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.
Reading the Bible seems incompatible with understanding it. What’s on the page seems to conflict with what it says.
That’s what you SAY you mean, but that’s not actually what you’re using. You require more than that when you insist that there is something in addition to p being justified, believed and true that must be the case for p to be known. I can tell this by when you ask of someone who says of p that they know it because they believe it, it’s justified and it’s true, “Yeah, but how do you know it’s true?”
I’ve explained this already, but you’d have to pry out the crickets to hear it.
That can’t be right. In order for an assertion to be an assumption, it has to have a specific place in an argument — it has inferential consequences, but it is not derived from any other assertions (for the sake of the argument).
Hence, in order to recognize an assertion as an assumption, one has to be a competent reasoner already: one has to know how to recognize what an assertion is, and what an inferential pattern is, and distinguish between assertions that are entailed by some other assertions and assertions that aren’t entailed by any other assertions.
Therefore, one must already be a competent reasoner in order to make any assumptions at all — one cannot start off with an assumption and then proceed to reason.
This is the same point I’ve been making in my arguments with Murray — the characterization of the epistemic situation in which we find ourselves when we begin to philosophize must be as “thin” or “sparse” of metaphysical commitments as possible, in order to avoid prejudicing further inquiry one way or the other.
(Technical aside: This is actually what was right about old-style Cartesian foundationalism, except that the “foundation” isn’t a set of self-evident truths but a set of necessary abilities that we must have in order to reason at all. And that’s what was right about Hegel’s reconstruction of our epistemic condition in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where mutual recognition is discovered to be a necessary condition of possibility for objective inquiry, and also Wittgenstein’s shift towards “pragmatic foundationalism” in On Certainty.)
That also can’t be right, since it assumes — contrary to the very idea of a necessary presupposition — that one can somehow attain a vantage-point of total epistemic neutrality between the two presuppositions. But then one has no tools with which to evaluate the presuppositions, since the presuppositions themselves determine the tools you’ve got.
Either the presuppositions themselves are the foundation of all reasoning, in which case there’s no epistemologically neutral vantage-point from which worldviews can be compared and all one can do is evaluate the presuppositions of a worldview by using one’s own presuppositions, or, if we can compare presuppositions from an epistemologically neutral vantage-point, then the presuppositions are not the basis of all reasoning.
Presuppositionalism leads to relativistic dogmatism and a disintegration of the epistemic community and, which is pretty much equivalent to destroying the village in order to save it.
Yes, he’s confusing the presuppositions necessary for an epistemology (how to gain knowledge and what knowledge is) with the presuppositions necessary for being able to even reason.
fifthmonarchyman,
And what do they say?
Though FMM is probably (and blissfully) unaware of the Gettier cases, his demand is actually not unreasonable. The whole point of Gettier cases is that the formal conditions can be satisfied and yet we don’t have knowledge.
While analytic epistemology is not my strength, I do recall reading a very nice essay by Kitcher, “The Naturalists Return”, where he talks about the resurgence of naturalized epistemology in response to Gettier and also Kuhn. One point he makes — and I don’t know if this a generally accepted way of seeing the matter or not — is that the insight behind reliabilism was that Gettier was right: just meeting the formal conditions isn’t enough. The procedure or strategy for satisfying the condition is crucial.
Hence the big question, is it sufficient for knowledge that the methods for arriving at it are generally reliable? Or is it also necessary that one know that those methods are generally reliable? That’s the divide between externalism and internalism, if I understand it right. (Again, not my forte.)
The problem is, the former seems too weak to give us a genuine constraint on knowledge, but the latter leads to either an infinite regress or to a dogmatic foundationalism that involves the Myth of the Given.
It’s beginning to look as though the only to patch up reliablism and make it work as a solution to the Gettier problem is to show that Sellars et al are wrong and Alston and BonJour are right: the Given is not a Myth after all.
But the argument for the ‘Myth-ness’ of the Given depends on semantic holism, which means that either we can (contra Sellars et al.) tease semantics and epistemology just far enough apart that we can have both semantic holism and epistemic foundationalism, or else we vindicate semantic atomism (somehow — maybe Fodor can help?).
I’m reassured to know that I’m not the only one who thought this was a problem. I’d call it a conflation of the background conditions of a theory with the background conditions of our ability to theorize.
That might not be a bad way of putting my objection to Murray, come to think of it.
So when I quote a passage that tells women to be silent, you know all about that and how I’m not understanding it correctly, but when it’s something like this you simply don’t know. Very odd.
When it’s something you don’t like the plain reading is insufficient, when it’s something like this you are happy to say you don’t know!
