Is atheism illogical?
Atheism is illogical
Practicing a religion could gain you divine favor in the afterlife.
However, atheism couldn't possibly gain you any divine favor, and therefore it is irrational to hold atheist beliefs.
Objection A:
Thinking is simply a road to truth. If you follow your road, then you will find your truth. If you try to follow somebody else's road, you will find only lies.
Objection B:
Well, it may sound ridiculous, but who's to say that a god wouldn't punish the theists? We mortals know pretty much nothing of the universe, and so why should we assume anything about gods true nature.
Practicing a religion could gain you divine favor in the afterlife.
However, atheism couldn't possibly gain you any divine favor, and therefore it is irrational to hold atheist beliefs.
Objection A:
Thinking is simply a road to truth. If you follow your road, then you will find your truth. If you try to follow somebody else's road, you will find only lies.
Objection B:
Well, it may sound ridiculous, but who's to say that a god wouldn't punish the theists? We mortals know pretty much nothing of the universe, and so why should we assume anything about gods true nature.
Comments (483)
Sure it could. Organizations receive donations from people they've never heard of all the time.
Religious beliefs are, on the whole, irrational.
Hurdle has been stumbled upon.
Such thinking makes you vulnerable to erntirely fictional threats, basically spiritual terrorism. All someone has to do is invent a narrative where you end up in hell, give you no evidence that that narrative is true, and they have you in the palm of their hands.
If god is good, he's better than that. If god is evil, no reason to suppose "believing in him" will keep you safe.
The answer depends on the argument. I find the OP's argument is illogical (unpersuasive).
Indeed. The argument seems to be some kind of Pascal's wager. But if I were God I would likely look more favourably on atheists who made some effort to figure things out than someone who confuses the American constitution with the Bible.
Yes it could.
My biggest complaint, is that your argument doesn't actually attempt to demonstrate that atheism is illogical...even if I were to grant everything you said.
Another complaint, is that you seem to believe that doing anything non-egoistically is irrational.
Reasons aside, you either believe something or you don't.
Sometimes it's rational to refrain from identifying as an atheist. If you don't believe, but fear persecution for your disbelief, it's logical to pretend that you believe.
Whatever rewards there might be in Heaven for believing, you don't get them: I've heard you can't con God. If he exists, it would be illogical to lie about you unbelief. Anyway, if you die and discover that he exists after all, you'll believe, so you won't need to lie about it.
Quoting Bob Ross
:up:
Quoting Lionino
Quoting flannel jesus
It is. Pascal's Wager is about practice. And in practice, if you are all about Pascal Wagerism, you are more likely to go to hell than most people in almost every situation, as my chart shows.
Quoting ScarecowIt could if gods exist that reward us for reasons other than practicing any, or a particular, religion.
That doesnt mean it is logical to believe in God, but that is not what you asked.
It just means that, as a thinking being, there is no reason to conclude the Non-existence of anything.
We make conclusions about existing things with reason.
We are talking about a being, not some sort of logically necessary axiom or proof. We are asking about the conclusion that God doesnt exist. We can conclude there are no square circles, but thats because we defined a square (which is an idea that cant be physical) and a circle (which cant be physical) in such a way that square circle cannot represent anything meaningful, and squares and circles are not physical beings anyway.
Someone says God is in this shoebox, hands me the box and I open it and see shoes. Do I have to logically conclude that God does not exist? God isnt in the box - but of course I cant conclude anything about Gods existence elsewhere. Someone else says Shoes are in this shoebox and I open it and see some tissue paper but nothing else. Must I conclude that shoes dont exist, and become an a-shoe-ist?
Atheists dont need beliefs in the religious sense. Scientifically, there is no evidence for God (unless you believed eyewitness accounts of miraculous physical events maybe). Without evidence, there is nothing to examine, so nothing to conclude. Therefore, it is illogical to conclude there is no God.
I am not an a-unicorn-ist. I dont believe unicorns exist or ever did, but I wouldnt just rule it out and call anyone who saw evidence to the contrary not worth listening to, not rational, and delusional (at least until after I heard their evidence).
Atheists do not always conclude there are no gods. I am an atheist. My position, like that of many other contemporary atheists, is that I have encountered no good reason to believe the proposition that gods exist. I am familiar with the classical arguments but none of them resonate.
I do not believe in gods. This is all it takes to be an atheist. Whether gods can be demonstrated to exist by some evidence in the future, or an as yet to be identified compelling argument remains open.
Perfectly rational position to take from my standpoint.
Then I stand corrected. Atheism is not illogical.
I guess I meant people who know there is no god. I dont think its rational to conclude as fact that something does not exist. Dont know how you prove a negative. Hard enough to prove a positive.
Here's a "rational" example of "how to prove a negative" from a 2020 thread Belief in Nothing ...
Quoting 180 Proof
I think this proves we can prove a negative.
Quoting Fire Ologist
We can know only that particular deities do not exist but not that 'every conceivable deity' does not exist. To wit:
IF 'absence of evidence entailed by a particular X's predicates', THEN this 'absence of entailed evidence' necessarily is evidence of the absence of that particular predicated-X.
So, more to the point, absence of evidence that is entailed by "your god" entails the absence of "your god".
If a deity in question is described with predicates attributed in scriptures? by theology? by ontology? which entail changes (events) the deity has caused in (to) the world and given that the world is scientifically observable then such changes (events) purportedly unique to such a deity must also be observable.
(A) If, however, such changes (events) are not observed, then a deity with those predicates cannot exist; otherwise,
(B) if these entailed changes (events) are observed, then such a deity must exist.
So yes, in this way, it is quite reasonable to expect that such a deity can be demonstrated either to exist or not to exist.
(C) And insofar as a deity is described without any predicates which entail this deity has caused changes (events) in the world, then there are not any purported facts of the matter to investigate, and such a deity is ontologically indistinguishable from an idea or fiction.
In sum, positive atheism (i.e. to claim this or that god does not exist) is not illogical as per (A) above.
Fair enough. How do you respond to those who might argue that the Bible is allegorical and that it contains a 'broader truth' about Yahweh, who does not always conform to the stories, except through fable?
My questions around this have generally been: if so, then what do we know about this deity if all we have are stories? Do we have any reason to accept this deity exists, except as a character in allegorical tales? Etc.
Out of interest are there any other frames you know of a believer might use to preserve belief in Yahweh without literalist scripture?
It only proves this if you can definitively say that and where the missing item ought to be. Which is absurd. The only way you could say that would be if the missing item actually existed, then disappeared. You are conflating a "disappearing existent" with an unknown. Anything which is to whatever extent unknown can not be definitively identified sufficient to this putative "proof of non-existence." This is exactly what Dennett failed to appreciate.
I'd respond "Okay". Stories and fables exist, but not "YHWH" (except as one of the main characters).
All that comes to mind at the moment is Paul Tillich's notion that to say either "God exists" or "God doesn't exist" is idolatrous / blasphemous / meaningless (I can't remember which) or Quentin Meillassoux's "inexistent God" that is yet to come to be (or something like that) à la waiting for godot... :smirk:
I don't know what you are talking about. As far as I can tell, sir, your reply has nothing to do with what I've written.
You did not write the following?
[P]redicates of X entail search parameters for locating X (i.e. whether or not X exists where & when).
Because it sure looks like you did. Which is what I disputed. You are searching for something that is well-defined. You are not proving the non-existence of an unknown something, you are proving the absence of a known something. I fail to see exactly what it is you are failing to see.
That makes sense but is it absolute? Our abilities to search are certainly limited. Must there be no things that exist for which searchable predicates are not entailed by their existence? And what do you mean by searchable - is that sensible searching only, or searching metaphorically with the mind? I think you mean sensible.
Are there sensible predicates of an illusion itself? What are the sensible predicates that distinguish a goblin from a unicorn from a deity? Or are all illusions indistinguishable from each other as constructions that can have no searchable predicates? Is it an illusion to call one illusion different in any way from another illusion?
