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?
This has been refuted repeatedly. The fact that you are admittedly fallible means that any or all of what you consider revelation could be simply a mistaken belief on your part. Unless you’re claiming that your god is making you infallible in some instances, everything you believe could easily be wrong.
Since you are fallible it is not possible to reveal anything to you so that you are justified in knowing it, by definition.
That’s not at all what I’ve written and I’m frankly rather tired of your disingenous claims otherwise.
The problem is with your epistemology. You only accept revelation as a source of knowledge so you have no way of validating that revelation except via . . . wait for it . . . revelation. Since you are fallible, you have no actual justification for your beliefs, hence they are not knowledge by your own definition.
Your circular definitions may make you feel good but they don’t stand up to even minimal scrutiny.
Perhaps you should consider mixing some science fiction in with your philosophical reading. These ideas do get discussed.
While empirical measurements appear to be impossible, speculation based on science and mathematics is at least possible.
This is simply incorrect. Atheism is simply a lack of belief. It is the neutral position. Only theism requires postulating entities without evidence (a “leap of faith”).
I have the ability to compare my (always) provisional views against reality and adjust them as necessary. In fifthmonarchyman’s epistemology that option is unavailable since everything is a revelation from his god. There is no way to confirm a revelation except by revelation, which makes his beliefs unjustified and therefore not knowledge by his own definition.
Errors can happen. I have no idea what you mean by “error” existing.
What is your definition of “truth” and in what sense do you believe it exists?
No, we got them through the hard work of many scientists and mathematicians. One would think you’d show a little gratitude, or at least respect, rather than trying to steal them for your god.
Kantian Naturalist noted already that you are attempting to enjoy the advantage of theft over toil. Doesn’t your scripture say something about that? As I recall, it was against it.
You’re equivocating. You talk about revelation from your ill-defined, unevidenced god as if you mean the same thing as observing empirical evidence. That’s a logical fallacy.
The first step on the way forward is defining your terms and providing some evidence that this trinity you speak of actually exists.
Got any?
That is completely false about my entire view.
The central organizing idea of my version of pragmatic realism is that we have no cognitive grip on our thoughts except through their functional role in our practices — and specifically linguistic practices — that we have no cognitive grip on our own practices (even language) except as modes of bodily comportment, and that all bodily comportment in the world requires interactions or transactions with things in our environment.
As a result we cannot have any cognitive grip on our thoughts even as thoughts without at the very same time understanding that thoughts, in general, depend on the existence and persistence of things in general.
And that at once dispenses with the entire Cartesian problematic, since we only get on the Cartesian bus if we grant that we can understand our own thoughts, as thoughts, wholly independent of things (even to the point of the very existence of things can be called into question).
By YOUR definition. Not everybody’s. Did it ever occur to you that you aren’t the language boss? Not exactly sure what Lizzie told you when she gave you this Mod gig, but maybe somebody needs to inform you that your authority does not extend to English usage.
I wish you’d do that a bit more, actually. Your views about, e.g., what “atheism” means and what constitutes acceptable evidence are clearly not held only provisionally by you. At any rate you have consistently refused to consider the possibility that you are mistaken about many things.
Fifthmonarchyman.
Lack of belief is simply what you get when you apply skepticism to religious claims.
Sounds a like a religious claim
How so? I find it to be supported empirically.
Perhaps I need a definition of religious claims then. Much of religion is subjective in nature, emotional. If I claim my religion comforts me at the death of a loved one, that seems to be a religious claim to me. Many religious claims by their metaphysical nature seem outside the reach of empiricism.
Flying monks, lack of both belief and disbelief. Anything is possible with an omnipotent,omniscient, trickster deity. I always assume there are unknowns.
To be a religious claim it must assert or rely on the existence of one or more deities. Those are the claims that don’t stand up well to skeptical scrutiny, historically.
Coyote is one of my favorites as well. I must do some more reading on this flying monk people keep talking about.
Yes, they do get examined in science fiction. I’m quite a fan of the genre myself. Peter Watts does an outstanding job of dramatizing alternative kinds of minds in Blindsight and Echopraxia. There’s also a truly outstanding work of philosophical treatments of science fiction, Steven Shaviro’s Discognition that focuses on science fiction stories, novels, and (I think) TV shows and movies about alternative kinds of minds.
However, since we are dealing here with literature and art, I find their use for metaphysics somewhat limited.
