A few times I’ve referred to my view about “the God question” as “radical agnosticism.” I thought it might be fun to work through what this means.
For the purposes of this discussion, by “God” I shall mean follow Hart’s definition of God as “the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things” (The Experience of God, p. 30).
Next, I shall stipulate that our assertions about the world fall into two classes: those that take a truth-value in all possible worlds and those that take a truth-value only in the actual world. This is a contemporary version of “Hume’s Fork”: there are “relations of ideas”, “truths of reason”, analytic a priori claims and then there are “matters of fact”, “truths of fact,” synthetic a posteriori claims. (There are some reasons to be skeptical of this neat distinction but I’ll leave that aside for now.)
Whether or not God exists would therefore seem to be either a “truth of fact” or a “truth of reason”. I shall therefore now argue that it cannot be either.
Truths of fact are either directly observable phenomena or they are posited phenomena. (Though the boundary is strictly methodological and shifts over time.) But there are many presumptive truths of fact — claims with truth-value about the actual world — which we know have turned out to be false. And we know that because of empirical inquiry, and in particular, in the collection of techniques of inquiry called “science”. (I shall not insult anyone’s intelligence by assuming that there is a single thing called “the scientific method”).
Central to disciplined empirical inquiry, including and especially the sciences, is the act of measurement: intersubjectively verifiable assignments of quantitative variation across some interval of spatio-temporal locations. (It might be said that “the Scientific Revolution” is the historical period during which measurement slowly becomes the dominant conception of objectivity.)
But with that notion in place, it is perfectly clear that it is not even possible to take measurements of a perfectly transcendent being. A being that transcends all of space and time cannot be measured, which means that no claims about Him can be subjected to the tribunal of scientific inquiry. And hence no matters of fact about God can be verified one way or the other. That is to say that all claims about God that are restricted to the actual world have an indeterminate truth-value: they cannot be determined to be true or false
The epistemic situation is no better when we turn from a posteriori to a priori claims. In a priori claims, the tribunal is not science but logic, and the central epistemic concept is not measurability but provability. Can the existence of God be proven? Many have thought so!
But here two things must be pointed out: a proof, to be deductively valid, consists of re-organizing the information contained in the initial assumptions. One can generate a logically valid proof of the existence of God. (Gödel, for example, has a logically valid version of the Ontological Argument.) The process of proof-construction is not going to give you more information in the conclusion than was present in the premises.
Logic is limited in another important way: there are multiple logics. What can proved in one logic can be disproven in a different logic. It depends on the choice of logical system. Once you’ve chosen a logical system, and you’ve chosen some premises, then of course one can prove that God exists. But neither the premises nor the rules are “self-evident”, inscribed on the very face of reason or of reality, etc.
Hence we cannot determine that God exists or does not exist on the basis of logic alone, since provability is no more reliable here than measurability is.
On this basis, I conclude that it is not even possible for beings such as ourselves to assign any truth-value at all to the assertion that God exists. This yields a radical agnosticism. Whereas the moderate agnostic can accept the logical possibility of some future evidence or reasoning that would resolve the issue, the radical agnostic insists that beings with minds like ours are completely unable to resolve the issue at all.
Radical agnosticism is at the same time compatible with either utter indifference to the question of the existence of God (“apatheism”) or some quite definite stance (ranging from theism to pantheism to deism to atheism). All that radical agnosticism insists on here is that all definite stances on the God-question are leaps of faith — no matter what direction.
You may know what you mean, but unless you make it clear to your interlocutors, you are the one failing to communicate.
On the contrary, what you are doing is attempting to shift the burden of proof from your god claims to others’ epistemologies. You have not once supported your claim that your god is necessary for you to know anything. When challenged the best you come up with is that you know by “revelation”. In other words, personal conviction just as Flint states.
Ok as you wish, your belief that God can reveal stuff to you may be the result of an unreliable cognitive faculty. You have no need to assumption of reliability for your belief
Knowledge to an unreliable cognitive faculty may be, with an unreliable tool one can never be sure of the results
peace
Hume’s Fork, as formulated in the Enquiry (and I’m more familiar with the Enquiry than with the Treatise), has pretty clearly got to be a “matter of fact.” Firstly, it manifestly fails the “negation is a repugnance to reason” test for relations of ideas. Secondly, it’s a claim grounded in empirical claims about the human mind — it’s a psychological claim.
But why is that supposed to be an objection to it? It’s an empirical claim that all objectively valid assertions fall into one of those two categories. What’s wrong with that?
The logical positivist version is a bit cleaner, since it amounts to a distinction between the object-language and the metalanguage. The logical positivist version of the Fork is not a statement (Satz) about any objects but a proposal or rule about how language should be used.