Double standard much?
If you are unsure what noun was intended, how are you so sure about the rest of it?
Is your God unable to make itself understood?
I think this is a bit different from Gettier issues. Those problems involve how something can be true, believed and justified but still not known because the sort of justification is insufficient in some manner. The classic example is the broken clock that’s right twice a day–the justification is defective because of the believer’s ignorance of the clock break. But I could start with whatever warrant is necessary to avoid Gettier problems–pump that right into my definition–and Fifth would still respond, “sure but how do you know it’s TRUE?” That indicates that he thinks there is some difference between knowing that p and knowing that p is true. And that means he doesn’t actually take knowledge of p to be justified true belief that p.
Incidentally, I think you get the same result by declaring Gettier problems to be destructive of any possible JTB definition of knowledge. Either way, FMM is actually rejecting such definitions, not using one.
You know, IIRC, Plantinga’s epistemology starts right off using something like “whatever warrant is necessary” to get to knowledge. That’s the way he tries to put Gettier-type problems aside.
It seems like, in the xtian world, They’re all Plantinganians now.
I suppose some of my frustration with philosophy stems from one of my presuppositions:
Namely that theists start with whatever presuppositions are necessary to make their belief true and necessary.
I start with the presupposition that people who figured out how to make stuff like quartz watches and iPhones are smarter than people who think Jesus talks to them personally. I am such a Philistine.
petrushka,
That’s a reason for being frustrated with theists, but how does your frustration with philosophy stem from that?
And how and when did you come to make this assumption?
See, the problem is, you could just be saying that the color green is what allows you to reason, and it would tell us just as much. There’s no there there. Is your presupposition a chant, a magic incantation, a psychologic solace, or just an assumption that something supernatural takes place? I’d say that the foregoing is a serious question, except that I’m afraid that there is no serious answer, that it could be all, none, or that you’d just say it’s your “presupposition” all over again without shedding any light on the matter whatsoever.
See, the sneaking suspicion is that you learned about your “presupposition” without having had that presupposition, and that it is altogether likely that you were accepting it on authority–that someone told you that it explains your ability to know. Unless you can tell us something else, it’s probably going to be the tacit assumption here, as it tends to underlie most non-explanations that people trot out as “magically” fixing all problems.
As many have tried to point out, you really don’t compare presuppositions. What you seem to want is some “magic” to compare to your “magic,” and thereby to compare the strengths of the purported “magic.” I use scare quotes because I know that “magic” might be pejorative, but still use it because it’s shorter than “supernatural occurrance” or some such thing, and any term like that might be understood pejoratively anyhow (mainly because “magic” or “supernatural occurence” really is no explanation), and am trying not to be any more pejorative than I can help.
Since you don’t accept good but hardly complete answers from others, the best thing for you to do is to explain how you know things in your worldview. Like, how do you know that your presupposition allows you to know things, how the incarnation bridges any gaps, most importantly, how did you learn about your presuppostion in the first place?
See, I rather suspect that you had to learn quite a few things without that presupposition, and then learned about the presupposition.
When you provide an explanation for how you came to make your presupposition, and when you actually acknowledge and accept the much better (if far from complete) answers you’ve received, then dialog can begin. As long as you’re claiming superiority based on your “presupposition” without explaining anything about that, you’re just bragging. And we’re pretty sure that we can see through your bragging, since it’s so like other warrantless bragging we’ve encountered.
Glen Davidson
For FMM, but not WJM, I think it is more basic than this confusion. I think it comes down to having different goals and values.
You may believe that preservation of the epistemic community is the higher value. But others may believe that living according to a revealed truth takes precedence over having a logical argument or living up to the goals of an epistemic community.
Similarly, some may think that meeting scientific norms for explanation is the reason to support evolution. Others, eg many at UD, place political goals higher, for example the goal of changing educational curricula to include religious belief.
But what about your religious speech acts, KN? Are you still thinking about how to reconcile them with the goals of preserving the epistemic community?
I thought you might take Flanagan’s approach. As I understand him, he says that one may recognize that science cannot answer why there is something instead of nothing, and so live according to a “myth of creation” which brings meaning and purpose to one’s life.
This is why I asked Fifth which parts of Christianity specifically were necessary preconditions for knowledge. He said ‘the Gospel’ – which could hardly be more non-specific.
How is the story of Genesis a necessary precondition for knowledge?
How is the great flood a necessary precondition for knowledge?
How is the resurrection a necessary precondition for knowledge?
How are the acts of the apostles a necessary precondition for knowledge?
