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.
Except that God is said to be the creator of the world, not an entity in the world. The atheist tactic is to first redefine God, as a teapot or spaghetti monster, and then talk about how irrational it is to believe that.
KN is way slicker – first define, properly even, and then refute by sidestepping the definition.
I’m not “sidestepping” the definition.
I’m arguing that one cannot coherently establish the existence or nonexistence of God if one accepts Hume’s Form between analytic a priori claims and synthetic a posteriori claims.
The question then is whether or not to accept the Fork.
Kant famously argues that there are synthetic a priori claims, but they are only claims about our own cognitive capacities and not claims about the world.
The chief problem here is that cognitive pluralism — the knowledge that there are many different ways of being sensorily affected by the world and of conceptualizing it — undermines the necessity and universality that Kant ascribes to the forms of intuition and categories of understanding.
The pragmatist response to Kant is to relocate the distinction between a priori and a posteriori to a distinction internal to a conceptual scheme or language-game. I think that is a big step in the right direction. But it does not affect Kant’s critique of rationalist metaphysics.
Correct. And the answer to the question is to not accept it. Why? Because the Fork does not get to the subject matter of God defined as the one infinite source of all that is.
What information is added by calling the one infinite source of all that is god?
What follows from adding the label?
It’s the other way round. God is not a label on some thesis or other. The issue is how to formulate who God is.
Scriptures say God is Creator. Creator can be formulated as the one infinite source of all that is.
There’s no label being added. Rather, a concept has been defined for philosophical purposes. The definition helps to see clearly how Humean forking and atheist teapotting are not addressing the concept.
I don’t agree, at least not with this way of saying it.
We shouldn’t say, “we should reject the Fork because we want to be able say that there is objectively valid knowledge of God, and we can’t do that if we accept the Fork.” That’s allowing our wishes to determine our epistemology, and that seems intellectually dishonest.
Rather, we would need good reasons for rejecting the Fork as an epistemological/semantic position in the first place, and then see if, once we’ve done so, it then turns out that there is objectively valid knowledge of God after all.
One would not have any trouble formulating who, if one has evidence that the who in question actually exists and has demonstrable attributes.
Neither is pretending that you’re talking about anything but a fiction prior to having any good reason to believe that it exists.
Glen Davidson
I don’t think that’s right. We first need to have a concept of what X is in order to figure out if there are Xs, otherwise there’s nothing to guide our inquiry.
Is that how we discovered the platypus?
Glen Davidson
Perhaps you could provide an example of something less controversial, about which we have a concept first.
Without the concept being an extension or example of something already known.
Perhaps one could list the attributes of “one infinite source of all that is” without circularity.
I disagree with this. There are a number of examples of inferred Xs for which initially there were no concepts. X-rays come to mind. Radiation in general. Black holes. Dark matter. Higgs bosons. All these Xs were conceptualized to fit indirect data. No one conceptualized a black hole and then went looking for Special Relativity to support the concept for instance. It was the other way around.
And that is precisely the problem I have with the various concepts of god(s); such concepts have never been and never are succinctly defined to help make sense of some issue in our understanding of how things work. Rather such concepts are always bottomless definitional placeholders for the wishful feeling that there must be something more to this world and reality. And those bottomless definitional placeholders have gone through numerous reorganizations and reconfigurations as the various gaps in our knowledge have filled and/or shifted.
Not particularly useful concepts if you ask me…
Reference free concepts are fairly easy to create.
Invisible pink unicorns, for example.
I agree that science mostly invents concepts to fit data. Sometimes concepts are useful, and sometimes not, but the data remain.
I am not aware of any data that pertains to “one infinite source of all that is”.
The word “source” seems to assume a conclusion.
That’s right, it would be intellectually dishonest. This is why I, instead of what you suggested, said that the Fork does not get to the subject matter of God. I’m saying you should reject the Fork because it does not enable you to prove or disprove God, even though this (disproving) is precisely what you set out to do. It does not fit your purpose. It does not enable you to determine what you want to determine. The Fork is not the right tool for the work you planned.