Quoting 180 Proof
I think you have just shown that it is logical to deny the existence of things like deities. But it does not prove you must deny the existence of these things. No negative has been proven. It means to rationally believe them you must find more evidence or refute the finding of no evidence.
Evidence or lack or evidence shows it is rational to conclude something does or does not exist. That is what Tom clarified. It would only prove something does or does not exist if you could prove the evidence or lack of evidence MUST be the case. This leads to all of the problems of epistemology. Its not proof of the existence or non-existence of anything, only proof of the rationality of drawing certain conclusions based on certain presumed (asserted, searched) evidence or lack of evidence.
I dont think we can prove existence or prove non-existence. So we cant say I KNOW God exists or I KNOW God does not exist. Just like I cant prove the sun exists. I can only prove things about relations (such as evidence relates to conclusions logically or not) as in Copernicus proving that if we believe our senses, the sun in fact does NOT revolve around the earth. Hes proven something about the relation of the earth to the sun, but not proven anything in particular exists.
Hardly ridiculous. You must know that gods of all sorts routinely punish those who believe in them. It's part of the job.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
Except things that quite obviously made up. Even if it's not proved 100% beyond doubt, the preponderance of evidence precludes paying homage or tithes to, making sacrifices for or obeying the rules of an improbability.
An atheist doesn't necessarily claim (though some may) that no kind of supernatural entity could possibly exist, or that no entity which might seem like a deity to humans could possibly exist. Most of us simply reject the god-forms that have so far been held up to worship by human agencies of one kind or another. It's perfectly rational to trace both the provenance of a deity-figure and its mythology to a human culture, human attitudes and concerns, human ideas and human interests. Interesting, but not faith-inspiring.
Which kind of atheism is essentially a socio-cultural critique, which is the most reasonable version of atheism I have heard. Unlike the nonsensical version that seeks to prove that "god cannot exist." Quantum physics is rife with things that defy reasoned existence, until they are discovered.
One can't just turn on a belief, so let's say I take a pill that causes me to believe in a god, because I want to have that chance at getting a reward. Is my belief in a god rational?
A belief that is established by reason is rational. It was rational to create a chance of getting the reward, so one might argue that my belief was indeed established by reason. However, it was actually the pill that established the belief - not a reasoning process.
So it's actually irrational to believe in a god in order to have a chance at a reward.
Youre right. Tom S pointed that out to me above. I was speaking more to the illogic of someone claiming that necessarily God cannot exist. So point taken.
Quoting Vera Mont
I dont see that as the case with Christianity. I dont think we could have thought of Jesus as the Messiah prophesized in Judaism.
Its all so absurd. Yet its really, as an extension of Judaism, many thousands of years old.
Who would have thought of dying humiliated on a cross, to save all of humanity?
By a son who utterly bows to his father, dying willingly tortured on a cross?
Yet this son and the father are one and the same spirit and one God, as three distinct persons?
Already the religious institution committee would have said nope - preposterous - it will never stick! Lets go back to Zeus or Baal, or Odin and work around them.
Or why was it God himself becoming a man, living poor and being killed, so that he could rise again? Why is the incarnation leading to poverty and bloody death needed?
And if God was here, walking the earth to found a church, why did he not write one word down, not one written word by Jesus, to found a 2000 plus year old institution?
Why throw in the sacrament of gathering to eat his flesh and drink his blood to have eternal life?
Absurd, yet it works - shows me something more at work than the human mind, interests, cultures - this absurdity should have died within years, even if he did rise from the dead. Why the absurdity?
Most religions capture pieces of this story. So they seem incomplete or more easily traced to culture, interests, etc. But no other religion captures all of the absurdity of being a human being while also capturing the rationality of being a creature like God.
And the message of action - love, sacrifice for others, forgiveness, the value of life, that God cared so much, held each one of us in such esteem, that he would rather die on a cross to lead us to him than leave us with nowhere to go, but preserving our freedom to live by our own choices, like creatures in the image of God.
Let's face it, this God is a sloppy worker and doesn't pay attention. Hence we now have thousands of Christian sects, some mutually hateful towards each other over doctrine and dogma. All interpreting god's will differently. God could settle this in a minute if he intervened.
Jesus being sacrificed was really just a weekend ruined. I think gods can take this kind of stuff in their stride. I never understood this tale of ritualistic blood sacrifice, which seems absurd more than anything else. God could have provided redemption any number of ways but settled on this piss-poor piece of theatre. What do some atheists say - Why did God sacrifice Himself to Himself to save us from Himself because of a rule He made Himself?
Zealots suffering from cognitive dissonance after their mentor (and supposed messiah) was executed for high treason.
Quoting Fire Ologist
It's an "extension of Judaism" the same way the Latter Day Saints are an extension of Protestantism (which was an "extension" of Catholicism).
Quoting Fire Ologist
Was it really more absurd than other religions of the time in which it became popular? Few taught there was an afterlife (Judaism was ambiguous on this) - that had its appeal. But in general, it's an interesting historical question.
We always had, and probably always will have, sects, and gangs and mobs, the participants in identity politics.
I agree - damn all the sectarian. Just because we people, armed with religion and sectarian, tribal, fear and aggressions, have used Christianity as a slogan to further perpetrate division and oppression, that just makes the so-called Christians like all the rest of us republican conservatives and demo-social-communist progressives. Im sure someone has put me in a box already. I just separated myself from the box-makers, so Im just as bad..
None of that looks like Christ to me at all.
You say God could settle this. I agree.
You say if God intervened. I agree. He had to intervene looking at the likes of us.
In the story of Christ, the cross was the intervention. Before the word Christianity when a man named Jesus was just showing us who God really is, he hung himself on a cross to die an horrible death. If anyone wanted to leave their sectarian birthplace, God said Here I am, your servant. The final intervention.
The rest he left to us, to take what he taught, what he said and lived, and continue to make a sloppy mess like we always do.
That is how much regard God has for me. He still left me free, ready to forgive me, even though I killed him, like we all killed him. For you. For each one. So much does he want me to think I am loved, so much does he want me to live, that he would die on a cross for me. For each one of us, individually.
Because we want to be left alone. Right? Who needs God anyway.
When God intervened with us most directly as human beings, we killed him.
If God intervened more, than what good would my friendship with him be? What good would our friendship with each other be, if we were not free to seek our own minds, our own wills and share our own hearts with each other. God wants us to be us, so he doesnt intervene; but God wants us to be friends with him and each other, so he shows us what friends do, how friends talk to one another, how to love not matter what the cross.
He didnt ram religion down anyones throats, not even the religious experts of his time who did not recognize him. We are the bad parts of the things we muck up, be it religion, politics, family, friendships. Christ wasnt sloppy at all if you look hard.
The intervention isnt over until its over, and we get to live both the deprivation and the salvation. Forgiveness is always instantly there, with a banquet to celebrate immediately after.
I see it as with everything authentic about whatever god there is, as the most absurd, leaving nothing left to be said, able to fill us with wonder even if life was eternal.
Three persons, like I am one person, but one God. Totally absurd. Heresy to the Jews like Peter and Paul who knew him first hand. Impossible to fabricate this story. And it surviving without a pen for the most important years.
To me this story doesn't make sense.
You are simply speculating on why god doesn't intervene. You cannot demonstrate this is the reason.
Remember that god not intervening is a more recent thing. He intervenes and appears in person to prophets and figures throughout the Bible. Why no more? (that's rhetorical - there is no proper answer)
Naturally, for me god doesn't intervene because there is no god.
To whom do you refer when you capitalize God? It's perfectly logical to say that Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, Osiris, Jehovah and Allah cannot possibly exist. Some nebulous supernatural entity somewhere might exist, but we wouldn't have been introduced to it.
Quoting Fire Ologist
You can't? I wonder why. The late revisionists were able to scrape a couple of coherent verses out of Isaiah's rants to back up their claim - 60-300 years post-crucifixion - that a messiah had been promised to the Jews - who didn't buy it.
Quoting Fire Ologist
There was nothing new in human sacrifice, or eating demigods.
Quoting Fire Ologist
So he could forgive the imperfect man he created for falling for his tainted fruit con.