How is the book of revelation a necessary precondition for knowledge?
And the donkey?
fifth,
By your logic:
Incarnation is an active process.
A timeless being is incapable of change.
Therefore a timeless being is incapable of incarnation.
My frustration with philosophy stems from the tendency to agonize over the posts of cranks and loons. There is no possibility for a meeting of minds.
When you debate a YEC or a Behe, you can share some common facts and methods. You will never change your opponent’s mind, but you can clarify and bolster your position.
When you debate a certain kind of theist or philosopher, you are debating someone who starts with the definition of himself as correct. Non-negotiable.
A negotiation with someone who starts with a non-negotiable position seems a bit futile.
petrushka,
Who are some of the philosophers you have in mind?
Fmm’s position on Incarnation,at least a couple of years ago, was that until the Incarnation occurred no creation was possible. So the Incarnation did not occur at the conception of Jesus but rather before the creation of the universe. So the OT God was post Incarnation.
FWIW, I appreciate your defense of philosophy against the Neil/petrushka line: “They’re not like us when we opine about knowledge, truth, goodness, justice, necessity, lawlike behavior, etc. because while we have important points to make, they’re all idiots.”
Anyone who would devote a hundred posts or more debating FMM or WJM.
It’s true I waste a lot of time here, but I try to limit my engagement with non-negotiators. In the case of Gary Gaulin, I quit reading the AtBC thread altogether.
One more point. When I do engage in philosophy, it’s more to express a personal viewpoint than to expound on TRVTH. I don’t consider anything I have to say on philosophy or theology to be anything more than my opinion.
It is my opinion that people differ in their preferred way of thinking. Not all thought is verbal. I once encountered the concept of kinesthetic thinking. It seemed immediately to fit me. I am simply not comfortable with concepts that convey no action.
I realize this is an oddity, but I like it.
Wow, now you’re channeling Murray as well as Fifth: “Hey, I’m not claiming anything I say is actually True–only that it appeals to me! Philosophers (those nitwits) have the audacity claim stuff is true! When I post here, it’s just fun, interesting stuff, but when they post on precisely the same topics, it’s pedantic nonsense–even when they agree with me! Can’t you see this difference?”
I don’t think I have anything in common with Murray. My definition of knowledge is whatever the consensus is among experts. It’s a probability rather than a certainty.
I could be a head in a vat, and the experts an illusion,. but (perhaps like Murray?) I don’t think so.
There are few places where I may side with minority experts, but these instances are unusual. I’m not aware of any place where I side with anyone regarded as a crank.
So I would be interested in anything regarded by academic philosophers as true that isn’t consillient with science and which hasn’t been addressed by science.
I have not ever used the phrase pedantic nonsense. You made that up. My disinterest in academic philosophy is clearly a personal preference (possibly a personal shortcoming). You may not like my preference and you are free to think I’m shallow or stupid, but I have not called you shallow or stupid.
Your arguments simple sail past me, particularly when you are engaging people I think are cranks. But again, this is personal. I do not KNOW that Murray and Fifth are wrong. It’s just my best guess.
petrushka,
I’m still interested in hearing about those philosophers who “start with a definition of themselves as correct.”
Could you name some names?
I was thinking of religious speech acts as exempt from the constraints of the epistemic community, but I recognize that that exemption must be earned and I haven’t done enough to show that the exemption is warranted.
Owen Flanagan? Where does he develop that approach? I’d love to see it!
I did. It was a distillation of what I take from the tone of many of the posts on that subject by Neil and you. Those sorts of posts are a bit insulting as well as self-congratulatory.
As I’ve said before, I certainly don’t mind if people don’t like philosophy, anymore than if they said they don’t like archeology. But the posts I have in mind are of the type that sneer at people who happen to have found some questions interesting enough to have spent years studying them, while the sneerers have apparently found them only interesting enough to post on them (generally quite knowingly) on various sites on the internet.
When you say it’s just a preference–why would I mind? People like to read and study what they like. But there’s a tone there as well, you know? I don’t read chemistry texts myself, but I don’t sneer at them, act as if the questions they ask are stupid, or write as if I had some particular insight into their issues.
That’s how I read sections of the last chapter especially of The Really Hard Problem.
ETA: starting near bottom of p. 190 of 2007 edition.
By the way, when it comes “developing” ideas, I find that Flanagan is more of a broad rather than deep kind of expositor. At least from the couple of books and articles of his that I have read.
That’s my sense as well. He’s written some stuff on Buddhism, I believe.
Point taken. I confess to being a non-verbal thinker, and I am probably sneering because I don’t follow what you are saying.
