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.
None of them applies to the world we live in.
It isn’t a question of which applies. It’s a question of “which should we apply”. And that depends on other choices that we make.
No, definitions aren’t assumptions. They’re just definitions. They are declarations about the meanings of words and concepts. They don’t have to be “supported” by anything, people can either agree to use those definitions or not. If most people disagree with the definition, then it’s just not a very useful one and I might have to come up with a better one.
It is meaningless to call it an unsupported assumption when we are talking about setting up definitions. For example, if I define a vehicle to be a wheeled object for transport of humans or goods, is that “an unsupported assumption”? It would seem silly to call it that. It just means we have defined a concept. You either agree with it or you don’t.
You are so thoroughly confused by our discussion.
I don’t believe definitions are static, universal and binding. And I don’t believe they have to be, to be useful and allow us so communicate, seek and gain knowledge.
Tell me, do you disagree with me when I say me observing coffee in my cup is justification for the belief there is coffee in my cup? I don’t think you really disagree with that, and in fact I think you live your everyday life, when you are not having arguments with atheists on the internet, as if you agree that evidence justifies belief.
For example, when you put your hand in your pocket to feel if you left your keys there and you feel them, then you believe that your keys are in your pocket because you felt them. So you do, in fact when it comes down to it, also agree that evidence justifies belief.
Your talking about the existence or non-existence of truth seems odd to me. I prefer a correspondence theory to deflationary theories, but I take them both to explain what truth IS.
Gerald Vision’s book Veritas is a nice summary of truth theories. It wasn’t that well received, I don’t think, but it’s about my level. I like Vision’s stuff, generally. Also Marian David’s SEP article on truth is very good. Incidentally, I’ve corresponded with both of those guys. I think David got annoyed with me when I disagreed with something he said about Russell’s “Logical Atomism” essays. Haven’t heard from him since.
I could alienate Gandhi, I think.
OK, but then what does “should” mean in that sentence. Possibly it means we “should” choose the geometry of space-time that makes it possible for us to predict what will happen and to control how things work (needing GPS means not Newton’s version of Euclidean geometry).
And is there a similar “should” for logic? I read WJM as answering that the “should” for logic is we should follow the objectively correct logic creating/grounded/whatever by God.
ETA: I recognize that you could mean that we can apply Euclidean geometry in making day-to-day cases, like building a house, because it is approximately correct. But can “approximately” be applied to logic?
On the other hand, if you mean good enough in terms of whether a chosen logic axiom system functions to accomplish goals, then I agree that we choose are logic as we choose our geometry.
Yes, IEP and SEP both have good articles. I’ll probably start with this simpler, neutral book when I have time: Truth.
SEP claims that it is controversial in what sense Tarksi is correspondence theory, but I cannot say I understand all the subtleties. But it does seem to have something to do with whether there are facts in the world to correspond with or just a semantic/reference type of correspondence.
David recommended an old book by Pitcher on truth to me, which I picked up. Didn’t blow me away, but I guess it’s considered a classic.
The meaning and importance of Tarski’s paper has been controversial since its publication. Several books (and who knows how many dissertations) have been published just on that! One of the papers I heard in Chicago was mostly about whether Tarski’s theory was deflationary or not. The guy who wrote the paper (Michael Williams) said it was. McDowell (and I) said it wasn’t.
That subject is a great example of how little progress philosophy ever makes–even on exegetical issues!
Pragmatic choice. But, as I indicated, that depends on other choices made.
The world comes to us without lengths, angles, directions. We (earlier humans) had to invent those. The geometry depends on how you determine length (or distance). There’s an uncountable infinity of possible ways that we could define “distance”, though we would reject many of those on pragmatic grounds. Once we have selected how to measure distance, when can look at what that implies for geometry.
The change from Newton to Einstein isn’t just a change of geometry. It’s a change in how we measure length. The Newtonian way of measuring length implies Euclidean geometry. We are not quite sure of what is implied by the GR way of measuring.
It’s the same kind of issue with logic. The world came to us without words, sentences, concepts, etc. How we conceptualize the world, how we “design” a system of concepts and words that allow us to talk about the world, affects what is an appropriate logic.
