We are waiting for both of you to prove something, but you got nothing. Your logic could not answer those questions. Mmmmmmm, sounds like Atheism isn't as logical as you thought, no?
Ok, then answer this: did my consciousness daydream or my subconsciousness daydream, while driving the car?
— 3017amen
I answered that: probably a bit of both. They work together
But how?
God is love.
Actually, I did, and you're just refusing to engage it. That not only shows you've lost the argument, but that you're kind of a bad (and impolite) interlocutor.
If you want to define god as love so that you can continue using that random word for whaatever reason, go ahead. But that means god is just an emotion and not a conscious entity, creator of the universe, or an independent existence in any way.
I'll keep asking you to prove your point. How does consciousness and subconsciousness work together, as you keep saying. Please tell everyone. tick tock tick tock
What is Love?
So that's just rude.
1. I'll keep asking you to prove your point. How does consciousness and subconsciousness work together, as you keep saying(?).
2. What is Love?
3. This statement is a lie.
Can you explain at least one of these please? (Are these deficiencies in Atheism?)
So, for example, I have now 3 or 4 times explained 3 and you keep just ignoring what I say. On that basis, and your unapologetic rudeness (which leads me to believe you either can't handle the discussion or you're just a troll) there's no point in responding any further.
I'm sorry you want to end the debate. I'm expecting you, as an Atheist who's values logic, would be able explain them. In keeping with the OP, is this one deficiency?
Are you acquiescing to the unexplained?
I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make him understand logical arguments.
Robert, with respect to one of your questions, I could be wrong, but it appears Atheism has no answer/explanation for these questions/phenomena occurring in life:
1. I'll keep asking you to prove your point. How does consciousness and subconsciousness work together, as you keep saying(?).
2. What is Love?
3. This statement is a lie. (True or False.)
Can you explain at least one of these please? (Are these deficiencies in Atheism?)
Why do you ask questions when you're clearly not interested in the answers?
I'm waiting... ? Do you think GMBAA could explain it better?
Do you always ignore the things your interlocutors actually say?
No, I'm listening, waiting, and excited that you might be able to explain how the human consciousness and subconsciousness work together?
Or how about question number 2. Love. Is that easier?
Not until you respond to answers I've already, repeatedly given you :kiss:
1. I'll keep asking you to prove your point. How does consciousness and subconsciousness work together, as you keep saying(?).
2. What is Love?
3. This statement is a lie. (True or False.)
Can you explain at least one of these please? (Are these deficiencies in Atheism?)
You're trolling.
I'm asking you direct questions. And you are politically deflecting them.
You ignore my answers and then you ignore my criticism of you ignoring my answers. Just in order to ask the same question over and over. Trolltrolltroll.
The more interesting question to ask here is: how does God explain any of those?
Not because they do.not have explanations or need God to be explained, but rather to question the entire approach for handling unknown questions. What explanatory power could "God did it" or "My religion says so" ever have in this context? It's simply stating a relation of concepts, no more explanatory than if we said "atoms did it", "brains did it" or "2+2=4 did it."
God is always cheap herebecause God is literally anything and everything. Being other to the finite instances we are trying to describe, it never says much interesting about how things came to be or what they are. Just silly humans struggling to come to terms with self-existence by shifting it into something else.
I'm desperately trying to make sense out of your logic. Thus far this is what you're leaving me with:
1. If Artemis is God, she can answer my questions.
2. She cannot answer my questions.
3. Therefore, she is not God.
Absurd?
Are you trying to use a priori logic to 'disprove' God's existence? Of course that's a rhetorical question...
I would think in your case, Apophatic theology, would be a more intellectual approach. Or harder yet, inductive reasoning, I'm thinking would likely pose more hurdles for the positive Atheist I'm sure.
Otherwise what I'm hearing you say is Fundamentalism v. Atheism all over again. No?
I will go ahead, thanks. But it is not random and I have not invented it. It is a mainstream tradition. And obviously, it is not an emotion. And I have already said I am not even interested in "existence" in this context. But apart from that , excellent response.
If you define a god as a magic man in the sky that exists and for whom there can be evidence, I will join you in your scepticism. But that is not what sensible people mean.
In a way... but less trying to disprove an existing God (that's a space for emprical questions and answers), than showing that the a priori infinite being posed as God cannot exist/give account of finite beings.
...sure...an unchanging Being in a deterministic/contingent world is not logically possible (but neither are my questions sort of speak).
Thus:
1. If TW of D is God, he/she can answer my questions.
2. He/She cannot answer my questions.
3. Therefore, he/she is not God.
None of these have to do with theism or atheism.
You might as well ask what is gravity, who invented the cursor and why do stars shine.
You stick to these three questions as if they were meaningful or a way to prove a point.
You can ask meaningless questions, questions that don't have any relevance, questions that are completely incongruent with the topic, but don't expect any replies.
For instance: the topic at hand is, "deficiencies of atheism". What is Love? Why would it support a deficiency of atheism? or refute the deficiency of atheism? It's not even a claim, but a question. It has no truth value. It is not an argument or a point.
This statement is a lie. If it's true, it's false, and if it's false, then it's true. This in support of your point of denying the deficiency in atheism, or your argument in support of deficiencies of atheism? "This statement is a lie" has nothing to do with anything. You are sticking to these utterances because you can, but you have given no reason why they support or reject the claim expressed in the topic.
Why do you do this, @3017amen? You are -- I am sorry to say so, but it is true -- becoming and acting like a troll. You carried these pointless three utterances for a number of pages now, for no reason, no consideration, and you yourself don't know why.
Putting meaningless posts and riling others, as well as giving others tasks, as well as being cockey about the whole thing, is a typical troll behaviour. I think it's time to call in the judges.
Then you don't speak English. Or have misconnected ideals of concepts.
There is a HUGE difference between "Artemis is politically deflecting them" and "@3017amen keeps ignoring her answers. " Time to learn the difference.
It is very frustrating for a debating opponent when the opposite party keeps ignoring the points. The opposite party in this scenario is either stupid, or malicious, or both. And stupidity + malice is what defines a troll.
IN my opinion, you are perfect natural specimen of what constitutes a troll, @3017amen. You ask irrelevant questions; you demand, nay, command an answer of those who are not obliged to; and when they answer you, you ignore their answers.
You are a humongously malicious, enormously reasonless, multi-story high troll, in my opinion. You are impervious to logic, to responses, to anything said to you.
How else would YOU describe your own behaviour, @3017amen?
This I find more in support of atheism than any strong argument made for it by a true atheist.
In other news: Atheists are not denying the possibility of the existence of god. We just don't believe it exists. We can't prove god's non-existence with any more validity than theists can prove its existence.
