Kantian Naturalist: You simply have not provided any account of truth, reason, and logic. Until you do, there is no reason for me to believe that a correct understanding of these concepts has anything at all to do with God.
Some initial first thoughts.
What would it mean to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic? Don’t all of us take all three of these for granted?
Can science settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic?
If science cannot settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic, what does that tell us about the question?
If science cannot settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic, what does that tell us about science?
Who were the first scientists to ask and attempt to answer these questions and what answers did they offer?
Who were the first philosophers to ask and attempt to answer these questions and what answers did they offer?
Is the argument that because someone has not provided an account of truth, reason, and logic there is therefore no reason to believe that a correct understanding of these concepts has nothing at all to do with God a non-sequitur?
What is true. What is logical. What is reasonable. Are these not all inter-twined? Which of these can we dispense with while retaining the others?
My objection to FMM isn’t to his claim that “truth, reason, and logic exist” but rather to his refusal to explain what he means by that.
There’s a perfectly innocuous interpretation of that claim that I’ve given above and defended myself.
I think it is true that some of our beliefs can be true, that we ought to support our beliefs with reasoning (and, where relevant, evidence), and that logic is a good guide for detecting incompatible beliefs.
The exact nature of truth, reasoning, and logic are contentious, but I know of no argument to the conclusion that one cannot give an adequate explication and explanation of these concepts except by identifying them with God (as classically defined).
But FMM refuses to endorse my interpretation, and he won’t say why. Nor has he been able to give an argument that isn’t either question-begging or tautologous.
FMM goes waaaay further than that – It’s not just any old God, but specifically the Christian God. Further still – it’s not just the Christian God that’s the necessary precondition but the entire truth of the Gospel.
This means that any old guff, so long as it can be teased from scripture, automatically becomes a necessary precondition for knowledge. Crucifixions, resurrections, burning bushes, pillars of salt, plagues and donkeys….all these elements are apparently necessary conditions for knowledge.
This seems to have escaped the notice of the vast majority of those working in epistemology and there’s never any valid explanation as to why ‘the Gospel‘ should have any bearing on our capacity to know things.
Yeah, I was just going with the classical theistic conception I got from Hart: the necessary being, absolutely transcendent with regard to all contingent beings, and which sustains them in their existence through His power and love.
I don’t see much basis for identifying that — “the God of the philosophers” — with the tribal deity of the ancient Israelites and their stories about him. The god of the ancient Israelites is a god much more like Zeus than he is like the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle or even the Demiurge of Plato.
Your answer is lazy.
First you don’t even want to admit there are rules, a patently foolish statement.
Then, since you know how foolish that is, you simply say, well, its not God, but you offer no other explanation. So your default is, “there are rules and intelligence to the laws of the universe, but I don’t think about why.”
Of course I did not say that.
My point is that they are our rules. They come from us.
So you are saying you value understanding more than truth? How can you have understanding without truth?
Why in your mind does there need to be a separation between understanding and truth ?
I view them as different aspects of the same thing.
Right but as has been repeatedly demonstrated here* we are unable to do so sans revelation.
peace
*Recall the “how do you know?” exercise
The qualities of deity
omnipresence, eternality, holiness etc.
I don’t recognize truth as God because it posseses these qualities rather I ascribe these qualities to truth because he is God.
Truth is my God because my heart cherishes and confides (trusts) in him.
Now it’s possible that you (or me) might not be aware of all the qualities that truth possesses. But that is irrelevant to the point.
I’m am not aware of all the qualities KN possesses but I’m confident that he at least possesses the qualities of humanity
peace
Fear simply means reverence. You will never have understanding until you value it.
It is illogical to despise instruction Don’t you agree?
peace
You can know stuff without having a clue how you know stuff
The “explanation” is very simple.
We gave up our right to understanding and knowledge etc when we refused to honor Truth as God.
The Gospel is simply how we get that right back
peace
Good luck with that. I’ve been asking him since he first claimed that “truth exists” but he hasn’t explained in what sense he means that.