On my reading, Tarski’s theory was intended only as a theory of truth for a formal language. His truth conditions were the requirements that truth, as used within the formal language, would be consistent with truth as used in the natural language where we might discuss the formal language.
I take the correspondence theory to be something like an intuitive account of how we think about the meaning of truth. But it really doesn’t qualify as a theory (in my opinion).
One of the features of human reasoning that deeply perplexes me is this: how did we acquire the capacity to detect our cognitive biases?
Think of it this way: any cognitive system is presumably going to employ various short-cut in order to satisfy the goals of the organism without devoting more calories than necessary to information processing. It’s a trade-off between the need for lowering metabolic expense and the need for increased representational accuracy.
If we start off trying to think about cognition in ecological and evolutionary terms, cognitive biases are pretty much what you’d expect, so it’s no surprise that we have them, too. Rather, what is surprising is that we have the ability to detect that we have cognitive biases and even come up with ways of reasoning that are less biased.
The fact that our knowledge about the world is fallible-but-corrigible is interesting, but not terribly surprising to a naturalist — we can see analogues elsewhere in other animals of hypothesis formation, testing, and revision. But what is deeply surprising is that we human beings can turn this process of hypothesis formation, testing, and revision back around on ourselves, and apply it to our own cognitive activity. We end up forming, testing, and revising hypotheses about our ability to form, test, and revise hypotheses. I find this quite remarkable, to say the least.
But I would not want to say that Aristotle or Nagarjuna made arbitrary choices. They developed axioms in light of other metaphysical, ethical, and political views that they had, embedded as they were in different kinds of cultures and political economies.
(I know one philosopher, John McCumber, who has gone so far as to claim that that the form/material account of substances is abstracted from the citizen/slave relation of ancient Greek slavery. I worry that this is too reductive, but it’s an intriguing thought.)
Since the emergence of non-classical logics, the big debate within logical theory is between logical pluralism — there are multiple logics with different principles, and we basically just choose which one we want to operate within — and logical monism — all the different logics are aspects of a single universal logic that we have yet to discover.
It’s an intriguing suggestion, but I doubt it could work. It’s not so much that we ask, “which geometry applies to the world?” but rather, “given at least two physical theories, each of which is based on a different set of geometric axioms, which theory has better empirical support?” In answering that question physicists use a great deal of theory — including the theories used to construct the devices used to make measurements — in order to get the geometric axioms to “speak” to empirical measurements.
I don’t see how there can be anything analogous in logic, because there’s nothing analogous to measurement.
I like this but I’d put it a bit differently. The choice of logic and the choice of metaphysics stand and fall together. The principle of non-contradiction in Aristotelian logic works hand-in-glove with the metaphysical commitment to the substance-property account of beings. With a different metaphysics — such as the co-dependent origination of all beings taught by the Buddhists — you get a different logic.
There is a single correct logic if there is a single correct metaphysics, and conversely. Personally, I’m doubtful that there is one.
Yes, a binary logic works pretty well when what you’re trying to do is keep track of people’s various commitments and entitlements, and where doing so aimed at mutual understanding and successful cooperation.
Once again more hand-waving incoming….
Non-responsive your Honor.
How is the death and resurrection of Christ, specifically, a precondition for knowledge?
What is it about about knowledge that demands Jesus be nailed to a cross and resurrected three days later?
Hell if you want an easy one how about this….
Would knowledge be possible if Christ came back after 2 days rather than 3?
Any married person knows from whence we get our knowledge of our own fallibility.
More precisely, Tarski’s theory is a procedure for generating the semantics of “is true” for a formal language. I believe that Tarski himself was not happy about Davidson’s use of Tarskian semantics in natural languages.
One big question here that needs to be made explicit is whether we’re talking about truth as a semantic notion, as an epistemological notion, or something else. Deflationary accounts, like the prosentential theory, the redundancy theory, and so on, all pertain to truth as a semantic concept. Thus one might think that there is no more meaning to “p is true” than there is to “p”. On the prosenential account, “is true” is introduced to refer back to sentences without repeating them — thus,
Person A: “p”
Person B: “yes, that’s true”
where “that’s true” points back to “p” and confirms A’s entitlement to assert it.