If anything, the history of philosophy in the past 150 years has been kinder to Hume than to Kant. Kant thought that arithmetic, Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian mechanics were all synthetic a priori. But Frege showed that arithmetic is analytic, and the history of mathematics from Poincare through Einstein to Carnap shows that geometry and physics have both an analytic a priori dimension and a synthetic a posteriori dimension.
Anyone who has followed the history of math and science should conclude that the prospects for Hume’s Fork look rather good.
(That is not to say that I myself would endorse it in all cases. I actually prefer recent work by Michael Friedmann and Hasok Chang on how to think about necessarily contingent and relative synthetic a priori principles as constitutive rules of local discursive practices.)
Welcome to TSZ,The Huxley Agnostic. Apologies that your comment languished in moderation for a while. Any further comments you decide to make will appear immediately.
Here we come to the very heart of the disagreement between us: I think that one cannot talk, in any intelligible sense, about justification in the first place without also committing oneself to a belief in other minds. (Not that I like that way of putting it — “a belief in other minds” is a much too intellectualistic interpretation of the myriad ways in which we experience the sentience of nonhuman animals and the sentience-and-sapience of other human animals.)
I say this because justification is itself a social practice — and one that we ourselves are taught how to participate in. (In the contemporary jargon, I’m a social externalist about justification.) For what is justification? It is a normative assessment of the evidence and reasons for one’s claims. But that normative assessment necessarily involves other rational beings like ourselves.
Think of it this way (taking an example from Wittgenstein): suppose I’m waiting for a train, and I want to know if it will be on time. I could look up the schedule. But suppose instead of doing so, I imagine the schedule: I look up the time in my imagination. Why isn’t that the same thing as looking up the actual schedule?
The answer is that there’s no constraint on how I imagine the schedule. It could be whatever I want — or subconsciously desire — it to be. But without constraints, there are no norms or rules at all.
Justification is much the same: it is a normative assessment of evidence and reasoning according to rules or norms, and there are no private norms. (Though Wittgenstein doesn’t put it this way, he might say that the very idea of a “private norm” is a category mistake — a category mistake on which several hundred years of philosophy have depended.)
So whereas you think that we need to justify our belief in other minds, I think that this makes no sense at all — we cannot justify our belief in other minds because there is no such thing as justification at all in the first place without also accepting (what is indeed a manifest reality to everyone who is not a psychopath) that there are other sentient-and-sapient beings other than oneself.
What would be an example of some fact in the world that might falsify it?
Again,
And I tire of repeating this.
It’s not a claim it’s a hypothesis. It will be falsified if and when you can present a cogent consistent justification for knowledge sans God.
I’m not claiming that God is necessary for me to know anything I’m saying that since God exists knowledge is possible.
Knowledge might be possible in a world with out God but that claim has not been demonstrated
revelation is not the same thing as personal conviction in fact the two concepts are close to opposite of each other.
peace
It could an empirical discovery in the cognitive science of mathematics that our mathematical judgments are synthetic a priori.
Again an omnipotent God can reveal in such a way so that I can be sure of the results even if I have an unreliable “tool”.
That is after all what the word omnipotent means
peace
Hey KN Just for you I’ll engage in a little philosophical meandering
I would agree with this claim.
The question is what other mind(s) do you commit yourself to.
I would disagree that we taught ourselves. I would say we were taught by God.
If we taught ourselves then our justification would depend on our own error prone teaching ability.
Again I would agree but would disagree on which other being(s) are qualified to give a normative assessment of the evidence.
again we are in so much agreement here. The problem is you are constraining yourself by yourself and other unreliable intellects. This sort of constraint is of no value at all.
In order for a normative constraint to be of value it must be objective and true. IOW it must come from God.
no I think you need justify your belief in (only) other minds that are like you in that their cognitive and sensory functions are unreliable and error prone.
Joining the error prone product of two minds can not yield a conclusion that is with out error.
On the other hand you would be perfectly justified in believing in another mind if he was infallible and omnipotent and had revealed himself to you
peace
I don’t understand how that could happen. What sort of empirical discovery would cause cognitive scientists to be warranted in that claim? And if some propositions are indeed deemed synthetic apriori, why wouldn’t that alone show that Hume’s Fork must be wrong?
Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make a dog have five legs. You are making a claim about reality.
And right there you are attempting to shift the burden of proof.
Your claim/hypothesis/idle speculation is not the default that must be disproven. If you can’t support it, there’s no reason to take it seriously.
That’s simply a restatement of your claim. It needs support.