If empirical measurements are impossible, then there’s no way of confirming — let alone testing — any putative model or theory. That’s quite sufficient to dismiss the status of those models as having a legitimate role in any metaphysics that purports to be grounded in scientific theories.
In this regard the people over at Uncommon Descent are perfectly correct: if the lack of empirical confirmation is sufficient to rule out intelligent design as a working scientific theory (and it is) then the same criterion is sufficient to rule out the multiverse. It makes for good comic books, but that’s a different issue entirely (pun intended).
If we take “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” as our guide, then agnosticism is the neutral position. There’s no evidence that God exists, but there’s also no evidence that He doesn’t exist. Likewise, for all the deductively valid proofs of God’s existence, there are also deductively valid proofs that He does not.
I do not see any hope for the idea that deductively valid proof or inductively confirmed explanation can establish either the existence or the non-existence of God.
The reason why I am a naturalist is because I think that (1) one can have a fully conceptual coherent (as well as affectively or emotionally attractive) explanation of what it is to be a human being and our place in the universe without invoking any ‘supernatural’ posits and (2) any invocation of supernatural posits would rely on a presumption of cognitive privilege that should not be granted.
I have no problem acknowledging that naturalism is but one “reasonable comprehensive doctrine” (as Rawls put it) among many. As a result, if someone chooses to believe in God, that’s none of my business. (Likewise it is none of their business if I choose not to.) It only becomes my business when they rely on their belief to support policies and laws that affect other people.
That’s my view too. This is how secular society should work.
I also find this remark confusing.
But I lean towards the view that, even if one of the participants does have a correct metaphysical view (and I am leery of the idea that any metaphysical view can be “correct” or “incorrect”), the correctness or incorrectness can only be established through dialogue that compares and contrasts the adequacies and inadequacies of each candidate metaphysical view with those of other candidates.
Alan Fox,
Except there are plenty of laws that are placed by the whim of the societies morals, and who decides if they are just? The majority? What if the majority is religious?
phoodoo,
The intersection of legal and moral is complicated.
It wouldn’t matter if the majority is religious or non-religious; majority rule can never justify a policy that violates human rights.
In the US, quite a few secular liberals were outraged at how French police accosted a Muslim woman on a beach for wearing a ‘burkini’. The sentiment here — and I don’t think it was only here — was that what a woman chooses to wear is her choice. The fact that the majority doesn’t share her beliefs is irrelevant.
And we’re going to get “but how can a non-theist even believe in human rights at all?” in three . . . two . . . one . . .
Hey KN – would “render unto caesar” (a moral abdication) be contra to objective morality?
Kantian Naturalist,
No, but I am going to ask you what these human rights are you refer to? Is avoiding being offended a human right? If people do things that offend others but don’t harm them in any other way, should society be allowed to prohibit this?
Also, it is obviously very hypocritical of any Muslim to complain about the Burkini ban, if they don’t also at the same time complain about any country that forces women to wear burkas (which they seem to be pretty quiet about). So in that sense I kind of support France.
French media commentators have been nonplussed at the international reaction. It’s hard to see the actions of the mayors of Cannes, Marseille, Nice etc as other than racially-motivated. (I speak as one who agrees with the French law on covering the face – closely based on the Georgia state law directed against the KKK)
I don’t disagree. I do think that scientifically and mathematically grounded speculations have value both for inspiring potentially testable models and identifying flaws in other proposed models.
You’re privileging the concept of gods, unjustifiably in my view. There are an infinite number of possible entities that might exist (and an infinite number of those are gods). The default position, in the absence of any evidence, is that there is no reason to consider any of them seriously. That is atheism.
Agnosticism as you are using it here seems to grant theism relief from the burden of proof required for all other claims. Are you also agnostic about elves? Faeries at the end of the garden? Cthulhu? Invisible pink unicorns?
Why give gods a free pass?
Alan Fox,
Well, I think it is somewhat akin to not allowing people to wear Neo-Nazi attire or KKK Robes to intimate people in public. In Japan you are not allowed to go into many beach side restaurants and establishments with any tattoos showing, for similar reasons.
Intent (mens rea) is hard to establish but I’d say the intent in wearing Nazi insignia in a public place is indeed to intimidate. There’s a difference between being offended and being intimidated, threatened or scared. If naked people offend me, I can stay away from Cap d’Agde. There’s space on the beach for all tastes.
