Last night I was talking with an old friend of mine, an atheist Jew, who is now in the best relationship of her life with a devout Roman Catholic. We talked about the fact that she was more surprised than he was about the fact that their connection transcends their difference in metaphysics. He sees himself as a devout Roman Catholic; she sees him as a good human being.
This conversation reminded me of an older thought that’s been swirling around in my head for a few weeks: the disunity of reason.
It is widely held by philosophers (that peculiar sub-species!) that reason is unified: that the ideally rational person is one for whom there are no fissures, breaks, ruptures, or discontinuities anywhere in the inferential relations between semantic contents that comprise his or her cognitive grasp of the world (including himself or herself as part of that world).
This is particularly true when it comes to the distinction between “theoretical reason” and “practical reason”. By “theoretical reason” I mean one’s ability to conceptualize the world-as-experienced as more-or-less systematic, and by “practical reason” I mean one’s ability to act in the world according to judgments that are justified by agent-relative and also agent-indifferent reasons (“prudence” and “morality”, respectively).
The whole philosophical tradition from Plato onward assumes that reason is unified, and especially, that theoretical and practical reason are unified — different exercises of the same basic faculty. Some philosophers think of them as closer together than others — for example, Aristotle distinguishes between episteme (knowledge of general principles in science, mathematics, and metaphysics) and phronesis (knowledge of particular situations in virtuous action). But even Aristotle does not doubt that episteme and phronesis are exercises of a single capacity, reason (nous).
However, as we learn more about how our cognitive system is actually structured, we should consider the possibility that reason is not unified at all. If Horst’s Cognitive Pluralism is right, then we should expect that our minds are more like patchworks of domain-specific modules that can reason quite well within those domains but not so well across them.
To Horst’s model I’d add the further conjecture: that we have pretty good reason to associate our capacity for “theoretical reason” (abstract thinking and long-term planning) with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and also pretty good reason to associate our capacity for “practical reason” (self-control and virtuous conduct) with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (and especially in its dense interconnections with the limbic system).
But if that conjecture is on the right track, then we would expect to find consistency between theoretical reason and practical reason only to the extent that there are reciprocal interconnections between these regions of prefrontal cortex. And of course there are reciprocal interconnections — but (and this is the important point!) to the extent that these regions are also functionally distinct, then to that same extent reason is disunified.
And as a consequence, metaphysics and ethics may have somewhat less to do with each other than previous philosophers have supposed.
Is that from the bible? If it is, I wonder how the fuck Calvinists can even believe what they do. I guess there really is no limit the kinds of reinterpretations and rationalizations believers allow themselves with that book. Which is Ironic considering how they think it is of almost incomprehensible importance.
It’s not about what you believe. You are the sole authority on that (just as atheists are the sole authorities on what they do not believe). The issue is what you claim is true in reality. You claimed to have objective, empirical evidence that a god exists. That’s not just a statement of your beliefs.
If you want to restate all of your claims as simply your unevidenced beliefs, I will, of course, drop my request for you to support them.
God in my world view is not a postulate.
God is in a sense reason.So I guess in that sense you need Reason (ie God) to postulate anything
I not a “fan” of Calvinism either and I am not wedded to any Calvinistic position.
I am a Calvinist simply because I think that is what the Bible and reason teaches but am very open to other viewpoints.
I find this passage to be a helpful when dealing with this sort of issue
quote:
If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.
(1Co 8:2-3)
end quote:
peace
I do and I pointed you to that evidence.
The objective empirical evidence is all around you
You have continued to ignore it.
I can’t help you if you refuse to look
Peace
I have conclusively demonstrated that Patrick is a liar.
I missed that. Are you claiming you accept that “reason” exists a priori with out justification simply by faith.
If so you are not far from the kingdom 😉
peace
How can you know that given your worldview?
Do you have any objective empirical evidence to support your claim that a believer is the sole authority on what he believes ?
peace
So I’m curious Mung, do you really believe that everyone…even the aboriginal cut off from all society…holds in his or her heart the knowledge of your understanding of the Christian God, or was this a response to my summary of Calvinism, and that those of us who are doomed from before time know we are (and by association, those who are the Elect know so). It’s hard to tell from your context-less post.
I find this fascinating (seriously). It seems that you are saying that an essential aspect of the god you believe in is that it would not have created atheists. Is that correct?
Are you basing that only on your interpretation of a verse in your bible? I’ve already pointed out contradictions in the Christian bible twice, and provided you with a link to many more.
