Questions about truth, free will, logic have been raised in another thread. To help clarify the discussion, let’s separate those from the “necessary premise” discussion.
Here’s an example of the argument being raised:
True statements can only be expected to exist, and we can only expect to be able to deliberately discern them, if we assume the universe is governed by logic (necssarily rationally ordered) and if we assume for ourselves the libertarian free will causative capacity to discern them.
This seems a rather strange claim, given then many people believe that our best and most reliable true statements are those coming from science, and based on describing our world in terms physical causation. Moreover, science is often considered to provide our best examples rationality and logical reasoning.
The argument presented continues with:
The alternative assumptions that logic may not or does not truthfully describe phenomena, and that deliberacy may not be or is not a sufficient cause in and of itself, is simply not enough grounds to warrant the daily, ongoing, universal expectation we operate from,, that true statements exist, and that we can independently, deliberately discern them.
But why is that considered the alternative? Why not say that world is governed by physical causation, and that logic is a human tool that we use to structure and organize our descriptions of the world?
Personally, I happen to believe that we have free will (for some suitable meaning of “free will”). However, it still seems to me that the world is governed by physical causes, not by logic. And it also seems to me that if all agents with free will were to disappear, the physical world would continue without those agents and their logic.
Untrue. My belief that free will exists (necessitated by how I must actually behave) doesn’t comport (that I can tell) with any founding premise other than theism. Similarly (and in correlation), my beliefs of first/sufficient cause, an objective good, and that true statements exist and can be deliberately discerned do not comport with any fundamental premises other than theistic ones that I am aware of.
One can’t just “throw away” the premises and keep the product of those premises and still maintain that their worldview is logically justifiable (consistent). The idea of an “objective good” is especially untenable without a creator god.
An essential part of what makes a set of beliefs logically consistent is that they are logically justifiable (and non-contradictory to each other). extrapolated by sound inference from one’s premises.
I’m not sure what to make of the claim that one can toss their premises and still claim to have a logically consistent worldview.
Murray:
The idea of an “objective good” is especially untenable without a creator god.
Round and round we go. God creates objective good, therefore an objective good exists. An objective good exists, therefore a creator god must exist.
Perfectly logical and circular.
Yet there are plenty of people without any theistic commitments, who nevertheless believe that they and others have free will.
Tossing beliefs does not introduce any new logical inconsistency.
I believe that is exactly what Neil is saying:
Take all direct and **indirect** deity-dependent statements out and you will be left with a world-view without god. Then check what is remaining for logical consistency.
Your “absolute good” will be gone along with a “common purpose” for all of us.
Your “free will” will allow you to not only be free to say “yes” but it will also allow you to say “no” to church-like organizations.
You will finally have free will, meaning the right to make **all** your own decisions.
I’m not arguing about what people believe, but rather about what beliefs can be rationally justified. People can believe all sorts of irrational things.
That statement seems to have a “Stockholm Syndrome” side to it.
Lack of necessary premises makes one’s beliefs logically unjustifiable.
But what does “rationally justified” even mean?
When I read the philosophical literature on justification, I see little more than made up “Just So” stories. There does seem to be a solid consensus that the scientific method produces justified beliefs. There is no comparable consensus about beliefs based in theism.
Your description of your subjective feeling (how things “seem” to you) isn’t a debatable point. Things “seem” otherwise to me. So?
It means ones beliefs logically follow from ones premises and comport with how one must actually act (think, behave, etc).
But what does “rationally justified” even mean?
Does that mean you act as if things are as you believe rather than as they appear to be from observation and shared experience? Does evidence count for nothing in your world-view?
Little by little, I think I’m beginning to get a better picture of what theists actually are looking for.
It’s not a worldview a theist is looking to justify as much as it is his behaviour.
By having a “moral code”, an “absolute good” and a “common purpose” provided for you, you have built a framework which results in behaviour that can be called “objectively acceptable” and not “subjectively acceptable”.
By doing this, you are no longer responsible for behaviour that others may find unacceptable since your behaviour may be permissible within your law-givers framework.
So here’s a question for you…,
…if you believe in free will, can you say “no” to your god, and still be a “good” person?
Which becomes a problem when that framework is considered imposable on others.
What do you mean by “evidence” in your question? By “shared experience”, do you mean “according to what other people tell you”, meaning anecdotal and testimonial information? By observation, do you mean empirical information? If so, why should I take any of that to be “evidence” of anything?
As I’ve already pointed out. evidence is defined and interpreted by worldview; it cannot be vice-versa. Without premises that define what facts are, how they are gathered, categorized and interpreted into evidence for or against a proposition, “evidence” means whatever it “seems” to mean to anyone at any time.
