The “consensus” view among atheists seems to be that atheism is reasonable and that religious beliefs are not.
So why are atheists angry at God?
We can become incensed by objects and creatures both animate and inanimate. We can even, in a limited sense, be bothered by the fanciful characters in books and dreams. But creatures like unicorns that don’t exist ”that we truly believe not to exist” tend not to raise our ire. We certainly don’t blame the one-horned creatures for our problems.
The one social group that takes exception to this rule is atheists. They claim to believe that God does not exist and yet, according to empirical studies, tend to be the people most angry at him.
I’m trying to remember the last time I got angry at something which did not exist. It’s been a while since I last played World of Warcraft, but that might be a candidate.
But atheists angry at God? That’s absurd. Assertions that there are empirical studies to that effect? Simply ludicrous. By definition, atheism is a lack of belief in God or gods. It is simply a matter of logical impossibility that atheists should be angry at God.
That’s where the logic inexorably leads, which is why KN resorts to political and rhetorical condemnations and emotional pleading.
Arrogant much?
I think it’s a very interesting topic. If you decide to write something and you’d like to send me drafts, I’d be happy to give you my comments.
But you don’t actually believe god exists!
Kantian Naturalist,
The parts I understand have merit. I wish theists would understand that proper secularism guarantees their freedoms too. (Not to burn folks at the stake, of course)
I’m saying that it doesn’t lead there, that you’re wrong about that.
fifthmonarchyman,
You’re just assuming that your preferred religious beliefs are correct. How nice for you.
When the value of an argument is determined solely by norms that may or may not include any actual logic at all; when necessary logical truths can be negated in argument because they are deemed “oppressive” or “unjust” against metaphysics that logically fail; then one has simply redefined the terms “argument” and “rational discourse” to mean anything one requires they mean in order to validate their views – what’s the point in arguing?
Either the conditions are actual, or they aren’t worth bothering with. If terms are going to mean whatever one (or a group) say they mean – like logic, or morality, or rational, etc. – why bother, other than just to play manipulative word-games?
Without theism, the world is a pointless, meaningless morass of entirely subjective definitions, meanings and values only employed on a per-item basis in order to advance one’s own desires. You might as well just just use a gun.
So?
walto,
I know exactly what he’s doing. No matter how special he thinks his version of belief is, it’s no different from many other fundamentalists in my experience.
I find it refreshing that he admits to assuming that his beliefs are correct and refuses to place them in the realm of debate. It makes it much easier to simply ignore the rest of what he has to say on the topic.
Who or what defines what “proper secularism” is, or what “freedoms” are, or which ones should be protected, and why they should be? A “proper secularism” necessarily depends on theistic morality for all of that, or else “proper secularism” doesn’t even mean anything. You cart is before the horse; the only “proper secularism” that exists devoid of theistic moorings is anarchism.
But you do advocate the use of guns! Correct me if I’m wrong but you support the right to bear arms, correct? Do you own a gun personally?
And anyway, have you ever looked at the world around you?
Here is a list of conflicts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts
Please do go on and explain how great the world is because of theism!
Nonsense. Here is a list of secular states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_state
Please demonstrate how they all depend on theistic morality.
So buttons. (I mean, if your logic is bad, it’s probably best not to opine on the inexorable results of logical reasoning.)
So? (Here, I mean, who says that’s not the case anyhow? Why do you think the world was constructed in such a way that you might be comfortable in it? Sure, you’d like it one way rather than another, but…so what?) Tough toenails. Sew buttons.
So sayeth WJM, noted thinker and philosopher.
You might as well say 10+10 = 1000. You jump to your desired conclusion without demonstrating it.
So now what William? You’ve won any debate before it even starts as to have a debate is to acknowledge the reality of theism?
So what will you do with this new power of yours? Will you be fixing what you see wrong in the world? Will you be convincing reluctant parents to give the HPV vaccines to their children? What will you be doing? Now you have the power to win any argument without even saying a word (for as soon as your opponent opens their mouth, they lose!) what will you be doing with that power?