On the other hand, correspondence theories of truth are not metalinguistic theories but rather theories about the relation between language and the world. One compelling reason in support of correspondence, I think, is that it helps us make sense of the idea that truth is an epistemic norm: we want true statements, and more of them, as a goal of inquiry.
It’s hard to see how truth as a metalinguistic concept can also be an epistemic norm or goal of inquiry.
On the other hand, the traditional form of the correspondence theory of truth is problematic, not least of which because the corresponding items on one side of the relation are claims or propositions. What is it that corresponds to a claim? A fact? A state of affair? An object? A “truth-maker”?
If there’s going to be a correspondence between language and reality, and more specifically, between propositions (the bits of language with truth-value) and reality, then it seems as though reality itself must have a linguistic or propositional form to it — otherwise there’s no way to set up the correspondence relation. And that’s a really hard metaphysical pill to swallow, not least of which because it conflicts with a scientific metaphysics grounded in the epistemic authority of empirical inquiry.
Based on these considerations, I think that something like what Sellars called “picturing” must be correct: there is a correspondence relation between mind and world, but neither mind nor world are, in the ordo rerum, essentially linguistic. Rather the correspondence relation is enacted through continuous feedback loops between the coupled dynamical systems of brains, bodies, and environments, and in the case of scientific theories, augmented by technologies and measuring devices.
I want to say “They are and they’re not,” but five minutes ago I was plumping for the principle of non-contradiction!
🙂
No. Reality does not have a linguistic or propositional form to it, as far as I can see. This is where I start to become critical of philosophy for not studying what should be the very core of that discipline.
And this is why philosophy should be done without metaphysics.
If a scientist wants to study some aspect of reality, and there is no suitable correspondence, then the scientist invents such a correspondence. This requires inventing new language (often described as “technical jargon”) and new standards for using that language (often described as “measuring conventions”). In many cases, a scientific theory is really a definition of the correspondence that scientists have constructed, in order to allow them to do their study. Data is theory laden, because you cannot have data without a suitable correspondence, and the data depends on the definitions of that correspondence.
By implication, perceptual systems are also in the business of intenting correspondences, except in this case it is correspondence between neural representations and reality.
Inventing suitable correspondences is at the core of science. And investigating the principles of correspondence ought to be the core of philosophy.
But your post is nearly ALL metaphysics. Do you think discussions of the relations between thoughts and reality is not a metaphysical inquiry? Do you make your own remarks to consist entirely of empirical claims? (Even claims about the the theory-ladenness of data and of the invention of correspondences between neurophysiological representations and reality?)
You just happen to like your own philosophy best.
walto,
I like Neil’s philosophy as well — because it is so similar to mine!
But I do see your point that such an approach has metaphysical commitnents of its own. One can reject a specific version or method of doing metaphysics easily enough, but doing philosophy without metaphysics is something else entirely.
I have an article arguing that Rorty didn’t dispense with metaphysics (as he claimed) but adopted Davidsonian semantics to his own purposes in order to disavow his own deeply Sellarsian metaphysics.
It’s not really clear to me that philosophy without metaphysics is a viable project.
Agreed.
walto,
I can’t stop doing metaphysics!
Perhaps this is due to dual process reasoning.
System 1 resulted from biological evolution and its norms are possibly etiologically-based on natural selection, as you say.
System 2 is formalized reasoning. It’s norms are based on understanding how we want deductive processes based on language processing to preserve the truth of sentences (or propositions for the pedants).
Come to think of it, there is at least a superficial resemblance to the bifurcation of intentionality I read about somewhere.
KN said this:
After which, I pointed out that if such criteria are grounded in “social practices”, indicating to me that whatever (2) was for a particular society grounded that particular society’s (1). In other words, you could get an entirely different (1) from different (2)s.
