…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
Of course, KN. You are so attractive in your disenchantment! 😉
Well, he was a Jewish convert to Christianity. You don’t seem to ‘feel like you need’ any such sort of vertical thinking and believing, according to your “I love Sellars” atheism. He was a greater ‘philosopher’ than you like Erik is too. You’ve already shown you’ve got your goonie reductionist-empiricist-naturalist squad of atheists that you’d prefer to lounge with.
Y’know, it’s funny. When Lizzie attributed her de-conversion to Daniel Dennett, I realised the superficiality of western atheists much more clearly. You have done nothing to inspire a soul about life at TAZ or UD, KN. Just a faithless clerk who depresses people (while entertaining & even sometimes ‘informing’ them).
Re: co-teaching. I’ve done it before. Don’t even dream about ‘our students’. You don’t seem like a professional to me KN, nor capable of finding balance in life beyond facades. Do you think you could just walk into a lecture hall and spew disenchanted, foundationless ideology without exposing your atheist propaganda for what it is? Higher education has changed and the ‘person’ of students (including their worldview) is treated more importantly than ever now. Your ‘indifferent’ anti-religious nihilism would ultimately be exposed to students who sincerely and passionately wish to think and live clearly, without all the masks & confusion you (seem to) imply in your philosophistry. It would not end pretty for your atheist egoistic myopic ‘western’ pedantry, KN. But maybe that’s because you only dream in the USA.
You claimed that you were (taught as) a ‘reformed Jew’. I assume that means you believed in YHWH ( יהוה) at some point in your life. Didn’t you ever?
I took Gregory to be demonstrating that he is way out of his depth.
I’ll agree with walto on that one.
Depth? KN, Neil Rickert? Comedy.
What are you talking about?
Oh, realised this is quite old.
But, for what it’s worth, no I didn’t think that TristanM was an ID supporter.
And I certainly didn’t try to cover anything up. There wasn’t anything to cover.
I was just pleased to a link to an actual ID defense, i.e. Jonathan Bartlett’s. And I do think that Jonathan Bartlett is an ID supporter.
But I’m a bit miffed now. Because now it looks as though I AM covering up. But in fact, it’s the first I knew that I was supposed to have made a mistake, so I can’t exactly have covered up for a mistake I didn’t know I’d made until right now. And, in any case, I didn’t make it.
But I guess I can sort of see why someone might think that I was referring to Tristan, not Jonathan.
But, for the record, I wasn’t.
I’m upset now 🙁
I attributed my de-conversion to some thoughts triggered by Daniel Dennett’s book, Freedom Evolves.
I just want to make that clear. It was not on account of a pro-atheist argument made by Dennett, but about something quite different.
Also, if you want to make the case that the argument is superficial, do make it.
Because merely asserting that you find it so doesn’t exactly rock my world.
In fact, Gregory, why don’t you make your actual case against atheism? Instead of merely describing atheists in pejorative terms, and claiming that we are shallow and nihilistic?
Show, don’t just Tell.
Elizabeth,
Goodness, Lizzie, why should I need to make a case? You show your shallowness & nihilism (and in your case worldview confusion; Buddhist, Quaker, atheist, pantheist, Gaia, etc. all wrapped into one little mixed-up lady!) regularly on TAZ! 😉
Don’t rule out the possibility that they are merely more resistant to new and better ideas than you are.
Well, tell me how that manifests itself to you. Turning your fastidious nose in the air is neither use nor ornament..
🙂
Moved a comment to guano (and a response for continuity) for reasons that should be obvious.
Hey Alan Fox
Why was my comment moved? Is there a reason other than the poor grammar?
I’m Just trying to understand the ground rules
peace
The ground rules are quite clear. No porn/malware, no outing, and no aggressive theism. I think you violated the last one.
Aggressive theism is not against the rules, and I wish there were more of it here. The TSZ is supposed to be a space of free and open dialogue, not a “safe space” for militant atheists.
In fact, it’s perfectly clear to me that none of the non-theists here actually understand what classical theism is supposed to be. I say that because all of the criticisms of theism, as rehearsed here, are based on the supposed lack of sufficient evidence. But if one looks at any of the classical arguments for the existence of God — the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, or the argument from design — they are clearly a priori demonstrations, not a posteriori explanations. Hence the lack of evidence is simply irrelevant to what classical theism purports to establish. To criticize any of those arguments, one would need to examine the logical structure of the a priori demonstrations.