William J Murray,
Whatever we can know about the world and universe we inhabit The only route for information is via our senses. The working assumption is that we need not descend in to solipsism and that we can, should and do share and compare information gained from observation and experiment.
The store of information available has accumulated across generations and continents. The pragmatic test of the worth of any information is its usefulness. Information that does not produce useful or reliable results is discarded. Reading a book or a paper is a shortcut to knowledge. We don’t need to learn how to make fire from scratch. We have shared experience and matches!
Give me an example of something evidential that has not ultimately arrived via your sensory inputs. And you, of course, don’t need to accept any evidence that you don’t wish to accept. Inconvenient facts have a way of biting you on the backside, however.
The existence of gods is an empirical question.
“The working assumption” = premises. You continue with your worldview description of how to proceed from those premises in the following:
Pragmatism is a worldview that establishes the “worth” of any information in accordance with usefulness. The idea that we can gather information from what others have done and rely on it and compare our observations against them is a commitment to anecdote and testimony (not “shared experience”, because reading or hearing what others claim is not itself the experience of what they have claimed) as a meaningful source of information. It is also a commitment to a consistent world where one can discern true statements – i.e., read testimony from others, such as a description of an experiment and the results, set up the same experiment, compare results and arrive at a (provisionally) true statement about the world.
“Useful” is a pretty broad and vague concept here. If I get non-repeatable results from an experiment that I find useful in maintaining a belief in Leprechauns (which, let’s say, I find usefully enjoyable), then does the pragmatic worldview authorize my keeping that information and not discarding it? Or, is pragmatic usefulness limited to physical functionalism and not conceptual usefulness, as in “it helps me enjoy life”?
I contend that if I’m reading about an experience I have not personally had, the experience I am reading about is not “shared experience”; supposedly, the person who wrote the account had the experience, and my experience is that of reading about his or her experience. This is not the same experience, nor even a “shared” experience. What I am doing is gathering testimonial and anecdotal information that, if I act on it, or employ it as if true, then I have taken that information as meaningful evidence that the described observations or experiment is valid.
If you mean “evidence” as defined by empirical pragmatism, you haven’t really described what “evidence” is – you’ve only described “information”. If I can assume that by “evidence” you mean “information empirically gathered and interpreted according to its pragmatic value”, then I would point out that what you are asking me to do is impossible under the stated terms and definitions; under the worldview premises of pragmatic empiricism, evidence is defined as information gathered via sensory experience and interpreted according to its pragmatic value.
IOW, you’re asking me to point out a horse that is not a horse.
There are other worldviews where sensory input is not defined as the only means of evidence – such as rationalism – because rationalism doesn’t definitionally limit the term “evidence” to only meaning that which is acquired via the senses. Rational argument, for example, doesn’t arrive via the senses. Concepts about what is experience do not arrive via the senses. Many ancient Greeks believed that no knowledge could be acquired via the senses, but rather could only be found in the conceptual world (which basically stymied scientific advancement).
So, what we have established here is that how we gather and sort information & facts, how we weight the value of that information and interpret it into evidence, is determined by worldview. If your worldview is founded on empirical pragmatist premises, then one must logically justify their behaviors and beliefs accordingly in order to maintain a logically consistent and justified worldview.
Note how you talk about “shared experience” above as if the concept of a “shared experience” can be justified from your premise of empirical pragmatism. While two people in a room both have an experience of whatever is occurring in the room, they are not “sharing” an experience, as if they can experience what the other person is experiencing. They cannot; all experience is subjective.
Perhaps by “sharing experience” you mean I experience something and then I tell you about my experience (testimony, anecdote). If that is true, then you are not a strict empiricist, since you accept as evidence that which you have not personally experienced, but also what others testify that they have experienced (based, I’m sure, on a weighted scale of source value).
Thus you are also something of a rationalist, because you also accept conceptual evidence; other people describe their experience, which produces not the experience itself, but a concept of the experience they are describing, and you filter that through another concept – that of the relative trustworthiness or legitimacy of the source of the testimony/anecdote – and assign a weighted value of “evidence” to the description in question.
Unless one is also a rationalist, pure empiricists cannot weight **descriptions** of experience as empirical evidence of the experience, because pure empiricism can only assign what one experiences themselves as empirical evidence.
That is what empirical evidence **is** – experience of the thing – not a description one hears about someone else’s experience of the thing.
This is why the understanding that facts & evidence are determined by worldview, and why the understanding that one must logically justify their beliefs via their worldview premises is important if one wishes to maintain a logically consistent and justifiable worldview.
Says who?
William J Murray,
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The Cathars, and anyone else who believed in a theistic worldview that conflicted with the theistic worldview of a church with a bigger army, found out the hard way that theists also believed in might makes right.