Having said that, I still have a complaint. People like Einstein and Schrodinger and Gamow worked in a world of abstract mathematics that is unavailable to 99.9 percent of humanity, and yet they worked to develop images and examples that conveyed the consequences and entailment of their ideas, if not the mathematical reasoning.
What turns me off philosophy is name dropping as a substitute for argument, and the reliance on technical terms that do not engage the experience of less refined mortals. Perhaps I’m simply not very observant, but I don’t think we do that when arguing biology. I know we drop names (Lenski, Behe, Darwin, Mayr, etc) but seldom without also discussing some specific concrete finding.
I find retreat into abstraction to be annoying. It’s what IDists do when they talk about information. It’s very easy to spin up an abstract argument (Keiths: without naming names, this is what I’m thinking about) that guarantees the impossibility of evolution. It’s a variation of the bumblebee argument.
When I said I was frustrated at hundreds of posts engaging theists, I was thinking what a waste it is to engage on their terms. People can always create a self-consistent abstraction, as long as it doesn’t engage the world inhabited by other people.
Let me offer up a thought experiment. Suppose the eighteenth and nineteenth century geologists had found massive evidence for a global flood, including perhaps, the remains of an ark. Would this affect the way we philosophize? Would we be asking different questions?
I don’t think so.
Re colorful thought experiments, the trolley problem comes to mind. Also the parasitic vioinist and baby seeds. There’s also a cool paper on Leibniz’ Law involving a universe consisting only of two perfect spheres (I won’t name drop the author.) And of course evil demons, ‘speckled hens’ ‘the beetle in the box’ and ‘twater.’ Literally hundreds of what I’d call colorful thought experiments. You yourself mentioned one of them recently: the brain in the vat.
What’s your take on the parasitic violinist? If it were a law coming up for a vote in the next couple of minutes, would you vote for a law enabling this medical intervention?
I think I mentioned that I recently finished a paper on consequentialism. In it I discuss what I take to be the important considerations regarding such a vote. (As you can see, I think the answer can vary with the situation.)
And the incarnated body (which would later be known as Jesus) was just on ice in the cryolab somewhere , waiting for the untold millennia to pass after god created the universe before it was time for the artificial insemination of Mary.
Christians are capable of thinking such incoherent things, they should be embarrassed for themselves. They should do anything within their power to remain silent and hidden rather than be willing to expose their cray-cray to the eyes of the non-deluded. They should be as ashamed to share their bizarre fantasies about god as most people are to share pornography.
BruceS,
Very interesting! I hadn’t read The Really Hard Problem but now I want to. He has an edited collection coming out soon on “neuroexistentialism”. Though I agree with that assessment of Flanagan’s weakness as an expositor.
I was drafted and sent to Vietnam. I won a lottery, just like the one in Hunger Games. Would you consider the draft morally equivalent to a parasitic violinist?
I got a high enough number to miss it. I guess iI think the issues are similar. What do you think?
I think nations kill people and impose obligations on people all the time. That doesn’t mean I approve, but it does imply that I see some equivalence among laws that tax people, laws that draft people into the military, and laws that enable war and police action. I refuse to get excited about all this, even when I disapprove.
I’m afraid I see it all as an evolutionary process rather than a moral or intellectual process. (Hi, Gregory.)
Here’s another thought experiment. I do not oppose war on principle, but I oppose war on utilitarian grounds. It’s pretty rare to find a just and necessary war, and when you do, you can generally find some dirty business in the past that led to it. I opposed the Vietnam war not because I thought the opposition were the good guys, but because I thought it was unwinnable and counterproductive. Not to mention brutal.
I went to a Quaker college. I could have been a conscientious objector, even though I don’t technically qualify. I could have easily stretched my conscience.
I had political connections. I could easily have landed a safe job in the National Guard.
If I had avoided the draft, it would not have made a nit’s worth of difference in the war machine. Some other bastard, most likely poor and black, would have gone in my place.
Everyone I knew at time avoided the draft in one way or another. At least one guy chose prison as a principled stance against the right of the government to force people into service. My father-in-law was a CO in WWII, the just war. He was in some very exciting medical experiments.
What say you? How does a philosopher approach such a problem? Bearing in mind it is not an artificial or abstract question.
Yes, there is a chapter in the book about reconciling Buddhism and science. I skipped that one.
petrushka,
We disagree on the value of philosophy, but I do think you have a point about the name-dropping. I don’t think it’s inherent to philosophy itself, but there does seem to be something about the culture surrounding modern-day academic philosophy that encourages excessive name-dropping.