:cheer: :100:
Time for my new thread showing not a disproof but an unlikeliness of 'God'.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6817/an-estimate-for-no-god
"None of these have to do with theism or atheism."
Yes they do. They are Existential analogies to highlight your flawed logic.
They are important questions that have puzzled philosophers throughout the years. And no one has yet answered those.
So it begs the question, if Atheism can't answer those deep, pragmatic questions of existence, how can it prove that God doesn't exist?
A pretty simple point, no?
Atheism does not address the question "Does god exist, or does god not exist".
It addresses the truth-values of theism, starting first with it's sin qua non fundamental claims on reality.
Theism is false, therefore god does not exist. Inexplicable "Gods" with no claims/predicates are irrelevant to atheism.
People are arguing the wrong thing. As usual.
Quoting Bartricks
Doubt it.
Quoting 3017amen
A. The one question "What is love?" has been answered satisfactorily. So has the question by your, "how do the conscious and the subconscious exist together?" The third is not a question. You have to be able to tell what a quesion is. You are unable to do so.
B. The lack or presence of an answer has no bearing on the deniability of atheism. Remember, atheism says, no more, no less, "I don't believe in god."
C. You have to tie "They are Existential analogies to highlight your flawed logic." to "I don't believe a god exists". That's a pretty tall order. I doubt you can do it.
D. There is no logic to "I don't believe in god" any more or less than to "I believe in god."
E. "if Atheism can't answer those deep, pragmatic questions of existence, how can it prove that God doesn't exist" Again, the umpteenth time for your edification: Atheists can't prove that God does not exist. Theists can't prove that god exists. Atheists are simply on the opinion, or belief, that there is no god or gods.
F. "A pretty simple point, no?" You are so far away from logical thinking and philosophical insight, that you can't even see your nose, in my opinion. If you ask for philosophical insight, and you ignore it, because you can't understand it, then please don't claim victory. If you can' t understand my point in E., then what can you? Probably as much as buttered bread is good, getting hit on the head by a fly ball is bad. I wouldn't venture any further into understanding life's deep, long, unanswerable questions if I were you. And I would definitely not draw conclusions from incongruent analogies.
I won't bother you with questions, I'll just do it and remove your doubts.
1. There are existing prescriptions of reason
2. Any existing prescription is the prescription of an existing person, a subject, a mind (I use those terms interchangeably).
3. Therefore, the existing prescriptions of reason are prescriptions of an existing person, a subject, a mind.
4. The prescriptions of reason are not prescriptions of mine, or yours, or any of ours
5. Therefore, the existing prescriptions of reason are prescriptions of an existing person who is not any of us.
That argument is valid and its assumptions seem, to me anyway, to be beyond question. One can't coherently raise a reasonable doubt about assumption 1 without involving oneself in a practical contradiction.
Assumption 2 enjoys 'default true' status, and so the burden of proof is one anyone who wishes to deny it to provide an uncontroversial example of a prescription that lacks entirely any person as its issuer.
3 is entailed by 1 and 2.
4 is self-evidently true. If I insist that 2 + 3 = 6 that will not mean there is any reason to believe it. And as it applies to every one of us, it narrows the scope of whose prescriptions the prescriptions of reason could be to one person: her. Which is what 5 says.
The prescriptions of reason are the prescriptions of a person: Reason.
This person - the person of Reason - is omnipotent. Why? Because there's nothing higher than Reason. She is not bound even by the laws of logic, for those laws are ones she herself writes. There is therefore literally nothing she cannot do - which is just what it is to be omnipotent.
This person is also omniscient, because for a belief to qualify as an item of knowledge it must be justified. And 'justified' just means 'endorsed by Reason'. She is, the, the sole arbiter of knowledge and is therefore omniscient.
This person - the person of Reason - is also morally good. This is because moral values are the values of Reason. And Reason, being omnipotent, is going to be as she values being. Thus, Reason is morally good because she values being exactly as she is.
There. Reason is an omnipotent, omniscient, morally good person and she exists. Proof: done.
Interestingly, the noun 'person' is derived from the Greek 'persona', derived from 'the masks worn by dramatists'.
I think the theological idea of the 'person-hood' of God, is not that God is 'a person' but is only understandable as 'a being' or 'being' as distinct from some thing or force or energy. And, according to Christian theology, this being manifested as a person, but once, and only once, in the person of Jesus Christ.
Quoting Bartricks
'to me anyway' is a bit of a [s]cheap trick[/s] rhetorical dodge, isn't it? For an argument to be valid, it ought to be valid to all and any - otherwise we're no longer engaging in a debate, but a matter of personal conviction.
Quoting Wayfarer
Er, no, the exact opposite. All you're doing is expressing your personal conviction - your personal conviction that the argument is invalid. What I'm doing is reasoning. It is not my personal conviction that God exists. God demonstrably exists.
But you said the argument 'seems to me' valid, and by so doing you declare it a matter of personal conviction.
Look, it seems to me that 2 + 2 = 4. That doesn't mean it's a matter of personal conviction. That itself is poor reasoning. It seems to me that there's a chair to my left. That doesn't mean whether there's a chair to my left is matter of personal conviction. I do have the personal conviction that there's a chair to my left, but chairs are not made of personal convictions (hence why I'll fall over it no matter how convinced I am that it is not there).
Likewise, for truths of reason. It is my personal conviction that this argument is valid:
1. P
2. Q
3. Therefore P and Q
But that doesn't mean it's validity is a matter of personal conviction. It's valid regardless of whether I think it is.
that's the thing about reality. Our faculties - ultimately via our faculty of reason - give us insight into how it is. But they don't compose it.
But a certain sort of person - one who is fundamentally opposed to philosophy proper and just treats it as kind of self-indulgent exercise in self-expression - thinks otherwise.
The argument I made is valid. Someone who thinks it is invalid just because that's their hunch is not someone I want to debate with - not until or unless they can show me, by appeal to self-evident truths of reason, that it is invalid.
Invalid argument. Nothing demonstrated or warranted. 4 contradicts 2. Bizarre anthropomorphic projection fetishes onto reason.
Theists are weird. They need god to exist, it's definitely bizarre.
Seems to me that you tar a lot of people with that brush.
Going back to your original claim that there is:
Quoting Bartricks
This is one of your axioms, right? You say 'if P' - but 'P' in this case refers to this proposition. And I think there are very many grounds to question that on. You have repeatedly stated that 'reason is a person', but again, I can't see any compelling grounds, either logical or empirical, to accept that.
