Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
I haven’t used the word lie. Ken Ham and pre-geology flood theorists almost certainly believed that seashells on mountaintops are evidence for a global flood.
But they are wrong.
Being wrong is not the same as lying.
See hotshoe’s October responses, quoted above. Or read any textbook on geology. Your ignorance is not evidence of anything except your ignorance.
I note your novel and self-serving re-definition of the word “nobody”.
LMAO
But that isn’t the inference that Ken Ham et al make, is it now?
It’s fossil of sea shell –> Flood reached this high
Pathetic.
Erik,
Thus far your record of answering anyone is not good. DNA_Jock has also asked questions concerning your claim of a supposedly historical event. So far, no answer.
You need to either address those questions or retract your claim.
Wrong why? Remember, we were supposed to be talking evidence.
“You.Have.Been.Lied.To” was from hotshoe. That’s the gist of the argument from that particular poster.
So, not a shred of empirical evidence forthcoming. I knew it, but let’s note that it’s been confirmed yet again.
I see that you are an expert on Ken Ham. Good for you. And at the same stroke you are not an expert on any other interpretation of the flood story, such as the orthodox exegesis.
I notice that you feel comfortable dismissing Ken Ham’s arguments. And I notice how nobody feels like engaging my arguments, except by assuming that my arguments must be the same as Ken Ham’s. And when I don’t represent the same position as Ken Ham, then e.g. Patrick feels justified to studiously ignore my answers, while pretending for months that he’s interested in “understanding”.
Erik,
Here’s the problem, I think: you’re not a creationist, I know that, you know that, fine. But since you’re not a creationist, why did it even occur to you to mention marine fossils in a discussion about the historicity of the Biblical flood? That’s a basically creationist debating tactic, and I think it’s reasonable to expect that you know that it is. So why do it?
Gawd. You really need to pay attention. That was my comment. You referred to marine fossils in the Himalayas as supporting a global flood. (And a vapor canopy as the source of the global flood waters, but that’s a whole other category of wrong.) You asked me multiple questions about that “You.Have.Been.Lied.To” statement, which I answered. In fact, that exchange was the origin of the “Where did you get the idea that fossils in the Himalayas support a global flood?” question, and your epic diversionary response “In what geology textbook…”
I really don’t see the point in going into any further details of the empirical evidence with you when you are completely unwilling to clarify what YOU believe to be historically accurate. And when you repeatedly claim to have answered questions that you have not answered.
Erik,
If you want empirical evidence, then you need to read (and understand) Abusing Science, then we can talk.
ETA
P.S.Clarifying your claims will be needed too….
KN,
In my last comment, I gave an example of how to rephrase a statement of religious belief so that it is no longer making a claim about external reality:
If the phrasing in the second example feels unsatisfying to you, consider the possibility that your religious beliefs are in fact assertoric with respect to external reality.
I think walto and I both have the impression that on the one hand, you want to make actual claims about reality; but on the other hand, you want to classify them as non-assertoric so that they’re immune from challenge or criticism.
Erik,
I’ve been trying to understand your position for weeks so that I can engage your arguments. Please answer the questions posed regarding your claim or retract that claim.
I think somehow you must have been asleep for the past 200 years.
Question for Gregory. Do you find Erik’s questioning of 200 years of geology convincing? How about you Mung? Phoodoo?
petrushka,
If I didn’t know better I’d think you were trying to set the cat amongst the pigeons in the Big Tent.
It is unsatisfying to me, but for reasons that might strike one as nitpicking.
Firstly, I wonder if there’s an important difference between an assertion about my feelings and an expression of them. This is a somewhat technical question about how to understand the pragmatic functions of first-personal avowals. Consider the difference between calmly stating, as if it were a neutral fact, “I am very angry right now” (imagine Mr. Spock saying this) and shouting, “I am so angry right now!” There seems to be a difference between simply reporting on one’s feelings and expressing them.
Secondly, “feelings” seems to be not quite the right word. I would prefer the somewhat vaguer term moods. I’m afraid I don’t know how to be more precise here, but what I want to say is something like this: moods aren’t precisely articulated feelings, but affective states that color the whole of one’s experience — the mood suffuses how the world appears to one. When you’re bored, nothing jumps out at you as calling for attention; when you’re angry, everything jumps out at you as calling for an aggressive response.