You’re right that the Fork does not allow one to prove or disprove God — but that is precisely the point I was trying to make! That’s the whole idea behind radical agnosticism: it is precisely because of the Fork that the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven! That’s exactly the position of radical agnosticism that I’m trying to defend here!
Data reveals a pattern. Patterns are systematized and analyzed by means of concept systems. There is no single detached reference free concept in science, logic, philosophy, theology, or natural language. They are always concept systems, by means of which you can expect things that should be there, even though you have not discovered it yet in terms of data.
To understand God it’s a good idea to understand first that we are not talking about a physical thing. Physics and metaphysics are different.
For your radical agnosticism to have validity, you must presuppose that the Fork is applicable to everything that has truth value. But you discovered that the Fork was not applicable to God. Shouldn’t you consider if your presupposition was justified?
Well, maybe. I’m not saying the Fork is unproblematic.
Here’s where we stand: we agree that the statement “God exists” (or similar) has no truth-value (neither true nor false) if one accepts Hume’s Fork.
The question is then, which do we have stronger reasons to reject — (1) the Fork, with the radical agnosticism that it implies, or (2) the intelligibility of both theism and atheism?
My view is that it is (2), because in order for both theism and atheism to be intelligible, we would need there to be synthetic a priori concepts.
And not just any synthetic a priori concepts (SAPs), but SAPs of a specific kind: SAPs that can be applied independently of all sensual content. While concepts like “space,” “spaces,” “time”, “times”, “object,” “individual” and “subject” are synthetic a priori, their conditions of application are indexed to spatio-temporal particulars.
By contrast, concepts like “God”, “free will” and “immortality” (to take the Big Three that Kant talks about) explicitly are not indexed to any spatio-temporal particulars, and that makes it impossible for anyone to know that they are using those concepts correctly. I don’t see how we can be entitled to use a concept if we can’t distinguish between correct and incorrect applications.
This false dichotomy implies more flawed presuppositions.
The thesis that only spatio-temporal particulars can be “used correctly” is not Kant. It’s scientistic physicalism. Physicalism has no claim to any sort of comprehension of the concept of God.
Yes my deciding ability is error prone.
But an omnipotent God can lead me to choose correctly if he so desires.
peace
Once again
It is possible even likely that I may be mistaken about one or more things that I think I know. Certainty is not necessary for knowledge.
What is necessary for knowledge is truth and justification and belief.
A machine or a rock does not know things because it does not believe things
Since I believe things I’m a third of the way to knowledge.
Since God exists truth exists because God is truth
Since God exists then I can be justified in believing things because God can provide justification.
Therefore I can know things
If God did not exist there would be no way for me to know anything including that God did not exist.
the proof that God exists is that with out him I can prove nothing
peace
So that means that you don’t think that the ID designer can be God. Interesting
FYI, that’s David Bentley Hart’s position as well and it also underlies Thomistic criticism to ID (e.g. Ed Feser).
Oh, I see, thanks a lot. Another case of different theists with different views and definitions of “god” I guess.
“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.”
It is true that ID does not require divinity as the proximate designer but unless there is an ultimate undesigned designer from which complexity originates ,ID is falsified. So at the start whenever that is, Kn’s God and the Designer must be the same.
Feser certainly is no IDist
A rock certainly knows how to be a rock,beliefs seem to me to be models of existence created in the mind . Do you agree your God has no beliefs? He just is .If so He has knowledge without belief .
If you believe a false thing you are further from knowledge than if you believed nothing . When you know nothing ,you know you know nothing, if you believe something false you do not even know you know nothing.
In particular, whether the premise itself can be established as “a matter of fact.” If it can’t be, what good is it?
How do you know this?
So? Who gets to decide what is a truth of fact and what is not a truth of fact, and who appointed David Hume as the trier of fact?
So God cannot exist unless you can create a concept? But you can create concepts, so God must exist.