And it's also the case that you can form a valid syllogism on the basis of fallacious axioms - 'if all men are monkeys, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is a monkey' is a valid syllogism, but it's a fallacious argument, because the initial premise is fallacious.
You are talking about an 'agent' like the rest of theists, it is no different from the rest of theists. Your argument is invalid. Atheism addresses the fundamentals.
1. The entirety of existence was created by an immaterial 'being' (agent).
2. Immaterial interacts with material.
3. Immaterial 'being' (agent) created and/or is 'morality', objective morality, etc etc.
Etc., etc.
Your argument is ridiculous and does not demonstrate a "god" ... only that an "agent" is around that you deem 'God'.
It's true of a lot of people. You think ruthless followers of reason are the norm or the exception?
Quoting Wayfarer
that's because you don't recognise a valid argument when you see one.
I have not said that Reason is a person, I have demonstrated that she is by means of a valid argument whose premises are true beyond reasonable doubt.
Once more I am doing the exact opposite of what you say.
I am not expressing convictions. I am arguing.
It's difficult. Try it.
Welp, on that one, I'm out of here.
Good luck everyone else.
Quoting Swan
Well, I never realized it was that easy and quick to cook a Swan. And what a disappointingly thin flavour, I must say.
It's only difficult because you - and only you - recognise your own arguments. You take it that when others don't want to play in your bathwater, that you've 'beaten' them. Run along, now.
This is valid:
1. There are existing prescriptions of reason
2. Any existing prescription is the prescription of an existing person, a subject, a mind (I use those terms interchangeably).
3. Therefore, the existing prescriptions of reason are prescriptions of an existing person, a subject, a mind.
4. The prescriptions of reason are not prescriptions of mine, or yours, or any of ours
5. Therefore, the existing prescriptions of reason are prescriptions of an existing person who is not any of us.
Can't you see that?
Any living cat is a mammal. Any living mammal has a heartbeat. Therefore, all living cats have heartbeats. Yes? Or do you think that's poor reasoning? Poor, or good?
Now, I'd say that's good reasoning. You'd say "that's just your conviction". Unbelievable!
It's a valid argument. If you can't see that it is valid, then you've got problems.
Well, it is a little bit more elaborate than that.
First, you have that strange conclusion that occurs when you represent sentences as numbers. For every predicate that is calculable about numbers, there exists a sentence that says that it satisfies that predicate.
So, if "green" is calculable, then there will be a sentence provable in such system that says:
I am green.
The corollary is true as well. There will be a sentence provable in such system that says:
I am not green.
That is the notorious Gödel-Carnap diagonal lemma.
Its proof is purely syntactic. Up till now, nobody has been able to produce an intuitive interpretation for this. It is just four or five entirely correct steps in a strange reasoning, and voila, there it is. In the field of metamathematics, you really need good resistance against syntactically correct propositions that otherwise sound nonsensical.
Still, as a side note, propositional logic is just a system of 14 arbitrary beliefs that correspond with absolutely nothing at all in the real, physical world. It is an abstract, Platonic world in itself. Therefore, we should not be surprised that syntactic conclusions in that world mean nothing to us or correspond to nothing we can identify with. In fact, that should rather be expected.
So, from there on, Gödel famously went on to show that provability is just a relation between numbers (=theorems/conclusions) and other numbers (=a set of sentences that proves such theorem), and that therefore, the following sentence is necessarily provable in such system:
I am not provable.
That sentence is also logically true. So, Gödel's first incompleteness theorem created a first consternation about the limitations of logic. Next, Tarski used the same system to show that another sentence would be provable in such system:
I am not true.
However, the problem can still be fixed by disallowed the definition of a "true" predicate in arithmetic. Hence, Tarski's famous undefinability theorem: truth cannot be defined in a system of arithmetic. That is forbidden.
So, yes, the liar sentence plays an important role in Tarski's undefinability theorem. Still, it is not insurmountable. Just ban the practice that allows it to emerge in your system.
Quoting Bartricks
I have not heard the expression 'prescriptions of reason'. But the word 'prescription' (leaving aside the medical use of the term) is defined as 'a recommendation that is authoritatively put forward' (e.g. "effective prescriptions for sustaining rural communities").
All such prescriptions have originated from someone, ultimately dependent on the introduction of laws, edicts, and the like, presumably in the early phases of civilized culture, and dependent upon the existence of written language and the concept of law..
So a naturalistic objection would be that prior to the development of such domains of discourse, no such prescriptions existed, and it would be meaningless to speak of the 'prescriptions of reason' outside that context. In other words, while it is true that the existence of 'prescriptions of reason' might not be dependent on my mind or yours, they are nevertheless dependent on there having been human agents that devised such laws, and are not, therefore, dependent on the existence of an abstract 'person' known as 'reason'.
@Swan, you've seen the oldest bar trick in the trick bag of @Bartrick. The trick involves denying any and all necessities to adhere to logic or reason. Drinking buddies' argument.
You did well in pulling out. If your brick wall does not accept your argument, you leave it there, the argument, and the brick wall, and you go on to do other things.
Take a course in critical thinking.
Here's a question you might encounter on an IQ test: if all As are Bs, and all Bs are Cs, are all As Cs?
What's the answer?
Yes, all prescriptions have some person or persons behind them. But that just confirms my second premise, which says precisely that.
So I am unclear which premise you are disputing.
When you suggest that prescriptions cannot exist absent human discourse you beg the question. Prescriptions do not require humans, they require minds. For it is in virtue of having minds that we can issue prescriptions. And what enables us to develop a discourse in which we are able to express our preferences to one another is precisely that we all have the language of reason to appeal to.
So you're just assuming that all prescriptions have to be human prescriptions and that humans can develop languages without the assistance of reason.
But that's mistaken, as my argument shows. To challenge my argument you need to show one of its premises to be false, or at least to raise some reasonable doubt about one. But so far you have not.
It pains me to say this, but I think I'm in agreement.
You cannot do that with reason. You can only use reason to verify -- and not to discover -- what is provable.
We are now long past the idea that "true" and "provable" are even related to each other.
Seriously, that misconception was abandoned after Gödel's famous lecture at the Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences on 5–7 September 1930 in Königsberg.
You are almost 100 years behind now.
Well said !
Alas some members rely on pedantry as an excuse for ignorance of the literature.
:lol:
In context, I suggest to you that the commandment "Love thy neighbour" is not a command to have an emotion, but a command to act.
How would you know how to act in that situation if the actions are not motivated by particular emotions?
I dare say that every act must be motivated by an emotion, - that is tenable. What is not tenable is that the commandment is to have an emotion and not to perform an action. So it must surely be the case that the word refers both to an emotion and to the actions that flow from it, and that this is not something I have made up on a whim, but a long tradition.