At a guess I’d say you’d be doing the same with it that you’ve done your entire life.
Nothing.
William J. Murray,
I think we covered this at UD when I was posting as Aurelio Smith. I could dig out some quotes. Oh wait…
While I agree that one can’t get any kind of God from the existence of rationality, I do think there’s some truth in some sort of “pre-requirement” for stuff like non-contradiction and induction when one asks for evidence. That’s why I think KN’s discussion of norms above is interesting and maybe important.
Walto said:
Doesn’t matter what I would like, or what you would like. What matters is the nature of arguing and living; none of us live as if the world is pointless and meaningless; none of us argue as if all we are arguing about are “norms” and relative moral preferences; none of us live or argue as if right and wrong and true and false and fact and fiction are all relative, subjective, ultimately pointless artifacts of happenstance evolution.
We all (except sociopaths and psychopaths) argue and live as if something else entirely is the case, even in direct, logical contradiction to the very words you (and others like you) string together. You talk as if it matters; as if truth matters, as if how we live and think matters, as if we have autonomous capacity to change how we think and see things, as if there is some purpose that we serve by why and what we argue for and against, and how we live.
A foundation of “norms” doesn’t provide relief from the absurdity of atheism. Basically, atheism insists that existence is essentially absurd; yet no one here can actually act or argue as if that is true. If you admit such a thing, then you must admit that all you can be doing here, in this forum, is trolling. Nothing more, because none of it matters, there is no point, and it’s all just the relentless processing of matter and energy into vapid utterances according to physical law and chance.
It’s interesting and important to everyone set on avoiding the logical necessity of theism. I mean, if logic necessarily indicates belief in god, screw logic in favor of social justice and metaphysical freedom, right?
Which god? There are many proposed gods.
That’s harsh.
Harsh but fair, I feel. I see the world as black and white. Those who are making it better and everyone else.
When William does something that adds something concrete to the sum total of human knowledge then perhaps he’ll have earned the right to criticize those who have so added.
And his “proof of theism” trotted out for the 175’th time was just the cherry on the cake today.
walto,
It’s the same situation as with omnipotence. Sophisticated theists understand that omnipotence is limited to those things that it is logically possible for God to do; even an omnipotent God can’t make a rock too heavy for it to lift. The naive view of omnipotence is incoherent.
Likewise, sophisticated theists understand (or should understand) that omniscience is limited to those things that it is logically possible for God to know. The naive view of omniscience is incoherent.
My claim is that “I am not being fooled” is something that it is logically impossible for God to know.
And even if the naive view of omniscience were coherent, this question would remain: How does God know that he isn’t being fooled? Definitional magic is not a persuasive answer.
OMagain, to WJM:
It’s amusingly similar to fifth’s claim, except that fifth goes even further and claims that Christian theism is a prerequisite for rational debate.
William at least tries to justify his claim, though he fails. I’m still waiting for fifth to explain why he thinks that the truth of Christian theism specifically is a necessary presupposition.
I don’t think the omnipotence and omniscience issues are analogous, actually. Yes, no one should expect an omnipotent being to be able to do things that are logically impossible. But requiring something that is omniscient not to be fallible in the way that human beings are fallible is not requiring anything that’s logically impossible. As I indicated in my post, it’s no more than the requirement that the being knows each proposition in the way that we know that we exist. Nothing logically impossible about that.
I think your definition (S is omniscient iff For all p, if p is true, S knows p) doesn’t quite get at the notion, which is, as I said, not simply quantitative. That’s why your argument fails.
ETA: You ask, How does God know that he isn’t being fooled?
One answer is: The same way we we know we aren’t being fooled when we know that we exist.
So much the worse for your kind of logic.
For me, logic is a useful human practice. It isn’t any kind of metaphysical principle.
walto,
And likewise, no one should expect an omniscient being to know things that are logically impossible for it to know.
