Why do most philosophers never agree with each other?
Is "logic" according to an individual's subconscious? Or according to the "universe"? Or is it the subconscious that makes up that certain universe? In other words, is it "wrong" to only believe what's in your subconscious? You're in the process of implementing of what's in your subconscious anyways. It is true that not willing to consume any more information will keep you at a loop, but that loop will keep varying alongside your subconscious. If religion is wrong, life is literally meaningless (unless the satisfaction of emotions becomes a job).
Comments (68)
People disagree with one another because they don’t see the same things. We can use the same logic, but if we don’t make the same observations we don’t have to reach the same conclusion. However there are a few things that everyone can agree on (or come to agree on).
?Yahya Al Haj Eid
Philosophy operates in an imaginary world at the boundaries of science.
And all that goes without saying, so the stuff you get to hear about is the odd region where things are as yet undecided.
Religion reminds me of the satire comedy movie The Dictator where the main protagonist Admiral-General Haffaz Aladeen passes a decree that changes both the words "positive" and "negative" to "aladeen". There's a scene there where a doctor tells a patient "you are HIV aladeen" with the expected result of utter confusion for the patient.
God, if that's what you mean is religion, falls in the same category as "aladeen". If something good happens it's God's grace and if something bad happens, God works in mysterious ways.
:rofl: :rofl:
If 'Christian' religion is right I'd be in Hell by now. I prefer a meaningless life.
Why? Did you do something so "bad" as to ask for evidence?
Yes good one.
You'd think God has a inferiority complex with all that worshiping going on. Obviously no truck with a nihilistic Atheist then.
I feel sad when we badmouth God. Richard Dawkins "bested" us all in that department in The God Delusion:
[quote=Richard Dawkins]The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.[/quote]
I feel sad because:
1. IF he exists, he's not offering us even a small-scale miracle in his own defense. He allows his own creations to say the worst imaginable things about him and some of us rub salt into those wounds, which must already be very painful, by worshipping Satan or denying his existence outright as in atheism
2. If god doesn't exist and he's a human invention then how poor was our imagination, how pathetic was our morals and how great was our ignorance that we could do no better than a god that Richard Dawkins can describe in such disgustingly vile terms. If God doesn't exist any criticism of him is like pointing a finger at yourself and though that may be extremely satisfying it becomes awkwardly unsettling when you realize that it's you criticizing you
We had created a God in our own image.
Religion is not right or wrong, it is based on nothing. It may be right on target, or it could be totally off. We don't know.
Religions talk about the nature of god and its will. But god is completely elusive, we got no data, no information on it. It is perfectly possible that god exists, and equally possible that it does not exist. But to claim that any human knows anything about god is charlatanism.
Sure, we got the ancient texts on god... but who were these books written by? Some humans, who purport to hear god's voice. You believe it if you want to; but you can also disbelieve it if you want to. And lo and behold, those who believe that the scriptures of a religion are authentic, are called the religious, and those who reject this notion, are the non-religious.
So... you say you can only have a meaningful life if you believe that an ancient text's words are authentically god's words. This is your perogative, but basically what you can be SURE of is that you have a meaning in your life because you believe the texts, which are not proven to be authentic, only believed to be authentic, and believed not even by everyone.
Your entire meaning is hanging on a text that describes, among other things, gods that have attributes that make the particular god impossible to be, because it has conflicting attributes.
So your meaning is hanging on something impossible.
Have a nice meaning.
It is not based on nothing.It is based on the belief that you have an immortal soul that will survive the death of your body.
For most people life is shit and religion helps.
This is something I find myself thinking about whenever debating the Problem of Evil. Theists fall all over themselves to make excuses for why the world can be as shitty as it is and yet God can still somehow be all-knowing, all-powerful, and most of all all-loving. I see that and just find myself wondering why you would even care whether or not there exists a being that, for whatever excuse or other, still permits genocides and children being sold into sex slavery, never mind horrible diseases and parasites and predators that are not even human fault, and otherwise appears to have no noticeable effect on the world. What comfort is that? That you go get to live in some afterlife later... managed by the same "all-loving" being who lets this life be such shit for so many? Why would that life be any better than this one then?
I can easily imagine a God that's much better than that, but that better kind of a God clearly isn't real, whatever the case may be about the lackluster type theists try to prop up.
