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.
Yes it’s God to be omnipotent, and God is good.
no I’m saying that omnipotence does not include the ability to do things that are against your nature. If God could do things that are against his nature he would not be omnipotent he would be incoherent.
no in order to be absolutely sure you have the truth God needs to reveal the truth to you in such a way that you can be absolutely sure.
That is all that is required nothing else and certainly nothing is required from the recipient of the revelation .
Again for probably the thousandth time. It’s not about me it’s about God
peace
I only observe the track record. Looking both ways before walking across the street isn’t better than closing your eyes and trusting revelation because I say so, but YMMV.
Ah, so you have decided what your god is and is not permitted to do, according to your ideas of what’s coherent. Next time you pray, you should let it know this.
You mean, if your god clued me in that way, I could be as absolutely sure as you are? Where do I sign?
Like, maybe, SUPPORTING your claims? No, I can see why that’s not required.
Why am I always reminded of the little boy who blames his invisible playmate when he gets caught?
How do you know you have not imagined the track record?
How do you know that you are not mistaken about the track record in some important way?
while we are at it
How do you know that you are not imagining everything outside your own mind right now?
peace
No God has revealed this.
You are absolutely sure about some things right now. For instance you are absolutely sure you exist aren’t you?
what claims?
Perhaps because you have constructed a strawman version of what God is like from you own imagination.
peace
If by ‘sure’ you mean ‘absolutely certain’ then I’d say No.
No. I’ve explained this many times. Neither justification that P nor knowledge that P requires either certainty that P or knowing that one knows that P.
Because you’re still that little boy?
So you, too, can be omnipotent, as long as you only want to do the things that you are able to do. Doing something you don’t want to do would be against your nature, so omnipotence doesn’t require that.
Neat.
</sarcasm>
They don’t want God to be coherent so they strive mightily to make Him incoherent. But I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already seen for yourself.
Of course , revelation requires an assumption by a limited mind
I think that would require the God have the power to make you omniscient which would be the only way to be sure and also sure you were not deluded. I do not think that is logically possible even for an omnipotent God.
Now of course God could cause you to be deluded but that would be a form of lying which is contrary to His Nature
That is after all what the word omnipotent means
peace
fifth:
Walto:
Of course, Fifth has similarly stated that he can be mistaken in this sense: he can mistakenly believe that God has revealed something, when there has been no revelation. That is to say, in his worldview he can’t ever be sure whether an apparent truth is a real truth.
Fifth:
Walto:
Fifth has a berth on the same boat:
This is somehow not reaching KN.
You are right about one thing: You make no difference. None whatsoever.
But the statement was itself included in the particular class of statements, so the content of the statement can be applied to itself. This is a basic test of general claims – see how it works when it’s turned on itself. The test is applicable as long as the claim is about a class of claims that include itself.
You quibble about whether it’s an assertion or not, according to your special-pleading definition of assertion. The real issue is whether it is about itself or not. If you say the statement is not subject to its own rule, you have to have logical proof or semantic analysis to back it up.
Says the OP “For the purposes of this discussion, by “God”…” as if it discussed God. It doesn’t.
The radical agnosticism you arrive at is not about God. It’s about “synthetic a priori assertions” or whatever you call them. And you shouldn’t be puzzled about how to identify them. You wrote an OP claiming that Hume’s Fork works to be agnostic about them, so it should also work to identify them (by finding out that the assertion can be neither truth of fact or truth of reason). Don’t you believe your own OP anymore?
How do you know that?
so why do you think that I am unjustified in my belief if I am uncertain?
peace
no this is incorrect, I can be sure if God has revealed it in such a way so that I can be sure.
No in my boat knowledge is possible because God (who is truth) exists, If God did not exist the boat would not exist and I would be adrift on a sea of incoherence and illogical disorder .
In walto’s boat knowledge is potentially possible conditioned on (among other things) whether or not truth actually exists. There is no reason for him to beleive that truth exists in his boat he merely assumes (and hopes) it does. His boat could function just fine without truth. For all he knows there is no truth at all in his boat but he acts as if he knows that it it is there based on nothing more than the readings from his unreliable truth detector.
do you see the difference?
Again
The proof that God exists is that without him I could prove nothing.
peace
Kind of. He SAYS that all one needs is warrant, truth and belief to get knowledge, but he misses the implication of that equivalence (falsity) for his repeated insinuations that one can’t really know anything unless one knows why one is warranted, how one can trust their senses, etc.