That’s a very low bar. You’re requiring much more than that — namely, that an omniscient being be capable of knowing every truth, including ones that are logically impossible to know.
It’s exactly like requiring that an omnipotent being be capable of creating rocks too heavy for it to lift. Omnipotent beings can’t do things that are logically impossible for them to do, and omniscient beings can’t know things that are logically impossible for them to know.
If you don’t think it’s logically impossible for God to know that he isn’t being fooled, then I would be interested in hearing exactly how he can know that.
Again, “by definition” is not a persuasive answer. If God can do the logically impossible by definition, then God himself is logically impossible.
How is it logically possible for God to know that he isn’t being deceived? What, other than definitional magic, permits him to transcend his own cognition and “senses” and rule out the possibility of deception?
walto,
It isn’t a question of knowing that he exists. It’s a question of knowing that he is who he thinks he is — an omnisicient, omnipotent God — and that he’s not being fooled.
I don’t have any idea why you think it’s logically impossible to know (with certainty) that one is not being fooled: it’s not obviously contradictory (like a rock that’s too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift). I therefore await some reason for thinking these are analogous.
Furthermore, just because it may be impossible for humans to know with certainty precisely what they are, is no reason to suppose that something that is not burdened with human limitations must also be fallible. Sure, WE can’t know precisely what we are with certainty, but nothing follows from that. We’re mere schlubs.
Any hell-believing Christians out there who can explain why their supposedly omnibenevolent God doesn’t employ a technique like the one I describe here, or something even better, to avoid sending billions to hell?
walto,
Earlier in the thread, I quoted a UD comment that explains my reasoning:
If you think that God can transcend his own cognitive faculties and prove that they are infallible, then how does he do it?
I don’t see why God would would have to transcend ITs own cognitive faculties to know that IT is infallible. That all comes with omniscience, presumably. Anything omniscient knows everything infallibly. Again, if you think that’s impossible, I believe you’re just denying the existence of God. That’s fine, but I think an argument as to why even an unlimited intellect must be fallible would be required. That we limited intellects are fallible doesn’t seem sufficient. I take it that for theists the distance between our intellect and God’s is bigger than that between the amoebas and our own.
Incidentally, here’s the Creel article, which I guess you can rent for a day for six bucks.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2413104
walto,
In that case, you might as well assume that God can transcend the laws of logic and be done with it. Can God create a rock too heavy for him to lift? Yes — he isn’t bounded by logic. Can God lift that rock? Yes — he isn’t bounded by logic.
Can God know everything, including things that are logically impossible to know? Sure — he isn’t bounded by mere logic.
(Barry Arrington actually tried the “God can encompass contradictions” gambit once — I’ll provide the link later. Pretty amusing, considering his self-righteous purge of commenters who wouldn’t swear allegiance to the law of non-contradiction.)
Theists who want their God to make rational sense need to do better than that. My question for them: How does your God know that he isn’t being fooled?
I’m only denying the existence of a God with that kind of (naively conceived) omniscience, just as I deny the existence of a God possessing a (naively conceived) omnipotence that allows it do anything, including the logically impossible.
There are lots of god concepts that don’t run into these problems. It’s this “omni” business — what I call “greedy theology” — that creates most of the trouble.
You can read it for free by registering for a MyJSTOR account. I’ve got it but haven’t read it yet.
Anyone remember the Beatles animated Yellow Submarine movie? The Nowhere Man vacuumed up everything, including himself.
Whoa — that’s a long-buried memory.
Yeah, except that it’s NOT logically impossible to know that one is not being fooled (even if you continue to repeat that it is a couple of dozen more times). There’s simply no analogy there at all, as I’ve explained twice now.
What, exactly, is the contradiction supposed to be?
BTW, if all you’re going to do is repeat the same (apparently incorrect) claim, maybe adding a few more times that the sort of omniscience that most people hold is naive and only something that makes the omniscient person fallible is OK, (or that anyone who disagrees with you is just another Barry Arrington), I don’t see that there’s much point in continuing.
