This post is to move a discussion from Sandbox(4) at Entropy’s request.
Over on the Sandbox(4) thread, fifthmonarchyman made two statements that I disagree with:
“I’ve argued repeatedly that humans are hardwired to believe in God.”
“Everyone knows that God exists….”
As my handle indicates, I prefer to lurk. The novelty of being told that I don’t exist overcame my good sense, so I joined the conversation.
For the record, I am what is called a weak atheist or negative atheist. The Wikipedia page describes my position reasonably well:
“Negative atheism, also called weak atheism and soft atheism, is any type of atheism where a person does not believe in the existence of any deities but does not explicitly assert that there are none. Positive atheism, also called strong atheism and hard atheism, is the form of atheism that additionally asserts that no deities exist.”
I do exist, so fifthmonarchyman’s claims are disproved. For some reason he doesn’t agree, hence this thread.
Added In Edit by Alan Fox 16.48 CET 11th January, 2018
This thread is designated as an extension of Noyau. This means only basic rules apply. The “good faith” rule, the “accusations of dishonesty” rule do not apply in this thread.
No it would not, Apparently you don’t understand what is being discussed here.
I am looking for a justification for knowledge that does not include God.
You seem to be saying that the fact that you think somehow justifies you knowledge of your own existence.
You haven’t even begun to explain why that should be the case.
If your senses or reasoning ability was not reliable you could you move from the supposed observation that you think to the firm knowledge that you exist.
If your reasoning is invalid that utterance could be the rational equivalent of a lunatic saying
I eat therefore I’m a ham sandwich
You need to justify your reasoning and senses before you use them for justification.
peace
But that doesn’t even start describing Plantinga’s problem there. The problem in Plantinga’s usage of the term is one where he thinks that truth is something attached to events or objects, or whatever, like a magical thing, rather than being a label for propositions (which is more of a semantic theory of truth, than correspondence theory).
Yet, again, that’s but one of the problems in Plantinga’s bullshit.
KN:
Sure sounded like it to me:
Oh that must be it,
The problem is not that you haven’t offered a justification for knowledge that is not itself subject to further regress.
The problem is that you are somehow thwarted at every turn by the clever fundi’s stupendous rhetorical tactics and amazing ability to dismiss your herculean efforts simply by asking a little question.
LOL
Peace
I understand all right.
No. You’re assuming that you have a justification for knowledge. You then reject anything anyone else might try and clarify and propose, and you declare that your presupposition is both knowledge, and “revelation.” Mere claims with no substance. You assume that you win by “default.” You are thus exercising a very elaborate god-of-the-gaps fallacy compounded with other fallacies. The last thing you are doing is looking for a justification for knowledge. Knowledge is your main enemy.
I’m not doing such thing. Before even thinking about justifying anything, I’d have to exist. The fact that I think makes it axiomatic that I exist.
I don’t need to. It’s self evident. I think, therefore I am.
Well, since I can “move” from I think to I exist, it’s obvious that my reasoning is valid enough for that. Nobody can refute it. Any attempt would imply that I exist.
That’s more like your “justification for knowledge.” Haven’t you heard of all the lunatics claiming that “God” told them to kill some people? That the end of the world was coming? That they’re the new Messiah? That’s no different to “God told me that my reasoning is valid” (the nonsense is painful). It doesn’t matter how deeply you believe it, it’s just claims, and they’re as viciously circular as anything you’d rather reject. (Here’s where you pronounce your special pleading fallacy.)
That’s a nonsensical, self-refuting and self-imploding request. Justification is part of the system of reason. I already told you that. The request is an invitation to jump into a rat’s wheel. I reject your invitation. You can have that wheel all to yourself. Keep running there with your “justification.” You can call it a “virtuous circle” if you wish. It’s still a rat’s wheel.
That’s delusional, fifth.
I haven’t offered you a justification for knowledge at all. That’s a nonsensical request, and I’m not inclined, at all, to answer non-sensical requests. You have to know something before you can start talking about justifications. The reason that shit goes into “further regress” is that the request itself is an invitation to jump into a rat’s wheel. You’re running there, but I refuse to jump in with you. The supposed superiority of your “worldview” is that you run inside a rat’s wheel unaware of it because you call it a virtuous circle. You can have it for all I care.
I’m not sure what KN thinks on this.