The reason he won’t endorse your interpretation, obviously, is that he can’t use it to support his god claims.
You have yet to demonstrate that knowledge is possible based solely on revelation. In fact, you haven’t even demonstrated that any revelation is actually knowledge.
All you’ve got are the rather ridiculous beliefs you were indoctrinated with as a child. They may seem important to you, but they are utterly uncompelling to anyone not sharing that indoctrination.
Electromagnetism comes from us?
What a strange thing to say.
Why? The properties of electromagnetism are what we observe. Thé laws are mathematical models constructed and improved by people.
Alan Fox,
It’s not crazy to think that laws are our freely conjectured posits to systematize and predict observable regularites.
The phenomenon does not come from us. But the concepts and rules that we use do come from us. If we conceptualized it differently and measured it differently, we would have different rules.
Actually, I think it is a bit problematic to say that “the phenomenon does not come from us”. The objects of scientific inquiry — such as (for example) the flow of electricity through an electromagnetic — are constituted through an interaction between scientific apparatus (and the concepts that they embody, the laws that inform our understanding of their use, etc.) and what the world contributes. (Karen Barad calls this “intra-action“; video here.)
I don’t have a firm conception of laws — and I think that laws are overrated in scientific explanation (are there laws of biology?) — but I like Michael Friedmann’s point that the laws of physics are internal to the physical theory. Newton’s laws function as constitutive a priori statements of Newtonian mechanics. We use those laws in order to derive hypotheses that can be confirmed by measurements, where those measurements in turn depend on a certain ‘cooperation’ between the apparatus or instrument and whatever causal and modal structures underpin observable regularities (and where “observable” cannot be fully specified without making explicit the contributing role of our contingent, evolved perceptual and conceptual capacities and their subsequent cultural elaboration).
I do not, for all that, think that scientific realism is unsupportable. Indeed, quite the opposite. But I think that scientific realism should be understood as epistemologically grounded in a pragmatic realism that has ineliminable elements of both biological and cultural constructivism. By that I mean both that certain patterns are salient to us because of the kinds of bodies and brains that we happen to have, and also that culturally transmitted forms of life tend to favor some patterns as more salient than others. (Consider, for example, that Eastern cultures tend to favor a more ‘holistic’ way of understanding.)
Scientific practice, in short, exploits our biological and cultural sensitivity to salient patterns in order to construct models (themselves contingent and revisable) about which patterns are fundamentally real and which ones are only real in relation to us.
Sure I have.
If it’s possible for me to know stuff an omnipotent God can reveal stuff so that I can know it by definition.
In order to try and deny this obvious fact you are forced to claim that you must be infallible in order to know anything.
Despite repeated requests you have refused to explain how you know this?
Revelation is not knowledge.
Knowledge is the result of revelation
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
What has been revealed that we can test?
I also think that, when it comes to evaluating the bearing of science on metaphysics (or: the bearing of scientific metaphysics on traditional metaphysics), there are two questions that need to be disentangled:
1. How should we best explain the fact that the human mind has the capacity to make sense of the universe?
and
2. How should we best explain the fact that the universe has the requisite structure necessary for generating any cognitive agents at all?
The answer to the first question can be couched in terms of cosmic, biological, and cultural evolution: our minds can understand the universe because we partake of its structure. The mind is not some self-enclosed entity that confronts the universe (the Cartesian fantasy) but rather the relation of mind to world is that of part to whole. The fact there is a relation of fit between mind and world is no more mysterious than — and is in fact exactly the same kind as the relation of fit between roots and soil. (That analogy is from Dewey’s Experience and Nature but I’m too lazy to look it up right now.)
The second question is much more difficult, because we do not know what other kinds of cognitive agency might exist elsewhere in this universe and because we do not know what kinds of cognitive agency might exist in any other universe that has different physical laws. Could intelligence evolve in a universe that had very different values for the physical constants? It seems hard to imagine but there’s really no way of knowing.