Quoting Fire Ologist
No, the Pharisees largely considered him just another crackpot, though a few thought he was a prophet (of which Israel had a long tradition - even if they were mostly crackpots). I very much doubt they would have heard of Odin; Zeus would be out of bounds under Roman rule, while Jupiter had never really made a splash in Mesopotamia, and Baal was very much not the Jews' cup of poison. A long while later, Constantine got some serious mileage out of it. Then the Europeans converts ran with it - at considerable cost to common folk the world over.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yeah, all that. In action. When?
I admit I cant demonstrate anything I understand from the story of Jesus as some sort of argument. I admit the story is as far-fetched as it is incomprehensible.
I think the story shows God did absolutely everything he could for a humanity that is good and worth his attention. Theres nothing left to say or do. AND as a bonus, we get to go on living as we please no matter what we believe. The question becomes simply, do I want to, of my own heart and mind, want to please God. I see the story is of a God who told us to please each other.
Youre just being grumpy.
I'm very cheerful. I don't have to pretend a cracker is human flesh, or that a magic prince will eventually come back and take a second shot at rescuing us.
So you take the position of God then - leave us to figure out what to do for ourselves. The lonely way is the only way. Should I have crackers or maybe some ooo cashews! Thank the Lor oh forget it.
I think no god was ever there at all. And 8 billion ain't exactly solitude.
They needed to rationalize Jesus divinity with monotheism. Aristotelian metaphysics helped them do that.
Pretend? He took his shot. Its done. We know enough what to make of our own end from here.
And its not a cracker. That would be silly. Its a wafer.
I agree. To say anything determinate either way about an indeterminate, or generic, "God" is illogical (i.e. nonsense).
However, no observable evidence entailed by attributes ascribed to any allegedly "revealed" deity that has been actually worshipped during recorded human history has ever been demonstrated, ergo it is reasonable to conclude that such (Bronze-Iron Age tribal) deities do not exist in a factual (i.e. non-fictional) sense as several hundreds of generations of 'devout' worshippers have believed and extant religious cults still dogmatically reify.
Of course I (we) could be wrong. Show me (us) :smirk:
:up:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Which of course doesn't say anything about whether it is true or not. A Sikh colleague says the same thing. There are vegans and techno pagans saying it too.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Sure. My atheism is intuitive and derived from literature and life events.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
I prefer The Good Soldier vejk as literature, although I suspect as religious texts go, the Mahabharata is possibly the greatest one, but personal taste is subjective.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
True. But this still doesn't address which god is true, if truth is what matters. Or should we do the populist dance of syncretism and say all gods point to the same divine principle?
You want a personal invitation.
Im not capable of showing you God.
I hope you keep looking.
:point: Pandeism Pandeus, sive Naturans is my speculative jam.
Similarly then, any god of any tradition can be viewed as a "best approximation" to the concept of god. Criticisms of the adequacy of this god or that god are nothing more than an acknowledgement of the particular cultural limitations wherein the idea was formulated. The concept of a citizen used to include the right to own slaves. We don't contend that there were no citizens in ancient Rome or Greece.
Ergo, proving that the Christian God "couldn't exist" is really just pointing out the universal historic fact that concepts are constantly being updated to keep pace with cultural evolution. Tilting at windmills.
Doesn't need proving or disproving. You either buy a particular insurance package or you don't. I don't buy any of them.
And of course there is the role of faith in everything from epistemology to social reality. These institutional facts don't depend on the pre-existence of god, inasmuch as they are self-instantiating. I do not seek to understand in order to believe, I believe in order to understand. I, for one, very much believe that belief is foundational.
I get that you're an atheist, Tom, but this a concept expressed in paganism/polytheism. So you're kind of a pagan atheist. I've never loved this view though as someone with a disability I don't want to be told "oh God was just not paying attention or drunk or didn't care when he made you" because it leads to a certain portion of the population just being seen as cosmically rejected. I don't believe Gods who are utterly indifferent to humanity are worth being called Gods/God. I am a monotheist, by the way. The Hebrew Bible often retells earlier polytheistic tales, but imho, in a wiser way.
You can never be sure of that! :smile:
Quoting Scarecow
This is an argument based on arbitrary and unfounded statement.
But for fun's sake, I would reverse that and say that "atheism is rational and therefore it gains you a favor". That of a sane mind! :smile:
Why atheism is rational is too obvious to be explained.
However, the problem lies elsewhere: You cannot interpret belief in God --and theism, i general-- on a rational basis. Reason and belief in God can satisfy totally different needs. The need for reasoning, evidence, etc. is totally different than that of believing in God. They are not contrary; one does not exclude the other. They can coexist harmoniously.
Quoting Scarecow
Really. What are you talking about?
This is not philosophical thinking. It's a religious and dogmatic talk.
Quoting Scarecow
It does sound ridiculous! :smile:
Proving that the Christian God does not exist, which is to say that either it is internally contradictory or contradictory with a well-established fact, does not amount to imprecise definition, as an aproximation with contradictions is not an aproximation but an impossibility.
Demokritos' atom was a wild guess that happened to be close to later confirmed empirical reality, but Demokritos' atoms do not exist because we know today that the basic constituents of matter are not solid blocks but full of empty space fermions aside.
Whether or not the approximation has contradictions is irrelevant to the fact that it is the approximation and the thing to which it points conceptually is that. Who is to say at what point the hypothetical begins and where it ends? Science is all approximations.
Exactly!
The word was not coined by atheists, who were perfectly fine going about their business without a load of guilt or fear and without a label. The label was stuck on them by believers as an accusation - or a brand. So they said, what the hay, the shoe fits close enough.
As for gods punishing... Do you suppose they also exchange prisoners?
At that point you can just say that everything is an approximation to something and thus we can't prove anything wrong.
Kepler's system was an approximation of how the solar system really works. Geocentric theory was nonsense.
Quoting Pantagruel
Approximation of calculations, not approximation of concepts or fictions.
Are you equating concepts and fictions?
No idea what a pagan atheist might be. I was just expressing an obvious absurdity about the usual claims of monotheism's perfect deity. Conveying 'truth' through an old book, the contents of which few can agree upon, is sloppy work. The botched and imperfect world we live in, full of design flaws and disease also seems to indicate sloppy work. And the fact that a god would design an animal kingdom where predation, torment and suffering are a constant necessity for most species to eat, suggests a love of cruelty or more sloppy work. And there's more... but I have no doubt that believers of any stripe can find a post hoc rationalisation for these things, or a way to deny they are present.
This is true. It would have been simpler if you had put it that way from the start.
That's the second reason not to believe in gods. Whether they're as powerful as the believers claim or not, they're not worthy of praise. I can't worship anyone who fails to meet my standard of morality.
The first reason was the stories believers tell about their gods.
I think, if there is (a) god(s), and our conventional constructions hold true, that god(s) would "see" through our self-serving reasons. In that sense (albeit, I'm speculating) an authentic atheist might garner more divine favor than a self interested adherent (albeit divine favor is not the point of religion).
In any event, theism (or "mysticism" , deism, agnostic theism, pantheism) and so on, might be as rational a mechanism as any, in "places" in philosophical pursuits where one is left having to fill "gaps" with an externally independent/atemporal/first mover etc.
On the other hand, atheism seems rational when we restrict ourselves to empirical methods, etc.
To me there are "regions" of religious thought in history which necessarily overlap with and inform philosophy (particularly moral/metaphysical) and can shed light on "truths" which for one reason or another, philosophy has overlooked.
Finally, for me, many of the arguments which this age raises against (a) god(s), stem from a mistaken expectation that god(s) are for gaining favor/reward, and avoiding suffering/punishment; that god(s) has to be active in, and "care" about, the things we care about: actively alleviating suffering, intervening to prevent "sins", choosing sides, etc. These, and questions like "why are wars so often in the name of religion?" are strictly human concerns tainting religion, giving rise to "fanatical" (angry and hostile) atheism.