The focus in science seems to be more on the ideas themselves and their relative merits, and less on their provenance.
walto:
Bruce:
And an entire book called The Bodhisattva’s Brain.
KN said:
What (2) means for (1) is that any behavior, and any thought, is “rational” and/or “good” as long as it obeys criteria grounded in the culture of a particular society. This makes what is considered “rational” and “good” entirely subjective (even if inter-subjective throughout most of that society).
This means that if the social norms consider driving planes into buildings full of civilians rational and good, then by (1) and (2), it is rational and good by definition.
Nobody actually argues or behaves this way, other than sociopaths or true nihilists. No sane persojn actually argues and lives as if (2) is true; rather they argue and live as if (2) was defined thusly: These criteria are grounded in the structure of our existence and apply to all humans at all times regardless of their society, norms or beliefs.
Otherwise, you’d have no reason to argue with me, 5thMM or Mung. Or anyone else. And you would frame your arguments (or at least pepper them with disclaimers) that you are only arguing about some particular society. I don’t know what society you are arguing about (or more accurately, from) – perhaps a society of postmodernist deconstructivists – but you argument simply does not reflect the norms or standards of the society I find myself living in because nobody I personally know thinks the way you and others in this forum think.
Different philosophers say different things, of course–just like everybody else. Some are pacifists, some write about just and unjust wars, some are hawks. There’s a thread here that gets a little into the question about a bunch of currently popular atheist philosophers and their views on wars in the Middle East.
The main difference between a philosophy book on when/whether we should get involved in some war and somebody just shooting the shit about it on the internet is that the philosopher will spend more time trying to figure out what assumptions his/her opinions are based on, will try to make sure any arguments for his/her conclusions are sound, and will be more careful not to contradict him/herself from one moment (or possible war situation) to the next. For good or ill, it’s not like an empirical science, where you could just design an experiment.
Like you, I’m a consequentialist, but I’m no better at calculating utilities than anybody else, and need to rely on economists, actuaries, psychologists, environmental scientists, etc. just like every other utilitarian should. So my interests are in how/whether we can support the consequentialist premises as being superior to competing views (like those pushed by libertarians, e.g.), what the utiles we should be concerned with are (and what’s so great about them in particular), how these goods should be aggregated, etc. IMO, unlike the queries of the economists, etc., none of THOSE are either empirical or mathematical questions, so we either have to study them separately or, if questioned about why we like consequentialism best be willing to just mumble something like, “Beats the hell out of me–I just do like it best!” Because once we try to say why, e.g., hedonism is better than natural rights theory, we’re doing philosophy.
Let’s be clear. My opinion of philosophy is my opinion, and subject to correction.
You, of all people, should be aware that I am a shoot from the hip writer. This is entertainment to me, and I do not wish to be so careful and consistent in what I say that it ceases to be fun. At the same time, I do try to learn and avoid repeating mistakes. But I will sometimes fail even at that .
I do not wish to be mean or to cause pain. No one should lose sleep over my opinion.
Yeah, I’ve got a copy of that I think. Never opened it yet, though.
I appreciate all that, petrushka. I wish I could extract similar sentiments from Neil. But I think a philosopher must have yelled at him once in school or something.
BTW, regarding the military draft, I had what must be a pretty unique experience with that. When I was 16, I had a job at WONO, a little classical music radio station in Syracuse, NY. One or two nights a week, I’d put on music, read the news, etc. So, when the draft numbers came out, I saw mine as it sputtered out of a teletype machine on yellow paper. It was 250, and, at the time, I didn’t know if that was high or low, (good or bad). Turned out to be high enough.
I have two older brothers who both managed to get out with bullshit medical deferments, but by the time my cohort came up for the draft, they were cracking down on that stuff.
As I’ve said before, I think philosophy sort of hovers between science and the arts, so maybe it’s not so surprising if the views are associated with individuals. It’s more of a solitary activity than working in a big lab, too. Many fewer papers with 40 names at the top.
Nevertheless, I’m sorry if I do a lot of that.
petrushka,
I’m not losing sleep over it — I just think you’re missing out, like a kid who tries broccoli, hates it, and avoids it for the next 40 years, only to discover that what was disgusting at age 5 tastes pretty good at 45.
There’s plenty of bad philosophy (and bad science, bad poetry, bad food…) but the good stuff is really, well good.
walto,
I haven’t noticed you doing it all that much, actually.
walto,
Maybe he had a childhood encounter with a philosopher that was similar to Little Albert’s ordeal at the hands of Watson.