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.
The law of non-contradiciton is non-negotiable. This goes for the both of us. When you say there’s some possibility the universe might be, or become, illogical, what you’re showing is that you don’t understand the subject we are discussing. No, that isn’t possible where possible means logically possible. Because the very proposition suggest a violation of the rules you use to construct and evaluate all propositions.
Truth necessarily exists. And no, truth is not synonymous with god. For exampel if I say “it is true there is a mouse in the house”, that is not the same as saying “it is god there is a mouse in the house”. God is not the author, inventor, creator or architect of truth and logic (and god is not a substitute for those words either)
In so far as a god exists, that god necessarily is subject to truth and logic too.
For example, to say that god can do certain actions is to say that “it is true that god can do certain actions”. To say that god has certain properties is to say that there are truthes about god.
Reality, existence, nature, the universe, whatever you want to call it, necessarily have properties. Even if we don’t know what those properties are and even if we can’t find out what they are, they would nevertheless be the case. If every thinking human being were to stop existing, there would still be truthes about a world without humans in it. It doesn’t matter what kind of world that world would be, there would be things about that world that would be the case.
There would be facts about existence that could be stated as propositions (if someone were to exist and state them) and a truth-value could be assigned to those propositions. It cannot be otherwise. This isn’t a “worldview”, it is the foundation of thought itself.
You have been fed nonsensical one-liners about “god is truth” and shit like that, but it’s meaningless blather that probably just sounded profound to you on the face of it, and you didn’t bother to think about it any further.
I thought we’d been through this already, but if you’re asking me to justify my support for non-contradiction or, as you say here, “the existence of truth,” I can’t do that. These are part of what Aristotelians would call my basic categories. For example, ignoring sorites-type issues, It is not possible in my worldview that it is both raining and not raining outside my window right now, but I can’t defend that. It’s an axiom of mine: I can only repeat “It is or it isn’t.” Hall argues that all we can do in support of our categories is note their congruity with common-sense, their explanatory usefulness, their and consistency with the findings of modern science. None of those are proofs, however.
You apparently think one can get to God (and your particular God at that!) from the fact that all of us rely on axioms we can’t prove. Have at it.
Once again yes.
Knowledge is justified true belief. My beliefs are not Justified unless I have some way of connecting with the truth.
To say that truth exists out there somewhere hypothetically is not enough. In order to be justified in believing something I need to have access to the truth.
The Gospel is the only way I know that a subjective human can access objective truth it provides a way for me to have access to the Logos.
peace
I think this is the “problem” with the internet. Previously if you had something to say and it was not very interesting, unique, new or profound then your opportunities and your potential audience were limited. Who is going to publish a book of things that don’t need to be said or have been said already but better?
Add to that the reluctance to accept that others have said things worth listening to over the years (some of which will of course debunk what they are saying) and you get a perfect storm of hubris and arrogance.
Well said, Rumraket. (Or, put another way, I agree wholeheartedly.) 🙂
And yet, despite that, you can only guess at “Gate, animal or rope”.
You need to take this up with your fellow travelers. They have made is a point to say that they have no way of saying that the universe is fully comprehensible.
Why is that the case in your worldview why does the law of non-contradiciton hold? I agree you can’t reason with out it but why should we expect it to be true in a world with out God?
peace
Why should we expect it to be true in a world with God? Bonus points for actually supporting your answer.
I can in my worldview. In Christianity truth necessarily exists
That is what the discussion is about. That is the difference between me and you.
peace
Enough for what? By the way, I’m not saying truth exists out there hypothetically, I’m saying it exists categorically and necessarily. That it cannot logically be otherwise.
Why? Why can’t you be justified by evidence? It works for me.
This is not something you know, it is something you assume as you have declared now multiple times.
That’s a confusion. What makes you assume that if the universe exhibits non-contradiction everywhere that it is “fully comprehensible”: maybe, as Spinoza urged, it also contains an infinite number of Attributes that we can never comprehend.
Now you ask why it holds. If one is a human being and believes that the universe is not “fully comprehensible” by human beings, why should we be able to answer this. There’s a lot of stuff that human beings don’t know, and perhaps can never know. Rumraket and I have told you that non-contradiction is among our unprovable axioms. When you ask why it’s true, you must not be hearing us.
Infallibility is not a prerequisite for knowelege. The meaning of the verse is the same (that it’s impossible for a rich man to get to the kingdom) either way.