For that matter, confidently telling other people what they really believe, despite what they say they believe, is also not against the site rules. But it is considered extremely rude, and if it persists, could be construed as a violation of the social norm that we assume that everyone else is posting in good faith.
If a theist says, “you believe that p”, and an atheist says, “no I don’t!”, and if the theist then persists in saying that the atheist believes p, then it’s on the border of transgressing against the expectation that we all take each other at our word. (The same point holds in the other direction as well, of course.)
Kantian Naturalist
Thank you
Allow me to ask a clarifying question. Suppose I said I completely understand Neo Darwinism because I studied it in grade school and reject it because it obviously leads to bestiality.
Would a critic be justified in suggesting that perhaps I did not quite understand what I was rejecting?
Would you consider him rude if he did it respectfully?
peace
As must be obvious by now, Lizzie, this kind of stuff is all he’s got.
Suppose you mustered up a grain of consciousness and realized that your phrase is just the same as the texts which, historically and currently, christians use to excuse murdering millions of innocent people, Suppose you mustered up a grain of shame at choosing to equate “Darwinism” with “bestiality” even for a hypothetical example against those your faith tells you are enemies. Suppose you mustered up a grain of your professed christianity and reflected on the fact that your conduct here only drives every witness further and further from anything to do with any kind of religion which induces people like you to behave so badly.
It’s not good for you personally, and it’s not good for the cause you supposedly serve.
I’m telling you this not as your friend — because I could never be friends with a person like you — but as an empathetic human being who is concerned for your spiritual value which you are degrading by indulging yourself in words like those.
What do you benefit when you score a cheap shot here and lose your soul?
Perhaps you need to reign in what I am going to kindly refer to as “hyperbole.”
Do you have any empirical evidence that Christians are actively engaged in murdering millions? Where is this taking place and why is it not on the nightly news?
Which texts, specifically, are they using to excuse their actions and what empirical evidence do you have, if any, to support your assertion?
Mung,
Nothing to say to your fellow-christian about their inflammatory and bigoted equation of “Darwinism” and “bestiality”? Nothing to say about the shame they should feel for themselves or the damage they cause to the faith by exposing how faith encourages stupid sectarian behavior?
You’re supposed to be the ones who are better than we are. You’re supposed to be the ones with god-given morals and a god-given book of rules to guide your behavior. Here’s your chance to prove it.
I’m not going to take any of your comments seriously until you show that you police your own brethren at least as zealously as you try to police mine.
hotshoe_,
Well, you just think about it for a bit and let me know when you believe you have the moral high ground.
Don’t be daft, Mung. I wouldn’t have said what I already said if I weren’t already sure that I have the moral high ground over fifthmonarchyman with his particularly odious style of christianity, at least. And you’re falling by the second. You had your chance.
To be fair on fifth, I think he was putting the case, not claiming any equivalence between Darwinism and bestiality.
At least I hope so.
Poke by one atheist to the others at TAZ.
But you actually do understand what it is “supposed to be”, not what it is? Gosh that’s big of you, KN! 😉
Kantian Naturalist,
And much of the advocacy of theists here is based upon the supposed presence of sufficient evidence, for them. Few people check with ‘classical theism’ before taking a position on the propositions put to them when they are too young to even say “classical theism” without sounding hilarious and cute.
As best I can tell, all a priori arguments for the existence of god are critically dependent on one or more logical fallacies, most commonly Assuming One’s Conclusion, with Wishful Thinking not that far behind it, and more than a few instances of Non Sequitur.
Can you cite an instance of a “classical argument” for god’s existence which doesn’t depend on a fallacy which renders it invalid?
I have no illusions myself of having extensive knowledge about “what classical theism is supposed to be,” but I think the “perfectly clear” and the “none” in KN’s remark are a either hyperbolic or a little presumptuous.
Kantian Naturalist,
I’m not particularly interested in criticizing those arguments, unless and until there is any objective, empirical evidence for anything resembling a god or gods. If theists want to talk about the nature of their object of worship, they need to demonstrate its existence first.