I think the method of criticism that uses rigid definitions that clearly cannot be meaningfully applied to the usages that are being criticised is rather weak. It is much more interesting and revealing to look for an interpretation that makes sense than to defeat another understanding without understanding it.
Yeah, I agree with that. I'd say that part of what that particular emotion entails is that you perform certain sorts of actions towards the object of the emotion, otherwise you don't really have that emotion.
You mean, fuck my neighbour. That directly bang head-on contradicts another commandment, "Do not fornicate".
But you can act and I do act all the acts that point to an uninformed observer that I love my neighbour, while I do not love my neighbour.
The commandment is wrongly worded. In fact, the entire Roman Catholic cathecism (sp?) is replete with imperatives to have this emotion or that emotion. Or that just thinking about a sin is a sin. They don't say "thinking about a sin with the intention of sinning"... no, that would make too much sense, they realize their own stupidity, whoever wrote it, and the stupidity of their readers, so they use the simplified version, and omit the "intention" part.
The whole thing makes me puke. They, the religious, when presented with a fact, rather alter the fact than adjust their theory. I think that's sick.
---------------------------------
A typical conversation between a Christian police man and a Christian man, both of whom obey the ten commandments to the letter and to the spirit:
"Love thy neighbour."
"I'm loving him already! I am just gouging his eyes out because I do love him."
"Oh, it's okay then, I guess."
Someone could interpret your actions in a manner that doesn't match your motivations, sure.
I wasn't following the whole discussion by the way. I just saw the stuff about whether love is an emotion.
You said : "Atheists are simply on the opinion, or belief, that there is no god or gods."
So what is your belief or opinion based upon?
I understand you are frustrated, but this has been the point from the beginning. I am attempting to make you think about those existential questions using your logic.
Let me help you. Your response should be something like..'....based upon this, that, and the other analogy from science, psychology, philosophy, et.al., I have reasonably concluded God does not exist.'
Thus far, I have not read anything from you that provides logical justification for your belief system.
Your answers do not describe things in themselves. In other words, they do not provide any meaning to the nature of our existence.
It's based on different things to different atheists. There's no one common justification for all of them. All that atheists have in common is the lack of a belief in the existence of any gods.
For me, my atheism is based on (a) the incoherence and absurdity of religious claims, including the notion of gods and supposed properties they'd have, primarily from an ontological perspective, and (b) the fact that there's nothing that I'd even remotely consider evidence of a god empirically.
It's not just gods that I make this judgment about. Pretty much anything where both there's zero empirical evidence for it AND where the very idea of it is incoherent I'm going to say doesn't exist.
Yep, totally get that. And I feel that pain. Once again, a priori logic rears its ugly head there (not that that's always bad of course ie, mathematical truth's, and so on...). So yes, Fundamentalism in many ways gives God a bad name.
But here's where the deficiency lies. You said empirical truth's, more or less, are not persuading you or most atheist's into a belief in a Deity (I take it Taoism too, but am not sure what you think there).
Empircism, phenomenology, psychology and even physical science would suggest more evidence of a creator than no-thing at all. Right? Do we want examples?
Here's an obvious one that has perplexed philosophers: why do we have two ways to avoid falling objects?
Same as god worshippers' belief in god. Go away already, nincompoopsie. You are so stupid in my opinion, that it is of no use to tell you anything enlightening. You are incapable of understanding logic, reason, and connected reasoning. You have shown it in many, many posts. You have also shown that you don't read responses to the questions you ask, and you don't apply them to your thinking. People who respond to you can get a better (and certainly less irritating) response from a brick wall than from you. You are stupoid and you are malevolent. I don't want to talk to you. You are way below the level of the minimum acceptable standard of intelligent discourse, in my opinion, of this forum. Furthermore, because of your stupidoity and ignorance and bad manners you behave like a troll. I don't talk to trolls. Sorry.
I WILL NEVER AGAIN RESPOND TO YOUR QUESTIONS, INQUIRIES, CLAIMS AND STATEMENTS, AS IF I HAVE PUT YOU IN IGNORE, @3017amen. YOU ARE NOT WORTHY OF RESPONDING TO IN MY OPINION, AND IF THIS SITE HAD AN "IGNORE" FUNCTION, YOU'D BE THE FIRST ONE I WOULD PUT ON IT FOR MYSELF.
Well sorry you feel that way. Your choice.
In fairness, if you could answer at least one of those existential questions, we might could learn something.
I've tried to help you, but I see you are frustrated.
Be well.
Re "or most atheists," I wasn't speaking for anyone else.
Re my second point, "there's nothing that I'd even remotely consider evidence of a god empirically," obviously then, there are no facts of physical science, psychology, etc. that I'd consider to be anything even remotely in the vicinity of evidence of a god.
It's probably important to keep in mind that it's not as if I think that the notion of a god is at all plausible and thus worth considering, where I then go, "hmmm . . . well, such and such sways me this way rather than that way." Rather, the notion of a god strikes me as incoherent gobbledygook that insane people came up with. That's exacerbated by the fact that I knew very little of the idea of gods, religion, etc. until I was in my mid-teens. So at the point where I finally learned something about what people believed, I couldn't believe that they weren't putting me on, because it just seemed to ridiculous to me, and it still does.
But sure, if you want to list a couple things that you take to be good evidence, go ahead.
Quoting 3017amen
What's perplexing me is that you're saying that that has ever perplexed anyone. What sorts of big falling object threats are you even thinking of, first off?
At any rate, I certainly don't take the fact that things can and do move to be good evidence of a god. That seems like an insane idea to me instead.
So if I love to walk and I break my leg or become tired, I must not love walking any more? I cannot love to be out in the hills when confined to bed?
Quoting god must be atheist
Indeed! Fake it 'til you make it is a thing too, and there is a famous C15th book, "The Imitation of Christ" that gives this some pedigree.
There are loving feelings and there are loving acts and neither entails the other inevitably; this much is inescapable without doing violence to the language. Not much follows from this except that the criticisms based on a rigid definition fail. But I can invite you to consider with a slightly more open mind what I might have meant by this:
Perhaps it is not too controversial to say that perfection is usually unobtainable. Engineers have the notion of tolerance, which they measure. Parts of a machine are made to an imperfect fit and even the measure of imperfection is imperfect. And you will be familiar at least with the formal, or ideal realm of Plato. In his dualism, the ideal and the material are opposed, and the ideal is real and the material illusory. And I hope you have enough sense not to just dismiss Plato as not worth considering.
