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?
… and how do you know that revelation came from your deity?
sean s.
But it does require justification based on evidence or logic; that is what distinguishes “knowledge” from “opinion”.
sean s.
Right. The criteria of falsification are not falsifiable (though they are fallible). It’s just the difference between our first-order judgments about ‘matters of fact’ and our second-order judgments about those judgments.
In my imagination, most of the people who post at TSZ probably last took an undergrad philosophy class in 1950.
It is an interesting sociological fact that Karl Popper is the favorite philosopher of science among working scientists — much as Thomas Kuhn is the favorite philosopher of science among humanities folks (outside of philosophy).
I don’t know who my favorite philosopher of science is. Probably Ian Hacking or Philip Kitcher, though I have a bias towards two little-known philosophers of science, both at Wesleyan: Joe Rouse and Steven Horst. I’ve read two books by each of them, all four of which are ground-breaking.
ID and Creationism are at least of the same genus, if not the same species; like as the common dog and the coyote are of the same genus.
sean s.
The deity, being omnipotent might be capable of much, but since we are not omnipotent, how do we fallible creatures know that a deity has just demonstrated who they are, if they did not meet us face-to-face?
And if you are tempted to reply “Revelation” then the question becomes “how do you know that revelation came from your deity?”
Ad nauseum …
I think we agree a deity (should it exist) is capable of anything.
But I also think we agree humans have limits; one of them is that we only know what we experience or can reason to. A deity who does not meet us on our level is a thing we cannot know.
The problem is inescapable because our limits are inescapable. We are who we are.
sean s.
Cdesign proponentsists disagree!
Glen Davidson
I never claimed it did but I did understand that was your position to be one must know something with certainty. That one knows the truth with certainty and that certainty comes thru revelation. That one knows with certainty that revelation is from an infallible deity therefore it is infallible. But it seems I was mistaken
1 knowledge requires truth
2 knowledge does not require certainty
3 knowledge does not require truth to be certain
Anything logically possible
Whyever not? It’s about empirically observable events and proposes known mechanisms to explain them.
You are getting scarily good at channeling your inner intelligent design creationist. If you could keep it up you’d be a DI Fellow in no time.
Some warning about gazing into the abyss comes to mind, though.
Indeed. The two terms are synonyms.
The events are past, and therefore do not exist.
I missed this. Well, that’s BS and also very telling. Tell me more about the “establishment” and how their bias is holding back science
Um, no. What Patrick thinks of as knowledge is actually opinion, and you make the same error. Google knowledge and opinion.
You don’t seem to know what the word hypothesis actually means. So everything else is a bit pointless.
Thanks fmm, I pondered Him for a good long time. Nice story but a bit anthropomorphic for my taste. Prefer more the incomprehensible types.
You must just love walto then!
😀
Jesus probably looked better in robes.
you must of missed the first line of my favorite summery of the Christian definition of God
quote:
That God as He is in Himself, cannot be comprehended of any but himself
end quote:
1644 lbcf
😉
peace
no,
Opinion may or may not be justified
What distinguishes “knowledge” from “opinion” is truth.
peace
an omnipotent being can do what ever it takes to reveal something to us.
it’s not about the fallible creature it’s about a God reveals
you can know if an omnipotent infallible deity chooses to reveal to you. That is what it means to be omnipotent and infallible
I would agree.
That is what the incarnation is all about.
peace
Knowledge does require truth to be knowledge.
Certainty on the other hand does not even require knowledge
peace
That’s wrong. Opinions can be true without being knowledge.
It is plain to the rational soul that God the Creator is necessarily a Hermaphrodite.
but opinions can’t be knowledge without being true.
peace
We are not discussing creation here but epistemology.
I could be wrong but I think the choice of pronoun is not important in this regard.
If we wanted to be anal we could point out that the Godhead is a Trinity in which on or more persons is often thought of as feminine.
For the Greeks it was the second person (wisdom) that was at times referred to as a she. Other folks designate the third person that way.
peace
peace
peace
Opinions can’t be knowledge, period.
Typically — at least ever since Plato in the Meno — philosophers have held that justification and truth are independently necessary and jointly sufficient for a belief to count as knowledge.
Except for worries about Gettier cases (which I myself find hard to take seriously), this works pretty well.
However, it is worth pointing out that there are minority views: Crispin Sartwell argues that justification is not necessary — knowledge is just true belief — and Jay Rosenberg argues that truth is not necessary — knowledge is just adequately justified belief.
If one were to insist that truth is absolute truth, and that truth is necessary for knowledge, then no one knows anything. One could avoid that conclusion either by arguing that truth is not absolute truth, or that there it need not be, or that truth is not necessary for knowledge.