Try to shove a camel or a rope through the eye of a needle and the result is the same, failure and frustration.
peace
You still think this an argument it’s not. I am only sharing my presuppositions in response to the repeated direct question from keiths asking me how I can know the Bible is true.
peace
Yes, it is a difference. You have an additional category. It’s no more provable than ours are and seems to me to unnecessarily bulk up your list. As to whether it is consistent with common-sense and modern science and provides anything else useful, I leave it to keiths, Glen, OMagain, et al. I take it that that’s what this site and UD are largely about.
Hit it, boys.
How do you know that evidence is justification?
peace
As I told KN. It is both a presupposition and a revealed truth.
The Logos became flesh
peace
Yeah, but I’m not talking about comprehensibility in the sense of a child trying to learn a difficult subject. It might be true that there are (nevertheless totally logically coherent) facts about the universe that are just too complicated for humans to understand.
This is different from saying there are properties of the universe that are incomprehensible because they violate the foundations of logic.
When my “fellow travelers” are conceding the universe might not be fully comprehensible, they are talking about the first thing (that some things might just be too complicated for humans to ever get a nice intuitive grasp of, and I would agree). They’re not talking about comprehensibility sensu logical contradictions.
There is no reason for it, it’s just the way it has to be. It cannot, given the nature of what it is, rest on some deeper foundation.
When you ask me this question, you are again demonstrating you don’t understand the subject.
God is truth he can not lie. If God exists truth exists necessarily
peace
It cannot be both.
Rather, it is a pressupposition that it is a revealed truth.
Suppose there is a red apple in front of you. If I understand the semantic/Taskian theory of truth (which I believe you subscribe to), the “the apple is red” is true because “the apple” successfully refers to the apple in front of you which does possess the property of redness.
So if one says “the apple is red” is true, does that trueness exist in the same way the apple does? Or perhaps I should ask if it exists in the same way red does? Or maybe the redness of that particular apple?
On a different note:
Have you looked at the Aeon article KN linked above on different approaches to logic which don’t use LEM or binary truth values?
By definition. We simply declare that evidence justifies beliefs.
For example, upon observing coffee in my cup, am I not justified in believing there is coffee in my cup? Of course I am. Because evidence has justified the belief, because we agree that, by definition, evidence justifies beliefs.
In your worldview is there something that can understand the universe?
If nothing can understand the universe can you still say it is understandable?
Can something be coherent and not understandable at the same time and in the same respect?
peace
This is a nonsensical statement. It makes as much sense as saying that green is angry set theory.
Whether or not god exists, truth would necessarily have to exist in any case. For exampel if god exists, it is true that god exists. And if god doesn’t exist, it is true that god doesn’t exist.
If there was nothing at all in existence, then it would be true that there was nothing at all in existence.
But not a gate….
So it’s just an unsupported assumption on your part. Correct?
What justification do you have for believing that definitions are static and universal and binding ?
peace
Yet the Devil can appear as an angel…
I’m sure it’s not a gate but even if it was an unbowed rich man is not getting in.
peace
Yes only God can not lie.
What I know is true if and only if God revealed it to me.
If God has not revealed it then knowelege all knowelege is impossible
peace
Just ask what it is! You have a personal communication channel, no? Can the answer not be “revealed” like all the other answers that have been “revealed” to you?
Oh, right. So God can’t lie but he can create beings that will lie on his behalf (as God would have know what the things he will create will do)? That makes all sorts of sense.
Got a list of these revelations? Do the clarify any currently ambiguous statements in the bible? Like, you know, which creation story is the actual creation story?
You forgot to add a disclaimer that some sorts of knowledge (Rope, Animal or Gate) is impossible with or without revelation.
How do you know that given your worldview? Perhaps nothing is something, Atheists often argue that the universe sprang into existence from fluctuations in the nothingness
peace
I’m not clear on the role of cognitive biases in your analysis. Specifically, the day-to-day reasoning we successfully use in our world, social, and linguistic interactions is flawed when judged by the standards of Aristotlean or other formalized logics.
To me, this means that Aristotle, the Zen Buddhists, and others that create formalized logics made judgements in doing so about correct reasoning which are different than our day-to-day logic.
But how did they choose the norms for those logics? Are they arbitrary axiom systems or is there a single objectively correct logic?
Euclidean geometric provides a useful analogy. There are alternative geometrics based on different axioms. They all work. But we can still ask which one applies to the world we live in. Can we ask a similar question about logic. For example, do we live in a binary truth value world? I think that is close to what WJM claims.