To me, I do not have to profess to be a Christian to appreciate these words from its founder regarding the "proper" religious perspective on/relation to god. After telling his disciples not to seek worldly favors from god(I.e., the alleviation of suffering) he exhorts them to only do this, "seek [god's] kingdom [domain/realm/dimension/truth/reality]" and leave worrying about the world to the world.
With this simple sentence, you've put yourself in the "God" position. You've now judged God and thus assumed the role that you know better about how run the universe.
Look, you're free to place yourself in the "God" role but I wouldn't given our incredibly limited scope of knowledge as humans. We live for ~70-80 years maybe and process reality throughout our own irrational and biased brains and then who knows what after it all ends.
We can do it but it's sort of a ridiculous exercise. If I'm God everybody gets free ice cream btw.
Straw man. But I would say that I (and most members here, probably you too) are morally superior to the Old Testament god (at least the character as written) who endorses slavery and commits mass murder even more effortlessly than Pol Pot.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
:up: I think it's proper to take every opportunity to analyse the narratives we are presented with whether it's the Koran or the Old Testament or The Book of Mormon and identify problems and inconsistences. That's our job.
Anyway, there' s no point letting a little thing like god come between us. Take care.
Let's just start with the flood. God presumably kills a large portion of humanity. Was he wrong to do that? You presume that you know better. I admit that I don't know. That's the difference here.
Religious people say God will give and take life as he does. You say that you know better. That's really the fundamental difference. So how much life should everyone have? I understand that to us floods/natural disasters look bad but we also just don't know anything about the bigger picture.
No, the difference is that I accept that the mass murder by drowning of men, women and children is wrong.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
There's really nothing you can't justify using this approach, just like the Muslims do.
And we weren't talking about 'natural' disasters we were talking about god created ones. Omniscient omnibenevolent disasters, apparently.
Murder is unlawful killing. In any case, if no flood how long of a life do these people get? The flood story is derived from an ancient mesopotamian account btw. How much life does everyone deserve?
Quoting Tom Storm
Jews and Muslims are on the same page then.
Quoting Tom Storm
God is the ultimate cause of natural disasters. Nature is under his purview according to classic theology/the bible.
No, just the tiny corner of it that we can see and experience. When your car stalls and you have to pull off to the shoulder, you can't help knowing that's not supposed to happen, even though you're not qualified to design car engines.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
The people, probably. The animals, definitely.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
God does whatever he bloody well likes. That doesn't make it right by human standards. And it's the humans are expected to do all the praising and adoring. Can they, in good conscience? Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Killing willy-nilly is the least serious indictment. It's all the suffering inflicted on innocents who know nothing of good and evil that I can't forgive any sentient entity who did it. The bigger picture doesn't come into it: if the god is omnipotent, he has the power to reduce the horror in each pixel.
Always seemed to me that there was never an expectation in Christianity that 'the world' could be other than a 'vale of tears'. The point of the Christian faith is not to fix that, but to transcend it. Heaven, or the Life Eternal, is where there is no suffering or evil or corruption ('there's no sickness, toil or danger in the place to which I go.') Whereas because there's no conception of that in secular culture, we expect earthly existence to be as perfect as possible, and then blame the God we don't believe in for spoiling it.
Quoting Schopenhauer's Compass, Urs App
Yes, that's a car -- not a human. We don't say that about someone who is deaf or blind.
Quoting Vera Mont
How much life do they deserve? Should such a life also be pain free?
Quoting Vera Mont
That is faith for you. Death could be the most wonderful thing to happen to us, yet we all fear it. In my faith, God is viewed as essentially good -- we may not understand his ways, but in the end it's all for the best. Nor can God be judged by human standards. Otherwise he'd be guilty of murder when a 90 year old dies of natural causes. All death would be God "murdering."
Quoting Vera Mont
He could, but maybe the suffering is for a purpose. In any case it is temporary.
No, we say that about a world full of blindness, leukemia and leeches. Quoting BitconnectCarlos
It's not about quantity. It's about punishing them for the perceived iniquity of one tribe of humans.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
No, not for me! Pain cannot be the most wonderful thing to happen to any feeling entity. Faith may be able to find an excuse for any amount of cruelty; reason cannot.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
What other standards are there? If somebody wants my admiration, they have to earn it.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Faith can find an excuse for any amount of cruelty; reason cannot.
:fire: Yes yes a minimally moral (i.e. empathic-benevolent) person, who knows a child is on the verge of being raped and also has the power to prevent it, would do so whereas "Almighty God" does not prevent child-rapes (e.g. priests) wholly unworthy of worship. Such a deity is either a sadist or a fiction.
Quoting Tom Storm
:100: :up:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Theodicy is a top-down, otherworldly, inhuman/unnatural excuse ex post facto rationalization for 'divinely permitted' evil in this world. In other words, it's superstitious bullshit. :death:
Quoting Vera Mont
:clap: :flower: :hearts:
Depends on the church.
Quoting Wayfarer
My criticism of the characters in monotheism are closer to literary criticism. I dislike Mr Casaubon almost as much as I dislike Yahweh.
If you and I were talking about god and scripture, we would likely be talking allegory and I wouldn't bother talking about scriptural truth. I'm assuming we'd both consider this pointless. But some here seem to believe this stuff.
Quoting Wayfarer
Like most Westerners, I grew up hearing sermons about the perfection of nature and god's design. Still a theme, given my last church attendance at Easter. So all I am doing is providing an atheist's counterpoint.
Quoting 180 Proof
And what's truly dispiriting is the awful tap dance believers will do to justify the unjustifiable. This must be what they mean when they say religion is nihilism.
Yes, ritualized reality-denial. Which is why I define "faith" as believing in the unbelievable in order to defend the indefensible and excuse the inexcusable.
So are you rejecting the concept of god that you perceive as being advocated in the world around you, or are you rejecting the most reasonable concept of god that you yourself have been able to formulate? Just curious.
Maybe it's our job to elevate it.
Quoting Vera Mont
We're talking about the flood regarding animal deaths, right? I can't say that God bringing about animal death is bad. Would it be better for them to die slowly of old age?
Quoting Vera Mont
Pain is not necessarily cruelty. Some pain can be cleansing. Some pain can be justice. Some can be necessary. Some can be for growth.
Quoting Vera Mont
Does God "murder" a 100 year old who dies of natural causes? It is him taking life - murder, right? Or is it ok if he's 100? How do we judge the giver and taker of life according to human standards who operates outside of nature?
Theodicies like Job are just a reminder that as humans our scope of knowledge is very limited so consider that before understanding misfortune as cosmic injustice. Just facts.
I am rejecting the concepts of gods.
Some that I've read about are less gruesome than others; some are even attractive in their way, but none are credible - and I've read a fair amount of mythology. The guy in the Bible was pretty awful in the OT, but he was at least in some kind of acceptable proportion to the people he harassed. Once the Roman-European Christians raised him way above his level of incompetence, he became both grotesque and absurd.
I have not formulated a reasonable concept of god, since that's an oxymoron, but I've both encountered and depicted some tame versions of the Christian one in fiction.
We've done a bang-up job so far!
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
That's what I'm doing and I consider myself lucky, so YES. Have you ever drowned?
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Bull. Shit.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
By whose definition? Are you at all familiar with criminal codes?
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
By rejecting him.
Do you think that other people with different experiences might be capable of forming such a concept? Not everyone is capable of conceptualizing equally well in every domain. Perhaps you lack the relevant experiences or abilities? The world is full of examples of people who are incapable of grasping concepts that others find evident. Look at flat-earthers.
It's theoretically possible, but I have not encountered it in god-related literature.
Quoting Pantagruel
Well, I dropped some acid in my youth, but all I saw was the Void looking back at me.
Ancients called that "gnosis" or "nirvana" ... :victory: :cool:
Not at all. That you deny all of the suggestions he put forward is extremely perplexing. Swathes of pains are beneficial for various reasons. I am telling you this, from experience. It's not deniable in these terms.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
This is one very, very good reason to ignore the concept of religious morality from a personal God. Its completely impossible to reconcile it with anything we know about suffering and death. The only thing what you've pointed out seems to make implausible is a personal God making arbitrary decisions about lifespans.