If we have adequate definitions of “meaning” and “truth”, why isn’t AI already working near perfectly (in the sense of artificial persons)?
Neil,
Why on earth would you expect the former to lead to the latter?
I’m not so sure Plantinga is conflating truths and beings. And even if truth is a label for propositions (which seems OK to me), there’s still this further question: by virtue of what property are some propositions true and others false? Surely the correspondence theorist can say, “by virtue of corresponding to how things are”. Just pointing out that true is a property of propositions isn’t quite enough to refute the correspondence theory.
As I was taught the semantic theory of truth, the core of the idea is that the use of the predicate “is true” in endorsing or re-endorsing commitments (A: “there’s still some milk left in the fridge”. B: “yes, that’s true.”) is all there is to the meaning of truth.
I’ll confess that I don’t find that entirely sufficient. It seems to me that there is something to the idea of “correspondence” that needs to be retained, even if a semantic theory of truth does a good deal of work in explaining how the predicate “is true” is used in ordinary language.
Entropy, to fifth:
The sad thing is that fifth already acknowledged, long ago, that he can be mistaken about a purported revelation. When you remind him of this, he’ll say “certainty isn’t required for knowledge.” Well, duh. Of course it isn’t, but the problem isn’t that he isn’t certain of the truth of his “revelations”; it’s that he doesn’t know they’re true at all.
That’s when he falls back on his regress argument, while stupidly denying that it is a regress.
He’s been confused about this stuff for years.
KN,
Just so we can move on, do you agree that the EAAN can accommodate meaning and truth, contrary to your earlier characterization?
Your choice of a presuppostion says different.
Do you really think it’s a nonsensical request for me to ask you to offer evidence that your reasoning is valid before I simply grant that the results of your reasoning is valid?
Why exactly should you be deemed to be above any scrutiny?
peace
I really don’t understand what you are getting at.
I Presuppose God simply because I know of no other justification for knowledge. The presupposition that God exists also has the handy quality of being something that I already know to be true so I don’t have to introduce additional axioms.
Now as a presuppositionalist I’m naturally interested in what other people presuppose in order to reason. So that I can compare them to my own.
I’m especially interested in the presuppositions of people who choose to deny the existence of God.
peace
Perhaps because meaning and truth are beyond the capacity of algorithms to produce.
peace
I do nothing of the sort.
“How do you know?” is a clarifying question. I ask it precisely because I’m looking for them to provide clarification
No it’s not, Because we can very easily see that those claimed revelations from God are not true and therefore not revelations from God.
peace
How?
real revelation 😉
peace
fifth:
Infidel! Your puny god couldn’t reveal the location of your ass to you if he tried.
Rumraket is the only justification for knowledge. It’s Rumraket or absurdity.
Prostrate yourself before Rumraket and beg his forgiveness for your blasphemy.
peas
Humble yourself and say The Raketeer’s Prayer, as revealed to us by the prophet Bob:
quote:
Almighty Rumraket,
I prostrate myself before thee.
I have rebelled against thee and placed other gods before thee,
Even claiming them as justification for knowledge.
I was lost, and thou hast found me;
I blasphemed thee, and thou hast slapped me upside the head;
I have used my ‘Ignore’ button to block the voices of thy followers.
I see the error of my ways, and will no longer rebel against thee.
In the name of Rumraket, the Holy Gasket, and that Other Thingy,
Amen.
endquote:
peas
He presents his sophistry as evolution selecting for truth. How could evolution select for truth unless truth is some kind of object?I know that could be a figure of speech, but with creationists you never know. They tend heavily towards Platonism. For example, W Lame Craig often talks about immaterial things existing, like abstract “objects” such as numbers.
Everything else, well, the issue is that the label is a label. I have no problem with your inclination towards correspondence theory, which I see as a subset of what’s explained in semantic theory, but, as long as what this thing is (a label), we’re fine. So, how could evolution select for a label or a concept? That’s a deep failure for a supposedly professional philosopher.
Entropy,
Here’s a slightly less crude way of putting Plantinga’s thought: since natural selection will only eliminate behaviors that are not adaptive, there’s no reason to believe that natural selection will favor the evolution of cognitive capacities that tend to produce true beliefs. For this reason, anyone who thinks that their own cognitive capacities are a result of natural selection should not regard their own capacities as reliable, etc.