There is also the distinction between a statement being true in a conceptual framework and the truth of a conceptual framework.
My working position for the time being is that what distinguishes science from other kinds of knowledge is that science takes ‘the absolutely correct, unrevisable conceptual framework that is fully adequate to the structure of reality’ as its pragmatically regulative ideal.
But then again I don’t do epistemology and philosophy of science (except on TSZ, apparently) so this is no doubt badly wrong in many ways.
Patrick,
This is an inference argument not a tested hypothesis which is your current requirement.
From the paper Dazz cited. Notice the word inferring. This standard is often used for historic evidence.
Phylogenetic trees are inferred from the data, when new data is available it puts the inference to the test and it always, invariably, passes the test.
dazz,
Ha, what test?
I am just curious Dazz, do you live in a home?
colewd,
Common descent predicts a nested tree, and we can infer that tree from the data, not because someone decides to infer a tree, but because it’s there. Do you understand the difference? Common descent imposes a clear restriction on the data, for example if A descends form B, and B descends from C, C can’t descend from A (or B)
Design, on the other hand, places no restriction on data because it can’t explain any of it. That’s why the design “inference” is bunk and common descent is a FACT
dazz,
Can you support your claim that common descent is a fact?
I already did: Theobald’s compilation includes all the evidence from different fields needed to confidently affirm that it is indeed a fact.
I think there’s a distinction between confirming and testing worth thinking about here. If there’s too much freedom in the model, then it will always be easy to say that the model is ‘confirmed’ by data. The model has to be very constrained in order for there to be a pragmatically meaningful distinction between testing and confirming. A model that can pass any test is not really being tested at all.
In the case of phylogenetics (as in everything), we’d have to be extremely careful to make sure that we’re fitting the model to the data and not conversely. But I think that our confidence that we’re doing so is warranted if discoveries made later on in the history of phylogenetics are less disruptive to our models than are discoveries made earlier on.
I like that, but I think it would be more accurate to say that common descent is a more parsimonious explanation of the nested hierarchy than a shared design is. It’s not that a shared design fails to explain the nested hierarchy, but that it introduces many more ad hoc assumptions.
phoodoo,
Most people in developed countries live in homes of some sort, phoodoo.
All I want to know is which tree is the True Tree?
Or are these phylogenies just opinion?
Kantian Naturalist,
Agreed. My point was that if design explains every possible outcome, it doesn’t explain anything. “Look! design!” is not a valid scientific inference
the tree of knowledge, of course
I’m wondering what constraints might be expected from a “shared design” hypothesis? What should we expect to see? And what should we expect not to see? The classic falsification to an evolutionary tree would be rabbit fossils found in Cambrian sediments.
How would you know it was a rabbit fossil?
uhm, let me try… comparing the morphology of the fossil with current rabbits maybe?
Yes, but not everyone lives in a place that has the word Home in its name, so I was just wondering.
That’s just insane!
Glen Davidson
It seems to me that it doesn’t really explain it at all. I’m not saying that it would be utterly impossible to tack on enough ad hoc assumptions to (sort of) “explain it,” but pretending that intelligence is the slightest bit likely to produce what unintelligent processes would is merely blurring the usual process of fitting entailments to their putative results in order to destroy the distinctions between the models. It is neither an effort to explain, nor an actual explanation.
I have said that if IDists really took their “inference” and treated it like it was a scientific explanation that they’d actually be trying to infer what sort of mind would produce results that differ so dramatically from known design effects. But that’s to point out that not even they really act as if ID is science, or even proto-science, not because it’s at all proper to try to twist your preferred “cause” to produce the effects expected from an entirely different cause.
Shared design may indeed explain some things. It doesn’t explain nested hierarchies, because known intelligence isn’t limited in the same way as non-intelligent evolutionary processes are. It’s like explaining the fact that mercury is liquid at room temperature as the result of “Jesus likes to play with a liquid metal” (however toxic), when there’s a relativistic explanation for that fact. The latter is an explanation, the former is a logical possibility, but not an explanation at all. Maybe it’s even a possible explanation, but a lot more detail and evidence would have to be supplied (and relativity would presumably play a role in it) for it to truly explain anything at all.
Glen Davidson
But even shared or common design wouldn’t be falsified if all living forms were unique, one could claim that it’s just that the designer still has not decided to re-use anything. It’s still complete BS
And at what point in that process does one come to know that they have a fossil of a rabbit?
If you don’t actually see it walk like a duck, or hear it quack like duck …
fifthmonarchyman,
Pray that God-in-Three-Persons reveal unto to you how to connect the dots.