Quoting Vera Mont
Try Psilocybin or DMT.
Can be this, can be that... are not valid reasons for a loving god to torture the innocent.
The excuses come long after the fact and put into a different context from the indictment.
Pain may have the benefit of warning us that something is wrong with the body - but a clever creator might have devised a less unpleasant warning sign. Some pain can be necessary in order to prevent greater harm, but that is not why Jehovah invented trichinosis. Nor does being nibbled to death by piranhas cleanse a cow of anything but her flesh. Rapid growth of bones may cause pain, but it's not the pain that causes growth. Neither does drowning all the creatures in the world - even the little flat world of the OT - cause the tiny remnant of humanity to become virtuous: one of the first things Noah did after landing was get drunk and curse his son for catching a glimpse of his junk.
Then you can always fall back on "He's too big for us to understand."
Okay. In that case, he's too big and inscrutable to give us coherent standards of moral behaviour.
What is it that we know about those two, especially death? Next to nothing -- only that it is inevitable. Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing, could be neutral. Accordingly, we generally leave those decisions to a power beyond ourselves.
God tells us life is sacred. Remove God and life can lose its sanctity quickly.
That right? All the time the majority of the people believed in God, none of them killed any other?
Card Game Analogy
A deck of cards cannot be properly shuffled without the use of mysticism; a human intervening using the blank side of the cards or in secret is necessary. The Card Game analogy is to ask whether the card game is a [I]true game[/I] even with mysticism implied, or is it not-a-game. If argued yes it is a game, then wouldn't the same apply to scientists who use mysticism to create theories? Does mysticism really mean lesser than true?
No. Mysticism isn't about truth or falsehood, fact or fiction, reason or logic. It's an emotional response to Nature, and has nothing whatever to do shuffling cards or theorizing, which in turn have nothing to do with each other. IOW, word salad.
For example, what about the following is not an emotional response? Wanting a game of cards to work so you use human intervention.
That was always a given.
Quoting Barkon
Another side order of word salad.
Quoting Barkon
Pragmatic; not mystical in the least degree.
My words have made a good imprint on this forum, I have set a good example. I'm sure they got across, beyond whatever mad, criminal delusion you're having...
If anyone can parse the sentences above or below
Quoting Barkon
they're more than welcome to it.
Quoting Vera Mont
In the Netherlands today they are allowing a healthy woman to euthanize herself because is depressed. Personal autonomy trumps all.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
But all the time the majority of the people believed in God, nobody committed suicide?
Or if they tried, did some god-fearing busy-body stop them and lock them up in an institution to suffer until god was ready to take them?
I knew of one such woman, institutionalized for years, making desperate attempts to die and being stopped each time, until she finally succeeded by stuffing her bed-sheet down her throat until she choked to death.
But nobody allowed her to euthanize herself, because life - as long as it's not the enemy's or an apostate's or a heretics, or a pagan's or criminal's or a beggar's - even the most wretched life, is sacred.
Can't fault the logic!
I believe that faith is a deterrent against suicide.
But maybe it's all wrong and it should be ignored and that in reality the idea that human life has value is really just a fiction or to be decided purely by the individual. So if you feel depressed or in pain why not commit suicide to stop it? It would be super effective. Who's to say human life is worth more than pigs or insects? Is that the type of society you'd like to live in?
It surely seems so, if the behaviour of people who profess a religion is anything to go by.
How does faith deter anything let alone suicide?
Faith is an important belief.
through fear
And how does "an important belief" deter ... suicide?
through providing a sense of purpose and empowerment. fear can work too.
Damnation by the god doing themselves in for selfish reasons; for escaping the nastiness he had planned for them.
Quoting 180 Proof
I don't think Martyrs consider themselves suicides so much as warriors in the cause, whom their deity is calling to himself.
The distinction is clear enough to the faithful.
Do I look like your Sunday school teacher? Do you want me to assign you reading? I'd wash your mouth out with soap before anything. No need to bring up martyrdom here.
Or pogroms, or crusades, or conquests or inquisitions, or the wars between Protestant and Catholic monarchs, or capital punishment.... Of course not. Suicide for selfish reasons is the only issue regarding the sanctity of life.
Clearly your "faith" has martyred your honesty and intelligence.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/902594
@180 Proof
Ah yes, clear. Well, I get the gist, anyway.
"it seems you lack the intellect that others don't to even make a valid contribution to this."
it-subject seems-verb [you lack the intellect that others don't to even make a valid contribution to this]-object
you-subject lack-verb [the intellect that others don't to even make a valid contribution to this]-object
the intellect that others don't to even make a valid contribution to this (others don't lack the intelligence, the purpose of the intelligence is to make a valid contribution to this).
:up:
The second one is undeciphrable however.
Kudos for taking the trouble; welcome to the rewards.
This is part of the thesis of Durkheim's book Suicide. It has been supported by academic studies, including this one which concludes, among other things that "external religiosity" - participation, in other words - statistically does have a prophylactic effect on suicidal ideation.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/902702
You've inserted several bits of fact-specific information in your objection that don't exist in the claim.
Much pain is beneficial. End of.
Quoting Vera Mont
This is prevarication. The pain is required for the growth to accrue. Given we are pain-perceiving creatures, anyhow. So, either hte position is God imbued us with Pain, and sometimes that's a good thing (it is one way to know we are progressing physically, for instance, or to avoid otherwise deathly scenarios such as high or low temperature exposure) or it is that Pain is a moral wrong, in and of itself.
Why would you not assent to the view that pains can be arbitrary or not?
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Yes. Life isn't sacred. Sacred is an invented concept that applies to nothing without a mind apprehending that invented concept and applying it, to assuage some existential gripes.
Your premise is absurd and unsupported, even if it turns out true. Such is the way with religious thinking. Nonsense. Quoting BitconnectCarlos
It is quite clear that this is a complete non sequitur. Even more so considering the(only) underlined direction you've taken it. This is the exact lapse in reason that leads to the utter insanity of apologetics.
So you think life and death decisions re: human life should be made lightly (i.e. that it is an unserious matter)? It's not like it's sacred. Who's to say humans are worth more than cockroaches? This is where your worldview leads you.
In nature, yes. In intelligent design, not so end of.
Quoting AmadeusD
No, it isn't. It is a side-effect that does not invariably occur.
Quoting AmadeusD
If that is a 'given', it was given by that same loving god.
Quoting AmadeusD
God had an idea that something very unpleasant and sometimes fatal was a good idea. I suspect that a kinder omnipotence would have found a better way to achieve those good ends.
Quoting AmadeusD
It's nothing to do with morals, if it happens through natural evolution. If it's deliberately inflicted, it's at least morally questionable. Or would be, if done by a mortal.
Quoting AmadeusD
Of course it's not arbitrary. It's a process of biology and has explicable causes.... unless invented and inflicted by an omnipotent creator, in which case that creator is not deserving or praise.
:up:
If a deity is "omnipotent" (which entails "omniscience"), then why didn't it create a reality that fulfills its goals without severely, often fatally, harming its creatures? And if it cannot, then, as Epicurus asks, why call this deity why worship "God"? No doubt, just another informal version of
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_poor_design
Unfortunately, yes. If the world is designed such that pains indicate, very well, what to avoid, then its still end of. Excesses aren't exactly attributable to design.
That said, not sure why you're reducing hte discussion to allow for restrictive points?
Quoting Vera Mont
Point to me a situation in which my point is violated? Unfortunately, Vera, we live in THIS world in which my statement is completely true.
Quoting Vera Mont
Yep. I see no issue other than your discomfort here. Which is reasonable. Just doesn't bear.
Quoting Vera Mont
And you may simply be unable to comprehend reasoning beyond Human reasoning. Not sure why you'd think you could - or, at any rate, apply human reasoning to the (claimed) omnipotent designer. Seems totally ridiculous to me.
Quoting Vera Mont
Bingo. I'll leave that there.