On those lines, what I’m interested in here is understanding religious discourse as a family of metaphors that can be used to express moods such as awe, wonder, gratitude, reverence, and a sense of interconnection with all of reality.
I hope my previous post dispels the impression that my defense of religious discourse commits me to any claims walled off from intersubjectively contestable assertions (‘the game of giving and asking for reasons’) about actually existing phenomena.
Though this not entirely right, it might be helpful to think of the assertoric/disclosive distinction as basically being the literal/metaphorical distinction.
Fine in philosophy, but not in Christianity.
Let your word be yes, yes or no, no.
Equivocation sucks for us lesser mortals also.
Pre-geology flood “theorists” might have really believed in a mountain-high flood. Why wouldn’t they? They had no idea how physically impossible that kind of flood is.
Ken Ham (plus other prominent YECcers and fluddists) almost certainly don’t really believe their chronology and fake geology. It’s a sophisticated con to suck in dollars from the rubes. It costs them nothing to say, and earns them a palatial lifestyle from faith contributions, plus if you’re Ken Ham, it gets you millions of dollars in bonds, taxpayer funding, zoning and highway improvements for Ark Park.
I mean, one or two of the big guys might actually believe, but balance of probability: they know better and they’re lying to their public.
We are clearly not on the same page.
First. We are discussing empirical claims.
Second. This is an empirical claim, as formulated by you, “And we do know that people reading the bible, for many years, thought shells on mountaintop were evidence for Noah’s flood.”
Third. You were in the process of disproving, on empirical/geological basis, what those people thought. Your basis is….?
“Read a textbook” or “You have been asleep for the past 200 years” is not filling the blank.
But I am a philosopher! And I’m not a Christian!
Hey, I’ll take credit for it (too). Sounds like something I would have said – and I’m still not going to search 2k comments – because Erik having been lied to by his pastor/creationist “science” teacher/whomever is the only explanation of his belief consistent with the rules of this site. He can’t be so stupid and he can’t be lying — so the best explanation is that he ended up believing a lie someone else told him.
I would be happy to let Erik off the hook for either his own stupidity or his lying to us by telling him “You Have Been Lied To”.
Yeah, I might have said that already.
My mistake. I gave you too much credit. Thanks for making clear where you stand in the discussion.
Erik,
And here is an empirical claim as formulated by you:
There are some open questions about this empirical claim that you have yet to answer. Please do so or retract your claim.
KN,
The important point is that either way — whether you are expressing your feelings or simply making an assertion about them — it isn’t necessary to use language that could be taken as making a claim about external reality.
I experience all of those moods, but it always seems possible to express them without recourse to religious language.
Why is it necessary to say things like this…
…if you are simply expressing one or more of those moods?
I just wanted to add my name to the list of those who asked Erik questions and received no answer. I did, however, receive a flat refusal rather than the claim that Patrick gets that his questions have been answered repeatedly. And this, in spite of Patrick saying that he accepted my versions as an acceptable restatement of his own questions.
Erik, I think the refusal was preferable: the insistence that you’ve answered Patrick’s questions is just weaseling. You know quite well that you’ve been answering your own wildly different versions–stuff he hasn’t actually asked you at all.
If you don’t want to answer just say so (again) plainly, so Patrick can get on with his life. I.e., cut the crap.
What was the question?
My answer to him is not an answer because….? Fill in the blank.
But I think assertoric is a tuxedoed word for equivocation. It looks like someone is trying to say something without taking the heat.
Question everything. Unless you’re a TSZ “Skeptic.”
Agreed. That’s why I am struggling with an alternative to “believe” — precisely to avoid the equivocations we’ve been worrying about here. In some contexts, “believe that” and “believe in” might work.
Oh, it’s not necessary at all! I never meant to imply that one should use this kind of language, or there other forms of expression were inadmissible or less adequate! (Did you really think I thought that? Good heavens, no!) I’m trying to carve out a space in which one can use religious discourse without shirking any epistemic duties — not that everyone should employ religious discourse!
The answer is the objective physical fact that floodwaters never did and never could reach those mountain tops, because there is not enough water on Earth to cover the planet to those heights. That is, unless god miracled all that water into existence and then miracled water back out of existence (when it decided it was done with its temper tantrum). But in that case, we’re no longer talking empirical claims, we’re talking religious tales again.