In the end, his desire for God trumps any reliance on his terms — as defined. And I think he’d admit, even WANT his love of God to trump everything. So that the record skips at the same spot each play is probably OK with him: it gives the appearance of soundness, and really feels good. A twofer!
Patrick does roughly the same stuff with his revelations from the church of Hitchens. It isn’t good philosophy, but it both sounds like it might be and reassures him to repeat it. They both feel there’s a kind of political wisdom associated with their views too. After all, haven’t the true believers been persecuted by the tyrants, whether the truths have been xtianity or Randianism? It must be good to fight the baddies at every turn; maybe one more repitition of their truths will help.
That’s a lot of value they get from their ‘witnessing,’ and I guess I shouldn’t be so quick to judge stuff that so clearly ‘works’ for each of them. But, you know, we all have our foibles.
1) I don’t have to know everything to know something for sure
2) ever hear of the believers union with Christ (who is omniscient)?
So God could not cause me to be deluded because it is against his nature.
If I’m deluded God is not to blame.
Now of course God could turn me over and leave me to my own fallible and unreliable cognitive and sensory faculties. If he did that I would be in the same boat that walto is in 😉
peace
No you still apparently don’t get it.
I know that you know stuff I’m not insinuating otherwise. I know you know stuff even if you don’t know why you know it
What I want to know is …..how….. you know stuff given your presuppositions.
If God exists I can know stuff because God can reveal stuff. That is simple and straightforward.
I want to know how you know stuff if God does not exist. What I hear is you saying that you know stuff because your mind and senses tell you stuff etc.
What I need to know is why given your worldview you can trust those things. Is there some compelling reason that in walto’s world that minds and senses are reliable truth detectors despite all the evidence we see to the contrary? Is there some compelling reason why truth has to exist at all in walto’s world?
That is what I want to know
peace
Like many philosophers since Descartes, you may “want to know” how knowledge is possible, but it doesn’t actually matter to the points I was making. I’d like to be playing in the NBA Conference Finals. So what? We can’t always get what we want.
You like your theory that God supplies warrant. I prefer mine that certain experiences have intrinsic warrant. You like vanilla, I like chocolate. Good for each of us! The point is that one doesn’t need to answer those questions to know stuff if knowledge is warranted, true belief. Period.
See last answer. Certainty is not required.
It’s the human condition–and it doesn’t require some Vishnu to place us in it. The question is, can one accept this with courage–or at least resignation (even fear and loathing!)–or does one have to create a Daddy to get through life in one piece?
As you have made clear, you can be mistaken regarding “knowledge” you take as having been revealed to you in this way. Specifically, you may believe God has revealed something to you in such a way that you can be sure, when he has not. It follows that you can be “sure” you have the real truth through revelation, when you don’t.
This right here illustrates how I know that FMM’s (and similar folks’) take on his omnipotent god is totally erroneous. I completely violates Dirac’s Equation to say nothing of logic.
People who believe in such gods clearly have no real grasp of the way quantum particles move around, but what’s worse is that they have no grasp of the fact that in order to have any sort of interaction with humans, the world, or the universe, it (or they or her or simply ‘pronoun’ thing) must be able to move quantum particles in violation of their energy states. Never mind that such would mean the complete and utter end of the universe, but even the most minor perturbations would be detectable. Violating Dirac’s Equation would be like putting up a billboard sign the size of Jupiter to the power of…oh… about a million…that says, “THIS IS GOD!” Oddly (and fortunately), nobody has ever seen any such billboards…
Douglas Adams reflected on that billboard:
And yet, you’ve still not shown that a razor is assertion. So I reject your rebuttal as erroneous once again.
So special pleading required. You’re more than welcome to provide a definition that shows that assertion includes the philosophical razors. Have at it.
Oh…wait…that would demonstrate you’re wrong because lo and behold there are no such definitions.
No, I simply have to show that a razor is not itself a part of the set called “assertion” since the razor is an observation about assertions. And lo, I did just that.
fifth
no this is incorrect, I can be sure if God has revealed it in such a way so that I can be sure.
How can you be sure when that is?
Yeah, it’s clearly contradictory. FFM starts with his unreliable nature to know thinks, and then posits a “god” than can “reveal” things to him, and have him know things beyond any doubt. This omnipotent god can’t do impossibles, but apparently can turn an unreliable human mind into a fully reliable one. Self defeating worldview, obvious to anyone but him. All the while he somehow thinks he’s such a deep thinker. Hilarious
How? By defining it? The only relevant statement you have is
…which tells me you were just trolling.