However, KN objected, saying that I was conflating “norms” and “conventions”. Well, I’m not sure what he meant by the term “practices”; one would think a social practice is more a convention than what he has now clarified as:
The question is, what does that addendum bring to the table? What does it mean? And, does it actually rebut my point about the subjectivity (and intersubjectivity) of norms in KN’s viewpoint, allowing any sort of social practice – like a supposedly rational argument for slavery or exteminating jews – to be counted as “proper rational discourse”, and any type of behavior as “proper human behavior”?
It appears that KN thinks this addendum does exactly that; he goes on:
Well, then the norms he is talking about are not actually grounded in social practices, as he originally stated, but rather are grounded in universal, species typical behaviors. Social practices, then may or may not reflect these universal behaviors, and so are not the “grounds” for (1) at all.
KN clarifies and explains:
This where KN makes his error:
What we have here is Wittgensteinian view vs Platonic, or rather that instead of criteria for rational discourse and proper living being sewn into the fabric of reality and existing a priori regardless of any social or evolutionary influence, it is instead sewn into the fabric of humanity via evolution (as he states elsewhere), then interpreted and approximated by some social practices.
But this leaves questions and problems unanswered. What are mere social conventions, and what are true universal human norms? For example, in the arena of humans asking questions and giving answers and making assertions, rhetoric, emotional pleading and intimidation have certainly been around as long as inductive and deductive logic. One might even successfully argue that it is the former group that holds the real sway over human discourse throughout history, while the latter is something of a minor player. Does this mean that rhetoric, emotional pleading and intimidation are proper forms of reasoning? It would seem so. I don’t see how a Wittgensteinian case can be made for Aristotlean logic as being superior, as a universal human means of giving and answering questions, to rhetoric, emotional pleading and intimidation (REPI).
But, we all know that while perhaps a much greater number of humans currently and historically employ REPI (even while they may think and assert they are using logic), REPI is not a form of proper rational discourse. It is a means of circumventing proper rational discourse. KN has not cleared up this issue and so his reference to “social practices of the distinctively human form of life” offers no real clarification. I suspect he will have even more of a problem in a debate about Platonic vs Wittgensteinian groundings and justifications for “proper” human behavior, since the history of humanity has always been pretty brutal.
The Platonic view “wins” not by “violence”, but rather because it is the only view that saves “proper” discourse from (1) trying to figure out what is mere social convention and what is universal human norm, and (2) the problem of which “universal human norms” should be used, and which should not be used. Something must transcend even universal human traits when those traits are in conflict with each other in order to decide which should be employed. Wittgensteinian accounts of norms cannot do this; it equally validates all “universal” human tendencies as human norms.
Perhaps KN would argue that we should only employ those which appear to make us different from other animals, but that would certainly be a specious, bad argument.
KN then gets to authority:
A “should” that carries with it no necessary ramifications is a meaningless should. When I ask, “why should I”, then if the answer is “because it is part of your nature”, that line of reasoning can be used to justify any behavior at all. I have asked several times now and have yet to see an answer: what is the ramification for disobeying a Wittgensteinian norm? If there is no penalty for disobeying such a norm, nor any reward for obeying it, why shouldn’t I disobey if I think it will benefit me? Why shouldn’t I use threats or rhetoric? Why shouldn’t I steal something if I can get away with it? Why shouldn’t I lie if it will get me what I want?
Wittgensteinian (arguing from what you’ve presented here) “shoulds” (as in, what kind of argument should I use), have no meat on their bones. Why should I limit myself to whatever “universal human” tactics you or anyone else distills from the history of all human methods as “the proper” one? What difference does it make?
You mean, besides the whole “why the hell should I care” problem with non-theistic accounts of proper reasoning, discourse and living.
You can tell yourself that all day long, and maybe your postmoderist, deconstructive form of reasoning implies it, but the fact is that the W/D conception suffers from internal ambiguity (which universal human behaviors do we call the deep norms and apply, and why?) and the fact it provides no reason why we should other than to bleat pitifully that we should. The Platonic/Aristotlean doesn’t bake theism into the cake; Theism is the only viable explanation (meaning, assumptive premise) for how people actually behave and actually argue that doesn’t end up in a big, fat sez you & so what?