William J Murray,
If you believe in free will, can you say “no” to your god, and still be a “good” person?
The question doesn’t mean anything in my worldview. It’s nonsensical.
An explanation would help me understand what a theist means by free will.
I take free will to mean that I can make **any** decision I want without feeling pressured to come to decision “B” instead of decision “A”.
I want to know if your worldview **expects** you to prefer “A” or “B”.
Regardless of what decision you ultimately make, are you just as free to take one over the other “without penalty”?
That’s not what I (and IMO, most theists, and most philosophers) mean by [libertarian] free will. Free will means the capacity will (intend) any outcome or action one wishes.
Yes, we clearly differ on the meaning of that term.
My meaning of the term is in the vein of, “I free willingly gave my consent”, in other words I was not required to make this decision by any external pressure.
I believe I would rather have an atheistic worldview if a theistic one requires I submit to a pre-ordained code of conduct.
I can’t see why I would allow any outside party the right to restrict even partially, my decision-making capability.
Free will is the acausal capacity to sufficiently cause directed intentions. What I intend to do is not **caused** by influences or pressure or anything else.
That pressures or influences exist, and that I can intend against such pressures, or ignore such pressures and influences, or go along with them, demonstrates my free will capacity.
I can intend to fly when I jump off of a cliff. That gravity prevents such that intention from being physically realized doesn’t change the fact that gravity cannot cause me to intend – or even physically attempt – only things which agree with gravity.
What kind of world you’d “rather” live in is irrelevant to the debate, as far as I can tell.
It’s not “irrelevant to the debate”, it actually **is** the debate.
Within your worldview, there exists an “absolute good” and a “common purpose for all humans”.
This doesn’t exist in my worldview, so our preffered realties, and therefore the worlds we “see”, are different.
You would “rather” live in a world that exists as your “logical algorithms” have justified it to be, while I would “rather” live in a world that I have defined.
Neither one of us has a single “objective” input into our logic since we are both trapped inside our own subjective minds.
You might be engaged in such a debate, but I am not. My arguments are not about what kind of world I’d “rather” live in, but what kind of worldview is logically consistent and justifiable. What I would “rather” has nothing to do with it.
But no one adopts a worldview they think is **not** logically consistent and justifiable.
How do you reach outside of your subjective experience of the world to get an objective premise, even one?
Since you have no objective input and no way of creating one, how can you justify that you have reached an objective conclusion?
You and I are both fallible and subjective observers.
Which one of us is right?
That does not make much sense to me, though perhaps that is mostly a matter of poor wording. If free will is acausal, then it cannot cause. That’s part of what “acausal” means.
Perhaps you mean “uncaused” rather than “acausal,” though I think I would disagree with that wording too. However, my disagreement in that case would be because I prefer to use “cause” in the sense used by science rather than in the Aristotelian sense.
According to you, there’s no way to tell. And yet, you keep arguing as if there is.
You might want to look up the meaning of “acuasal”. It means “without cause” not “unable to cause”.
Free will intentions have no cause, but can cause effects.
The question is aimed at you and you claim you **can** tell.
So how can you, a fallible human, know which one of our two subjective opinions is right, without having a way to get any objective input?
I never claimed to be able to provide an objective premise, and I never claimed that any premise of mine was objectively true.
You are the one that keeps inserting “objective” and “subjective” as if I’ve made a claim about what is objectively true or existent, which I have not.
Without some sort of objective grounding, you can’t claim that right or wrong exist, much less tell the difference.
If your theistic worldview is based only only on subjective premises, it’s only as “grounded” as my atheistic one.
Pedant: The existence of gods is an empirical question..
Murray: Says who?
What kind of question do you take it to be? Are not all questions about “existence” empirical questions?
Murray:
This is why the understanding that facts & evidence are determined by worldview, and why the understanding that one must logically justify their beliefs via their worldview premises is important if one wishes to maintain a logically consistent and justifiable worldview.
Mr Murray is a self-declared brain in a jar.
Toronto,
Indeed! I don’t live that far from Montségur. It’s an eerie place.
(So says the atheist materialist) 🙂
Everyone here is in agreement, then. Objectivity would be a wonderful goal but it is unattainable.
I have never claimed right and wrong exist, nor have I ever claimed any objective grounding.
Once again, you mistake a logical argument for a claim about “what actually exists”.
That would matter had I made any argument that something objective exists.
Regardless of whether or not something objective exists, we must behave and argue **as if** something objective exists, and **as if** we can discern true statements. Arguing that “everyone’s experience is subjective” and that “we cannot know objective facts” is stating the trivial and employing sophistry; it has no bearing on my argument whatsoever.