So I say, to the materialist in his engineer's world, that love is an ideal, and does not exist in his world except as an unrealised unrealisable idea. And just as the engineer strives for an exactitude he knows is unobtainable, so one can strive for a love that is unobtainable and that is the 'heart' of the Christian tradition. And very very crap they are in most cases at reaching anywhere near it.
Well first off, thank you for taking the time to respond in a reasonable fashion.
Secondly, I'm not here to prove the existence of God. I'm a Christian Existentialist. ( I am obviously participating in this thread to offer my observations on the deficiencies of atheism.)
Nonetheless, I enjoy exploring the mysteries associated with our human existence. Accordingly, to give that example you asked, of a mysterious or perplexing question:
1. Abstract mathematical laws of gravity allow us to calculate falling objects.
2. Our consciousness (perception, sensorial/spacial knowledge) allows us to avoid falling objects.
The mystery is, why do we have this dual capacity to know the world? What evolutionary advantages are there to such intellectual, abstract knowledge like mathematics/the laws of gravity? (How does one spring from the other.)
Different sense of the term. So we'd be equivocating a la "If I value freedom, then I can't charge anything for the hot dogs I'm selling??"
Let's talk about Love.
Is love a subjective or objective truth?
First, something doesn't have to be an evolutionary advantage to persist. It only has to not be enough of an evolutionary disadvantage that it gets "bred out" of a species.
Consciousness, reasoning have survival advantages to us, because we evolved into the sorts of creatures that can't easily survive to reproduce purely by autonomic functions. Our consciousness and reasoning enables us to live long enough to reproduce. (Mathematics, by the way, is just a way of reasoning, mostly via extrapolation, about relations that we observe.)
Propositions are what are true or false. "Love" isn't a proposition. (A proposition is a statement about something.)
On my view truth is subjective, but to explain why, I have to get into the standard view of what truth is in analytic philosophy. It's not a norm in analytic philosophy to consider truth to be subjective, but the standard view of what truth is in analytic philosophy has the upshot, on my view, of making truth something that only obtains subjectively.
Are you saying it devolved out of consciousness and/or is somehow just an unexplained extra feature of existence?
I'm not following you there...
Propositions are what are true or false. "Love" isn't a proposition. (A proposition is a statement about something.)
Gotcha, let me then try it in propositional terms:
1. Love is a subjective truth.
Is that statement sound?
Say what?
You asked what the evolutionary advantage of x is. (It could be anything, hence why I'm using a variable.)
It's a misconception that only things that are evolutionary advantages can persist.
Mutations do not need to be advantageous to survival to persist. They can be neutral, or even slightly disadvantageous to survival. All that's required for a mutation to persist in a population (well, aside from being a mutation that will be passed on genetically), is for it to not negatively affect survival to a point where individuals of that species with that mutation can not make it to reproduction stage.
'Sound" is a term that applies to arguments. That's not an argument.
At any rate, yes, that's true in my view.
"Love" isn't a proposition. It would need to be a proposition for that sentence to make sense. I didn't think about it much when I first answered. But then I went back and read it and realized that it's a nonsense sentence because it's framing something as a proposition when it's not.
Ok, so if I could restate your theory, are you saying it's an accidental feature of existence? In other words, since we don't need it to survive ("advantageous to survival" as you say), it's just an extra intellectual feature of human conscious existence?
"Actually, wait, "Love is a subjective truth" isn't true in my view."
What is love then, an objective phenomena ( of sorts ) that most all humans aspire to do?
No. I don't at all buy the "accidental"/"essential" distinction.
Further, I didn't at all say that consciousness or reasoning weren't advantageous for survival for humans. I explicitly wrote the opposite: "Consciousness, reasoning have survival advantages to us."
You're conflating a general comment about evolution and advantage, where I was clearing up a misconception (with respect to a background assumption you were making in asking the question the way you asked it), with a specific comment about consciousness and reasoning.
The phenomena are subjective.
It's just not "true" because only propositions are true.
Okay, let's try one at a time: How does mathematical knowledge evolve out/into a species? It has to spring from one to another in any case, to fit into the theory of Darwinism.
If love is subjective, why then do all human's aspire to it (with minor exceptions)? And if all humans aspire to it, would that not make it objective ( love being an objective truth)?
Mathematics is based on observing relations in the world, and then extrapolating more complex relations, based on the way we think about relations, into a construction we create.
Again, the only way our species (and immediate precursor species) can survive is via the fact that we can take in information from the world, via consciousness, and reason about it. Other mutations led to us not being able to survive long enough to reproduce successfully without concomitant mutations that led to increased consciousness and reasoning abilities. Part of the problem there is that we have to survive at least 11-12 years before we can reproduce. (well, although surely the increases in consciousness/reasoning ability also contributed to the fact that we could be relatively incapable when infants and that we could wait 11-12 years to reproduce, too--each thing fed into the other surely)
"Subjective" doesn't mean or imply anything like, "Only some" or "this varies."
It refers to the fact that it's a brain-functioning-as-mind phenomenon.
The subjective/objective distinction isn't about agreement. It's about where phenomena occur. In brains functioning as minds or elsewhere.
Sure, that's intellectual abstract knowledge. That's what I'm talking about. You haven't answered why we have it?
"Again, the only way our species (and immediate precursor species) can survive is via the fact that we can take in information from the world, via consciousness, and reason about it."
False. We survived in the jungle through spacial abilities, not abstract mathematical computations.
If I haven't answered that, then you're not being clear on what sort of thing you're looking for as a "why" response.
So what sort of thing are you looking for? You'd need to be clear about that. You'd need to give criteria for what you'd count as a satisfactory "why" response (and you'd probably need to explain/support the criteria).
Ok, so how then is the love phenomena explained using formal propositional logic?
Ignoring the "explain" issue (which is similar to what I just asked you re "why" above), the reason that all of a sudden we're asking about love being explained "using formal propositional logic" is?
Why we have that dual capacity to avoid falling objects?
I'm sorry, but I'm not following that. Could you restate that in simplier terms?
What sort of thing you're looking for, your criteria for a satisfactory "why" response, can't be a question.
It would need to be a set of statements re requirements and some justification for those requirements.
One part at a time: why would you be asking all of a sudden about explaining love in terms of propositional logic? Where is that coming from?
It seems like being in the middle of a conversation about orange trees and asking how we'd explain the biology of orange trees in a bit of choreography. Why would someone be asking that all of a sudden?
Ok, help me out with my logic:
1. Love is an objective truth
2. Love is a subjective truth
3. Love is an unexplained human phenomena that defies logic
Tell me how to arrange those thoughts in propositional logic?
(1) and (2) are nonsensical because Love isn't a proposition.