From the W/D evolutionary perspective, we might as well just be birds chirping nonsensical noises. I might as well just point a gun to get my way. I might as well just emotionally manipulate other people and con them to get what I want. I might as well lie and quote-mine and misrepresent. I might as just hurl insults.
But nobody (except maybe card-carrying postmodern anarchists and sociopaths) actually live or argue that way – or, at least, they don’t want to and insist they are not.
The folks in ISIS are obeying god given norms. No postmodernism allowed.
Perhaps KN can answer this:
Are intimidation, rhetoric and emotional pleading proper forms of reasoning? If not, why not?
Unfortunately, without referring to a god-given nom, there is no logical principled way to condemn anything ISIS does, other than “because I say so.”
But ISIS’ norms come from Leviticus. Directly from the mouth of God.
According to who, you? Well, I’ve got news for you sonny…
You mean, it’s either “because god says so,” or “because I say so.”
The difference is staggering.
Glen Davidson
Actually, what William really means is “because I say god says so.”
That’s the Barry Arrington method. He inherited it from someone who inherited it from Moses.
Well, yes, if God really did say so we’d have to consider what that means.
Since it’s never God saying so to any reasonable degree of credibility, we have to consider who is speaking “for God.”
Glen Davidson
Unfortunately there’s no way to distinguish between ‘god-given’ norms and man-made ‘because I say so’ norms.
I wouldn’t worry about it, William.
That’s the knot cutter. As long as it’s just loons claiming to speak for god, there’s no point in wasting a lot of thought on what it would mean if god really said something.
That’s why I asked a day or so ago whether we’d be discussing this differently if geologists has found massive evidence of a global flood a few thousand years ago.
Like it or not, science really does impact theology and philosophy. Nothing makes sense that is not consilient with the findings of science.
Some people still know nothing.
So it’s working.
Where, exactly, does this leave young children who have not yet learned a language? Are they born with some innate language that they use?
You could be living in the matrix and your observation is actually an elaborate deception designed to keep you still and quiet so you can continue to serve as a battery for the collective.
Your observation is justification only if truth exists and if you are able to access that truth somehow.
Does truth exist in your worldview? How do you know?
peace
I don’t know. It depends on what he was doing while he was away
peace
fifth,
You still haven’t answered my question:
???
I do. Either that or you’re agreeing with fifth and just saying it in different words.
evidence: the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
So evidence depends on TRVTH.
Then you’ve just conceded that a portion of the gospel (the number of days Jesus was absent) is not a precondition of knowledge. It might be important in other ways but not as far as epistemology is concerned.
Good stuff.
So what about the resurrection?
William,
And as petrushka points out, you are simply saying “it’s immoral because I say that God says so”. Who is right about that, you or ISIS?
You’ve claimed that evidence doesn’t matter to you, and that you pick your beliefs solely for how well they “work” for you. ISIS at least looks to external evidence such as the Quran, poor though that evidence may be.
Conclusion: The morality of ISIS is logically more principled than the morality of William J. Murray.
Moral subjectivists have the sense to know that morality is subjective. You and ISIS both practice subjective morality while claiming that it’s objective. ISIS at least tries to offer evidence for that; you just mentally masturbate.
You’re at the bottom of the “logically principled” morality heap, William.
The “spirit of TSZ” is strong in you keiths.
Say ten hail elizabeth’s, two our petrushka’s, and be sure to wash your hands after posting.
I’m sorry but you must of misunderstood my attempt at humor I was not conceding anything.
As you know Jesus was doing vitally important stuff as far as the gospel was concerned while he was away.
He was gone just long enough to bridge the epistemological gap but not too long so as to suffer corruption.
peace
Are you asking for a step by step schematic or do you think there is some sort of logical impossibility involved in incarnation?
There is not an infinite gap between the Logos and the universe. The logos is the comprehensibility of the universe.
peace
In other words, it doesn’t exist. That, or the glass darkly business was just for fun.
Heh, exactly.
Well, no, not exactly.
The WJM method is “because I imply god would say so if god ever said anything outright, because god forbid I ever take a specific stand on either what I say or what god says”.