There’s also the little inconvenient fact that no account of the origins of the universe can be empirically confirmed, because it’s just not possible to take a measurement that isn’t indexed to a spatio-temporal interval.
So, to the question, “how did our universe come to acquire the necessary structures that made possible the emergence of cognitive agency within it?”, there is no scientific answer.
The next question is whether one confines one’s metaphysical speculation to what can be scientifically confirmed. If yes, then the scientific metaphysician must be an agonistic. If not, then she is free to chose between any speculation she wants — but both theism and atheism would be a leap of faith.
Fair point.
I actually considered posting an addendum about what I meant by “phenomenon”. The term is used differently by different groups of people. I actually had in mind what one might call “natural phenomena”, such as lightning, hair standing on end due to static electricity, etc. But I agree that once you get into our more detailed laws, we are taking about human created phenomena (created by electrical engineers, for example). However I tend to think of those human created phenomena as arising out of the way that we have harnessed natural phenomena.
On laws: I partly agree with you. I object to the expression “laws of nature”, because I don’t see them coming from nature. Rather, they come from how we attempt to control and harness nature for our own use. So they are not completely arbitrary, in that there are strong pragmatic constraints. But they are also not fixed by nature. We could have found other ways to harness nature. I’ll add that I do not have any objection to the expression “laws of physics”. Laws are important in that they allow the use of mathematics. I think biologists might identify some statistical laws with respect to evolution and genetics, but there probably aren’t any that are of much use in the classification of species.
That seems reasonable. It acknowledge our role. So it gets away from the idea that we merely find patterns in nature. But it does not go as far as the more extreme social constructivists, who seem to claim that everything comes from us.
How about
E=MC squared
or
The Pythagorean Theorem
or
That the universe is expanding
or
The second law of thermodynamics
or
That The nervous system acts via electrical impulses
or
Chirality or handedness of asymmetrical molecules
or
blink-associated resetting movement
I could go on but I hope you get the point
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
You’re a bit late with these revelations, Mankind already has them. Got anything new?
Yes. One of the larger questions in 20th-century philosophy has been to avoid the oscillation between an extreme realism (which, when pushed too far, collapses into incoherence) and extreme constructivism (which also collapses into incoherence).
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of work by Joe Margolis. He defends a version of ‘constructive realism’, according to which all of our thoughts (and all thoughts about thoughts) are historically situated and contingent, in both the contingency of human culture and the contingency of biological evolution, and there is no principled way to drive a wedge between what we bring to bear and what the world contributes, and no necessities or invariances that we can rely on for guidance of theoretical or practical conduct.
I am almost but not quite convinced of that. I do think that he’s right insofar as any account of the distinction between what we bring to bear and what the world contributes will itself be an explanatory posit made from within the evolving, shifting, and contingent world-picture, as both inherited from previous generations and revised in light of the flux of experience.
However, I also think that, from within the evolving world-picture, we can construct explanations of how the world constrains the construction of our world-pictures, and the explanations will be “better” than those of our ancestors — though of course only according to criteria of better than that we have adopted and which indeed are the right criteria — by our lights.
An upshot of all this is that, at a very sophisticated level of philosophical reflection, a version of ontological-cum-epistemological-cum-ethical relativism is true.
Richardthughes,
You’re missing out on the slickness of FMM’s entire shtick. Since we know (by revelation, of course!) that all knowledge is revelation, FMM can arbitrarily select any item of knowledge he likes and attach “ergo, revelation!” to it.
He can thereby bypass any close examination of justification, evidence, standards of deductive validity, predictive success, explanatory coherence, or anything else that philosophers (though not only philosophers) have cared about. His version of presuppositionalism has every advantage of theft over honest toil.
One can’t help but smile at the chutzpah of the entire approach — a purely arbitrary fancy is proposed to serve as the only possible “foundation” to knowledge. I take it to be a nice reductio ad absurdum of any foundationalist approach to epistemology.