(3) is a proposition, but semantically it's also basically nonsense because logic doesn't have anything to do with "explaining" love--or anything else really. Logic is about "what follows from what." In other words, it's about the implication of formulas or statements, a la, "If P and Q are true, what follows from that?"
Logic has nothing at all to do with explaining natural phenomena.
Similaly:
1. We don't need abstract computations to avoid falling objects
2. We only need spacial perception to do so.
Are those true?
Great we agree. The next question is, what does explain natural phenomena?
It would depend on what we're talking about. What's falling, what the context is, etc. If we're talking about something like a large asteroid headed towards the Earth, we'd need the assistance of mathematics. If we're talking about something like Joe not getting hit in the head with a football, mathematics isn't going to help him . . . maybe spatial perception, motor skills, etc. would.
Here's the thing. I refuse to do explanation discussions unless we first set out our criteria for explanations. That's because what always happens in explanation discussions otherwise is that someone gives an explanation for something and the other person goes, "That's not an explanation!"
So to nip that in the bud, you'd have to give your criteria for explanations.
Not true. We would look at the falling object from a distance and attempt to move away from it.
"Everyone blow really hard and maybe we'll change the Earth's orbit just enough"?
You are an atheist philosopher, here's the criteria:
1. Love is an objective truth
2. Love is a subjective truth
Which statement is true?
It's real simple, no? Am I missing something?
I already addressed this (and more than once). What did I say?
Would that be considered a miracle lol?
I think you said you needed more information. I gave it too you, no?
No, that's not what I said.
Ok, you said you needed more 'criteria'
So in turn, I suggested that love is either a subjective or objective truth.
You said it was an unexplained phenomena of sorts right?
Sigh. No. I said that "Love" isn't a proposition, and "Love is true" is nonsense, because that analyzes to saying that "Love" is a proposition that we're assigning the truth value "true" to. But "Love" isn't a proposition.
You could say, "Love is subjective."
That's a proposition. And a true one in my view.
Ok we agree. So please share what love is then?
It's a term for a wide range of mental (brain) states, states that involve affection, caring, devotion, etc.
You could just look this up in a dictionary, by the way, if we're going to pretend that you're not familiar with it.
I'm more interested in conversations when we're not pretending we don't know stuff, when we're not playing dumb, etc., by the way. I think that approach to philosophy sucks.
Ok, so loosely speaking, it's part phenomenology, logic & emotion...and a lot of psychology?
Why do we need all that to survive in the jungle?
If I'm going to be spending time on this, I need you to pay attention to what I'm typing, otherwise I'm wasting my time while you're playing a game or whatever you might be doing.
So to check if you're paying attention, is there a requirement that something is necessary for survival in order for it to persist?
I'm not playing games, I'm trying to follow your reasoning.
Ok, so in very simple pragmatic terms, are you saying that Love is not required for survival in the jungle?
Yes or no; this isn't that complicated is it?
Yeah, that won't fly. You need to answer the question I asked.
I'm taking time away from something I need to be doing. So if you want to have a serious, good faith discussion where you're actually paying some attention to what I'm writing, thinking about it, etc., we can try again later. I'll be back around in a few hours probably (well, at least sometime later today--it's just after noon at the moment for me).
I want to know what Love is, and you can't seem to simply answer the question. Maybe I'm mistaken, but am not sure.
Would you care to start another thread and give careful analysis to this huge topic of Love?
Otherwise, not to sound disparaging, but you seem to be unable to provide a succinct answer. Or at least it seems as though you're politically pivoting or distracting attention away from something.
Maybe just say you don't know. That's Ok.
See, the deficiencies (with both Fundamentalism and) Atheism is that both, at times, cannot simply say 'I don't know'.
Yes, the term has many different senses, but they are related. But if I love the natural environment and want the best for it even if I cannot have the pleasure of it, then that is quite close to the way i might love my children and want the best for them when I am dead. I wonder why you want to go on arguing about this word, and pretending that I am using it wrongly?
I don't know why you were reading my comments that way.
Before we go on, why are you quoting me saying, "Yeah, that won't fly. You need to answer the question I asked," without at all addressing the question that's referring to?
It's the way you keep commenting on my use of the word love, and not at all considering what I have said about Plato or about the Christian tradition or indeed anything. You are rather exemplifying the deficiencies of atheism in your inability to engage with anything beyond a linguistic analysis and attempted reduction of all concepts to the material.
:rofl:
Atheism isn't an ideology or a school of thought or system of rationality or approach to discourse or anything like that.
And it's not at all the case that atheists are necessarily materialists. Two atheists need not have a single thing in common aside from the fact that they both lack a belief in gods.
Yes. It's a bit of a pointless topic really, and the op has bailed as he usually does. But one does the best one can. I rather like to make the challenge of a faith in a non-existent God, but alas it is incomprehensible to most atheists, and they cannot even make a questioning response. Never mind, some other time.
I'm not sure what you mean by "making a questioning response," but in any event, I'd have no problem with someone saying that I have "faith in a non-existent God." I don't consider it faith, because I don't consider beliefs based on things like logical support or empirical evidence to be faith-beliefs (and that goes for religious folks, too--if their belief in God is based on logical argumentation or what they consider to be empirical evidence, I'd say that it's not a faith belief), but someone else might be using a different idea of what faith is.
I have no problem with you saying this because I consider it meaningless drivel. No, actually it being meaningless is a big problem. If I say 'I have faith' and you say 'that is not faith' then you have a problem with what I say. At least in any sense of 'having a problem' that I am interested in. Or we could just go our separate ways...
Different people use the same term in different ways, no?
Yes. You do not?
I wasn't saying "different people use every single term different ways."
You were saying that it's "meaningless" for us to use "faith" in different ways (something that I don't even know is the case--I explained how I use "faith," you didn't explain if you use it a different way).
Obviously people often use the same terms in different ways. That doesn't make the terms meaningless.
I didn't say anything about contradictions.
If you were to say that you have faith in a god that doesn't exist, though, I'd be curious just what you were saying . . . so I'd ask you to explain further.
I have no idea what you are referring to, can you restate your questions? I'll be happy to try to answer them!
I thought you were the Atheist who knows the answers... LOL.
It was a question regarding whether you were paying attention to what I was typing, with respect to something I had already explained, but you brought up again:
"Is there a requirement that something is necessary for survival in order for it to persist?"
By the way, I was reading "faith in a non-existent God" as saying, "Faith in the non-existence of God." Is that not what you meant by that?
I didn't say you did say anything about contradictions. I don't have to wait for you to say something before I can say it. But you know what a contradiction is don't you? I think we mean the same thing here. You said this.