But of course, whatever it is that he would say, if he would actually come right out and say it, would be the objectively moral thing. Just like god wants, ya know.
fifth,
You claimed that communication without incarnation was logically impossible across the “infinite ontological gap”. You obviously also believe that incarnation is possible and that it happened.
If incarnation is logically possible across the “infinite ontological gap”, then why specifically do you believe that communication is not possible across the same gap by any means other than incarnation?
It’s clear that you haven’t thought about this before, so if you need some time to go do some “research”, just let us know.
Meanwhile, why have you accepted this dogma so blindly? My question is an obvious one.
Again with the hand-waving.
What is it about the human mind or the nature of rationality that specifically requires the execution and resurrection of Jesus?
If you can’t explain why Jesus’s death and resurrection are necessary preconditions for knowledge then just say so.
FMM’s only accomplishment here is to show how he avoids the truth of reality.
Glen Davidson
Now, now. Give credit where it is due.
Think of FMM’s posts as satire, intended to make fundamentalist Christianity look ridiculous.
If you think of it that way, you’ll have to admit that he has done it quite well.
I’ve spent the morning and afternoon reading Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Its Heirs: Marx, Benjamin, Adorno by Idit Dobbs-Weinstein.
One intriguing point she makes early on is the fundamental difference between Christian orthodoxy, on the one hand, and Jewish and Islamic orthopraxy, on the other. She connects this with a profound difference between the Christian emphasis on love and the Jewish emphasis on justice. Christianity starts off with a focus on the individual, and Judaism with a focus on the community. So for Christian thought, the fundamental problem is “how can individuals love better?” — and this goes together with an analysis of what prevents us from loving better: sin, or selfishness. Whereas in Jewish thought, the fundamental problem is “how can communities be more just?” — and this goes together with an analysis of what prevents communities from being more just: oppression and violence.
As a Jewish thinker, I find that it is oppression, not selfishness, that is the ethical/political problem.
I mention this because Murray always comes back to this question: how is individual selfishness restricted, under a non-Platonic conception of logical and ethical principles? Whereas for me, that’s not even a question I find particularly compelling, because I don’t share his conviction — in part Christian, in part libertarian — that human beings are essentially selfish.
Since the roots of my thinking are Jewish and socialist (though in certain ways I find Dewey’s socialism far more congenial than Marx’s), I think that human beings naturally want to belong to communities, and since all communities are constituted by normative practices, I find it difficult to re-frame Murray’s picture of human nature in my own terms. The problem of selfishness is just the free rider problem, to be controlled through communally administered sanctions.
The problem of violence is then not a problem of how individuals relate to each other — though it has that dimension — but rather a problem of how communities relate to each other. Do they attempt to dominate, control, and manipulate? Or is their relation one of mutual acceptance? How do we organize the production and distribution of vital resources so that each community can flourish and none dominate over the others?
And, I would add, that the political problem is, as Wilhelm Reich nicely formulated it, “why do people desire their own oppression?” — why do people fight so hard for institutions that oppress them, and why are emancipation and revolution feared? (Spinoza was the first philosopher to pose this problem, and it is no coincidence that he was also the first philosopher of democracy.) Why is kyriarchy so passionately defended that many are willing to kill in order to defend it? Men are harmed by patriarchy, as whites are harmed by racism, yet many white men will defend these injustices to the bitter end.
The problem of violence, oppression, and injustice is far more central to my concerns than the problem of individual selfishness.
I might also point out that whereas Christian thought is often — if not indeed always — marked by a fundamental dualism of “spirit” and “flesh”, of the constant antagonism between our spiritual and material natures. (If one starts off with the spirit/matter dualism, and then subtracts away everything spiritual, it is easy to see how “materialism” is unrestricted lust, depravity, and selfishness.)
By contrast, I am something of a neo-Aristotelian (thought not a Thomist), which means I am emphatically anti-dualistic. The opposition between “spirit” and “flesh” does not even get started; to be a rational animal is not to be a site of conflict between spirit and flesh, light and darkness, good and evil; rather, it is to be a harmonious integration of norm-governed social practices and biological self-organization, and one that integrates these through habituation into a life of intellectual and ethical virtues.