People paint atheists like me as hating the idea of God or something, but really I'm terribly disappointed that there doesn't appear to be one, at least not anything that would rightly be considered an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God. Sure maybe the universe as we know it is something like a simulation created by something like an alien that's all-knowing and all-powerful over what we think is reality and forever hidden from our ability to tell whether or not he's there... but why would I care, if he lets it be like this and otherwise makes himself irrelevant to us here?
The best I can hope for is that eventually enough of us will get similarly disappointed enough that there isn't such a God that we'll collectively decide to make or become one.
ETA: I'm disappointed that this thread isn't about the progress (or lack thereof) in philosophy, as the title would suggest.
Whatever exists that seems evil to us must be good from the point of view of an all powerful being, otherwise it wouldn't exist. No comfort there for us, but it's consistent. This entails that the theist must embrace the fact that from God's point of view, any kind of suffering is good. It's hard to love God, if loving God is even a coherent concept.
On the subject of philosophers disagreeing, I guess there is no method that forces agreement, except perhaps the 'logical method' but that's a bit patchy, as you need clear premises that everyone agrees on. In science, agreement is eventually forced by a consistent build up of more and more evidence, and the success of technology based on scientific theory, and even then some people still hold out.
Yeah, a possible solution to the Problem of Evil, an answer to the question of "How can the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God be reconciled with the existence of evil?", has always been "What evil? I don't see any evil. Evil can't be possible, there's an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God, and he wouldn't let there be any evil so there must not be."
I think all but the most fortunate and either self-centered or ignorant people would find that pretty absurd though.
No contradiction follows from people having different values though, even if one of those people is God. Evil is always evil-from-a-point-of-view.
That is not an uncontroversial claim, and typically it is people leaning more toward theism who are most likely to object to it. People who think there's a God usually also think there's an objective moral standard, and that that standard is God's standard, so on their account if God approves of toddlers getting gang-banged and the toddlers disagree, well the toddlers are just wrong.
Maybe religion is the problem, not the cure.
It is hard to interact effectively with the world if one believes lies about the world.
They don't, I think. I think you'll find far more agreement among philosophers than among the public at large. It is just that philosophers focus on what they disagree about. So they don't disagree about more, they disagree about less. It is just that they are clever and reasonable and so they recognise - virtually all of them recognise - that on those matters where they disagree they need to spend more time. Hence the focus on areas of disagreement.
It is the public that disagree about things, but unlike philosophers they either conclude (stupidly) that 'it's all a matter of opinion' or 'subjective' or they punch each other.
Yup. If by "we" we mean those whose writings survived all those years and canonical revisions...
Or stab, shoot, and kill... often in the name of their chosen God...
Well that is just your subjective opinion.
Me too! Although I suppose that question has been debated to death on some forums, if not this one. But the OP raised a different question for me : Is the implied babble of rational philosophers a fact, or an unsupported attribution by those who prefer "infallible" divine Revelation to "fallible" human Reason?
As I see it, the relatively "easy" questions have already been pinned-down like butterflies by speculative philosophers like Aristotle, and theoretical physicists like Einstein. After the basics are settled, pragmatic scientists fill-in the gaps with more details & data & decimal points, and engineers turn that knowledge into useful stuff. But the remaining elusive butterflies, like the "hard" question of consciousness, are still being debated, because the available evidence remains ambiguous. How many philosophers still debate the notion of Phlogiston?
I'm guessing that most philosophers would prefer handed-down Truth over the hard work of reasoning, if they could find any reliable revelations among the babble of world religions. :cool:
Maybe life is the problem and not religion.
That's true
Or maybe there is a loving God who isn’t all powerful, because there is an evil God competing with him...
Quoting bert1
Not quite. When all things move towards unity, from any point of view all things are seen to move towards us. When all things move towards separation, from any point of view all things are seen to move away from us.
Now if you agree that unity is correlated with feelings associated with good (love, happiness) and separation is correlated with feelings associated with evil (hate, suffering), then good and evil aren’t relative, they are absolute. In many situations one can be mistaken for the other, but there are situations in which the two cannot be mistaken because they appear the same from all points of view.
:up: (I should stop doing this but you seem to read my mind)
As a wise man once said: 'Life is trouble, only death is not'.
How could you possibly consider it to be false?? Do you think life is easy?? Do you think being dead is hard???