Quoting Vera Mont
Ah. So you're the omniscient one. Nice :)
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
(have fixed the formatting, though)Which has nothing to do with my opinion or feelings regarding the importance of human life. It is a clear non sequitur with absolutely no logic to it.
Your suggestions above are further non sequiturs to avoid the clear gap between the (possible) fact we do not grasp 'life' properly, and that we then simply give up our faculties to a (never even close to proven) supernatural entity in blind trust. Risible.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Without invoking God, tell me why you'd think otherwise? Or is the case that you are encased in a religious framework to such a degree that you cannot fathom other thoughts?
I'm quite capable of thinking atheistically.
If so we're on the same page then -- no objective reason for valuing human life over cockroach life. We just have that bias because we're humans but it's not grounded in anything objective.
I read you loud and clear. We can go down that road. See where it takes us.
I agree. However, it doesn't seem to me a non sequitur to reject this reasoning because it's not objective. Perhaps this is why I have more comfort with it.
I generally prefer to believe and act in accordance with (my perceived) reality, but whatever your floats your boat.
Reality is that humans are biased towards humans because we're human. You've provided literally nothing else to support any other position. Which is odd, because I had asked for what causes you to think something other than the above.
Could you attempt?
Yes, it's just another bias. There's a million of them that we have and we generally strive to overcome these cognitive biases in our thinking.
If our natural pro-human bias is not accordance with reality and is just another cognitive bias then I will seek to unlearn it like I do with other cognitive biases. I only seek to act in accordance with true reality. I don't see the problem. Save 100 cockroaches or 100 babies? Who cares -- flip a coin, I guess.
Predation, parasitism and disease are.
Quoting AmadeusD
I was responding to specific posts. The discussion is not under my control.
Quoting AmadeusD
That pain causes growth or that all growth is accompanied by pain? I'm not sure I actually get a point about either, but I know that the first is untrue and the second is it is not always true.
Whether fortunately or otherwise, Amadeus, THIS world came about through natural forces and evolution. Which accounts for why the design isn't all that intelligent.
Quoting AmadeusD
Oh, no - I've heard ans understand all the excuses and apologetics. I just don't respect them. Quoting AmadeusD
Supposedly made in the bastard's image; able to comprehend his commandments; required to believe his idea of love has some relation my concept of love.
Just not getting that love, y'know?
Quoting AmadeusD
No, I'm just an ordinary mortal who can smell it when somebody tries to sell her two fish well past their sell-by-date.
It is reality. I have asked you to put forward something that either discusses, or displaces this.
You have failed to do so. So, once again, can you please attempt this? Otherwise it just plum seems you're just pretending to have an opinion, which reduces to a blind belief (as noted). I would genuinely like you to attempt to either discuss the bias, and why you reject it ("not reality" does nothing for me. Support it. If your "Reality" is to immediately jump to your religious views whole-sale, I can do nought but chuckle. That isn't an answer to this query).
Quoting Vera Mont
Yes. And, ecologically, these, prima facie, have great functional value. (I should be clear - I have no religious position and do not intend to defend one. I just find your line of reasoning chaotically dismissive).
Quoting Vera Mont
Hmmm. This may be a misunderstanding. I did not intimate either of these positions, to my mind. I said, in regard to (i think it was actually bone growth, but Im pivoting here without losing any relevance)
Quoting AmadeusD
This was a discreet example, pointing out that pain is required in various circumstances to achieve the benefit you're wanting without to get without the pain. Fine. But we live in the universe as it is.
Unfortunately, to adequately grow muscle, muscle fibres must be destroyed and that hurts. This has a dual nature. In injury, we need to know this is happening to address it adequately. While I hear your gripe, I just don't see what it has to do with the potential 'nature' of a God. It does it's job well.
(The same pain can be psychologically satisfying in situations of non-injury too(I'm thinking here of perhaps after nine rounds of Jiu Jitsu I cannot fucking move for the pain- but i am happier than heck). )
Additionally, I do not think the variability of pain is relevant. That's a function of it as-is. We tend to think people who do not adequate feel pain are, in fact, defective.
Additionally, again, I think it is entirely coherent to just say 'well, if God exists, you're wrong and misapprehending your reality'. A cop-out that the religious like to fall-back on - but there's no good reason to reject that at this point in the discussion. You not liking shit doesn't make the above illogical despite my sincere sympathy (and in other examples, I'd say the problem of Evil is live. Just think this one fails).
Quoting Vera Mont
These are conclusions. They do nothing for the discussion.
Quoting Vera Mont
You clearly do not understand what I have just put forward. It stands, and there is literally nothing you could say that would defeat it. It may be the case that you're incapable of understanding divine reason (as would every other person in existence, rendering your objection moot).
Quoting Vera Mont
Not his reasoning. You've done well to defeat your own point here :P
Quoting Vera Mont
If you're an ordinary mortal almost all of your claims above are pure nonsense. :) That was my point. The smell of your own farts notwithstanding
It's coherently and consistently dismissive of the idea of intelligent design by a benevolent deity.
Sometimes it can, but certainly not always. Sounds like the observation of William T Craig rather than that of an urbane Jewish man.
And in fairness, this is also where a Christian or religious worldviews can lead you. I remember talking to a couple of elderly former Nazi's back in the early 1990's. They were good Christians, of course. Lutherans, as it happened. They calmly described Jewish folk as cockroaches (as per the Nazi propaganda) - and were sure God would be good with that. They even referenced Martin Luther's antisemitic screed, 'On the Jews and their Lies'.
I also recall more recently meeting with a student social worker of Hindu background. In his view, somewhat ironically, the homeless and the beggars were destined to die of poverty and isolation as a result of Karma. 'They are like insects,' he explained. 'We shouldn't help them.'
I don't think misanthropic nihilism is the sole end result of secularism, it's common in religious circles too. Religious nihilism along with a cavalier disregard for the 'sacredness' of human life seems to be part of the practice of many religions.
I can smell your farts from here, Vera :) Not too bad.
Tom, these are not good Christians. "All Jews are cockroaches" necessitates that Jesus is a cockroach. :sweat:
One can believe themselves to be a good Christian. One can call themselves, outwardly (and even maybe inwardly) a good Christian. But none of that makes one a good Christian.
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm not talking practice. I'm talking Scripture.
Tell that to the millions who used faith and notions of goodness to justify their projects.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
You're almost there. Keep thinking this through. People use scripture to justify any practice, in all religions in all countries.
The problem with religions is that there is no objective basis for morality. It is always an interpretation of or a personal preference of scripture. Scripture is the multiple choice worldview, leading in any direction we, or our priestly class, believe God says we should go.
I am discussing it.
See the descriptive/prescriptive distinction. On a descriptive level we have a pro-same species bias. That says zero about whether it should be maintained rationally.
Typically we learn about cognitive biases in order to unlearn them & improve our thinking.
It's like if I were to say "well humans naturally have confirmation bias, what's the problem?" Well, we naturally try to unlearn that to get our thinking more in line with objective reality.
And the reality in this case is that there is no objective reason for preferring a human over a cockroach.
"But what about subjective reasons?"
I don't care. I seek to act in accordance with objective reality and if that gets you mad then anger is derived from an irrational source.
Sure, ok. But you're deflecting here. My point is that it is utterly absurd for a devout Nazi to declare himself a "good Christian." The Nazi is outside the fold.
Quoting Tom Storm
There may be multiple plausible interpretations but there are other interpretations that are completely implausible and therefore flatly wrong. "Open to interpretation" doesn't mean all interpretations are valid.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Why? What's the basis for unlearning it? (i realise this is now not at all a religious discussion, so happy to leave off if it feels too out-of-place in the thread). This is why non sequitur has been invoked. If there's no rational reason for the bias, there's no rational reason to try to remove it (though, in reality, it is rational to have an in-group bias. That doesn't require an objective basis for such and I would content it irrational to try to unlearn the bias. If you ahve to make that effort cognitively to overcome your actual reality (hehe, below..) then you're not doing God's work or employing rationality, on your terms).
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
This, once again, entirely and completely refuses to engage the question:
What bloody objective reality are you talking about? The one in which we actually have biases towards other humans??. Sounds like you're literally trying to overcome reality.