Why become a radical skeptic? You still haven’t provided an argument to support your claim that the Christian god is required for knowledge. Surely you could retain your faith while accepting that atheists do exist. After all, your god does deceive people (Jeremiah 20:7).
Incidentally, what would convince you that I actually lack belief in any god or gods? Would a lie detector test do it?
Seriously Fifth?!?! You can’t bother to even try to address the first verse or address any of the subsequent verses that spoon feed you the context:
Dude…it’s all about idolatry! It’s got nothing to do with everyone actually knowing things about your god from the the get-go.
You are correct. As per the rules of the site I was assuming good faith.
Yes indeed. With certain interlocutors it is necessary to either write painfully pedantically or be subject to word games.
You’d think that having experience raising three-year-olds who love the “why” game I’d be more immune to GOTCHA.
Thanks for the rhetorical bitch slap. 😉
Well, you haven’t. You have only demonstrated disagreement.
And your post should have been in Noyau.
Fifth should be seeing that as a reductio of his essentialism. But he won’t, because he’s a presuppositionalist.
It’s probably due to his buying into presuppositional apologetics.
There’s a great paper on it: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
I think I understand his problem. I have an equally hard time accepting that anyone actually believes in gods in today’s world. I suppose in the ancient past, before the concept of investigation was invented, credulous people had no other choices than “I don’t know” and “some god most have done it.” And nobody likes to admit ignorance (and few seem to understand that invoking any gods for anything at all is an admission of ignorance). But today, are they serious? I mean, do they REALLY think there are gods mucking with reality? Seriously?
If so, then I have to suspect sanity is a delicate and hard-earned condition, and there truly is no sensible limit to what the human mind is capable of believing, in the face of anything reality can show them. But trying to talk FMM into sanity is like trying to talk someone out of food poisoning – an exercise in barking up the wrong tree.
No rhetorical bitch-slap. Just a, “hey…perhaps you’ve not considered…;-)
OOO! Cool! Thank!
Feel free to send my posts to Noyau.
Fifth:
Click…whirrrr…ticka ticka ticka ticka…*spoink*:
“How can you know that given your worldview?”
I’m really not interested in doing a Bible study with an apostate. If you want to discuss the Bible I would suggest you find a local Bible believing church preferably one that takes the text seriously.
All I will say is that these texts have been studied from a “Calvinist perspective” since at least Augustine I would say since Paul.
I would not expect to find any that some how have escaped notice
peace
I never said it was about that.
It actually was a message from me to a fellow believer (Mung)
It’s about (among other things) bearing with Christians who have different perspectives because they come from different situations and backgrounds.
peace
No I’m saying that God is a God who reveals and he has revealed himself to everyone
No, not at all
1) I know that the Christian God can justify knowledge
2) I have yet to hear of anything else that can justify knowledge even after asking repeatedly here and other places
3) Therefore I am forced to conclude tentatively that there is nothing besides the Christian God that can justify knowledge.
IOW The proof that God exists is that without him I can prove nothing.
As far as I can tell it’s God or absurdity. The appropriate response when everything is absurdity is radical skepticism
You are welcome to try and falsify my hypothesis. All I need is a consistent cogent justification for knowledge sans God.
So far Walto has said that this is a difficult philosophical problem that he is doubtful he can solve and Dazz has said that we must presuppose reason.
Can you improve on those answers? I would be very interested to hear if can.
peace
That is what it’s like coming from radically different worldviews. Our outlooks are totally antithetical.
You start with you I start with God. It’s a simple as that.
I have no problem with antithetical worldviews.
The world would be boring if we all started from the same place
peace
peace
This is so utterly false that’s astonishing to behold someone completely self-deceived, unable to recognize the most basic facts about himself.
You also start with yourself. The difference is you never get past the idiotic fantasies you’ve constructed, whereas at least the rest of us have the ability to learn. At no point in your time here have you indicatex either the ability or interest in genuine dialogue, nor in learning anything about people or the world beyond the pathetically narrow confines that you call your “presuppositions”. At the least the rest of us are willing and able to revise our attitudes and beliefs when the need to intelligently adjust ourselves to reality indicates that we should. That cannot be said for you.
Do you have any evidence you could share?
Are you saying that you are a better judge of my own presuppositions than I am?
It’s seems like you are angry? Why is that?
Are you threatened by a different perspective from your own?
Try not to take this all so personal. think of it as just another philosophical
meander.