Is that kind of behavior supposed to round up some troops, maybe? I’ll ask you one last time what you think the logical contradiction is in somebody knowing something infallibly. If you have some actual thoughts along those lines, please tell us. If not….
I can remember that because I wasn’t there.
I’m not convinced. I don’t know about logic, but I see no way that any entity can know that it isn’t a brain in a vat. So to speak.
Well, if that’s so, it’s not a logical contradiction I don’t think. I’m not sure why it must be impossible, myself, even it it is impossible for human beings. But suppose you’re right that NOTHING could possibly know that it is not a brain in a vat–even some entity that doesn’t have a brain at all, but is, I don’t know, pure consciousness, enveloping the entire universe or something and is as far beyond brains as brains are beyond stones. Again, say you’re right about that. In my view, there could then be no such thing as God, because very few theists would hold that anything that might be deceived (say by a higher being) could be God. Fifth says precisely that in a post above. So, in my view, that would be an argument against the existence of God rather than an argument that God is fallible.
In other words, nothing would be worthy of being called “GOD” if it could be fooled by Loki.
BTW, I didn’t realize that Creel paper was on JSTOR. I just took a look at it. Terrible.
Funny, you don’t look bluish.
Hee hee.
I was there, and I do remember it. Since most folks around here know I am older than dirt it won’t surprise anyone that I was old enough to see it when it first showed at the theater in … hmm … not telling.
Went with a few siblings and friends on acid (and I decided afterwards I never wanted to waste another trip on pure entertainment). But yeah, I do remember.
It was a monster vacuum-cleaner-creature that vacuumed up itself and everything else, so the submarine popped into the Sea of Nothing and that’s where they met Nowhere Man.
Probably my single favorite bit was when Ringo picked up one of the holes from the Sea of Holes, put it in his pocket.
Yeah, we did leave the theater singing.
And later used it to help fill the Albert Hall.
Thanks! Yeah, I developed this kind of view while reading a lot of stuff on transcendental arguments — Stern, Strawson, Putnam, McDowell, etc.
The Hard Question that distinguishes my view from Murray’s is that I treat the conditions of rational discourse as norms binding on us, whereas Murray treats these conditions as conditions of existence. I don’t really understand what that means. But let me explain a bit more what I mean.
Murray and I disagree on many deeply contentious issues, two of which are directly relevant to this debate: what are we saying what we say that reality is intelligible, and what is the relationship between normativity and necessity? I’ll take the second issue first, and then relate it to the first.
Murray seems to think — based on his many scattered remarks over the years — that norms are insufficient or inadequate for the kind of philosophical work he’s interested in. He wants necessity, not just normativity. After all, he thinks, norms are always optional.
I think it is false that all norms are always optional. What is true that all norms are always transgressable — one can always transgress a norm. That’s right. But just because a norm is transgressable, doesn’t mean it’s optional.
One can recognize the bindingness of the norm on one’s conduct and transgress against it at the same time — think of deliberate rudeness as an intentional transgression against etiquette, or someone who dresses in clothes that are “appropriate” for the “opposite sex”, or people who cultivate hobbies and abilities more commonly associated with another sex or race. One doesn’t simply ignore the norm; one recognizes it while at the same time transgressing it, and in fact one couldn’t transgress it without at the same time acknowledging its authority. It is as if one recognizes the authority of the norm and then adds a footnote of one’s own.
When it comes to epistemic and semantic norms — the norms of rational discourse — I do not think that they are optional, or at least not optional for anyone who wants to live as a rational animal. One can opt of them only at the cost of having nothing to say (as in some forms of Zen Buddhism, perhaps). Otherwise, one acknowledges one’s commitment to the norms of rational discourse in the very activity of intentional communication, because the norms constitute intentional communication.
There is probably no successful intentional communication without an implicit commitment to the norms of rational discourse, and there is certainly no non-violent successful intentional communication without an implicit commitment to the norms of rational discourse, because the norms of rational discourse just are what successful non-violent communication is.