Allan Miller said:
Evidential arguments are different from a priori arguments. There are good a priori arguments for god. There’s also plenty of evidence for a reasonable belief in at least a “classical theism” god, and some of that evidence is the good a priori arguments for such a god.
“Supposed to be” in the sense of “what it is taken to be by those who believe it”, not in the sense of “what it should be but isn’t”.
I agree; I don’t think that there are that many Christians, Jews, or Muslims who understand classical theism. I’d go one step further and say that, by the standards of the Western theological tradition, most people of faith are idolaters. The ISIS and Boko Haram are most obviously evil here, with the Religious Right in the First World nations coming in a distant second, but I don’t think the Religious Left is all that different. (Even though I admire many people on the religious left, such as Eagleton, I think that Eagleton is an exception — intellectuals don’t make for good idolaters, and when they do become apologists for state, corporation, or church, they cease to be intellectuals.)
The Ontological Argument has never sat right with me because I was inoculated against it at an early age by Kant’s insistence that existence is not a predicate. So I don’t think that Anselm’s version is valid. But Goedel’s version of the Ontological Argument is valid, though not (I think) sound. The Cosmological Argument is both valid and sound, and the Argument from Design is also valid but not sound.
Mostly hyperbolic, with a little bit of presumptuousness thrown in.
I’m taking my understanding of “classical theism” from Hart’s The Experience of God, which I found quite interesting for its combination of erudition, insight, and error. Much of Hart’s rhetoric deployed on behalf of classical theism hinges on a strawman version of “naturalism” — or I prefer to say, “beating a straw horse” (which is when someone repeatedly refutes a position no one has ever held to begin with).
But he does a really nice job of explicating the concept of God under classical theism, and given that, the Cosmological Argument makes a good deal more sense to me than it did previously. The real point has to do with the concepts of contingency and necessity. If one thinks that an infinite regress of contingent causes is absurd (and I’m not too sure why one would think that — I myself have no firm intuitions on the matter), then it is quite straightforward to show that there must be a necessary (non-contingent) being — and, since it is necessary, it needs no cause.
But, as we’ve already examined here quite closely, a necessarily existing being still falls short of having all the attributes of God as conceived by classical theism, since the bare idea of a necessarily existing being does not logically entail any psychological properties (thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions) or moral properties — both of which are central to the classical theistic tradition.
Ah, but I hope you should at least appreciate the vast epistemological difference between an empiricist epistemology, in which “any objective, empirical evidence for anything resembling a god or gods” is what really matters, and a rationalist epistemology, in which the existence of something is logically demonstrated via deductively valid entailment from unquestionable first principles.
I agree with everything here except the second half of the last sentence.
I don’t see how the mere fact that some people make a priori arguments is itself the kind of empirical evidence that an a posteriori argument requires. Typically, evidentialist arguments take as a premise some observable fact about the world; the sociological fact that there are people who make good arguments seems like the wrong kind of fact to do the work that the evidentialist requires.
If you disavow the idolator’s god, the selective prayer responder, the big eye in the sky, the fickle finger of fate, you are left with a big so what.
Neither Gregory nor anyone else knows anything actually useful about god or any putative creator or sustainer.
So that leaves a sense of wonder and its associated woo. I’m as capable of feeling and experiencing woo as any theist. I just don’t feel impelled to inflict my personal rubbish thoughts on other people, or try to manipulate other people’s imaginations.
I didn’t say it was “empirical” evidence. I said it was evidence. IOW, a compelling rational argument for god is evidence such a god exists.
As far as empirical evidence, there is empirical evidence provided in the fine-tuning argument for god. Depending on what one means by “empirical”, there is also first-hand experiential evidence of god.
Of course, there’s also testimonial evidence, anecdotal evidence, and circumstantial evidence, all of which is reasonable to incorporate to one degree or another when considering belief in god.
Kantian Naturalist,
My apologies for the delay in replying — I’m just catching up.
I appreciate a deductive argument as much as the next skeptic, but it’s those “unquestionable first principles” that are the sticking point. If there is no objective, empirical evidence for the existence of the something that is logically demonstrated to exist, or if that something is impossible to detect in principle, then those first principles need some questioning.
The bottom line is that if theists had any hard evidence for the existence of a god or gods, they’d trumpet it in every possible venue. It would be impossible to get them to stop talking about it. The deafening silence with respect to evidence is quite telling.