Anyway the quote is from : Nikos Kazantzakis in 'Zorba the Greek'
Plus, if death is not a burden, not a harm, then what's so wrong about killing someone? I mean, what if someone is in my way and I don't want to burden them with the task of moving - should I kill them? Would that be the kind - because less burdensome - thing to do?
But I'm an old codger, so ignore me. :roll:
To who? I'd say getting murdered painfully is a burden and harm but death (the final result) certainly isn't. Who is there to be burdened by it? They're dead.
I think you are missing the point.
Bartricks, I would give you the perfect answer from my point of view, but why should I bother engaging you in a debate? I'll only do that if you can give me 2 good reasons why that would be a good idea.
I'm afraid it's you who's missing the point, @A Seagull. The point being that any debate involving @Bartricks leads to irritation, frustration, and anger for the opponent of @Bartricks.
Not at all, I am neither irritated, frustrated nor angry. It is all part of the great debate.
Yes, there seem to be a lot of master-debaters hereabouts.
Quoting unenlightened
I think everyone 'round here laughed inwardly, not in written words, but by moving their paragraphm or diaphragm or whatever it's called rapidly in a rhythmic way.
I may venture to say that you just hain't got there yet, to that point with @Bartricks. Have you experience with debating him?
But death clearly is a harm, for it's self-evident we have instrumental (and perhaps moral) reason to avoid it in our own case, and certainly moral reason not to visit it on others (extreme circs. aside).
By contrast, the idea that our deaths cease our existence is a mere article of faith.
It is irrational to reject a self-evident truth of reason on the basis of a mere article of faith. So, we should conclude that, as our reason represents death to be a harm to the one who dies, and as our reason also represents existence to be something required for harm to occur, we survive our deaths.
Nice of you to set yourself as a Bartricks-early-warning system.
You know your name makes no sense, right? First, it should be "God must be 'an' atheist". But even then it is conceptually confused. God can't possibly be an atheist - God is, by definition, all-knowing and existent. Thus he would know he exists (and know that he's a god).
What names got rejected? 2 are being 3? Fishes is cow? Right are wrong?
(Though it also reminds me of the Elves of Tolkien's legendarium, who insist that there is no such thing as magic while doing magic, because to them what they're doing is not magic, because they actually understand. So, possibly, the being humans call God, being so much more knowledgeable than us mere mortals, knows perfectly well that there are no gods, and that we're wrong for calling him one).
But the grammar does remind me of a confusing bumper sticker my neighbors have, that reads: "Which religion is God?" My first thought on seeing that was "uh, no religion is identical to a god, even if gods existed, this is a category error", but on re-reading I realized it's asking "to which religion does God belong", i.e. "is God a Catholic or a Buddhist or a Shinto or a Mormon or what?"
Incorrect. We have an instrumental reason to avoid getting killed. We are avoiding the transition from life to death. But once someone is dead it's obviously not a burden anymore.
Quoting Bartricks
Oh so: "We should avoid killing ourselves and others" is "self evident truth" but "There is no afterlife" is "a mere article of faith"
I think "We should avoid killing ourselves or others" is a convenient evolutionary instinct and nothing more.
Quoting Bartricks
Getting killed is a harm to the one getting killed. Death cannot be a harm to the one that is dead (because he's dead, he doesn't exist anymore)
Yes, I am aware of that. Winter evenings must fly by in his house.
Quoting Pfhorrest
But an omniscient god would know that he is a god, otherwise he'd be ignorant of something.
What's harder to fathom is how God could be morally good and omniscient, given that being morally good surely involves being humble to some degree, yet being omniscient would involve God knowing that he is morally perfect. Someone who believes he is morally perfect lacks humility and is thus not morally perfect. The morally perfect, it would seem, cannot know that they are morally perfect and thus cannot be omniscient.
So, "God isn't humble" would be a better name, I think, than "God must be atheist". It lacks humour - but then so does the latter, and at least it makes sense.
Why? I mean, yes, obviously we do. But why? Please explain how I can have an instrumental reason to avoid something that will not harm me.
Quoting khaled
Yes, that's right.
Quoting khaled
So you don't think it is true that we have reason to avoid killing ourselves and others?
Quoting khaled
That's just incoherent.
When did I say that? Getting killed will harm you, death itself doesn't. As to why you avoid death or getting killed? Because your ancestors that did so survived and the ones that didn't did not.