I’m sorry but from my perspective much of what you call “genuine dialogue” here is simply demanding that the christian acquiesce to anti-christian premises from the get go and then wondering why they don’t come to the same conclusions you “skeptics”wink wink do.
I actually would like some genuine dialogue here but that would require others to give up on the idea that their perspective is the only one that can be tolerated and accept our differences for what they are so perhaps we can begin to live in……….. peace 😉
PS I actually would much rather discuss other topics here and I would like to get back to working on my game project but as Michael Corleone would say
Quote:
Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.
end quote:
peace
I have yet to see any evidence for this? What have I missed? From my perspective it seems that “the rest of us” simply begin to rage and mock when reality indicates you should adjust your attitudes and beliefs.
I suppose the different impressions are just what one would expect if we looked at the world from radically antithetical perspectives
peace
Can you answer these questions a asked you a few posts above please FMM?
Is reason required for picking postulates and defending them?
Is reason required to receive and interpret knowledge by means of “revelation”?
So god reveals different, even potentially contradictory things to people depending on situations and background? That seems problematic. How do you settle those differences?
In this sentence, ‘I’ comes before ‘God’.
faded_Glory,
+1 😉
So in order to gain knowledge you actively add something to the entity perceived. To paraphrase Steiner, “between an entity perceived and every kind of assertion about it there intervenes thinking”. And to quote Steiner from The Philosophy of Freedom,
In obtaining your picture you have acted in a way that is natural to us all. We are not content to receive sense impressions and leave it at that. We all desire knowledge, so we use thinking to make connections between our perceptions. You last sentence above shows an understanding of concepts such as dynamic and static; past, present and future, combination and separation. This understanding does not come with sense impressions it was determined through thinking.
Any epistomology must start from a position prior to gaining knowledge. We start from totally indeterminate form of reality which is given. Thinking makes connections. Without thinking we cannot determine where the line is drawn between subject and object or if there is even a line to be drawn. Whether this given world is a reality or just our mental picture is a judgement which should not be made at the beginning of a theory of knowledge.
We should begin, not with that which comes first in time, but with that which we are most intimately connected, this is thinking. In order to gain an understanding of the given, we must first think about it. We must begin with observation and thinking. We can speculate about the given before thinking has begun to work on it but in reality we are never in a position where we are aware of this state. The given can be separated from thinking in order to philosophise but it is only a speculative exercise never a reality, except in one case and that is when thinking is included in the given, as one of the entities within the given. Thinking is as much a feature of the world as any other entity but it is the only entity that we know intimately from within and can use as a sure starting point for our epistemology. I am not talking about day dreaming, letting our minds wander. I am talking about pure, focused thinking where it is we ourselves who instigate the process.
As far as I can tell from your previous link Sellars is not critiquing the given, he is critiquing what human understanding does with the given. He is critiquing such things as sensing, how our senses operate. Am I correct in this judgement?
The way I see it. There is not a separate thought world in each of our minds. There is one single thought world of which everyone partakes. We use our minds to become sense organs which reveal this world piece by piece.
This is why Goethe said he could see the archetypal plant. His intense study of plants, their growth, the effects of various environments on them, and the changes they undergo brought him to the understanding of their essential nature. His external senses could provide him with limited separate experiences of plants, but concentrated thinking provided him with their living essence, something his senses could not do on their own. Through studying plants he gained the concepts of growth and decay, expansion and contraction, of leaf and stem and root and bud and inflorescence and sepals and all that makes up a plant in its entirety. In his mind he was able to combine these separate concepts into the idea of the plant as a unified whole. And it is the whole that provides the reality of the plant, the separate entities have no real existence outside this whole. Through reason reality becomes unified. Human senses separate that which is in reality a whole and our human reason reconnects that which we have torn apart in the first place.
The story of Osiris being dismembered and reconstituted by Isis conveys this truth in mythic form.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. Sorry for my delay in repying KN and thankyou for giving me a lot to think about.
Oh I completely understand…
No thanks. A church that “takes the bible seriously” from your perspective is not going to display much wisdom.
You’re a riot FMM!
No it’s quite clear that Reformed Theologists have spent years making up the oddest, twisted, and most obviously erroneous explanations for all the text…and much else. No question.
But hey…you know what FMM? If you sleep better at night because of it, who am I to argue?
An interesting example – as Goethe was wrong about the “archetypal plant,” and it was Darwin, with his interest in the evolution of development, who correctly explained the phenomena that prompted Goethe’s insight that “all is leaf.”