I have a funny view about this stuff, based on my enthusiastic response to J. M. Bernstein’s new book Torture and Dignity. Bernstein argues that the central concepts for modern secular morality are those of humiliation and dignity. (Here he’s building nicely on Margalit’s The Decent Society, also recommended.) Humiliation in turn is explicated as damaging one’s ability to trust and to love.
Hence, insofar as trust and love are the cement that holds together human society, humiliation undermines the affective condition of human society as such. Humiliation in turn can fall on a spectrum ranging from the relatively minor harm of being made to feel out of place or ostracized all the way to the psycho-physical devastation of torture and rape.
The contrary of humiliation is dignity, and a decent society (not a just one) would be one that allows love and trust to flourish by upholding the dignity of each and every individual.
In those terms, I think that one is not humiliated simply by being offended, though it’s a continuum and some extremely offensive words and actions grade off into humiliation. (Rape jokes are good example of how this grey zone, and anti-Muslim cartoons are another.)
In the case of the burkini ban, the humiliation of being forced to disrobe in public far outweighs any supposed “offense” to the norm of laïcité.
Intimidation implies that there is a reasonable chance that threats could be carried out.
People who have experienced abuse or violence, or who belong to groups that have been abused or harmed are justified in feeling threatened by symbols of those who did the harm. Those symbols might include swastikas or confederate flags or whatever.
I think that every major religion, and many political organizations, have some history of abusing people.
I agree that the concept of ‘human rights’ is a morass. Are they supposed to hqve been ‘endowed by the Creator?’ Anyhow, I’m leery of all such alleged thingies.
Right. One thing you and I agree on is our support for some sort of consequentialism. It’s not ‘rights’ that matter so much as concrete things like wants and needs and fears and pains.
Because God, as defined by classical theism, is not a god.
It is reasonable (I think, and I think we would agree) to refuse to accept the existence of Zeus or Krampus on roughly the same grounds that we refuse to accept the existence of phlogiston. (I say “roughly” because a detailed examination will reveal important differences.) But God as defined by classical theism is not at all like Zeus or Krampus.
(Though no doubt there are people of faith who are insensitive to this distinction, in which case their theism is, from the perspective of classical theism, actually a kind of idolatry. I myself would put most conservative Christians in the US in that category.)
Within the conceptual framework of classical theism, God is simply not the kind of being for which there could be any empirical evidence one way or the other.
My objection to classical theism here has been that, if we grant the classical theistic conception of God, but also defend a modest scientific realism in our metaphysics that rests on pragmatic realism in our epistemology, then agnosticism is the only defensible option. From that point of view, both atheism and theism qua metaphysical claims would go beyond the epistemological resources that pragmatic realism would legitimate.
It still strikes me as privileging one concept over all others. If there is no possible evidence that could support the existence of the classical theistic god then there is literally no reason to suppose that it does in fact exist. At most it is a curious rhetorical construct. Since it can apparently have no detectable interaction with the rest of reality, why consider it at all?
Kantian Naturalist,
Intersting post, KN. I never thought about treating (let’s say) Leibniz’s or Bradley’s god differently from Augustine’s with respect to burden of proof, etc.
Have to think about that.
I don’t work in ethics (fortunately) but I’m pretty much content with the idea that human rights are constructions we arrive at in order to prevent unnecessary forms of moral injury.
Somewhere — I’ve been told — Judith Sklar says that a liberal is someone who thinks that cruelty is the worst thing there is. I like the idea that the ‘foundation’ of morality lies in the use of ‘thick concepts’ like humiliation, dignity, cruelty, trust, love, objectification, and dehumanization.
Well, then why even consider such a claim?
It’s not hard to come up with claims that can’t be tested empirically. Mostly people just roll their eyes and otherwise ignore such claims.
Somehow, if it’s God we’re supposed to take an essentially meaningless claim seriously. I don’t.
Glen Davidson
This post pushes a positivist position. Suppose as many iD-ists and deists of various striipes maintain, that some kind of deity is required to explain….whatever. The god doesn’t need to punch somebody on camera then, the arguments for the alleged requirement just need to be good.
Cool. I’d be interested in reading that if you come up with a cite.
Kantian Naturalist,
At first glance I also thought the burkini ban was pretty pathetic. But is it really much different than Japanese not allowing people on many parts of their beaches if tattoos are showing?