From our perspective, yes.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
What objective basis have you identified that allows us to determine which is valid and which is not?
And the point, to go back to where this began, is that any human belief system can lead to cockroaches and humans being views as analogous.
And before you say 'but scripture is pure' - we can easily point out that scripture requires interpretation. There is no interpretation free understanding of any scripture.
Argued like a scholar and a gentleman.
Do you believe there's better and worse ways to interpret a text whether be e.g. Cicero or a Buddhist text?
Jews have the Talmud for guidance on this, btw. Interpretations are discussed for ~3 centuries.
The one that we both agreed upon for this dialogue -- that humans have no objective value above that of a cockroach. That it's all just our minds favoring our own kind.
Presumably in this reality there's still fallacies though, right? Like the gambler's fallacy? Probability still has a truth to it. Again, we typically try to rid our thinking of these improper elements.
I'm just running with your version of truth here.
I agree with that. I wouldnt say unfortunately. Its more like, unfortunately, we humans ruminate about and dramatize every little spark of the nervous system.
Poor old pain, such an easy target for derision.
But pain pushes things one way, and pleasure another way, and without each you dont get each direction. Some things fall into the fire and they sit there and get hot, others sit there and burn, others flinch and withdraw (like the hand of a functioning ape), and others explode forcing many other things to move in many directions (maybe blowing the fire out too).
Metaphysically put, change is a bundle of creation and destruction.
Bio/anthropo/psycho-logically put, pain is an organisms way of regulating the destruction part to allow for the creative part.
Pain need not have anything to do with God, and need not be seen as better or worse than any other state - pain is change measured by the one undergoing the change.
Very simply, thank God or the universe or random functioning for pain. Its how organisms feel their way across the desert, to find the shade, which might feel hot absent the trip across the desert first.
No reason to think pain or destruction could be banished from a physical universe and still build a universe anything like it is.
The destruction/creation dance is also discussed by Nietzsche, Aristotle, Epicurus, Darwin, Freud, and in the Bible, each in their own ways, each for a different reason or having a different effect upon the reader. Choose your poison, should it change you, something will be lost, and it might even hurt to live through.
I've put forward: We have biases towards other humans (as opposed to cockroaches, in your account). This is rational.
You now need to either point out why it is irrational, or give a more rational reason to try to lose the bias. You haven't attempted either. Quoting BitconnectCarlos
I'm not quite sure what you mean here, but probability seems to be the functional and rational response to Hume. Unsure how that plays out here, as Im not entire getting what you're trying to do.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
You're not. Because I didn't put one forward. Everything you've responded with is a little bit out-of-place given what i've posited. The bolded above is all that should be responded to, here. I suspect your appeal to Divine sacredness is what's underlying the resistance. Happy to be wrong, if you're willing to actually elucidate..
Quoting Fire Ologist
My inability to sleep due to hairs standing on end, dust landing on my eyelids, the tiniest excitation of my ear drums, a skin cell detaching etc.. says "fucking yes dude, this". LOL. It's an awful reality.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think I/we may have misinterpreted what Vera was doing/saying in those exchanges - but I would say she simply made up a lot of the context, in that regard. Nevertheless I am quite sympathetic to her position. Just htink her discussion here betrays a lack of focus (and perhaps a faulty commitment to an emotional response).
It's irrational for a few reasons.
In-group bias is common among humans. As humans we have an inborn bias towards our own race/ethnic group. We all work to undo that unless we just want to embrace it and embrace racism.
Speciesism is the same deal. Peter Singer talks about this. Species of animals are just different forms of being, one is no higher than the other.
I know youre merely clarifying a finer distinction with Vera, and who the atheists and the believer(s) are here, and maybe Im misreading things, but using pain to show how God was dumb or evil or non-existent, leaves us right back in a position to asses the role of pain in the mix, and I agree with your assessment.
Quoting Vera Mont
Pain sucks. But if we want to live at all, were going to have to work with it. I didnt say like it, I said work with it.
What are they? Your next lines were simply states of affairs without any argument about whether or not it should be. It's certainly rational, on average, to prefer flourishing of humans in the sense that we are far more apt to assist one another, for example.
It would need to be a very, very strong set of reasons to reject that bias. Singer barely gets close - his arguments are more akin to Parfit's in that they fairly soundly refute self-interest theory on it's own terms, but don't establish any reason to adopt either a total change in stance, or what other stance could be considered more rational in the actual world.
Yes. Thank your God for creating it, since you consider pain good. Job questioned it and Jehovah told him : Because I'm bigger than you. He accepted that and if it's fine for you, be happy. I disagree that there is anything intelligent or benevolent in a system that requires antelope to die in agony, torn apart by lions. They don't get the option of "working with it".
The other antelopes do.
The lions do.
The vultures do.
The bacteria do.
The grass does.
No, they don't. The other antelope are lucky to escape, for the moment; they don't 'work with' the loss of a herd-mate. Vultures, bacteria and grass benefit from the death and decomposition of animals. Another's pain is of no use to them.
(BTW, muscle growth doesn't hurt, either. Damage does.)
Among many other things, cockroaches are disgusting.
And humans aren't?
It has taken a lot of time and dedication to understand what the implications entail (though I did start early) and so I can say this with a rather high degree of confidence. In my youth I certainly did not think so kindly. :heart:
If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria. - Nietzsche
The ones I like aren't.
Of course it does. Who can deny that our morality is strongly influenced by evolution?
Evolution shapes our brains to survive which is not necessarily what is right or rational.
If something is not necessarily right then it could possibly be wrong. Evolution helps us survive, not necessarily thrive or self-actualize.
I did, see above.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Only if you see it as a matter of black and white and not as a spectrum.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Do you not think that the values that we define as necessary for those two are given (majorly) by evolution?
If you have some conclusive proof of the phenomenology of antelope agony, that would be interesting!
Quoting Vera Mont
I see you've entirely ignored the necessary relationship between the two, again.
Man, what the hell did I even mean by this. Fixed now.
With no explanation, sure, that's not very compelling though
Quoting Vera Mont
The truth is, you are both right.
What religions don't often face up to is that brotherly love and sanctity are actually applied only to believers. When it comes to unbelievers, all too often it's a different story. (Unbelievers includes those of a different sect.)
It's difficult to state this accurately. Not all religious people all the time regard unbelievers beyond the pale of sanctity, but it frequently goes that way.
But I don't think history shows religious people any worse than irreligious or atheistic people. (Though the majority of people through the majority of history have been religious, so the comparison is a bit flaky.)
Or vice versa. People who claim a religion don't just kill the irreligious and the heretics, they also kill those who profess a different version of their own religion, and those who profess their same religion but fight for a different king, people of their own nation and faith accused of crimes, their rivals, neighbours, fathers, spouses and other drunks at the same tavern.
Belief in a god stops no humans to from acting like humans; having no faith in a god causes no humans to act any worse.
He's right, of course, in his annoying way. Either there's a justification for that difference or there isn't. If there isn't, then morality is deficient. But I think there is. Cockroaches are annoying and dangerous. Butterflies mostly are not, but they are beautiful - except perhaps when they are caterpillars. (That's awkward, I admit) I don't see anything dubious about not destroying beautiful things that do no harm and something very dubious about not destroying dangerous things that are harmful.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Quoting Lionino
Evolution doesn't give a toss whether individuals or a given species survive or not. It doesn't even care much if a species survives. It is a consequence of the genetic variation of individuals within a species and the random effects of that variation on the survival and reproduction of traits amongst those individuals. Morality has nothing to do with it.
Homo sapiens is a social animal. So are many other species. It is curious that we so often see ourselves as individuals and society as an optional extra and a problem. But surely that fact sociality is so common should lead us to conclude that social living enables individuals to survive and reproduce better than competitors. I would agree that this may well have something to do with morality, insofar as morality is about social living. Evolutionary biologists regard this as "kin selection", based on preserving the genome and nothing at all to do with morality, so there is more to be said here.