See: Charles Darwin and the Origins of Plant Evolutionary Developmental Biology
Every living thing starts as a single celled organisn whose clones have an aversion to being like their neighbors.
In the sense that God (Logos) is reason— yes.
quote:
Logos, ( Greek: “word,” “reason,” or “plan”) plural logoi, in Greek philosophy and theology, the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning.
end quote;
from here
http://www.britannica.com/topic/logos
In that very sense Reason/Logos is a necessary presupposition.
peace
No but revelation like all communication is multifaceted.
peace
No, I mean, do you and everyone else require using his/her reasoning abilities to pick postulates, defend them, receive revelation and interpret it?
So he reveals the same things to everyone, but some meaning gets lost or changed in the way?
Are you saying that our imperfect nature makes our understanding of revelation unreliable?
Sean Carroll agrees:
Pointing to everything is simply empirical evidence that everything you can point to exists. It provides no support for your claim that a god exists.
My reasoning abilities are error prone so I endeavor not to rely on them for those things.
Providentially the Christian is united to Christ so he has access to reason/Logos that is infallible. The story of the Christian life is one of perceptual surrender to that infallible Logos/Reason and mortification of our own.
Not only does the reason/logos come from God but God supplies the means and ability to accomplish the surrender.
It’s God all the way down
Peace
I am not aware of any means for determining the beliefs a person holds other than discussing those beliefs. Perhaps some of the work on reading patterns of thoughts in brains will get us to that point, but it’s not currently possible.
Certainly we’re not always aware of the reasons for our feelings and beliefs, and a good therapist can help with that. Even then, that work depends on interaction with the person holding the beliefs.
So I would say the objective, empirical evidence is that, with current technology, the only person with authoritative knowledge about someone’s beliefs is that person.
I completely agree. I honestly can’t understand how a reasonably intelligent, reasonably educated, reasonably sane person could believe, really believe, in the myths of a bunch of bronze and iron age goat herders. Childhood indoctrination is a powerful force.
Our imperfect nature makes all human reasoning unreliable that is why we need God to justify knowledge.
That is what I have been saying for quite a wile now.
peace
Ever hear of revelation?
An Omniscient God knows your beliefs and can reveal them to who ever he chooses. Don’t you agree?
Among other things If God did not exist nothing could exist.
If you disagree please provide a cogent consistent explanation of how you can get something from nothing.
Once you have done that we can move on to other ways that God reveals himself to you through the things that are made.
Peace
I’m not sure that’s a distinction with a difference. Do you think that people can honestly lack belief in a god or gods? If not, an essential aspect of your god is that it has made atheism impossible. Is that what you believe?
On what do you base your claim that atheists don’t exist, then?
Let’s stop right there. You may think you “know” that, but thus far I haven’t seen you make the case for it. You just keep asking other people to provide a different way to justify knowledge, as if your beliefs are the default. They’re not. You’re making this claim so the burden of proof is on you to support it.
I’m genuinely curious. Please define your terms clearly and take us step-by-step through the proof.
You are again assuming that an omniscient God does not exist!!!
You need to provide objective empirical evidence for that bold claim before we can tackle the rest of your claims.
peace
No one is asking you to accept any premises. The prime directive of the site is to “park your priors at the door.” You seem quite resistant to doing so.
You’re making positive claims about reality on a skeptical site. You can expect to be asked to support those claims and have them challenged if your logic and evidence don’t stand up.
If you don’t want to participate in those kinds of discussions, stop making unsupported claims.
fifthmonarchyman,
I’m asking you a very simple question, and you refuse to answer it. Why is that?
Is reason (error prone or not) a necessary precondition to postulate and receive revelation or not?
So even after grounding your reasoning in god, your reason is still unreliable. Which means that all you have said here so far might be wrong, including all that about god grounding reason. Well, KN has already pointed out that. If it hasn’t sunk by now, I don’t think it will now.
You respond to this that you’ve never heard of an alternative cogent way to go about knowing, even though we’ve presented it. You simply reject it. Fine, but as I said before, that means you’re basing your worldview on an argument from ignorance. Your epistemology sits on rather shaky grounds dude
It’s not a claim it’s an axiom. It’s based on who God is.
An omnipotent God has the ability to reveal stuff to me in such a way that I can know it. It’s simply definitional.
Don’t you agree?
No case is necessary, It has been established that a person can know stuff without knowing how he knows it.
peace