So the norms of rational discourse are inherently transgressable (as all norms are) but non-optional (as many other kinds of norms are not). But they are not necessary: they are neither woven into the fabric of existence nor into the fabric of ‘human nature’. They can be revised in light of other norms. They are not “grounded”, nor do they need to be.
The other big question here is about the intelligibility of reality — what must be presupposed by the intelligibility of reality. (Here I do not assume that reality is fully intelligible, since I do not know what that would mean.)
I do think that we can show, via transcendental argument, that reality must have certain features in order for it to be intelligible to us. For example, there could no empirical inquiry if reality lacked the requisite modal structure to support counterfactuals, if causal powers could not be classified into types and kinds, or if there were no relations of similarity and difference between sensible objects. (For example, if every object were equally same and different from every other object, or if the sensible properties of an object arbitrarily altered at any given moment, then reality would be unintelligible — at least according to our conception of intelligibility.) There can’t be transcendental chaos.
But I do not think that the norms of rational discourse are identical to the conditions of real intelligibility, and I certainly don’t think that inquiry presupposes that they are. Successful empirical inquiry doesn’t just disclose novel features of objects — it also discloses features of our own cognitive powers that aren’t apparent on the first pass of reflective consciousness. We find out how the propagation of activity across large neuronal populations can be modeled using complexity theory and how it systematically co-varies with both static and dynamic features of the environment.
We learn things about how cognition works, as well as about how the world works, and that in turn transforms our conception of what inquiry is. That is to say, the process of inquiry transforms our comprehension of inquiry, so we should avoid presuming too much about what kind of structure either the world or the mind must have. Inquiry itself transforms our understanding of both and of their relationship. This can’t be done a priori or done with a comfortable armchair and a copy of the complete works of Plato (nor even with the complete works of Dewey).
…says walto, who keeps repeating the same (apparently incorrect) claim.
walto,
You (and fifth) keep forgetting that I am not claiming that God could be deceived by a higher being. I am claiming that God cannot know that he is not being thus deceived.
Think about it.
I wonder if the following might be helpful . . . we know that a set is infinite just in case there is an isomorphism between the set and any one of its subsets. (I’m getting that correct, yes? Been a while!)
Similarly, perhaps we could stipulate that a mind is infinite just in case there is an isomorphism between an inventory of its mental contents and any description it has of its own mental contents. Every thought it has about its own thoughts perfectly corresponds to that thought. There’s no loss of information, no compression, and hence — it might follow — no error, and no misunderstanding of itself, and so it cannot be fooled about its own cognitive abilities.
In other words, it might just follow as a matter of stipulated definition that an infinite mind cannot be fooled about itself.
That said, I find myself uneasy about transposing the concept of “infinity” from the context of mathematics, where it has a well-defined meaning, to talking about “infinite minds”. I’m not even too sure what a “mind” is, let alone what an “infinite mind” could be. For all we know, it could be that talking about an infinite mind is basically like saying, “well, this thing over here is exactly like that red circle over there, except that this thing is blue and rectangular.”
I like Loki. I would worship Loki. If I would worship any one.
I think Loki is worthy of being called a god – although I realize no one claims he is a “creator” and obviously not “omni” anything, I don’t think those are dealbreakers for godhood.
Indeed, I think the early christians rather over-reached when they developed a position that their god was omni-everything. I think it was a kind of stupid jealousy, a theological analogy of “My father can beat up your father”. I’m sure they didn’t intend it to be as incoherent as it turned out to be. And it certainly served them well for a few millennia: people switched allegiance from simply-powerful gods like Cernunnos or Odin to the claimed-omnipotent Father of the christers. But in the long run, I expect, people start looking at the illogical claim for omni-everything, and it stops making sense.
A trickster god, though, that makes sense. If you had powers, wouldn’t you get bored with ordinary reality and sometimes indulge in using your powers for mischief and fun?