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.
Which counts as your true belief if the conscious and the unconscious disagree?
You missed the point. The point is that the question assumes that my reasoning is valid. Why do you ask questions if you won’t remember what the question was and what the answer refers to? Oh, right! You take refuge behind your fantasies. Thanks for making my point yet again.
Justification is also part of reasoning.
You’re immersing yourself in yet more absurdity. My worldview cannot make things any different. Your question will remain absurd no matter what my worldview might be. I could be a Christian, a Muslim, a Scientologist, a Jew, a Buddhist, etc, and your question would still be self-refuting, and self-imploding.
If you don’t understand that validity is part of reasoning, then you’re posing a question that you don’t understand yourself. This is not surprising, since you don’t notice its absurdity.
A system that builds into whatever we’re trying to understand about the universe. There’s plenty, but I don’t have time to educate you. It takes time, effort, and the will to learn and understand, which are lacking by design in your apologetics.
I doubt it. You don’t even care about remembering your own questions when you look at the answers. You take the answers out of context just to continue your game of deception.
Since you don’t know what justification means, you don’t even know what you’re asking. Since this is the basis for your “defence of the faith,” I have to conclude that your fantasies are not just fantasies, but absurd fantasies from the very foundation.
Good job!
keiths,
Very well put.
If you believed the stove was off and you touched it and burned your hand, could you stop believing it was off?
Thought you might like that,
Our very own William J Murray could! He’s said as much on many occasions. Yet he still gets out of the bed to pee, oddly.
For the curious, here’s what OMagain is referring to:
fifthmonarchyman, to Entropy:
fifthmonarchyman’s own answer to the justification problem:
Eyeroll.
Now that is a very interesting question. What do you think?
Perhaps both are your “true” belief and you just hold contradictory beliefs in this area I don’t see any reason why that could not be the case.
There is nothing that says that humans must be consistent and non-contradictory.
I certainly think that there is much more to a person than what he is immediately conscious of.
peace
why wouldn’t you? You certainly might if your reasoning wasn’t valid.
Right so you have to start with something more fundamental than your reasoning,
That is certainly not the case.
Surely you agree that God if he exists could reveal stuff so that I could be justified in believing it regardless of my reasoning ability.
If I am taking something out of context feel free to correct me. I’m only human. Just be ready to provide justification for your actions.
How do you know that what you think justification means is what it actually means?
In other words how do you know your reasoning is valid?
I’m not defending my faith. I’m asking you to defend your faith in your reasoning ability
You have already implicitly acknowledged that my reasoning can be justified when you did not disagree that God could reveal stuff so that I could know it
I need you to provide justification for yours.
How do you know you are not a brain in a vat in a sea of irrationality right now?
peace
I don’t think you could choose to stop believing it was off.
I think that physical pain you experience would force you to stop believing that the stove was off
peace
Right, it answers the question completely and is not subject to further regress.
jelly roll 😉
peace
How do you know that the system of reasoning you choose “builds into whatever we’re trying to understand about the universe”?
Come on man try to think deeply about this and not just on a surface level.
peace
fifth:
Who needs “further regress”? It’s already an infinite one.
We’ve been over this again and again. You simply can’t grasp that an infinite regress can be stated compactly.
fifth:
Oh, the irony.
Is there any reason to think that one might be? Mere logical possibility is not itself a reason for doubt, and knowledge does not require certainty.
Speaking for myself, my confidence in the reliability of my senses is generally warranted by how well I’m able to move about the world. I see my keys on the desk, and when I walk over there to pick them up — lo! they are in my hand! There’s nothing in my embodied phenomenology that suggests that my senses are generally unreliable, though they sometimes are — when I can’t make out the name on a street sign because it’s too far away, or when I fail to notice the hole in the bottom of a bag of dirty cat litter.
So there’s an embodied phenomenology of perception, and on this basis we have learned over a few millennia to invent techniques for manipulating and experimenting with the world around us, and we’ve developed medicine and science — and also, much more recently, psychology and cognitive science. And after a few false starts — psychoanalysis, introspectionism, behaviorism — we finally seem to be making some progress on how brain, body, and environment work together to constitute our experience of the world.
What we’re beginning to see from enactive cognitive science and related approaches is that we can explain at a neurocomputational level why the phenomenologists of embodiment were right, to the extent that they were, about why skepticism about the external world is a non-starter.
fifth:
Right.
Now can you see why your response to ALurker’s deconversion story was so far off base?
It occurs to me that I’d better spell it out for you.
When ALurker wrote this…
…he/she was talking about honest reflection, not willing him/herself into atheism.