What I’ve been urging in this thread (and elsewhere) is that Plantinga starts off with a very crude version of what he thinks the naturalist is committed to. A philosophically sophisticated naturalist has very good reasons to regard his or her own cognitive capacities as reliable.
Yep. He’s a little gerbil running inside his wheel, denying that he’s doing such a thing, and he keeps inviting us to jump into that wheel next to him, so that he can laugh and say, hey! you’re running inside a gerbil’s wheel!
What advantage could it possibly be to become a gerbil, run inside that wheel, call it a “virtuous” circle, and yet be as limited as anybody else? Quite a burden to hold to an absurd magical being to become a gerbil that cannot solve any problems any better than anybody else. One who denies anything you could tell it, despite his situation is a much more evident cause of concern.
-Aha! Your vision can be fooled! You could be a brain in a vat!
-Well, your vision can be equally fooled, and you believe that a magical being gives you revelations, which fail. If anybody should be concerned about being a brain in a vat that’s you.
-The magical being tells me that I’m not a brain in a vat in a way that I can be certain!
-Well, if I were in control of your vat, it would be fun to give you the impression that you’re receiving revelations from a magical being, and that you can be certain. The best part of this is that you’d think that all absurdities about the magical being are not important because, well, you’ve got this revelation with all certainty, and you don’t care when revelations fail. You’re the perfect victim.
And on and on it goes.
Such as?
That we survive?
KN,
That’s a far cry from your earlier claim:
Plantinga acknowledges, at least for the sake of this particular argument, that truth and meaning are possible under naturalism. He just claims that since evolution selects for adaptive beliefs, not true beliefs, we have no reason to trust the deliverances of our cognitive faculties.
The problem with that idea, of course, is that a cognitive apparatus that reliably produces true beliefs is hugely adaptive. At best, Plantinga can only come up with specific scenarios (like his “tiger” scenario) in which false beliefs are adaptive. He needs to do much more in order for his argument to succeed.
Entropy:
That pretty much sums it up.
Yep. Plantinga starts with a very cartoonish version of what he thinks naturalism and evolution are. He doesn’t seem to understand that there’s a method that goes well beyond mere statements. I would not say that I’m foundational naturalist, I’m a naturalist because as hard as I might try, things being something other than natural doesn’t make sense. Either way, a naturalist starts by informing his premises as well as possible. Starting with the idea that “beliefs” are each under natural selection is astoundingly stupid. We know from direct experience that experience plays a huge role in our beliefs. We already know that our beliefs depend on what we’re exposed to. That experience can make us change them. That beliefs are not genetically determined. Thus, not the subject of natural selection.
When confronted with this, Plantinga changes it to “cognitive abilities,” but then, how could he calculate a probability that each “belief” is true, now that he cannot claim the independence of each belief, or it’s “fitness effect”? Now it’s an apparatus for dealing with multiple problems, and that has interdependencies imbued. Now there’s no absolute independence between beliefs, and the situation cannot be as easily cartooned. Press for an answer, he’ll fall back to pretending that each belief is genetically inherited and its probability of being “true” being independent of each other and of experience, etc.
There’s more problems, all of them profound failures in biology and in philosophy. But I’m tired, which means see ya later.
Entropy:
Here’s what happens when a follower of Rumraket (the white hamster) joins fifth (the golden hamster) on the exercise wheel:
I agree. But if we had adequate definitions, then they should be within the capacity of algorithms.
Neil,
Upthread, you asked:
I responded:
I’m still curious to hear your answer.
keiths,
😀
See Entropy, when someone writes like this, often there is not a lot one needs to say, other than, “Look…”
Entropy,
Yes, those are definitely serious problems with Plantinga’s view. But I was urging the suggestion that there’s a more serious flaw in his view: the very idea that cognitive capacities are reliable if they tend to produce true beliefs.
Here’s a quick argument for why this is a problem. Suppose we take “belief” to be, as most epistemologists will tell you, a ‘propositional attitude’. To believe that p to take an attitude of endorsement towards the proposition p. (If one is worried about construing propositions Platonistically, we could substitute something like, “disposed to commit oneself to uttering p or its synonyms.”)
This would make belief (and also desire) dependent on having a language, since there does not seem to be much hope for the idea that one can entertain propositions without having any language at all.