What are the factors that would allow one to operationally determine the difference between the two? That is, how would one distinguish between another’s claimed revelation and that other’s personal conviction?
As I’m imagining the case, we would asking the cognitive scientists to tell us whether Hume’s psychology is correct. It wouldn’t be enough for us to simply believe that some propositions are synthetic a priori; we would need reasons for that belief. And one way of undermining the Fork would be empirical evidence that it is false, since it is an empirical claim to begin with.
As for what kind of evidence we could imagine the cognitive scientists coming up with, we would imagine them determining through observation and experimentation that mathematical concepts are not acquired inductively (hence not synthetic a posteriori) and also that mathematical concepts are used in material inferences (hence not analytic a priori). That would count as a synthetic a posteriori claim that mathematics is synthetic a priori, and hence the Fork is mistaken as an empirical claim.
Alternatively, we could go “full Kant” and argue that it is a synthetic a priori claim (about the a priori cognitive capacities of finite rational beings) that there are synthetic a priori claims (about mathematics, physics, and/or ethics).
revelation
Sure it is. what gives you the right to say otherwise?
who died and made you judge of what the default position is?
It seems to me that if there is any burden shifting going on it is you who are doing it.
Your claim that no God exists is at odds with the position of the vast majority of humanity for the entirety of recorded history. Plus as a negative claim it is impossible to prove.
Yet you want us to treat it as the default position.
Does that not strike you as being a bit arrogant?
peace
no it is not!!!!!!!!
If you can’t even see the obvious difference between what you said and what I said how are you qualified to make a judgement as to what the default position is?
I’m serious here you need take some time and look at what is being said before you presume to rule from your ultimate decider throne.
my statement was about possibility your statement was about necessity these are not even remotely the same thing.
Just because something is possible given X does not mean that it is only possible given X
peace
I guess my initial response here is a casual shrug of the shoulders — ok, so all knowledge is fallible. So what? All that means is that the quest for certainty is a fool’s errand.
I mean, yeah, sure, my cognitive capacities are fallible. And so are yours, and so are everyone else’s. You can correct my errors, and I can correct yours. And what we take to be so firmly established as to be self-evident, the next generation may well call into question. In the game of giving and asking for reasons, there is no move that can call an end to all further moves.
We can imagine that absolute truth would be attained by only through an infinite process of inquiry, but at no point in that process would any finite inquirers be justified in believing that what is taken-to-be-known for them would also be taken-to-be-known at the conjectured, infinitely distant terminus ad quem of that process.
I don’t see how can ‘go full Kant’ and still retain Hume’s Fork. In fact, the existence of any synthetic apriori propositions–whether discovered by a cognitive psychologist or reasoned to by a metaphysician– would constitute a repudiation of the fork, wouldn’t it? If Hume is right there are no such animals.
walto,
Maybe we misunderstood each other here — I thought you were asking me for suggestions on how to refute the Fork! That’s why I responded as I did — by suggesting an empirical refutation of the Fork and then also a properly transcendental refutation of the Fork.
You are claiming that knowledge of X is justified if it is arrived at by compiling of the opinions of two or more unreliable intellects.
Why is that the case?
How can two opinions of undetermined and questionable reliability equal one reliable conclusion?
It’s even worse you are relying (solely) on the reliability of your own unreliable intellect to tell you that there is value in this “pooling unreliability” approach to start with.
Except when we share the same error. A distinct possibility given we share the same cognitive make up
peace
How could “absolute” truth ever be attained through any process of inquiry whatsoever relying on a “limited” cognitive apparatus?
The concepts are contradictory.
If we say that adding additional views makes the composite view asymptotic to absolute truth, then an infinite number of views add up to absolute truth.
Of course, even then no single individual could know that such a truth had been reached. That sort of “knowledge” is available only to the deluded.
how can you say that?
how can you possibly know that without access to the absolute truth to compare your limited composite with?
peace
Kantian Naturalist,
This comment of yours may seem obvious and boring to you, but I think you’ve hit on matters that many folks need to consider. Why not turn it into an OP?
I already answered. You omitted the sentence that provided the answer, and then asked for what you omitted.
No, you’re right, I did ask for how you might falsify the fork. But I wanted to know what factual empirical info could do it. I don’t really understand how one can falsify something like that with empirical information. Going “full Kant” is obviously not an empirical refutation. So that puts us back with the cognitive psychology stuff, and I don’t understand how any claim that all statements must be either statements of fact or be analytic (simply relations of ideas) can be falsified by any empirical study. If the findings are empirical, they couldn’t affect Hume’s claim: they’d simply be put on that side of the ledger.