How is that? A regress means a return to a former or less developed state.
That is not what you have here.
Revelation is not a less developed state than revelation. It’s exactly the same state that of mutual communication
And the contents of revelation change depending on the question and it’s context so returning to revelation is not returning to a former state.
I suppose it could be stated compactly but that is not what we have here.
If you disagree then present your case.
peace
I’m a Cartesian skeptic, so my own response to fifth’s question is that I don’t know that I am not a brain in a vat. Neither does he, presuppositional claptrap notwithstanding.
I also have no particular reason to believe that I am a brain in a vat, and neither does he.
We’re in the same boat. The imaginary superiority of his presuppositional epistemology is just that — imaginary.
KN:
Been there. I feel your pain. 🙂
Yes,
There are near infinite ways to be wrong and only one to be right.
If God does not exist we would expect irrationality to much more likely than rationality.
You are assuming that you have the ability to recognize what it’s like to move about the world well. That is the very thing that is at question
again you are assuming that you can properly evaluate the results of experiments. This the very thing in question
That assumes that you have the ability to evaluate the correctness of these things.
That is the very thing in question
Oh I complete agree that skepticism about the external world is a nonstarter the question is why that is.
peace
but you act as if you do know that you are not a brain in a vat………with out any justification
Therefore your actions don’t match your stated position.
You are acting as if my worldview is correct.
I rest my case
peace
How would a brain in a vat act?
Glen Davidson
fifth:
Thus demonstrating that you would be as incompetent at litigation as you are at everything else.
I recall you offering this advice to someone:
Have you considered giving it a try yourself?
Actually, I don’t. But since you are thinking shallowly and on a surface level, I can see why you might mistakenly conclude that I do.
keiths:
fifth:
I have, many times. What makes you think you’ll get it this time?
Rather than reinventing the wheel, I’ll present an old quote:
And that dimwitted regress can be compactly stated as “It’s revelation all the way down.”
keiths, to fifth:
fifth:
That might make sense if your arguments were any good, but as it is, your poor writing just reinforces the bad impression given by your poor arguments.
Why is God so all-fired determined to compound your humiliation?
You cut out the rest of my comment:
Then you proceed to try to avoid supporting your claim by asking questions.
Here, again, is what you wrote:
Please provide evidence and/or rational arguments to support this claim. You said it, you have the obligation to defend it. My views have nothing to do with it. Demonstrate that you really are participating honestly and in good faith.
You’re transparently attempting to distract from your violation of the site rules by starting a discussion of the difference between knowledge and belief. It doesn’t matter. You cannot, according to the rules, tell me either what I believe or what I know. I have told you that I neither believe in any god nor do I know there are any gods. You must accept that for the sake of discussion here.
Stop being rude and start following the rules.
fifth,
That was quite a retreat you made there.
In order to rescue your prior claim, it would need to be false, not merely “incomplete or misleading.”
Not only was this claim of yours false…
…but the following claim would also need to be false in order to change the first one from false to true:
That’s two blatant mistakes.
Also, you’re withdrawing your claim about knowledge not for any principled reason, but merely to get your argument to work. That’s dishonest, and for someone who never tires of telling us that God is truth, outright dishonesty would seem a pretty dangerous tack to take. It amounts to open rebellion against God, in your worldview.
It would do what it could to remove itself from it’s prison. Suicide I suppose.
In lueu of that object hedonism would be the next most rational responce
It certainly would not act as if it was not a brain vat anymore than a fish would act like it’s not a fish.
Keiths acts like there are other people in the world and as if things like logic and reason are valid and binding.
He has to, it’s like he is compelled to do so for some reason.
When he does this he is borrowing from my worldview.
When you borrow something with out acknowledging that it does not belong to you we call it theft.
peace
Says you who doesn’t even know that justification is part of reasoning. Muahahahaha!
fifth,
The issue is not what you’d do if you knew you were a brain in a vat.
It’s what you would do if you didn’t know that you weren’t a brain in a vat.
To quote that same self-unaware fifthmonarchyguy again:
No it’s not every single revelation is solidly grounded in a God who could reveal so that I could know.
You have already implicitly acknowledged that God if he exists could justify things like reason and logic.
You still don’t get it
It’s the questioning that is infinity regressive.
The answer does not regress it remains the same.
Of course the content of the revelation changes depending on the context.
That is the very nature of communication.
You are ……still…..confusing the answer itself with the content of the revelation
let me try to illustrate with a less controversial subject. My answer is equivalent to this
you—-how do you find out what 1+1 is
me —-addition
notice no regress here the answer is complete and correct and sufficient in and of it’s self.