No, by allowing the definition to speak for itself:
No, that would go hand -in-hand with the definition I provided. If you want to provide an different definition of assertion that shows it doesn’t include razor, that would be fine, but I already know there are no such definitions.
What’s the evidence that minds and senses are not reliable truth-detectors?
Wikipedia says, “In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate (“shave off”) unlikely explanations for a phenomenon.”
You say, “…a razor is not itself a part of the set called “assertion” since the razor is an observation about assertions.”
None of this shows that Hitchens’ Razor is not an assertion. It’s like –
A: Obama is the President.
B: I disagree! Obama is black!
You have not shown how asserting that a statement is “principle”, “rule of thumb” or “observation” somehow prevents it from being an assertion.
And notice – to me it suffices that it’s a statement that postulates a rule that can be applied to the statement itself. You have done nothing to argue otherwise.
Hitchens’ Razor has both logic and evidence supporting it.
The logic is that, without supporting evidence or logic, there is quite literally no reason to consider a claim. There are an infinite number of possible claims — the razor identifies those that are potentially worthy of consideration.
The evidence is that it works. It’s simply a restatement of the rule describing which party has the burden of proof in a discussion. Empirically, following this rule results in gains in knowledge. Ignoring it results in theology.
Everyone is quite happy to use the concept of objective, empirical evidence in their everyday life to make decisions ranging from financial investments to whether or not it’s safe to cross the street. It’s only when their unsupported claims about unevidenced entities are challenged that all of a sudden a new definition is needed.
Probably, the problem is determining which is which. That would require omniscience, isn’t that the whole point of revelation? God is omniscient therefore what he reveals is absolutely true.
2) unless the union with Christ makes you omniscient,you cannot be absolutely sure.
That seems to follow
Well the thing is He created those fallible and unreliable cognitive and sensory faculties, sounds like you are in the same boat as Walto by design. Maybe the point is the the journey not the destination.
Yet you are unable to provide a means of distinguishing between them.
To an external observer, another person holding a view based on revelation acts identically to the same person holding the same view based on personal conviction. You offer no means to determine which is which. Operationally they are equivalent.
Oh, you poor persecutated Christians. It’s so horrible that history shows that you were actually the ones oppressing, imprisoning, and killing in the name of your god when you had the power to do so. It makes it so hard to take on the mantle of the victim.
For someone who isn’t the “official decider”, you make a lot of claims about reality and about your god.
I, on the other hand, am assuming no authority. I’m simply pointing out that your claims are unsupported and incoherent. If you disagree, provide the support and articulate your views coherently.
Repeating incoherent statements does not make them more coherent. Not that I expect an answer after you’ve repeatedly failed to provide one, but hope springs eternal: What exactly do you mean when you say “Truth exists”? Do you simply mean that it is possible to make statements that correspond somewhat closely to reality or do you mean something else? In what sense are you using the word “truth”? Please note that claiming an abstract noun exists, as a literal meaning of your words suggests, is nonsensical.
Another claim you often repeat but never support with any logical argument.
And yet another claim you often repeat but never support with any logical argument.
Don’t you ever tire of spewing nonsense?
Yet you claim your god is omnipotent, omniscient, and the creator of everything. There is therefore nothing that is not your god’s responsibility. It knew what you would do before it even created you, by your own definition of its charateristics. Therefore it is to blame for any delusions you have.
Just more on the list of charges your deity should face if it turns out to actually exist.
Any assertion about God that uses the classical definition will be a synthetic a priori assertion, since such assertions cannot be analytic (bypassing the very large question of what “analyticity” is) or empirical (again, bypassing the somewhat large question of what “empirical” is).
That is to say, as standardly understood, the propositions of scholastic and rational theology and metaphysics are neither (1) statements indexed to spatio-temporal particulars and identifiable as such relative to some actual or possible rational being with sensory consciousness (and so not “empirical”), nor are they (2) statements that could be reconstructed as axioms or theorems an extensional or intensional formal system (and so not “analytic”).
Hence if those statements are understood as objectively valid assertions in the first place (which, however, Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich, Levinas, and other religious existentialists would deny!), then they must be synthetic a priori.
As to “Don’t you believe your own OP anymore?”, I thought it perfectly clear that I was engaging in an intellectual experiment. Not all experiments are successful, but we learn even from the failures.
Those are not support–they’re just restatements.
Thanks. The big step forward here is the definition of evidence as objective and empirical. So, as long as no objective empirical evidence have been presented for Hitchens’ Razor, it can be dismissed without evidence.