And even in the case of miracle-sourced-water, that much (much = enough to deposit sea shells on high mountains like Ararat/Everest) would have left other evidence besides a handful of marine fossils on mountains. There would be certain patterns of sorted sedimentation, literally billions of human and animal skeletons in a simultaneous layer, easily recognizable kinds of erosion as the waters rose then receded … Again, that would all be left behind unless god miracled away all the evidence after its tantrum.
As several people have explained, christian geologists spent more than a hundred years traveling our globe looking for exactly that evidence and found none. In spite of how much it challenged their faith in their precious bible, they had to be honest and admit that there never was a global or nearly-global flood. Little local floods here and there, sure. But little local floods are not what you’re talking about when you casually throw in some dumb remark about fossils on Ararat/Everest.
So which is it? Is Noah the folk tale of some sorta-serious but local floods in proto-Hebrew territory? Or was it a big bad global flood that reached the top of Everest?
How about you make an empirical claim of your own for a change? It would take the form of “I think fossils on Everest are significant as examples of _______ because ______”
Something like that.
Try it for a change. Stand up and say what you actually believe.
Completely agree. FWIW, I think KN’s desire to be “anti-metaphysical” is the culprit here. I think, the principal purpose of language, that from which all others emerge, is to assert facts. Some of these assertions are “metaphysical”–whether or not any or all of them are false. That’s life. Metaphysics can’t just be dumped (even if Ladyman and Ross don’t happen to like it).
Assertions are true, false or meaningless, and the positivistic claim that all metaphysical ones are meaningless is itself false. If they were meaningless, they couldn’t mean different things from each other–and they obviously do.
End of sermon.
walto,
If Erik refuses to clarify and support his claim he should retract it. Refusing to play by the rules violates his own stated morality.
Erik,
Because it was a refusal to answer:
If you’re not willing to answer, retract your claim.
From my point of view, the situation is as follows. First, I have answered. Second, you need to either acknowledge this and deal with the answer or explain why it’s not an answer. You have done neither. Third, among my answers is the statement that your questions derive from systematic ignoring of my actual position. Therefore, fourth, it’s actually you who needs to retract your questions.
But first things first. Deal with the answers that are there.
You’re quite welcome.
I do strive for clarity.
You should try it sometime.
😉
Unless, of course, you suspect that your position is untenable. In which case, you’re doing a bang-up job. Carry on.
Ooh, lovely! 🙂 🙂
As in :
rendering your points 2 through 4 wrong.
I somewhat disagree; I think that the primary purpose of language is to facilitate the coordination of social behaviors. Asserting facts plays a role within that larger economy of roles.
But I never said that I wanted to dump all of metaphysics — I said, quite clearly, that I wanted to get religion out of the metaphysics game. A scientific metaphysics is all the metaphysics we need.
That’s mostly right. Another angle of attack would be to show that we can’t do science without metaphysics.
It’s not an answer because it’s not an answer.
That was simple.
I answered the specific questions. i was not asked a personal interpretation of the flood STORY. Patrick has emphatically NOT been asking about my interpretation of the flood STORY. And even if he did, I am under no obligation to answer, because my statement, “Of course the flood occurred” is about the flood, not about the story, even though I believe in the occurrence of the flood because I believe the story. You can tell the story apart from the flood, can’t you?
So, Patrick has been patricking because he is a broken soul with no understanding. Self-admittedly so.
Erik,
No, you have not. You have refused to answer:
You should stop claiming to have answered when this refusal of yours is part of the record.
I’ve explained on several occasions. You have explicitly refused to answer. There is nothing to acknowledge.
You made a claim about a supposedly historical event. As I have repeatedly emphasized, I am asking you what you mean by the words you used. I am trying to determine what, exactly, you are claiming happened in reality when you say “Anyway, of course it [the biblical flood] occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.”
I am asking about your words and your meaning, not what someone else wrote about something else.
I am directly addressing your actual claim. Your own words. Please answer my questions to explain exactly what you mean.
My questions are specifically about your claim. I have nothing to retract.
There are no answers anywhere, just your refusal to answer. It’s well past time for you to either address the questions or retract your claim.