I guess I would have a bigger problem with the burkini ban, if it weren’t for the fact that it is a rule that is imposed on a culture that goes out of its way to disregard human rights. It just so perverse for a Muslim to go to any other country in the world, and then complain, “Gee, this place just isn’t sensitive enough to my personal feelings of freedom.”
That’s kind of laughable really.
You mean like multiple universes? Or the concept of infinity?
No . . . my point is that if one grants to the defender of classical theism her preferred conception of what God is, then the debate can’t be conducted on strictly evidential grounds. The debate has to carried over into a different terrain.
One reason why that’s important is because, if one insists on conducting the debate on strictly evidential grounds, it is trivially easy for the classical theist to dismiss the New Atheist as simply not understanding what he or she is talking about.
That said, I do not (of course) think that classical theism is true. I am simply saying that if one grants that conception of God, then the argument against it cannot be done on empirical grounds alone.
Now, one could adopt a belief-policy that says, “Only admit the existence of entities for which there’s sufficient evidence!” The problem with that belief-policy is that it is too restrictive — it eliminates the possibility of ontological commitments on non-empirical grounds.
That eliminates not only gods (for which there is no evidence) but also values, consciousness, numbers, concepts, rules, and norms — all sorts of things that we might want to say exist even though we can’t easily identity those things with causally efficacious objects that exist in space and time.
And if your belief-policy doesn’t allow concepts, norms, consciousness, and values into your ontology, then you end up with an ontology too austere to explain any semantic and epistemic activity at all.
Eliminating gods without eliminating selves or minds is not as easy as it looks. That’s one of the big lessons we should learn from Kant’s criticism of Hume.
No, we shouldn’t take it seriously. But do we need to worry if other people take the concept seriously? We only need to worry when some insist we should take it seriously. There is the possibility of peaceful coexistence.
Oh, for sure, I’m not in favor of the crusading against God mindset that some espouse.
If crystals bring someone into harmony with the universe (which I rather suspect involves psychology, not the power of crystals), that’s fine too. Unless that someone is claiming that anyone who thinks otherwise is some conspirator against truth. Then what matters is if anyone believes that person.
Glen Davidson
I thought you were focusing on metaphysics. Why would one grant a classical theist any privileges related to what is effectively a concept designed to be unprovable?
I suggest that the person who is unable to demonstrate in any way that what he or she is claiming is in any sense real is the one who doesn’t understand what he or she is talking about.
All of those things you listed exist as brain states (for lack of a better term encompassing the complex, but material, contents of our skulls).
That may be, but I don’t see the problem thus far. Everything you mention has potential impact in the real world except for the classical theistic god which is defined to be unknowable. It’s just not a useful concept.
I’m fine with religious people until they preemptively say I’m evil. I do not go to religion friendly websites and spout anti-religion. I never did at UD, and I only rant against religion here in response to specific claims that I think are unsupportable. I do not start anti-religion threads.
To be more specific, I don’t think there are any useful arguments against god as a ground plane of being, or whatever. I don’t think the label god adds any knowledge to the concept of existence, but whatever floats your boat.
It seems pretty clear, however, that the people who defend religion at this forum, have additional things in mind, over and above the ground plane thingy.
At stake here is the criterion of ontological commitment. By what criteria should some candidate be included in our best account of what the world is like? One might urge that ontological commitment should be restricted to what can be encountered in some possible experience — possible for a being with minds like ours.
But a defender of traditional metaphysics is going to say that this criterion is too restrictive, because we cannot experience within the world that which makes the world itself as a totality possible and actual in the first place.
That depends on the cogency of the a priori arguments for the existence of God.
In a sense this is correct. But only in a sense. It may certainly be hoped that we will eventually be able to identify just which causal structures, as specified by our best empirically confirmed models, implement the concepts of consciousness or value. But our understanding of those concepts doesn’t depend on our eventually being able to identify consciousness and value with brain-states (or, as I would prefer to say, the dynamics of the organism-environment transaction).
I don’t expect you to agree with me but I do expect an answer when I ask how you know? What I get is either silence or mockery
What am I supposed to conclude from that?
A simple “I don’t know” would be sufficient to demonstrate that you had at least pondered these things. But I have yet to hear any answer from you all to that question.
peace
How do you know this?
peace