Anyhow, I agree with the point I think mung was making with his remark, Hume’s Fork is itself neither analytic nor empirical. It’s no more verifiable (or falsifiable) than the verification (or falsification) theories of meaning.
What?
I don’t understand
The next sentence said that given your assumption no single person could know that [absolute] truth had been reached.
How is that an answer to the question of how you can know that limited composite opinion will add up to absolute truth?
peace
If you’re against such definitions why are you engaging in such an attempt yourself?
That’s probably a mistake.
There are statements that we make about the world (such as descriptions).
And then there are statements that we make about systems of statements. Call those “metastatements”. Hume’s fork is surely about ordinary statements such as descriptions. But Hume’s fork itself should be seen as a metastatement. So it’s improper to ask how Hume’s fork applies to Hume’s fork.
A friend of mine is schizophrenic, and furthermore heavily preoccupied with religion. I never cease to be amazed at his brilliance in rationalizing his delusions (sometimes hallucinations). Indeed, there’s a remarkable degree of internal coherence in the belief system he’s developed over the years.
It’s come to me again and again, over the past few days, that FMM’s brand of revelation is indistinguishable from hallucination. By no means am I suggesting that he is delusional. I will observe instead that he is that he is neither as coherent in his views, nor as intelligent in his defense of them, as my schizophrenic friend is. That’s not just an insult. It’s a fact.
Now, it is hardly an alien concept, to Christian philosophers and theologians, that an “absolute relation to the Absolute” should seem like madness to others. Part and parcel of this is recognition that the believer is ultimately alone in his faith. But FMM is no Kierkegaard. No way, no how. He asserts his hallucinations (we have no way of knowing that they are revelations) publicly, and attempts to justify his assertion of them by saying that (1) the view on which his hallucinations are actually revelations is not self-defeating (he neglects to mention that it is tautological), and (2) anything we might say in objection to his hallucinations is on a view that is self-defeating. And he snorts in delight at his own “cleverness,” evidently too dim to recognize that he’s a one-trick pony with quite an uninteresting trick.
FMM laces his pseudo-philosophy with affectations of piety, and is quite willing to suggest that those who object are anti-Christian. So let me repeat what I say from time to time, namely, that most of the people dear to me are evangelical Christians. I’m not upset by what FMM says here. I’m upset at the thought that he says it in churches, to people much like those whom I love.
Revelation
QFT
“The classic wisdom-of-the-crowds finding involves point estimation of a continuous quantity. At a 1906 country fair in Plymouth, 800 people participated in a contest to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the median guess, 1207 pounds, was accurate within 1% of the true weight of 1198 pounds.This has contributed to the insight in cognitive science that a crowd’s individual judgments can be modeled as a probability distribution of responses with the mean centered near the true mean of the quantity to be estimated.”
The answer, once again, is that there is no way anyone can know.
As a parallel, consider the political goal of the greatest good for the greatest number. EVEN IF everyone agrees this is the proper goal, and EVEN IF you should happen to blunder onto that happy circumstance, nobody can know that. There will always be attempts at improvement, because the greatest good for the greatest number might in fact not be the greatest good for anyone in particular.
I’ve sometimes wondered why religion plays such a frequent and leading role in this kind of insanity. Does the need to believe one has a hotline to absolute truth derive from religious faith, or does such a need lead one to find religion comfortable? I’m inclined to think that religion tends to offer a haven for those poorly equipped to deal with uncertainty — and also for those unable to admit their own ignorance to themselves.
I’m always surprised by the vehemence with which otherwise intelligent and informed people defend religious claims that all evidence suggest are preposterous. Perhaps all of us need one or more core non-negotiable absolute certainties in our lives, and religions provide these in easily-digestable form.
Well, having mentioned Kierkegaard already, I’ll mention also that he criticized Christendom for attempting to render faith comfortable. There have long been Christians who recognize that angst — it goes by various names — is intrinsic to existence, not something that is erased by faith. And there have long been Christians who recognize that religion has little to do with faith. When I agree with Marx that religion is the opiate of the masses, I’m not commenting on faith, but instead the faithless who congregate to proclaim their blessed assurance.
(I’ve thought about writing an OP on psychological religiosity among atheists. Deciding that you no longer believe in God does not magically eliminate the effects of a religious upbringing. In fact, the notion that ascribing to right beliefs brings an instantaneous transformation is just as religious as can be. It took me 35 years to reach the point where I could honestly say that I had let go of it all. And it was indeed a process of letting go. What I want to tell people about myself is that I have grown irreligious, not that I have taken a position on something I don’t even know how to define.)