Unless we can measure your claim, it cannot be established as a truth of fact.
How do you decide which worlds are real?
So true.
Is the claim that there is no largest prime ‘positive’?
No. There is truth and there is no God. There is justification and there is no God. You and I both know things not because there is a god but in spite of there being no God.
It’s awesomeness incarnate, bro! We rock!!!
No–the silliness is when guys like Fmm say stuff like ‘God is truth so if you believe anything is true, you’re a theist’.
Truth is a human invention. So I guess it follows that God is a human invention.
FFS, Mung, sprout a thought of your own.
You have not formalized the putative definition of God, and I doubt that anyone can, i.e., as a consistent sentence in the language of a bivalent logic. No one has established that this “God” talk, including the claim that I am “without a god,” is even meaningful.
Evangelical Christians claim that the saved have personal relationships with God. They say that they are filled with the Spirit. Their invitation to the sinner often takes the form: “Open your heart, and let Jesus come in.” Their testimony is that you will know it when He does (especially that guilt for all of your sins will be “washed away by the blood of the Lamb”). Growing up Southern Baptist, and later taking courses in philosophy at a Southern Baptist college, I never saw anyone attempt to prove the existence of God. Such stuff is of no real importance to evangelical theology. So why are we hearing such stuff from evangelical Christians these days? They got political. They’re trying to take control of public institutions. They need to argue that their personal religious beliefs are actually objective truths, to justify forcing them on the entire citizenry.
Knowing is hard. So don’t do it! PS – Christianity.
Or at least find something closer to a real thought if you must be derivative.
FMM’s sort of questions are sort of cute when a six-year old asks them. Later, it seems more like a failure to recognize how knowledge is gained and how poorly or well it is supported. Not clever in the first place, even less clever when copied.
Glen Davidson
ID relies on supposedly measurable “irreducible complexity”. For classical theists (such as Hart) God must be metaphysically absolutely simple, with no physical properties.
The thesis of ID is that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.” (sorry for quoting UD), but theism holds that God is the creator and sustainer of the universe and of everything in it, both living and inert. The idea that you can detect an “intelligently designed” (i.e. created) thing means you can measurably tell it apart from an unintelligently designed or undesigned or uncreated thing. In theism, there are no uncreated things in the universe.
No, they cannot be the same.
” They got political. They’re trying to take control of public institutions. They need to argue that their personal religious beliefs are actually objective truths, to justify forcing them on the entire citizenry. ”
Nobody is forcing anything to anyone. Everybody is free to render to Christ’s love and offer of forgiveness, or not. Of course we hope that everybody will be saved, but that does not mean we do force someone into that decision.
Design inferences based on measurement (putatively of information) are eliminative, not comparative. The failure to eliminate purely “naturalistic” explanations of some events does not imply that nature is not itself created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_conversion
So, naturalistic explanations and design inferences are supposed to be a continuum where the continuum is actually design inferences all the way down, only that where design is so small that it goes undetected, naturalistic explanations are tolerated? This would probably make some sense if design could be detected and measured.
I have problems accepting any of the central concepts of ID. “Intelligent Design” implies there can be “unintelligent design” or “undesign”. “Irreducible complexity” implies there can be “reducible complexity”. But how do you tell these things apart? What thing is unintelligently designed? How do you distinguish between things that have irreducible versus reducible complexity? And what of simplicity? The idea that you can put numbers on these things is ludicrous. I mean, of course you can put numbers on these things if you want, but this will be ludicrous.
ID theorists have ludicrous ideas, but since they have not yet measured anything at all to reveal how ludicrous they really are, some people have not yet seen them through. There are some sincere Southern Baptists who talk about “obvious design” and assert that “irreducible complexity” is a scientific concept. William Lane Craig was also an early proponent of ID.
it’s not silly it’s definitional
and it It’s not me God defines himself as truth. He also says you know he exists.
The only way you can be an atheist is if you first define God in a way that makes his existence contingent instead of necessary. That is what is silly
peace