And this puts us in an awkward position when it comes to non-human animals, since they do not have any language (that we can discern). Their cognitive activity is not linguistically or discursively structured. Hence they do not have beliefs or desires.
There are various options one could take at this point.
One might say that non-human animals do have a language, a Language of Thought, despite not having any spoken or public language.
Or one might say that philosophers have succumbed to an anthropocentric bias, and that we should expand our conception of belief (and desire) beyond the propositional attitudes, so that we can make sense of how animals without language can have beliefs.
But if one were to hold onto the ideas both that (1) beliefs are propositional attitudes and (2) propositional attitudes require a public natural language and (3) no non-human animal is a competent speaker of a public natural language, then one would have to accept (4) no non-human animal has beliefs.
And yet, non-human animals surely seem to have reliable cognitive capacities. And that means that we need a much broader conception of what a reliable cognitive capacity is than just the capacity to lead to true beliefs. Developing that broader conception can’t be done from the armchair; one has to go out into the world and learn from cognitive ethologists, understand what they do and how they do it, and how they understand the many different ways in which animal cognitive systems are (and are not) reliable, under various conditions.
This is not, by any stretch, a novel line of thought. Cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind have been developing these ideas for a few decades, and in some sense they go back to Descartes.
If Plantinga had been at all curious about what naturalists are really committed to, he could have easily found a few to talk to. But he didn’t. He assumed that he knew what naturalists are committed to, and tried to show that naturalism is self-defeating. But it is only his own caricature of naturalism that is self-defeating, and not the genuine article.
Depends of what you mean by adequate.
Adequate does not have to mean perfect. It can just mean correct.
peace
Certainty or magic is not required for knowledge but truth is.
You really need to understand the difference between a eternal regress and a firm foundation.
The only way that revelation can be a regress is if the content of the revelation changes in some way with each reiteration of the question.
That is definitely not what is happening here because in each and every case God is simply revealing himself.
Keiths should know this we as went over it already. Perhaps the taxing intellectual effort he is putting in as he learns his new faith is causing him to forget stuff.
peace
That you’re too stupid to make sense of what I wrote makes your strategy a self-defeating course of action.
Of course it’s possible that my reasoning is not valid due to manipulation by an evil superior being and therefore any knowledge whatsoever is impossible and I can know nothing at all
However If knowledge is possible at all God can do it.
I know that.
Do you get it now???
peace
fifth,
When you get tired of fleeing for Jesus, screw up your courage and confront this comment of mine:
KN,
Why on earth would you assume that beliefs must be based on language?
A cat watches a mouse flee under a closed door and sticks her paws through the gap, trying to catch it. Would you seriously claim that the cat doesn’t believe that the mouse is on the other side of the door?
The only belief that I am seeing there, is your belief about the cat.
Thus far I have not seen you make a good case for what you are “commited to” . That to believe you need language?
Furthermore, I don’t think its up to Plantinga to figure out what it is people who call themselves naturalists are committed to, rather, its up to him to delve into whether being a naturalist in the sense of evolution is rational. He is not asking what you believe, he is saying what undirected evolution implies.
You may well believe in some strange third way of metaphysics that is unique only to you, but which has nothing to do with mainstream belief.
keiths, to KN:
Neil:
Tell us more. Why deny that the cat believes something about the location of the mouse?
Also, don’t forget to answer this, which I am now asking for the third time:
Neil:
keiths:
Where is the list of things that god can do?
It would be an infinite set.
Omnipotence of course means that if it can be done God can do it.
instead of a comprehensive list I will provide a handy summery
quote:
“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
(Job 42:2)
end quote:
peace
Amen,
Could not have said it better.
peace
Then I hope one of you will get around to saying why you think the cat doesn’t have a belief about the location of the mouse.
fifth:
Almighty Rumraket,
Please send your Holy Gasket to reveal the spelling of “summary” to fifthmonarchyman.
In the name of Rumraket, the Holy Gasket, and that Other Thingy,
Amen.
peas
Why assume that the cat has a concept of “location” and a concept of “mouse”?
Why assume that the cat’s thinking is in the form of propositions?
You are picking up part of a reply that I made to fifth.
Your question indicates that you don’t get it. And it turns out that fifth doesn’t get it either.
There’s no point in repeatedly badgering me about my failed attempt at communicating.