Fundamentalist Christians are clinging to simplemindedness, not just absolute certainty. Their distinctive beliefs took root with poorly educated rural folk of the late Nineteenth Century. (Biblical literalism dates only to the early part of that century.) The intellectuals among them have to concoct bogus assurances that such simplemindedness is actually smart. ETA: I don’t see such assurances as “easily-digestible.” They are, in my judgment (fully acknowledged as that), a source of suffering. It’s not my objective to replace those assurances with my own beliefs. I want to displace them, and leave it to the religious to find their ways to beliefs that are less discordant.
I know you are attempting to insert humor into the discussion but your answer tells me that you can’t think of an alternative solution to the problem.
Of course you know that revelation in this context requires the existence of an omnipotent omniscient being. So your answer assumes the existence of such a being.
peace
Nothing but personal conviction all the way down, then. No wonder you lot are incapable of resolving disputes without bloodshed whenever you’re in charge.
accurate to within 1% is still inaccurate. Close does not count when we are talking about truth.
Suppose your conception of the world was 99% accurate except that you thought that the government was spying on you through the fillings in your teeth.
You’d still be a loony bird.
peace
As already pointed out to you, repeatedly:
You’ve presented no objective, empirical evidence to support your claims. There is literally no reason to bother considering them.
Not only are you having trouble distinguishing between possible and necessary but apparently you can’t tell the difference between revelation and personal conviction.
And you want to appoint yourself decider and chief. That sounds like a recipe for disaster.
By the way folks like me have never been in charge. We just want to live our life. We are the ones who are always on the receiving end of folks like you who want to appoint themselves boss.
peace
It’s about knowledge not certainty and being able to admit my own ignorance is a prerequisite in my worldview.
It is the other side who would assert that they know stuff based on nothing but their own cognitive and sensory faculties. Many of them are certain that no God exists based on the conclusions of those same unreliable faculties.
peace
You’re the one incapable of providing a means of distinguishing between the two.
Nope, I’m just asking for objective, empirical evidence.
Yeah, you were. We call that time the Dark Ages.
ah Hitchen’s razor. The self-refuting pretext you use when you make your pronouncements from your personal “decider” throne.
You decide I’m making a claim
You decide that empirical evidence is how to decide such claims
You decide what counts as objective
You decide that Hitichen’s razor is not a claim
You do all of this without ever taking the time to justify any of your decisions.
It must be cool to think of your self as King 😉
peace
I provide a means perhaps you missed it.
Revelation
You don’t like my answer because it does not leave you in charge
Folks like me were being persecuted by folks like you in the dark ages.
check it out
http://ihtys.narod.ru/foxes_book_of_martyrs.pdf
and
http://www.homecomers.org/mirror/intro.htm
peace
I agree that the Hitchens’ claim above (like Hume’s Fork) is not subject to empirical verification. It’s a kind of religious position, too. It’s proponents just fail to realize that. You will at least admit that you are religious. OTOH, Patrick IS a bit like you in that he seems to find some sort of comfort in having absolute assurance in his views about what objectivity requires and likes to make the same proclamations over and over again.
BTW, I clicked on the link you provided and it’s a 741 page-download! That’s a lot of persecutions by guys who are awfully sure of themselves–some of them Christian, some of them not. As Tom English notes above, a religious mentality can be found in professed “non-believers” too. It’s unpleasant everywhere, IMO.
You gotta have heart.
Except that you seem to want to repeatedly tell others how to live their lives.
You need to support that claim. Hitchens’ Razor isn’t self-refuting, it’s simply a pithy restatement of which party in a discussion bears the burden of proof.
No, I point out when you are making a claim. Your attempts to squirm out of the burden of proof don’t change the fact that you are making claims here.
If you have another objective means of supporting your claims about reality, please feel free to share.
No, I’m using a recognizable version of the scientific method.
It’s a restatement of one of the rules for reasoned discussion.
I’ve explained all of this repeatedly. You ignore it because you lack any support for your claims and so have no choice but to admit that or attempt to change the topic. It’s interesting to see which option you picked.
This is just pure projection on your part. Your authoritarian belief system makes it difficult for you to understand that there are those of us who do not require kings.
“A group of dogs cannot conceive of a group of cats without an alpha.”
So the way to tell if someone else is acting on personal conviction or revelation is . . . revelation. You’re admitting that revelation and personal conviction are functionally equivalent. They are indistinguishable to an objective external observer.
I don’t like it because it’s useless.
No, some folks like you were persecuted by other folks like you because you have no rational means of resolving your differences. When two revelations conflict, the one held by the people with the most political and military power tends to win. Funny, that.