Now look at this
You —how do you know what 1+1 is
Me—-addition
You—how do you know what 1+2 is
me—-addition
You—-how do you know what 1+3 is
me—-addition
What is regressing is the question not the answer. The answer remains the same and is always complete and correct and sufficient in and of it’s self
Do you get it now?
peace
You could escape the infinite regress like this if you wanted
me———-how do you know your reasoning is valid
you——— by reasoning
You could do that but it would be at the expense of embracing vicious circularity.
get it now???
peace
You seem to be mistaking your feelings about the question with the nature of the question. An absurd question will remain absurd regardless of your ability and self-imposed handicaps to noticing the problem.
With this you show the enormous incompetence necessary to hold to presuppositional bullshitologetics. You have no basis for judging anybody else’s reasoning abilities. You have deep handicaps that cannot be easily solved, and you’d rather not solve.
Don’t be stupid, we’re talking about absurd questions. No amount of revelations can make an absurd question any less absurd. It could fool you about it, but the question would remain absurd regardless of your foolishness.
As per what a magical being could do if it existed, you will always be limited. So, if some magical being convinced you of something, you’d think that it is true regardless of whether it’s true or not. You would feel justified to believe it, after all you were magically convinced, but you would not be justified to believe it.
Claiming revelation doesn’t solve anything. It makes you look like an incompetent fool, like a nutcase, like someone who doesn’t have his wits with him. It makes your whole bullshit of apologetics self-defeating and ironic.
fifth,
Not one of them is solidly grounded in God, because there’s not a single one of them that you actually know is from him. It’s an infinite regress of “I hope this is from God, but I don’t actually know that.”
We’ve explained this to you over and over. Your failure to grasp it is astonishing.
Your sovereign God (assuming he actually exists) appears intent on humiliating you again while the atheists triumph.
fifth:
You’re as bad at analogizing as you are at admitting mistakes or telling the truth.
Your argument is actually closer to the following. Suppose x is an integer, and that’s all you know about it.
Extending the regress to infinity does not magically transform a string of bad inferences into good ones. It doesn’t work for “x is odd”, and it doesn’t work for “this is a genuine revelation from God”.
*opens door, looks in, shakes head, gently closes door, tiptoes away*
While you may be convinced by revelation, that experience doesn’t in itself constitute evidence or argument capable of convincing others.
To have a fruitful discussion, you might try to act as if other posters are more than pzombies, that they are as self-aware as you, and that when they express a viewpoint, that you accept that is their viewpoint, at least arguendo.
Thank God you did not mess up the continuity .
The whole point of the brain in the vat is that it has the experiences that we do, that it apparently acts as we do. That it doesn’t know the difference.
Think a little, even if you’re hardly going to think deeply. I mean, don’t you know the first thing about what’s being discussed?
Glen Davidson
Or I choose to modify my belief based on the pain and smell of burning flesh since all beliefs are provionally held in lieu of new information. And that is where we differ, you need to know something is absolutely true to know anything, and I don’t think that is even logically possible for a finite intelligence.
He “knows” what’s been discussed only in parts, and each part only when convenient for his bullshit, even if he contradicts himself from one comment to the next.
Your religion is merely a rewriting of what came before. What was old became new again.
Since you have an imaginary friend, I shouldn’t be too surprised that you also think that you’re “a brain in a vat in a sea of irrationality.” Given your commitment to extreme subjectivism there’s nothing I can do to help you out. Sorry.
Solidly grounded in a fantasy. 🤣
I completely agree.
What is at issue is how given your worldview can one know a question is absurd.
I’m not judgeing anybody else’s reasoning abilities. I’m asking you to justify your reasoning abilities.
Do you understand the difference?
I complete agree, However God if he exists can reveal to me so that I can know whether a question is absurd.
How do you know that your judgement in matters like these is correct?
Of course claiming revelation doesn’t solve anything.
On the other hand revelation does solve the problem of how we can know stuff.
peace
If I did not know I was not a brain in a vat I certainly would not act like I do now
keiths doesn’t act like he doesn’t know the difference either. He acts like he knows that the external world is real and he can trust his senses most of the time.
peace
The problem is that he can reveal anything he wants to you, whether what he reveals is true or false. He can convince you that a non-absurd question is absurd or that an absurd question is not absurd. How can you know whether what he reveals to you is true? Even if he reveals to you that what he reveals to you is true, how do you know that’s true? And so on. You need, in other words, to deal with the fact that revelation is no more self-supporting a foundation for knowedge than anything else.