Quoting Bartricks
You're changing the statement. You've made it a practical question now. We have plenty of reasons to avoid killing ourselves and others the major one being: we evolved to avoid those actions. That doesn't say much about the morality of the act. It's more apt to say "We likely won't kill ourselves or others"
Quoting Bartricks
That's just incorrect. Getting killed =/= death. One is a process the other is a state resulting from said process. They're not even the same category of things. Getting killed harms us. Death doesn't (because we'd be dead and because it's a state not a process)
I try to avoid debating with everyone, well most people anyway.
I prefer to make brief comments to see what response I get, sometimes I get interesting ones.
I'm not saying that's not harm. Tim didn't want to die did he? He also didn't want to experience the pain that leads to dying (not that there is any in this case)
If he really is a god. That's the point of the comparison I made to Tolkien elves and magic: the elves are totally doing a thing that humans call magic, so "magic" as humans mean it is totally real in that world, but the elves who do it say there's no such thing as magic, while doing it, because they know it's not actually magic.
Likewise, it's possible that a being humans would call "God" could exist, who would know that there aren't any such things as gods, if that's actually the truth. That doesn't mean that the "God" we're talking about doesn't exist, just that he doesn't think of himself as a god.
You could combine those two things for a real world example in cargo cults. Giant metal birds descend from the sky delivering bountiful food, when some strange people wave their arms around in funny ways. It's magic, summoning gods! But the people doing the "magic" built the "gods", and know that it's neither magic nor gods: it's semaphore landing coordination of airplanes. Yeah, people really are doing the hand things and it really is helping to bring down big metal flying things full of food, but it's not "magic" or "gods" in the eyes of the people actually doing it.
You touch on an important theme here. Does metaphysics/philosophy get anywhere? If one judges by online philosophy forums, then perhaps not. But keep in mind that on forums like these that Cantor's basic results are rejected-- without being understood in the first place. (Note that this forum also has excellent members.) We can't, in short, expect a consensus on difficult topics between those who daydream or half-troll and those who are (relatively) serious about philosophy.
I mostly read 'continental' philosophy, and for me it's one long conversation in which massive progress has indeed been made. What differentiates it from math and physics and makes it so questionable is (among other things) its relative distance from technology and therefore income. Because serious philosophy is difficult, and because we live in an almost post-literate age, those who have worked at it are mostly only intelligible and interesting to one another. But Harry Potter is far more famous than Julien Sorel. People like the fun and easy stuff. To me, people are just missing out.
Technology doesn't have this problem. The shrinking size and the expanding power of our smartphones are a constant update on the incremental march of technology. That said, a person with no mathematical training would be at a loss to differentiate absurdity from good math.
There are two types of serious philosophers these days: 1. academic philosophers, whose jobs are mandates to delve into topics as hard and difficult a way as possible, and 2. gentlemen (or gentle lady, or Aristocratic) philosophers, who have a lot of time, energy, and other resources to devote to enquiries in philosophy.
The second type, type 2. philosophers, have the option of reading the same material and work through it and work it through as the type 1. philosophers. The type 2 . philosophers' other option is a speculative approach, which discovers for them brand new, but to the professional philosophy circles well-known philosophical thoughts.
I belong to the second optioner group of type 2. I am having ball. I don't know if I could even handle a disciplined study at an institution (academic, not psychiatric or penitentiary). I have taken four courses, but I used them mainly to shoot down the ideas of the presented topic's original author. I had a ball debunking Socrates and Hobbes, and had a chance to fall in love with the ideas and mind of Hume.
I used to think that I'd feel cramped in an institution by dogmatic personalities, so I studied something else when the time came. I never stopped prioritizing philosophy, though. If I could go back, I'd just choose philosophy and just deal with its dark side (which was really my dark side and unruly arrogance?)
This is mostly because I would have met more people who were equally passionate about philosophical conversation. I find myself frustrated with talk that remains on the surface of things, even if that surface is intricate and useful.
Quoting god must be atheist
This one is tricky. I suppose 'difficult' makes sense in terms of intensity. If I make my living researching and teaching, then one hopes that I'm more serious and diligent than others working in their free time.
Then this extra intensity of the ideal scholar allows them to make the difficult original text as easy as is reasonable, to pre-digest the situation for accelerated assimilation by others. At the same time all of this is creative, and they express themselves as intellectuals by what they focus on and the nuances of their interpretation. One of the nice things about philosophy (which is shares with life) is that its past is not fixed. Once Z comes along, we can read X and Y in a new light. If I study Heidegger, Hobbes changes.