Quoting Terrapin Station
There is a contradiction there: someone says they have faith and you contradict them - 'that's not faith'. And that is the same kind of trick you played earlier, when I said 'God is love' and you said 'love is an emotion. And again you are not engaging, not trying to understand but just having words your own way and shrugging.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Of course it isn't. Tell you what though, we were in agreement further back -atheism isn't a position at all and the argument is futile. So I think I'll stop here.
Based on your explanation apparently not. Which in turn begs the question as to why it exists?
That's not contradicting them. And I'd not be saying that they're wrong. I would just be telling them that I use the term differently than they're using it (if they're familiar with my views and they're saying that I have faith that God doesn't exist). It's just giving them info with the aim of understanding differences.
Quoting unenlightened
I didn't even see you say "God is love." Re love being an emotion, you had said that you don't consider it an emotion, so I was asking you questions about your usage of the term.
Quoting unenlightened
Hmm, that's what I figured you had in mind, but I guess not then.
You seem to want to argue, or to be trying to (or just tending to) interpret everything as an argument, but that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to have a conversation with you.
I explained this already--how something can exist even though it's neutral or even disadvantageous for survival (not that I'm claiming this about anything in particular, just to stave off you reading it that way). So I'd just be repeating the explanation of that I gave earlier.
The sense of the commandment is to act towards your neighbour in a loving way. It doesn't matter what you feel; the commandment is telling you to act a certain way despite whatever feelings you may or may not have.
This is your interpretation, @Janus. The commandment says "Love thy neighbour". If you alter the wording of the commandment to make it meaningful, you are a heretic.
I won't budge from this. If you can't believe what it says, directly, unerringly and unambiguously, and you have to alter its wording to make it meaningful, then the whole thing is garbage. Plus you are a heretic from the point of view of your brethren.
---------------
I mean, god in your religion is all-knowing. He knows English. He knows what love is. He knows what he says. He can't be accused with stupidity. So in all aspects, you'd trust god to say what he means. And he would not say something he does not mean. He is the ultimate communicator.
He says, "Love thy neighbour". Why do you have to put interpretations on it? Because, frankly, it is a stupid imperative.
Hence, I don't believe it came from god, because God, if he exists, which I believe he does not, would not say something so stuppid.
Anyway, the topic is "deficiencies in atheism." It is a deficiency of atheism that the commandment is worded stupidly? I beg your pardon.
How can you understand "Love thy neighbour" without interpreting it? You could (idiotically) interpret it to mean "Fuck (in the sense of have sex with) thy neighbour", but interpreted that way it would indeed be "a stupid imperative".
You need to understand the commandment in light of Christian thought and teaching. It is an ethical injunction; it tells you how to live in the world with others. It simply tells you to act towards others with kindness and fellow feeling. And that is obviously not "a stupid imperative", unless you happen to be a sociopath.
Are you absolutely sure? In other words you have explained hat it's just an additional feature but could not explain why?
Let me try to paraphrase, if you are explaining that mathematical abstract's are not required for survival in the jungle, then I'm missing your explanation as to why we have those attributes?
Surely you're not suggesting that someone should run calculations before they attempt to avoid a falling object, right?
Now what about the question of love? Can you explain that human phenomenon to me, or simply state what is, in layman terms?
If it's too complex of a subject here, I'll be happy to debate it directly with you in another thread. But for some reason I have not understood your logic associated with the concept of love...
For clarity, I summarize the two questions for you:
1. What is love?
2. Why do we have mathematical ability?
Language. It is not interpreted; it is understood.
Quoting Janus
I am saddened that you think so little of my intellect.
I am, however, on the opinion, that it is not correctly worded. And it ought to have been, if it was worded or insinuated or suggested by an all-knowing god.
So let's see which you don't agree with.
1. God knows everything.
2. Language is knowable.
3. Language in this commandment is not ambiguous.
4. You can't follow this commandment verbatim.
5. God gave a commandment that can't be followed verbatim.
6. Interpretation is needed to beat sense into this commandment.
7. Interpretation is not reliable; it is a subjective endeavour.
8. Any interpretation can be argued at any time to be false, as much as it can be argued ot be true.
9. Therefore any interpretation can be declared invalid and worthless. Any, not just nonsensical ones.
9. Therefore you'd trust that god could give commandments that need no interpretations.
10. But this commandment needs interpretation.
Please give me the numbered statement you think is false, and please explain why it's false.
If you are thinking that statements numbered 7, 8, or 9 are false, you have already disproved it for yourself. Please consider, that you gave your interpretation; I gave mine; they are incongruent. Persons A, B, C... Z may give interpretations that are different from yours or from mine and from each others'. There is no valid judging which interpretation is true, as they are all not the word of god.
Language is understood. You need that primary understanding in order to be able to arrive at the point where you become capable of interpretation. The meaning of any linguistic utterance is interpreted.
Some interpretations are better informed than others; that should be obvious.
So first, about this idea re evolution, do you understand that I'm not talking about any specific trait?
Well I'm not sure I'm guessing that you mean any trait.
For example, why do we have musical ability?
Is that what you mean?
??
I'm saying something general about evolution. Not something about any particular trait.
I'm asking you about these particular traits :
Love and math.
And now that we're talking about specific traits, let's talk about musical ability and the ability to engage in musical composition and theory.
Fair enough?
All interpretations are the best to those who believe it is the best. So for Person A it may be the best to believe one interpretation, and for Person B it may be the best to believe another interpratation.
Should the commandment not say something nonsensical, it would NOT need any interpretation.
In effect, not every statement in language needs to be interpreted. If a statement is inambiguous and clear, and everyone understands it, and everyone understands it the same way, then it has no room for a need for interpretations to be made on it.
That's fine. But I'm not saying something about those particular traits yet. I'm saying something about evolution in general first, without talking about particular traits. Does that make sense to you?
Fine, I will bite. "I have faith in a god that does not exist" seems nonsensical to me. Can you tell me how you define "faith", "god", and "exist" and then I can see if it starts to make any sense.
Sure that makes sense but it doesn't explain why and for what purpose we have those traits correct?
If we were animals or lower life-forms for example, we would presumably just need instinct to survive.
Similarly, to survive in the jungle by avoiding falling objects, you wouldn't run calculations prior to avoiding the object, would you?
Now what about musical genius, is that an extra ordinary feature or trait? Is it a metaphysical language of sorts or what?
Again, you being an atheist, I would think you would know.
There is no purpose to evolution.
"In biology, evolution is the change in the characteristics of a species over several generations and relies on the process of natural selection. The theory of evolution is based on the idea that all species are related and gradually change over time"
Does that sound right?