I suspect the answer is no. The logic we choose depends on the model of the world we are using. Different models serve different purposes. The Aeon article you linked shows how a multi-valued logic is useful for certain database purposes. But it does seem that two-valued logic is the most useful when we want to reason formally about our day to day life.
Presumably ‘understandable’ is short for ‘understandable by_____’ so something could be understable by my daughter and not me, by me but not frogs, etc. That’s one of the reasons I kept asking you what ‘fully compehensible’ means.
fifthmonarchyman,
Your sophisticated theology fits on a bumper sticker:
It’s still nonsense until you provide your operational definition and objective empirical evidence.
I never said God revealed everything to me
peace
Given your worldview how do justify the claim that something is nonsense until you provide an operational definition and objective empirical evidence?
Did you have an operational definition and objective empirical evidence for the proposition that an operational definition and objective empirical evidence are necessary?
peace
Truth would have to be a metalinguistic property, unlike redness. I haven’t read those papers, but alternative logics have been pushed by mathematicians at least since Brouwer and Poincare. Is that what they’re getting at?
Walto:
MMMmmm. Me me me me me… Ahem…
Row row row your boat
gently down the stream,
merrily merrily merrily merrily
life is but a dream.
I agree. So are you saying that in your worldview the universe is fully understandable by someone?
If so who?
peace
No, I’m not. I have no reason to believe that the universe is fully comprehensible to anyone.
ETA: …or ever will be.
Unfortunately, you’re probably right about that.
fifthmonarchyman,
You really have been damaged by your childhood indoctrination.
If you can’t define what you’re talking about in sufficient detail to distinguish it from anything else, you are literally talking nonsense. If you have no objective, empirical evidence to support your claims, they can be dismissed without consideration.
As far as your OldMung-like question, look up “category error”.
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t think he’s getting rid of logic, just insisting that we need additional support for our reliance on it.
Several of your posts have raised the interesting question of reasoning versus systems of logic. Don’t we need to be able to reason in order to create and critique systems of logic? Which comes first?
I think the key is to recognize the necessity of language. It is only through the tool of language that we are able to concretize and externalize concepts and the processes for connecting them through logic. Language hence makes them available for intersubjective development and agreement and subsequent use in personal and public formal reasoning.
I think that also means that the reasoning1 which underlies our ability to create and use language cannot be the same reasoning2 that we follow when we check the correctness of logic within some logic system. The reasoning1 in language use has to use a human biological capability, based on brain processes. To avoid regress, these brain processes cannot be usefully modeled by the sort of algorithms we associate with GOFAI and Fodor’s LOT.
But the reasoning2 in the use of formal logic is algorithmic in the GOFAI sense.
This relates to the rule-following puzzle you raised in another post. Wittgenstein points out, I believe, that we should dissolve the philosophical puzzle about how we avoid the infinite regress that seems to plague rule following by realizing that it is a brute fact that we do follow rules simply by choosing to act. I think that is it correct at a personal level. It explains how we are able to follow explicit rules in algorithms for formal reasoning as well (seem to?) follow implicit rules in language use.
But at subpersonal level, we probably have a limited number of computing processes, implemented via neural networks, evolved to leverage our bodies and environments. As Dennett has suggested and Clark and others continue to refine, language provides a “virtual machine” tool which we created socially and then can use publicly and internally to allow us to formalize logic and reasoning and to follow algorithms to apply them.
BruceS,
Excellent post, Bruce. Acute and…deep!
Yes, the Aeon article just summarizes some modern refinements of that work. The buddhist/koan relationship is not really central, but is a nice tease.
See my first reply to KN for more on my point in raising that.
OK, but in what sense do metalinguistic properties exist?
My first inclination is to say ‘the same sense as first order properties”–but I feel like you’re setting a trap for me! Is there a problem with my (likely naïve) supposition?
As far as I can tell what has been revealed to you is that “the bible” is “true”.
Yet it can’t be Rope, Gate or Animal all at the same time, it’s only one of them. But despite that the entirety of the bible is “true”.
No, I think you have someone else in mind. I don’t set traps as part of posting, at least not on purpose. Would Gandhi set rhetorical traps?
I’m just struggling to understand truth and the various philosophical arguments revolving around it. Deflationary theory has emotional appeal for me, which I think would imply that truth does not exist in some sense. But I know there are good arguments against deflationism.