Then there’s the fact that anybody even remotely logical knows that objective empirical evidence is not the only kind of evidence, that it’s not always the most important kind, and that it’s at times unobtainable for various reasons. We have no objective empirical evidence that all unmarried males are bachelors, but we know it’s true. So, Hitchens’ Razor is anti-philosophical, anti-intellectual, anti-logical. It’s physicalist scientistist rubbish.
Respect (if you are actually saying that you failed; I won’t believe for a second that you learned anything, but still respect).
*rolls eyes*
Do you really want to insist that principles and propositions are assertions? I mean, that would pretty much dismiss FMM’s (and most creationist’s) position entirely. I’m good with that.
That said, I’m betting even you agree that principles and propositions and even razors are just not the same thing as assertions or claims. Dictionaries are pretty good about noting when words are synonyms for instance, but none of those terms shows assertion as a synonym. So I’m really not sure how you think your argument has any validity.
Except that’s not what the definition states. Where did you get this?
Why would I? It’s not the point I’m making nor is it established by definition
However, we know that all unmarried men are bachelors because it is “analytic”, in the sense of being true “by meaning alone”. So while you’re right that Hitchen’s pithy dictum doesn’t allow for analytic statements, that complaint isn’t going to cut it when applied to Hume’s Fork, which does allow for analytic statements.
The real question here is whether there are synthetic a priori statements, and if there are, whether they allow us to make sense of classical theism.
My own view, as expressed a few times here, is that there are synthetic a priori truths, but once we get clear about their nature, we will see that they don’t allow us to make sense of classical theism.
But whereas the traditional atheist thereby concludes that theism therefore makes no sense at all, I think that the right way forward is religious existentialism, according to which linguistic (and non-linguistic) expressions of one’s experience of the divine are not really objectively valid assertions at all. We might say that Kierkegaard effectively concedes the letter of Hume’s criticism but denies its spirit.
Are you not asserting principles and propositions when you state them? In some abstract and non-useful sense they may exist without assertion, but when you bring them up in a discussion they’re being asserted. And we don’t know that “Hitchen’s Razor” is a principle. It seems more of a heuristic device.
No, a principle or proposition becomes an assertion when it is used to assert that something or other isn’t right.
But anyway, I don’t know why anyone thinks that the claim that we don’t have any obligation to listen to apparent made-up junk sans evidence does not itself have evidence backing it up. When has it ever paid off?
It’s a “meta” claim, hence not sufficiently backed up by specific evidence (one could bring up specific instances, but these would only be examples, not able to establish a “principle”), but it’s fair for us to judge that “Hitchen’s Razor” is backed up by the totality of the use of evidence vs. non-use of evidence (in the appropriate circumstances, of course) in general. It is so judged in courts, and there is nothing that is different between judicial settings and the rest of life that warrants that judgment in court and not in the rest of life/experience. It’s more difficult in some areas, notably, when evidence is asked for with respect to “Hitchen’s Razor,” but the evidence does exist for it. It isn’t “scientific evidence,” true, but it is the sort of evidence that scientists also use to dismiss claims that lack proper evidence (usually, however, the dismissed claims lack the proper scientific evidence, since science isn’t in the business of producing “meta” claims, while it does rely on them).
Glen Davidson
LOL! Hitchen’s Razor is a specifically epistemological observation; it simply notes that we are all free to reject unsubstantiated claims without having any need to substantiate the rejection. Feel free to make an argument that not all unmarried men are bachelors and I’m pretty sure everyone on this board (if not in the world) will agree that none of us has any reason to prove why not all unmarried men are bachelors; it’s simply an absurd claim by definition.
So, no Hitchen’s point is not anti-anything in terms of philosophy or intellect. It is, however, anti-nonsensical-claims-lacking-evidence and it does tend to land squarely against religious claims, particular those like FMM’s wherein he insists that – oddly – others have to prove his “hypothesis” wrong otherwise it’s taken as being true. Of course, he doesn’t have to accept Hitchen’s Razor, but those of us that do will simply note (as has been done repeatedly), “um…no.” And then, we simply reject it because we know it is absurd. That’s all there is to Hitchen’s Razor.
You bet wrong.
*waiting for evidence that principles, propositions etc. etc. are different from assertions, claims etc. etc. and why the statement of a rule about statements should not be applied to some statements*
None forthcoming, of course. QED.
Yeah, right. It doesn’t claim. It doesn’t assert. It doesn’t state. It notes.
It got boring and pointless very fast with you.
If principles are normative statements (claims about what ought to be the case), and assertions are descriptive statements (claims about what is the case), then the distinction between ought-claims and is-claims is sufficient to show that principles are not assertions.