Retreating to philosophical arguments about contingent beings and first causes looks to me like a desperate attempt to define their deity into existence. If they had evidence, they wouldn’t need arguments.
Exactly.
What would count as evidence? Scientific evidence a la phlogiston or graviton that is there for a century or two and is then hushed down? Or like atoms that are, at first, indivisible eternal particles of the four elements, then tiny little balls bumping into each other in space, then divisible into innumerable sub-balls that finally dissolve in quantum woo? Would you accept such God?
Not if you felt compelled to impart it with supreme goodness and intelligence, and a history bound up with parting the Red Sea, a mom in a manger, etc.
Imagine presenting the Old Testament in court, without all the God baggage. Just a witness that can be cross examined and subjected to expert scientific testimony.
If you subtract the testimony of unreliable witnesses, you have something like Buddhism. A nice ethical philosophy and a semi-mystical approach to coping with the pain and tragedies of the world. Useful, but not theistic.
As it stands, this cannot be completely right, but I assume that by now my reputation for pedantry precedes me and you won’t mind too much if I pick some nits.
Consider a geometric proof or other mathematical theorem. We logically demonstrate that a specific kind of formal structure must or cannot have certain properties, or demonstrate that a specific kind of formal system must or cannot exist. That certainly seems like an existence-proof of something that cannot be confirmed through publicly available, socially coordinated, and linguistically mediated sense-experience.
(I have a complicated argument for why ” publicly available, socially coordinated, and linguistically mediated sense-experience” is my way of reading “objective, empirical evidence” but I’ll pass over that for now.)
Now, one might object that the axioms and postulates of mathematics are not like the unquestionable first principles of metaphysics. In one sense this is right, since in mathematics we are free to vary the axioms and postulates as we wish in order to construct new systems. But, once a formal system or set of definitions has been chosen, there are necessary implications that are absolutely and eternally true. It is absolutely and eternally true that the area of a triangle is half the base times the height in a Euclidean geometry, just as the meaning of mass and force is absolutely and eternally true within Newtonian mechanics. Whether we choose to apply Euclidean geometry or Newtonian physics is a different question.
Metaphysics is, perhaps, different.
In doing rationalist metaphysics our premises are either conceptual truths that could be denied only by someone who failed to grasp the concept in question or claims about the world as we experience it that are so generic that they could be denied only by someone whose sanity was highly questionable. Thus we take the premise, “there are contingent beings”. If someone were to deny this — perhaps because they had taken Parmenides too seriously — it is difficult to see how there could be any further discussion.
The rules of inference in rationalist metaphysics are, we might say, the rules of reasoning itself — the rules without which there can be no reasoning at all. The principle of non-contradiction might be one of them*, and there’s a lively debate here at TSZ about whether the principle of sufficient reason is as well.
Here, then, is the big question: if you agree that a priori methods are sufficient for proving existence-claims in mathematics, then why aren’t they sufficient for proving existence-claims in metaphysics? Why is there a difference here? (I myself think there is a difference here, and an important one, but I do not think it is obvious what the difference is.)
If there were evidence, then it would a empirical truth, amenable to scientific investigation. But just because theology is not a branch of natural science, it doesn’t follow that theology fails as a kind of knowledge. One would need a much stronger argument than the mere assumption that only empirical knowledge is real knowledge.
* Though there are Buddhist logics which reject it and there also contemporary Western formal systems, paraconsistent logics, which don’t accept it or accept it in a modified form. (The most extreme paraconsistent logic, dialetheism, affirms that there can be true contradictions under specific circumstances.)
You get that from the Old Testament? I think it’s quite difficult to see where that might be found in a straightforward, objective reading of the Laws (dietary restrictions, sexual prohibitions, don’t wear clothing of two different fibers) or the history of ancient Israel.
It is true that in Reform Judaism, we do read the Old Testament (aka the Hebrew Bible) precisely as “a nice ethical philosophy and a semi-mystical approach to coping with the pain and tragedies of the world”. But getting that out of the Hebrew Bible requires a lot of creative interpretation to which hundreds of thousands of rabbis, scholars, philosophers, and mystics have contributed over the past one thousand, nine hundred and forty-five years.