The fact that each of you argue **as if** there are objective facts (whether or not you believe anyone has objective access to them), and **as if** true statements can be deliberately discerned (or else why argue your idea is more valid than the other and is closer to the truth), and **as if** the other person can deliberately discern the truth (whether or not truth actually exists, and whether or not you believe anyone can know any truths).
Therefore, you must behave and argue as if truths exist, as if objective facts exist, and as if humans can deliberately discern truthful statements about objective facts. Even the arguments that we cannot discern such things, and that objective facts are unknowable, and that free will doesn’t exist, requires the implicit assumption that those things exist and are true.
Which renders such positions and arguments irrational, because you must argue and behave **as if** your position is false, even though you argue (and perhaps believe) that it is true.
That is the logical inconsistency of such worldviews being demonstrated here.
William J Murray,
With respect, it matters not, either way. Someone (unless I dreamt it – I can’t find the reference now) made the allusion that we understand our situation in the universe about as well as an ant living in a side-walk crack next to the Empire State Building comprehends its construction.
I’m not really arguing with you, William, except to suggest that whatever your position is on objectivity is no less subjective than anyone else’s. All I suggest about objectivity is that assuming the universe we inhabit has consistent invariable properties (speed of light, mass of a proton etc. etc.) seems to work (and by “work” I mean are not disproved by evidence produced by observation and experiment). We can work with these assumptions till something better comes along. Maybe the next big leap forward will be instigated by a fresh insight from the “Intelligent Design” movement. It would be a first for ID!
“William J Murray on September 12, 2011 at 9:09 pm said:
The sounds like a very objective assertion.
You have said that entities that are not part of your subjective conciousness, meaning everyone but yourself, have the same purpose.
What data did you use to come to that conclusion?
It’s easy to take snippets out of larger arguments and make it sound as if I’m making all kinds of claims. I could do the same to your comments.
Toronto said:
Is that a claim of objective fact? Sounds like it. Is that a claim of truth? Sounds like it.
Is that a claim of objective fact? Sounds like it. Is that a claim of truth? Sounds like it.
Is that a claim of objective fact? Sounds like it. Is that a claim of truth? Sounds like it.
Is that a claim of objective fact? Sounds like it. Is that a claim of truth? Sounds like it.
You not only argue and live as if objective facts exist, you can barely write two sentences without making an implied claim of objective fact or the implication that we can deliberately discern true statements.
This is nothing but diversionary sophistry. We must argue and act as if objective facts exist and as if we can deliberately discern true statements about them. The fact that you and others cannot write two sentences in rebuttal against that point without directly implicating that something is true or an objective fact demonstrates my point.
But you’ve taken your “objective” point to an absurd level.
Watch this;
Clearly, whether “it” is “easy”, is your subjective opinion regarding the difficulty of a task common to the audience you’re addressing, which now makes it an objective statement.
How can we have any sort of interchange by lowering our debate to that?
What makes you think we all have the same purpose?
William
You seem to be adopting the position that all positive statements are implicit claims of objective truth rather than expressions of personal opinion. That seems a little sweeping, not to say unreasonable.
There is only one of us being absurd; I admit (in fact, it’s my argument here) that we cannot even talk without implicating and referring to things we must assume in every practical sense are objective, even if we don’t know that they are. We must also speak and act as if we can deliberately discern true statements. We definitely must argue in that fashion, or else we are doomed to constant qualify statements to the point of weightlessness with phrases like “it seems to me” and “I’m suggesting” and “I feel that” and “it appears to be” and “in my opinion” .. I mean, who cares? If you’re not making a claim that must be defended and supported beyond ‘I feel”, then it’s not worth arguing about.
So, while it is logically consistent for me to argue as if objective facts exist and as if we can deliberately discern true statements (even though I don’t know that to be the case), it is not logically consistent for you to argue that way and make those implications and references. You absurdly reiterate that “we cannot know objective facts” and “we cannot discern true statements” even though those very statements directly implicated the converse. That’s the definition of absurd.
Only when you agree that we must argue and debate and speak as if objective facts exist, and as if we can discern true statements about them (whether they actually do or not and whether we actually can or not) can we set aside this sophistry about subjectivism and objectivism and get on with a meaningful argument about what kinds of beliefs are logically supportable and internally consistent given theistic and non-theistic premises.
We argue and debate and speak as if we have **opinions**.
Different people have different “descriptions” about things.
“Reality” and “objective truths” are **some** of the things we seek to describe.
They are just descriptions though and they differ slightly depending on the observer.
By definition, an “objective” fact cannot exist since no one can circumvent their own sensory apparatus or be in an infinite number of places
I am trapped behind my senses and education just as you are trapped behind yours.
When it comes to objective facts, you can’t even tell me what time it is exactly.