But if you insists that it's an interpretation of the Christians, then you don't prove that it's the only correct interpretation, to ANYONE, but only to Christians. That is what I am telling you: it is not an absolute correct interpretation, because you have added a qualifier to it.
Sure, if you are Christian, you'll accept the interpretation you gave. I fully beleive that.
In fact, there are nearly 2000 instances in the Bible that needs altering the language or altering the wording in order to interpret the words of the Bible to make sense to a reasonable human being. This is just one such instance.
It's good enough, sure. Nothing there about purpose.
No. Statements in the language are understood.
Language, in and by itself, only exists in terms of its manifestations by utterances of words. Language is not "understood"; it is manifested by words and grammar, and when manifested properly, the statements made up are understood. Language itself alone without actual words and actual grammatical applications would not exist, hence, there would be nothing to understand.
Great I think we're making progress.
So if we agree that's the correct definition of evolution. How do we make a leap to purpose?
For example, and these are the topics we're trying to parse; how did love, mathematics, and musical ability evolve?
Or are you saying there is no purpose to these?
There's no purpose to anything in evolution.
That's why I had written "There is no purpose to evolution [period]"
Purposes are ways that individuals think about things.
There's no purpose to anything in evolution.
We agree! But again can you please answer the questions?
Or at least answer this simple question if you cannot answer the questions about Love, musical ability, and math: how do we make the leap to purpose?
Or let me try to help you and ask it in a different way: why do humans want to have a purpose?
As an atheist, how do you square that circle?
I admit that that's true. But the bible was not written for Christians only. When it was written, hardly any of the entire population was Christian. It is a document for Christians, while it is also a document for would-be Christians. And anyone who is not a Christian can become a Christian.
So my NOT interpreting the quote, or the command, but taking it at face value will turn me away -- hypothetically -- from Christianity. Not that it had any chance of my following it.
The fact remains that Christians don't follow the word of the Bible but a version which is altered from the original document. Altered by interpretation.
If that's how much Christians respect their god, that they decide, "this is what god said, but we don't believe it, we believe an altered version", then so be it. I have no argument against how the Christians decide to alter the word of their own god.
Quoting god must be atheist
Shake your head and walk away...
Some who call themselves "atheists" are just as fundy as religious ones.
1. What we call 'language' and what we call 'theism' both appear to be unique to humans.
2. Human language is largely involved in planning and control of our lives, and allows us to anticipate 'consequences'.
3. That anticipatory preoccupation of humans is linguistically/cognitively channelled by theists, like other religionists, into a concern with the 'direction' of their lives, and the inevitability of death, for which they seek 'spiritual guidance'.
IMO. It is only by trying to objectivize human language behaviour that we can observe a significant separation of thesists from atheists. Theists put 'the Word' on a pedestal...language ability being a 'gift from the creator to its image..humanity'. But atheists tend to 'see through' this anthropocentism, and reject the multifarious versions of so-called 'holy writ' in which 'existence of a deity' is merely an axiom on which the linguistic house of cards is built.
In short, 'religion' in general, and 'theism' in particular is the cognitive price many humans pay for their linguistic abilities. Words are the currency of thought. Existential axioms are as arbitrary as basing the value of a currency on 'gold'.
I believe in honesty. Everybody lies, I do myself. Yet if i don't believe in honesty, the there can be no communication.
Touche. Allow me to correct myself. (If that is permissible in the normal course of debates. By whatever rules.)
Corrected version:
Expressions of language are understood, using proper words, syntax, grammar.
Language is not understood, or communicated. Communication uses language. Language is the system of words, syntax, grammar. It can be likened to a telephone wire, inasmuch as it is essential for a landline telephone system to carry instances of communication, but the wire itself does not form part of a communicated message.
I admit you are right in this instance. I blundered.
I thought you were asking "How do we make a leap to purpose in evolution"--in other words, so that there's a purpose to evolution in some manner, at some point. The answer is that we don't.
If you're asking "How do we make a leap to purpose in how we think about things," it's just an upshot to consciousness as it's realized in us--we have conscious motivations and goals for things. That's a way that our brain works. It doesn't need to have an evolutionary advantage for it to work that way, but that does have evolutionary advantages, because it enabled us to prepare in advance for hard/lean times--it allowed us to think ahead re food, shelter, clothing, etc.
Note, by the way that I'm answering your questions as requested, and making adjustments as requested, so you're going to be expected to do the same when I ask you a question.
Thank you kindly for the reply. I'm going to go ahead and start another thread. I have too many questions to derail the discussion here.
If you care to join that would be great!
Huh?
I said:
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Are you saying I lied? I don't get it? Maybe you are responding to a different person or thread?
Of course they are. Claiming that some garbage made up 2000 years ago is not the actual way the world is is not the same as claiming it is. If I claimed there's a flying spaghetti monster in orbit around Mars, you are not being "just as fundy" to say there probably isn't. The two positions are not equal in justification, so being fundamental about one is not the equivalent of being fundamental about the other.
No. I am giving an example of a belief one might have in something that does not exist. Something that might be both more easily understandable and intuitively acceptable. And I am doing this because I have already given a definition of 'god', and 'faith' or 'belief' and 'exist' seem fairly uncontroversial. But having already gone round the definition roundabout in this thread and got bored, I will stick to my word which you quoted and wait for you to elucidate the contradiction before responding further.
The way I read that when I first noticed it was that it amounted to saying, "My belief that god does not exist is epistemically a faith belief."
"I have faith in a god that does not exist" would be an odd way to say that grammatically (and logically, perhaps--it suggests some sort of weird, Meinongish ontology maybe), but sometimes people say things that are weird grammatically.
Bald is a hair-color? :roll:
z. 'Belief that g/G does not exist' is a faith-belief ...
... IFF ~?g/G is unwarranted.
Ah, but you're forgetting the distinction between being real and existing! :lol:
Say I'm bald and my hair is nonetheless real (and it's blonde :joke: ) even though it doesn't exist.
Similarly God is real, and has real properties such as goodness, all-knowingness and all-powerfulness, even though s/he doesn't exist. :rofl:
God's Real (as a belief) for the believers, anyway, I guess...
For clarity's (or precision's) sake, allow me to rephrase:
Lack of hair [ lack of belief ... ] is a hair-color [ is a belief ]?
It's an epistemic, not ontic (or ontological), absurdio.
All the proof of atheism any one will ever need. The reality of God entails non-existence. :cool:
Not quite what I had in mind but that works, too!
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yeah, nice!
:grin:
Keep dreaming... I long flew away. :roll: