Kantian Naturalist: You simply have not provided any account of truth, reason, and logic. Until you do, there is no reason for me to believe that a correct understanding of these concepts has anything at all to do with God.
Some initial first thoughts.
What would it mean to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic? Don’t all of us take all three of these for granted?
Can science settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic?
If science cannot settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic, what does that tell us about the question?
If science cannot settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic, what does that tell us about science?
Who were the first scientists to ask and attempt to answer these questions and what answers did they offer?
Who were the first philosophers to ask and attempt to answer these questions and what answers did they offer?
Is the argument that because someone has not provided an account of truth, reason, and logic there is therefore no reason to believe that a correct understanding of these concepts has nothing at all to do with God a non-sequitur?
What is true. What is logical. What is reasonable. Are these not all inter-twined? Which of these can we dispense with while retaining the others?
I’d say that we have a pretty good account of logic, though people are always wanting to extend it one way or another.
I’m not sure whether there could be an adequate account of reason or of truth, that people can agree on.
I think that’s a problem for philosophy, rather than for science.
The prime directive of science is to provide knowledge that is culture independent.
Truth is an unlikely subject.
It’s your claim, provide your account and show how it leads to god.
What is it with ID supporters and getting others to do their homework for them?
As I just typed on another thread (why there are so many redundant threads here is beyond me), truth, logic and reason aren’t identical to each other and each is such that it couldn’t be identical to the hero of the Bible stories.
It’s a crazy view that is inconsistent not only with truth, but with logic and reason too.
Kantian Naturalist has written four excellent comments describing the problem with trying to associate truth,
justice, and the American wayreason, and logic with the concept labeled “god”:One
Two
Three
Four
I’d be interested in the response from any theists here.
Yes. Truth, logic, and reason cannot be identical with each other, and none of them can be identical with either the tribal deity of the ancient Israelites (Old Testament) or the palliative of the oppressed (New Testament) or the necessary being of the rationalist metaphysicians.
The very most that it even makes any sense to say is something like this: God is the only candidate for explaining why the world has an intelligible structure that is knowable to intelligent beings such as ourselves, such that we can come to know true things about the world by using reason, including (but not limited to) logic.
That’s not a crazy view. I think it is deeply mistaken. But it’s not crazy.
What is crazy is saying that these concepts are all identical with each other (not just coextensive but intensionally equivalent or synonymous) and also with the necessary and absolutely transcendent being who is also the tribal deity of a small group of ancient Near Eastern pastoralists.
Taking up the OP with some provisional responses . . .
We do implicitly rely on these concepts in our everyday cognitive practices; the idea of providing an account is not to give us some knowledge that we didn’t already have, but to make explicit what is implicit, so that we can put our cognitive practices under a better degree of cognitive control and (it is to be hoped) improvement.
No.
I think that there’s an important difference between (1) constructing confirmed (or at least confirmable) models of causal processes that explain observable regularities and irregularities and (2) constructing explications of the implicit structures of our conceptual frameworks (as embedded in patterns of behavior). Explanation and explication are distinct projects, though in the final analysis cannot be completely separated.
Within “the Western tradition” (as that is constructed), this was a central part of the philosophical and metaphilosophical project that occupied Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics like Zeno and Epictetus.
In the absence of an account of truth, reason, and logic, there is no reason to believe that any such account will have anything to do with God.
I’ve already presented a very hasty and provisional sketch of those concepts here, and on that account, those concepts have nothing to do with God (whether characterized metaphysically or Biblically).
If someone wants to argue that I’m mistaken, and that truth, logic, and reason have something or even everything to do with God, then he or she has to make an argument. And that’s something that none of the theists here have yet deigned to do.
Actually, I think that the problem with “self-authenticating episodes” will affect any foundationalist epistemology. Not just presuppositionalism (let alone FMM’s weird version of it) but also empiricism and rationalism.
At the same time, the problem with coherentism is also quite well known — one wants some degree of reassure that one’s conceptual frameworks are making contact with the world, and not mere “frictionless spinning in the void” (in McDowell’s memorable phrase).
And reliabilism, for all its insights, seems powerless to help us distinguish between the low-grade implicit knowledge that we ascribe to animals and infants and the kind of high-grade knowledge that we want our political leaders to have before making important changes to public policy.
Interesting. I evidently have some reading to do.
That’s definitely one area where fifthmonarchyman’s epistemology fails. I think there is also a psychological dimension — non-theists, as a rule, seem content with provisional knowledge that may change as new evidence appears. fifthmonarchyman seems to be looking for something more absolute.
The basic idea I am appealing to here is what Wilfird Sellars (see also here) called “The Myth of the Given”.
There’s no simple presentation of the Myth available on line, but here is the canonical interpretation of what Sellars was saying:
(1) If there are self-evident epistemic claims, of whatever kind, they must be both epistemically efficacious and epistemically independent.
(2) A claim is epistemically efficacious only if it can confer justificatory status (however informal) on some other epistemic achievement (e.g. a claim).
(3) A claim is epistemically independent only if it does not receive justificatory status (however informal) from any other epistemic achievement (e.g a claim).
(4) Any epistemically efficacious claim must be conceptually structured.
(5) All conceptual structure is, in the first instance, embedded in rule-governed public language (“the space of giving and asking for reasons”), which is essentially contestable and revisable, both synchronically and diachronically;
(6) Hence nothing that is epistemically efficacious can be epistemically independent;
(7) On the other hand, merely passive reception of the world — paradigmatically, in the empiricist tradition, sensings — are epistemically independent only because they are not conceptually structured;
(8) But, precisely because sensings are not conceptually structured, they lack the requisite form to serve as premises in reasoning;
(9) Hence anything that is epistemically efficacious cannot be epistemically independent, and anything that is epistemically independent cannot be epistemically efficacious;
(10) Hence foundationalism of every variety must be rejected.
Or, as Sellars nicely puts it, “the data of the positivists must go the way of the illuminatio of Augustine”
There’s a lot being neglected here, including — quite importantly — Sellars’s acceptance of both Kant’s critique of rationalism on the grounds that there is no available cognitive privilege of the sort that the rationalists required for their metaphysics and Hegel’s critique of Kant’s own implicit reliance on cognitive privilege into the a priori structure of the rational mind.
Yes. Once one takes on board all of
(1) Kant’s (famously dense) critique of both the empiricism of Locke and Hume and the rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff;
(2) Hegel’s (notoriously opaque, almost unreadable) critique of Kant;
and
(3) the realization that much of Hegel’s critique of Kant also applies to Hegel himself — a realization variously pursued in Marx, Nietzsche, Peirce, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Cassirer, Adorno, Sellars, and Rorty
then one will be forced to the conclusion that the history of philosophy shows that all human thought is necessarily and essentially historical.
Hence all the provisionality, tentativeness, and revisability that we must ascribe to empirical knowledge (including science) as it is continually adjusted to the passing flux of sensory experience must also be ascribed to any account of empirical knowledge. There’s no a priori knowledge of knowledge. Metaphysics and epistemology are, just like science itself, contingent, in flux, revisable, provisional, contestable, pluralistic, and open-ended. The very idea that the succession of conceptual schemes over time must eventually converge on some absolute description of the world is itself at most a “rational Hope” (as Peirce called it) that cannot be accomplished in any finite inquiry, as all human inquiry must be.
And, moreover, every attempt to evade the historicity of epistemology and metaphysics by recourse to some apodictic and infallible “foundation” of knowledge — whether Russell’s “knowledge by acquaintance” or Husserl’s “eidetic intuition” — has, over the course of history, been re-exposed to either the Kantian critique (in Heidegger’s critique of Husserl), the Hegelian critique of that critique (in Adorno’s critique of Husserl), or both at once (in Sellars’s critique of Russell).
The conclusion, then, is that there is simply no hope for any account of “the given” as the terminus a quo of knowledge or “the absolute” as the terminus ad quem of knowledge, since any such account relies on an appeal to cognitive privilege.
This line of reasoning, I should point out, does not fatally undermine theism in the weakest possible sense — that one may be entitled to use religious vocabulary in the course of deliberating over moral dilemmas, expressing one’s deepest hopes, and satisfying one’s need to rescued from despair.
One’s entitlement to be religious, to live a religious life, is not touched by the foregoing critique of cognitive privilege and the inescapable historicity and contingency of all thought (including all thought about thought).
For the curious (and brave), an excellent lecture on Sellars is available here.
Kantian Naturalist,
FWIW, 10 doesn’t follow from anything that precedes it. There’s no def of a single type of foundationalism (let alone “every variety” of it): in fact, it’s not even mentioned until the conclusion of this “argument”–so it’s not clear that anything about foundationalism follows from any of that stuff at all.
That’s almost fair — to fix the oversight, just add a premise that “foundationalism” is any appeal to self-evident epistemic claims. That’s not a controversial treatment of what foundationalism consists of!
I would say that foundationalism requires some claims to be basic or to provide justification without being based on other claims. If that’s what you mean by self-evident, I guess it’s ok. But there are other issues: E.g., I don’t think 6 actually follows from 4 and 5 without more either. Some of the stuff in there seems to be about causal priority rather than justificatory priority.
For reasons like that, It’s hard to put an argument of that kind together so it actually works. Sellars seems to me to have sometimes depended on a little obscurity at the margins. He reminds me of Spinoza in the respect that, in spite of how smart and imaginative they both were, the more you study them, the less their stuff seems to be quite right.
God is truth and reason and logic.
The syllogism would look like this
premise 1 ) God has revealed that he is truth, logic, reason
premise 2) Since God is truth what he reveals is true by definition
conclusion) God is truth,logic,reason.
now I’d be happy to explore your counter reasons for not honoring God as God but first you need to provide a list of qualities you demand in a deity.
peace
You are embarrassingly bad at logic dude.
“Since God is truth” in P2 is unwarranted unless “God is truth”, which is your conclusion. You have this pathetic tendency for circularity
but God is truth so it is warranted.
X is X is not circular.
It is simply a restatement of the law of non-contradiction
peace
*facepalm*
I think the theory is that, just as double-negatives make positives, circles within circles make non-circles. The only difference is that while triple negatives make negatives again, circles within circles within circles also make non-circles (for any number of nested circles).
If God is logic is immoral to be illogical?
If God is logic, FFM fucks up God every time
If a crime against logic is a crime against God, then this is the most sinful post I’ve ever seen at TSZ.
That’s utter nonsense.
That’s just a primitive, awkwardly put ontological argument. It’s fallacious.
For one thing, I don’t think the argument is a deductively valid argument, so there’s going to be some gappiness when you try to formalize it. But we can always work to close the gaps.
That aside, your suggestion that I was confusing causal and justificatory priority is actually quite serious. The whole point of the Myth is that nothing can play both roles at once.
The sheer fact of being elicited or wrung from us in response to some ambient circumstance is not necessary and sufficient to function as a premise in reasoning. Only conceptually structured responses to the environment can function as premises in reasoning, and specifically, the kind of conceptual structure that one acquires as one learns a language.
There’s a curious commitment here that deserves its own examination: knowing that presupposes knowing how. Knowing that — having a warranted or justified assertion — depends on knowing how to assert, being able to recognize that one has asserted, being able to give reasons for a claim.
Even perceptual judgment requires an acquired bodily competence in skilfully evaluating whether one is in favorable perceptual circumstances for being able to make a reliable perceptual judgment.
Q: “Is that a hawk?”
Compare:
A1. “yes, you can see that it’s a red-tailed hawk”
A2: “I can’t tell, it’s too far away”
A3: “I think so, but my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be”
A4: “I don’t know, I’m haven’t come down off that last hit yet.”
Well, Spinoza was — officially — aiming for a deductively valid argument, and Sellars was not. But yeah, Spinoza and Sellars are difficult philosophers. They’re wrestling with some of the deepest problems that there are. And no one ever gets everything quite right. The only question is whether Spinoza (or Sellars, or anyone else) advance our collective self-understanding. I think they both did, in extraordinary and important ways. (Also in closely related ways.)
walto,
ugh! I know it’s one of these quirks in the reply function of the forums, but that quote looks like I posted that garbage instead of FFM :/
I doubt that any of us had problems recognizing where the quoted text originated.
Except US, of course.
I want to be gappy
But I can’t be gappy
Till I make you gappy too.
😉
Oops. Sorry about that.
Thanks for providing the additional material.
Oh, FMM’s problem is much worse than that. It’s that he can’t erase the quotation-marks.
The starting-point is
1. God says, “I am truth, reason, and logic”
or more precisely
2. I say of God that He says, “I am truth, reason, and logic.”
and even parsing (2) to mean (generously)
3. It is true of God that He says, “I am truth, reason, and logic”
we still cannot erase the quotation marks in order to get
4. God is truth, reason, and logic.
It’s like the ontological argument insofar as it all trades on a conflation between de dicto and de re assertions, but it’s even more transparently bad.
No, your (3) gives him everything he wants.
Really all he has is
1, I believe( via revelatory experiences I take myself to have) both that there is an X such that X is God and that X is F, G, H.
2. If there is an X such that X is F, G & H, then X would not mislead me with respect to any revelatory experiences I take myself to have.
3. Therefore there is an X such that X is F, G & H.
But, as I’ve explained to FMM countless times, 3 doesn’t actually follow from 1 and 2. It’s just a scope confusion.
I think God is the only candidate for explaining why the universe has rules.
I think the “well that is just how nature is” position is an extremely weak and lazy position one takes when one wants to avoid any serious contemplation.
While I disagree, at least there’s more content there than anything FMM has given us so far.
How about you provide a list of qualities you ascribe to truth, reason, and logic which would explain why you think that they are the same as God?
As I’ve indicated numerous times already, I am perfectly content to accept the classical theistic conception of God for the purposes of this discussion: the necessary being, absolutely transcendent, etc.
What I have not seen is any argument for why truth, reason, and logic are the same as God.
And by that I mean, “they are because he says they are” is not an argument.
Stopped reading right there
would a deistic God suffice?
“Well that is just the way God is ” doesn’t get you very far either
The universe doesn’t have rules. Problem solved.
We humans have rules, but those come from us.
I agree with the “weak” part, but not with the “lazy” part. Crediting it to God (as you do) seems a better fit for “lazy”.
I think the rules are God (in a sense)
peace
Because I have more revelation than you do so I ascribe qualities to truth, reason, and logic that you are unaware of. Our lists would undoubtedly be different and we would get bogged down discussing those differences
Besides None of the qualities I ascribe to truth reason and logic would “explain” why I think God is truth reason and logic .
For example take eternality
God is not God because he is eternal he is eternal because he is God.
I’m much more interested in why you refuse to honor truth reason and logic as God.
Let’s go back to that quote from Martin Luther
quote:
“Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.”
end quote:
Why doesn’t your heart cling to truth?
Why don’t you trust (confide) in logic?
peace
A deistic God might suffice for providing laws but would be insufficient to provide knowledge of those laws to us.
peace
This is so far from what I believe I don’t know where to start.
my viewpoint is closer to these three informal positions (not arguments). In no particular order
position 1
1) X is F, G, H
2) F,G,H exist
3) therefore X exists
position 2
1) X has revealed himself to all persons
2) Walto is a person
3) Therefore X has revealed himself to Walto
position 3
1) Knowledge is impossible unless there is X
2) I know this
3) Therefore there is X
peace
Yes, The Biblical term is foolish
quote:
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.
(Pro 1:7)
end quote:
peace
That’s what I’m interested in discussing. What “qualities” do you ascribe to truth? Or to reason? Or to logic?
Because doing so does not aid in understanding what truth, or reason, or logic are.
I’ve already presented and defended my characterization of reason, of truth, and of logic. What you would need to do is show me what important features of these concepts I am missing by not identifying them with God.
To know we must be afraid, it is illogical to question instruction.We have always been at war with Eastasia
I guess we would have to figure it out for ourselves.
Hah. I gave you what you’ve GOT, not what you WANT. You can’t always get what you want. Sorry.
The are of different levels of quality/incoherence. I’ll take them up in turn.
This one is probably the biggest mess. 1 can be taken two ways, as a straight assertion or as a definitional stipulation. If you take it as an assertion, then you don’t need 2 to get 3. It follows from X’s being F that X exists. The problem is that the whole “argument” has gone bye-bye. There’s no basis for 1, 2, or 3.
If, OTOH, we take 1 to mean “If anything is X then it is F, G & H” then you can have 1. But now 2 is a problem. You can’t get 3 from it. In order to get 3 you need 1 to read If anything X then it is F, G and H, and if anything is F, G, and H, it is (can only be) X. Now if 2 is taken to mean F G and H are exemplified by one and only one thing, 3 will follow. But nobody believes that version of 2. That was the problem you started with, and you’ve just asserted again that God is truth, blah and blah, which is what you’re supposed to be proving, not sticking as the second premise of your “argument.”
That one has the virtues of being both valid and simple. But nobody is likely to believe 1. Arguments of this nature are supposed to have some heuristic value. If you start your argument with God has revealed himself to all persons, everyone who is not already a believer will either just walk away, deny it, or say “Huh? Who says so?” (And answering “God says so” will ensure that they will giggle also.)
This one I like the best. It’s kind of deep. I personally think you can get that there is truth and reasonability, if you let X = truth and reasonability, because I think we DO know things, and that it doesn’t make sense to deny it.
You do need a couple more premises to get anywhere you’d like, but maybe they are premises that at least some reasonable people might go for (or at least have a bit of trouble denying). They are (something like) this:
4) If there are people who believe this or that, nothing else is necessary for knowledge besides truth and reasonability.
5)There are people who believe this or that. [You kind of have this from 2 already, so I’m not sure you need this. That means this argument could probably be put more elegantly than I am slopping it together, but never mind, this premise is true anyhow.]
6) Only God could be that entity which is such that added to a batch of believers it could alone produce knowledge.
7) Therefore God must exist.
It’s quirky, but it’s got a little vim to it. I mean, I wouldn’t accept 6 myself–it’s not exactly incontrovertible, but I admit I don’t have a lot of alternative explanations for the existence of truth and reasonability in the world. Maybe no such explanations ARE needed–beats the hell out of me. But maybe it’s not, like the other stuff here, on its face ridiculous to make such a claim as 6.
I have to inform you that you can’t get revelation, the Bible, or any of the other stuff you WANT from God out of this argument. It’s what KN would call a philosopher’s God. Still, it’s not completely stupid, so, I’d take it and run with it if I were you. The other stuff you WANT is not happening ever.
Oh, and you’re welcome.
W
You have not addressed the issues raised by Kantian Naturalist and others about if what you are plugging in to F, G, and H can actually be said to exist.
1 is a baseless assertion about an entity for which you have provided no evidence.
1 is another baseless assertion which you have been challenged to support repeatedly. No such support has been forthcoming.
Logic. You’re doing it wrong.
1 isn’t baseless if you let X = whatever you think knowledge must consist of. FMM says it’s justified true belief. So any of those can make 1 true. The problem is to get anything like God from that def and the existence of knowledge. It’s a fun puzzle.
You’re assuming FFM is willing and capable of defending his premises.
But that doesn’t matter to me. I’m enjoying your posts and KN’s too much.
I think it’s safe to say he won’t appreciate your proposal to make his argument worth of some consideration and he will fall back to all that revelation nonsense, but FWIW I do.
walto,
The last one is basically a ‘transcendental argument for God’. It could be put as follows:
1. The existence of God is a necessary condition for the possibility of justified true belief.
2. But there is justified true belief.
3. Therefore, God exists.
The trick is getting (1) off the ground.
Transcendental arguments at their best show that, given some unproblematic feature of our conceptual framework that even the skeptic would grant, the conceptual framework must have some further feature that is less obvious.
For example, Kant argues that, given that minds like ours think in concepts, and that there are some concepts that cannot be subsumed under any higher concepts, those concepts must be at work in any possible experience that a mind like ours can have.
A leaner, clearer version of this argument is in Jay Rosenberg’s One World And Our Knowledge Of It, to show that any apperceptive temporal and discursive intelligence that can distinguish between forms and contents must be able to represent those objects as existing in space with objective existence.
What the TAG would need to show is that justified true belief is not possible if God does not exist. I don’t know how that could work. What I have found online has not been terribly helpful.
Here’s one line of thought:
1. There can be justified true belief only if the structure of the mind and the structure of reality are not accidentally related.
2. But if God does not exist, then the structure of the mind and the structure of reality could only be accidentally related.
3. Therefore, if God does not exist, then there cannot be justified true belief. 4. But there is justified true belief.
5. Therefore, God exists.
In that case, I’m not really convinced of (1) and definitely not convinced of (2) at all. In fact I think (2) is false. But at least it’s an argument!