I excluded unreliable testimony. So that excludes all revealed religion. What’s left is mostly feel good stuff and ethical rules of thumb.
I seem to be in the minority, but origins seems to be in the hands of philosopher physicists.
Heh. I had a similar conversation with an evangelical yesterday. It’s amazing how blind they are.
We don’t need evidence for the universe’s existence. We’ve already got that. I mean, assuming it’s not just a hologram, or a universe-scale simulation where I’m just a line of computer code — but even then, we’ve got the consilient evidence of how whatever it is that we observe does what we observe it to do — and we literally have zero such evidence for the actions of god(s) in this universe/hologram/whatever.
Even the theists don’t (usually) think we have such evidence. They don’t witness miracles anymore, the way they supposedly did millennia ago. They tell each other all the time “god answered my prayer” as if they think that getting healed in hospital is something that needs answered-prayer to occur, but they oh so carefully avoid the question of why won’t god heal amputees.
I wonder how many knocked-up teenagers wish they could use Mary’s excuse when they have to tell their folks there’s a baby on the way, here in the 21st century. Don’t get upset. God did it.
What is it about them that when we ask for evidence, they either say they’ve got it, but then won’t reveal it, or else they play dumb about the very concept of evidence? Are they afraid to admit to faith? Does faith somehow feel inadequate if it’s not backed up by evidence of god’s interaction with our real world?
Well, good, it should feel inadequate. But the proper response to that is simply to admit it, not to try to gaslight the witnesses into thinking you’ve got evidence when you really don’t.
Oy, so take a break already and have a bissel chicken soup.
We mathematicians would call that “an existence proof”, and we would talk or write about existence of mathematical entities.
Yet I’m a mathematical fictionalist. That is, I hold that mathematical entities don’t exist.
What it amounts to, is that when doing mathematics, I use a specialized mathematical meaning for “exist”. But when I’m not doing mathematics, I recognize that the mathematical “exist” is very different from the ordinary “exist.”
My reservations about metaphysics are different. They are because I’m inclined to think that metaphysics is a source of bad ideas.
On the God question. I agree with your view. If we are going to restrict talk to what is empirical, then we should probably deny that love and beauty exist. I never like the Dawkins title “The God Delusion”. It seems rude to assert that what people hold precious is a delusion.
Erik,
Objective, empirical evidence. That is, evidence that can be measured or inspected by other individuals (objective) and that is acquired by experimentation and observation of phenomena external to the observer (empirical).
You know, the kind of data theists tend to require for every other decision in their lives except those related to the object of their beliefs.
Your other examples are hypotheses that can be supported or disproved by evidence.
Will you lay it out some day? It would be interesting to see.
In my view, in addition to laws of inference being the true laws of reasoning, also language universals (understood more generally than spoken/written language) are identical to laws of thought and to the ultimate structure of reality. This view is implied in classical structuralism, it’s more emphatic in the works on logic and language by Arnauld and Lancelot, and it’s elaborated into an integral doctrine in Vakyapadiya.
Hmm, I can’t really agree. I’ll agree outright that for the last two decades Dawkins has acted as a cluelessly-offensive shit to, well, everyone who’s not him or his white boy Oxbridge pals. And I’ll stipulate that it’s “rude” to knock down what people hold “precious”, be that a love for Mother Russia or the exultation of listening to Carmina Burana in a concert hall. Although how we can possibly ever avoid that “rudeness” while still being human and having our own independent – and contrary – opinions is a whole ‘nuther question.
I’ve met thousands of religious people in my life (no surprise, given where I live). And of course I don’t know all of those thousands well enough to be sure whether their god is “precious” to them, or not. But I can only recollect one or two for whom I would tentatively suspect that their god belief is precious to them. I think for almost everyone, even in the evangelical US, religion is “something to do”. Being a believer just because it’s the done thing. Like being in the bowling league or going out for the usual Saturday night drinks. It’s the exact opposite of “precious”. It’s deadening to them, it’s a mind-numbing conformity.
I don’t have any objections to Dawkins’ book falling into the hands of those thousands, and maybe jolting some of them out of their shared delusion. If maybe one or two people feel harmed by encountering the rudeness of having their precious Jesus challenged, I pretty much just have to shrug and say that’s life. Too bad, but it’s not as if any religious person isn’t already aware that (some) other people think they’re nuts.