Quoting god must be atheist
To me this describes the position of any of us born 'too late,' when 'everything has already been said.' What really matters is the insight. I grant that. Indeed, I often find that an insight clicks and then realize that that must of been what X meant all along. We seem to have to reconstruct the cognitive act in our own singular context. Sometimes philosophers help us to do this. At other times we manage insights 'on our own' that were crucial for us in an old book and feel less alone. I'd be lonely without my books, at least in a distinctly philosophical way.
Quoting god must be atheist
I relate to this antagonistic attitude. Its like the demon in philosophy that constantly tests things with a hammer. At the same time, the notions of truth and rationality are implicitly aimed at a community
of some kind. Sometimes the debunking attitude is genuinely aimed at liberation. At other times (as I see it) it's also a resistance to identity-threatening novelty.
I also love Hume, but then Socrates and Hobbes are great too.
But then if he’s omniscient he would know that humans would see him as a God, so he wouldn’t think they’re wrong for seeing it that way, he would know that from their point of view that’s how it looks.
Also if he exists and he isn’t all-powerful, maybe sometimes he impresses himself, like sometimes we achieve things we didn’t think we were capable of, maybe not all would be easy peasy for him. Which would explain why there is so much suffering, the loving God isn’t all-powerful. But if the loving God is much more powerful than humans and other life here on Earth, then he could prevent suffering if humans and other beings were responsible for it, so if he can’t then some other very powerful being must be ultimately responsible for that suffering, so if there is a loving God who isn’t all-powerful there must also be an evil God on the other side...
That's another possibility, although it's a non-standard concept of God.
That's interesting, but I think beside the point. I think your theory of good and evil has some merit, but that doesn't stop people taking on self-defeating values, and defining good-for-them and evil-for-them in self-defeating ways. So God might, in a sufficiently revelatory mood, remind us that good is unity and evil is separation, but we can still disagree, no matter how foolishly. And in the act of disagreement, we create our own values. And God himself must value separation, or we would not exist (on the assumption of a creator God of course).
Socrates was an addict. He was addicted to winning arguments. Philosophical arguments. In that sense I feel akin with him (without his genius, but never mind).
He, however, was not shy to employ fallacious reasoning to win arguments, which I never do. I use fallacious arguments to create facetious humour, but not as an argument in philosophical debate.
Hobbes, however, was a mechanical thinker, who was bereft of human insight -- it seems Hume has got all the humanity in his mind that Hobbes lacked.
Hume! Hume! Humanity!!
Yes I agree with this, but the fact people can be mistaken about what’s truly good and what’s truly evil does not imply that good and evil are fundamentally relative, that there is no such thing as true good and true evil. For instance taking advantage of others for one’s own personal gain can be seen as good from the point of view of the person doing it, but from the point of view of many other people enduring it it isn’t good as it creates suffering.
Quoting bert1
Yes we can disagree, but then we pay the price as a whole as we move towards suffering as a whole. There can still be some people feeling good while global suffering increases, but eventually the ones who feel good end up paying the price too. And we don’t have to see it as a single loving God punishing us (which seems incoherent), if the loving God is doing his best then it’s simply evil that is spreading because we’re letting it spread.
Quoting bert1
Yes, unless again it’s the evil God who values separation and suffering while the loving God attempts to prevent it and to move back towards unity. In that view without separation we would still exist, we would all be united as the loving God himself, whereas now we are a part of him who got separated from him by evil, and evil attempts to move us towards his side.
I’m not asking anyone to believe that this loving God and this evil God truly exist, but I find a lot of things make sense that way. Even if people don’t want to believe in them, I think we can still come to agree on the sort of things that contribute to spreading happiness and on the sort of things that contribute to spreading suffering, and see that they aren’t purely relative.
It is nice to win arguments. To me it's a temptation I try to manage. As you say, it's an addiction. Perhaps you'll agree that learning is often a case of us admitting to ourselves that we were biased and wrong.
Quoting god must be atheist
I really like Hobbes' prose, and I love "Of Man,' his sketch in Leviathan of human nature. He can be too mechanical. But he had a fierce, penetrating mind.
[quote=Hobbes]
Continual Successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.
[/quote]
Quoting god must be atheist
Hume was lovable indeed.