Indeed. Funny how ‘knowledge’ can be found by all (faiths and not) working towards it and yet no one has had a highly technical ‘revelation’ outside of their field. Perhaps they didn’t pray right?
Sorry, had to be away a couple days. Will work my way backwards I think.
Before any response to any particular post, the following comes to mind:
Logic depends on truth and reason depends on logic.
Is that controversial? Yet how could anyone argue for that given that reason stands last in line?
Given an evolutionary account of human reason, did these all magically co-evolve?
I don’t understand what you find amusing about this. Fifth claims that all know. There’s nothing partisan about it. Everyone, including you, is without excuse.
I believe fifth revealed to you that he drives a truck.
Okay, let’s do this. All know WHAT? Explain, as you know. Be precise. Have you always known? Or how did the knowing happen?
I don’t think so. Logic “depends” on it’s axioms.
I guess it all depends on what one means by “depends”.
You married a woman without knowing she loves you. You haven’t been the first and you won’t be the last.
And your children can never know that you love them, even if you claim to love them. Try convincing them that when you discipline them it is because you love them. LoL!
Your parents and teachers, never ever revealed anything to know that you could know and it shows.
You can neither know that you love nor know that you are loved, and I pity you.
And wives. And children.
And you may deny this, but if you accept it, then how do you know it, if not by revelation? Or do you just claim to believe it but not know it, and have you explained to your family the possible effects of your professed ignorance?
But there’s no reason for that to be the case, and it would not matter one whit if the axioms are false.
Mung,
Priceless. Revelation is faith. But its shown to be right*
*Except when it’s wrong.
WTF?
If error doesn’t exist, why does it matter, Patrick? And if error exists, doesn’t it follow that truth exists? Because if all is error and nothing is truth the TSZ is a pitiful joke.
“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
Why are you even here, Patrick? Warrior for Truth!
I have a reason to believe she loves me when she tells me so, and she behaves accordingly. That counts as evidence to me, and you know… knowledge doesn’t require certainty
Recently published:
The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers
If you need to believe that you can’t know whether your wife loves you (despite of compelling evidence) unless God reveals it to you, then you probably need to pay more attention to her
Um. No. Your conclusion does not follow. Not that there’s any value to being reasonable, logical, or truthful, mind you!
Whatever. I thought you had a problem with something fifth wrote, and that’s obviously not the case because you’re acting as if you never read anything he wrote.
Are you waiting for God to reveal to you that fifth drives a truck?
This is good. Because these are ontological claims. To understand what he means by them would mean removing them from the realm of being epistemological claims. But you think they are epistemological claims, don’t you?
One cannot have knowledge unless they first have knowledge about how they can have knowledge. Epistemological claims must have a basis in epistemology.
We got them through revelation. You’d think you’d show a little gratitude
That blink-associated resetting movement one is just a couple of months old
peace
Oh, yes I have. Actually he has come to admit that his argument is circular, as if it wasn’t obvious enough.
– How do you know your wife loves you?
– Revelation
– How do you know that revelation is true?
– Revelation
– How do you know that revelation is true?
– Revelation
– How do you know that revelation is true?
– Revelation
– How do you know that revelation is true?
– Revelation
– How do you know that revelation is true?
– Revelation
– How do you know that revelation is true?
– Revelation
– How do you know that revelation is true?
– Revelation
– How do you know that revelation is true?
– Revelation
– How do you know that revelation is true?
– Revelation
– How do you know that revelation is true?
….
That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I know, right?
peace
Since you are making an assertion with out evidence you won’t mind if I dismiss it then.
peace
Duh. Hi, I’m an atheist, and I have this cool bumper sticker! F34R ME!
fifthmonarchyman,
Tell you what – use Bayes’ theorem or Laplace’s rule of succession.
You’ll find ‘making up unsupported shit’ does not fair well.
In other words, she reveals that she loves you. That is exactly what I’ve been saying all along
you might want to tell that to Patrick
peace