Erik, in ordinary English, there was no global flood and no event that produced a population bottleneck consilient with the Noah story.
So if you are unwilling to provide your personal interpretation, we are at an impasse. You have said something that looks for all the world like an assertion of fact, but which is incompatible with what everyone else thinks are the facts, and you have refused to clarify your position.
KN,
I didn’t take you to be mandating the use of religious language. I’m asking why you want to use religious language in a way that will quite naturally and rationally be taken by your listeners as asserting truths about external reality.
When you say “I believe that all human beings are created in the image of God, and that we are God’s partners in improving the world”, a rational listener will conclude (as I put it earlier) that:
1. KN believes that there is, in reality, an entity called “God”.
2. KN believes that in reality, we are created in the image of that entity.
3. KN believes that we are partnered, in reality, with that entity, and that our joint goal with that real entity is to improve the real world.
If you don’t want to create that impression, why use language that will inevitably lead to it? Particularly when religious language isn’t needed to express the moods in question?
Erik,
No, you have not.
No, you are being asked to explain exactly what you mean when you made your claim that “Anyway, of course it [the biblical flood] occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.”
I’ve repeatedly made clear that I am not asking about the story. I am asking what you mean when you say “Anyway, of course it [the biblical flood] occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.”
When you make this claim, using those words, when are you claiming the biblical flood actually happened? Are you actually claiming that the flood was global? That is, did it cover all the planet simultaneously as described in the Bible? Finally, are you saying that immediately after the flood were there only eight people alive on the entire planet?
Your claim. Your words. Explain what you mean or retract your claim.
Yes you were. Several of us have asked for a spiritual; interpretation. Several times.
You are confused. My refusal concerns personal interpretation of the flood story. Refusal to deal with exegesis of the story has been part of your questions all along, as evidenced by your own statement for example here
So on this particular point we are actually on the same page, even when you confusedly think we are not.
Now, the problem is that lacking any other agreed-upon evidence, the text is the prime evidence for the flood. And I gave you the traditional exegesis with which I justified my claim that you have been questioning like a broken record. So, sorry, dude, but your lack of understanding remains permanent as long as you are unable to deal with the facts.
What makes an assertion “true”?
Can the answer to that question depend on the context in which the assertion is made, eg could that answer be different for these two:
As a scientist, I believe that p.
As a Muslim, I believe that p.
Where “p” could, just to pick something out of the air as an example, be some biblical quotation, like “There was a world-wide flood” or “God exists and is One”.
ETA: Just to be clear, I am asking what makes “p” true. I am not asking about the ontology of any objects”p” might refer to (unless you think that is part of what makes “p” true).
Is that meant to be taken literally or scripturally?
keiths:
KN:
I think you need to drop “believe” altogether. As walto points out, to say that you believe X means that you believe X is true — in reality.
“Believe in” won’t work. When people say they believe in God, they’re saying they believe that God actually exists.
“Believe that” won’t work either, for reasons given in my previous comment.
This presupposes a bit more than “ordinary English”. It presupposes a Ken Hammian interpretation of the flood story. And you are making it very clear that this is the only kind of interpretation that you will interact with. For instance, I have given the orthodox Jewish interpretation. You have not been interested in it. Case closed.
Guano, darlin’.
But do feel free to carry on with your brand of overly-personal nastiness – and if your comment gets guano’d as it should be – do feel free to whinge about “biased admins” again.
Erik,
That’s right. You’ve refused to answer Patrick’s questions, which concern your personal interpretation of the flood story, as reflected in your claim:
You’ve refused to answer them, yet you claim you’ve answered them. What gives?
Why yes, I can. You, on the other hand, appear to be having some difficulty.
I asked:
KN asked for clarification:
I clarified [see how that works?]
You replied:
Not what I asked.
If you want to claim credit for answering a question, you have to actually answer the question asked, not the question you would rather answer.
Goddamned crappy evidence, then. Since that’s all you’ve got (prime or otherwise), you might as well join every single rational christian geologist who admits there is no physical evidence that there ever was a flood as described in Noah’s tale.
They all go by the actual evidence – and by the lack of physical evidence where it would have to be visible on the ground if there actually had been a big bad flood – you go by the old pages of a goatherders’ book.
Well, suit yourself.