I do agree that evolution doesn't have much to do with thriving or self-actualizing, as we understand it. Though it does seem very plausible that if morality interfered with the ability to survive at least until reproduction, it would surely die out. (Can you imagine a society in which everyone was celibate? Not for long.) So evolution must influence morality at least in that negative way.
The idea that ethics and morality are not merely about how to live in a society, but also about how to live well as an individual (that is, as an individual in society). Answers to that must be based on ideas about what human beings are and what they can be. But evolution, though it has an impact on everything, does not dictate everything, (though evolutionary biologists seems to forget that), so it is not impossible to choose different ways of living with the constraints of survival and reproduction. If our lives are really limited to survival and reproduction then they are grim indeed. It is better to regard them as the preliminaries to living well but not the whole story. There's more to be said, of course, but I'll leave it there.
The issue is that it's a certainty claim: God does not exist.
If we narrow that down to saying something like, the Abrahamic tradition of God does not exist, then I think it makes sense to say one is an atheist in regard to that.
But to say that one is an atheist about any possible notion of God (which is very often very ill defined) assumes more than one can know.
I think agnosticism is better, with atheism being applied in specific instances.
But we would have way to check if this proposition is true, we can send a telescope to Jupiter, or several of them.
If you say that this donkey is immune to being captured by satellites, or that it is shy and only shows up once a year to one person who looks up at Jupiter at very specific instances, then someone is pulling my leg.
First, define what God is, then we can say if we know enough to say, with certainty, that such a thing exists or does not. Maybe we can't reach certainty, in that case we shift to probabilities.
On that basis, agnosticism is the only rational response. (It is my preferred response if people ever ask me.) But there are a number of physical impossibilities, not to mention improbabilities, about that the green donkey hypothesis that make it, in my view, unreasonable to be agnostic about it. I assume that you focus on logical possibilities because that's the tradition of our philosophy. But we have to live with physical impossibilities as well, so it seems a bit peculiar to ignore them, if what you want to understand is human beings.
Wittgenstein imagines himself in conversation with a philosopher about the question whether the tree they are sitting under really exists, and then realizes that he has to turn to anyone nearby who's listening and explain "It's all right, we're only doing philosophy". If it's only philosophy how can it matter to actual human beings?
Quoting Manuel
That's the logical procedure, and some theists do like to try to follow it. But God isn't an empirical hypothesis. It is how you frame your life. What God means, according to the religions, is how one should (try to) live one's life. (What science means is not just the philosophy of science, but how you do it in practice.) Admittedly, how that works out in practice can be a bit puzzling to outsiders, but that's how the ideas work. (The same is true of science) To put it another way, if you start by defining God, that may turn out not to be a hypothesis, but an axiom. And there's no arguing with axioms, except by their results. In this case, the argument has to be about what life the believer leads.
That's a very reasonable position.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/902043
It's not so clear to me, many people treat God as if it were something explanatory, sometimes even empirical, in the broad meaning of the term (which includes personal experience). Why did I get a bonus at work? God is gracious. What caused my existence? God. Etc.
But I do not think that asking for some properties or attributes or facets of God is asking for too much. The more which can be given, the better we can proceed. If it is limited to a Great Being, or a supreme force, then I do not know what this means, or at least, it is very nebulous.
So I think we can have arguments about God, even if there may be no chance of getting each other to agree.
Yes. People may differ, of course. The view I expressed is unlikely to be acceptable to many believers - though there may be some, with philosophical inclinations who could accept it. There are theologians who would be able to recognize a view like mine.
Quoting Manuel
A nice simple example. But if you look a bit closer, you may think that what is on the surface is not the whole story. When you don't get a bonus, even though you worked just as hard, with the same good results, you don't think maybe it isn't God who gives you the reward, but your employer. You think that God must be angry with you and search for reasons why that might be so. You don't think maybe God is a bit strapped for cash this year so is having to cut back. The idea that it is God who dishes out rewards is protected against refutation. That's important. (I'm sketching here to avoid reams of writing and reading.)
Quoting Manuel
Yes, that's a fair demand. Too many "proofs" of God don't explain what that means. (Hence, we find that the God of the philosophers bears little resemblance to the God of the believers, and that's a problem.)
Quoting Ludwig V
In many ways, I'm not happy to be dealing with a God about whom there can be no argumentation. Hence belief in God as a matter of faith, not subject to rational comment, is far too comfortable a retreat for believers. That's why I suggested how the argument might go.
Quoting Manuel
You are maybe a little too pessimistic. People do sometimes abandon their faith. But it's a complex process that may include rational arguments, but religious belief involves more than that, so they are only one factor.
Quoting Ludwig V
Let's run the argument. "We don't know if god does not exist". The same argument applies just as well (more strongly in fact) to the theist. Ignore Christians or Baha'i, let's take a universalist generic theist: "I believe a personal creator beyond the universe exists". The atheist claims such a being does not exist. The UGT claims such a being exists. Who is more reasonable here?
Let's then say that "we don't know". Here is the problem: you don't whether you will wake up tomorrow, you don't know whether your HS history teacher was really licensed, you don't know whether your dad is really your dad, you don't know whether NASA is really saying the truth, you don't know whether you are dreaming as you read this, and yet you give a good, single-worded, definitive answer when you get asked about all of these matters. But somehow the God question is one of the very few questions where people feel the need to pontificate that we are aren't really sure.
The goal is to seek better understanding. Perhaps the topic of God is not as simple as the "New Atheists" take it to be, for we know that most primitive cultures believe in such a "being" or "beings", so maybe there is a room for nuance here which would be slightly more problematic than claiming that I do not know if my father is really my father, of which more could be said.
If by God you are speaking about a "personal creator", by this you mean a being that has the power to give life to people? If that's what is being argued, then I do not think it is a strong argument.
If you mean that there is "personal creator" of some higher being who created the universe. Well, I would like to know some of the properties of said being. A higher being or a higher power is a very nebulous term, people like to hand-wave when asked about it.
But if it is given precision, maybe we can work it out.
Back to the problem of my father, yes, you are correct, I do not know with 100% accuracy that he is my father. I have plenty of evidence to suggest that he is, but pictures of me being a baby could be faked, maybe the baby in the picture is not me, etc.
Given the options I have, then I opt to believe that my father is my real father with, say, 99% accuracy. Hence, I have no good reason to be agnostic about this issue, because what my father is, is much better defined than God, or a higher being.
Primitive cultures believe thunders are caused by a god's will. We know today it is not the case.
Quoting Manuel
I don't understand this.
Quoting Manuel
I am not making ontological commitments here, that's what theists do. I, instead of relying on religious conceptions, delineated the most generic God-concept possible, stripping it of all its accidents and sticking to the essence, the necessary meaning of the word "God". In my understanding, this concept is of a mind (so it is personal), it is outside of space and time (and by that of course I am excluding hippie distortions like "the universe is god", not to be confused with Spinoza's pantheism), and it is the cause of the world we see I think my rendition of the concept is minimal to all theistic religions.
My point is simple, this insistence on agnosticism applies not just to the God question but to most questions. Yet we reply to most questions with "yes" or "no". There are those that reply "I don't know", surely, but we don't say the people that said "no" are being unreasonable, especially when "yes" would be more unreasonable then. That much says that you are applying a special ad hoc epistemic standard to God.
Quoting Manuel
Now you are working with degrees of certainty and, by that standard, agnosticism, in practice, doesn't really exist a claim that I set to prove in this post. Graph:
Source.
Yes. The point is that there seems to be an innate mechanism that causes us to believe in these things, which is why I do not think they should be dismissed that easily.
Quoting Lionino
You said: Quoting Lionino
This creator is personal, meaning applies to one person, the one who believes? Or does this refer to people who claim a creator creates everything?
These are not the same.
The first claim is significantly weaker than the second one.
Quoting Lionino
So it's a mental concept, which postulates something outside of space and time. Ok, a mental concept, is a mental concept if we can apply it to something empirical, we can either affirm or dismiss the claim.
If a person believes in Unicorns, but we find no unicorns in the world, then this belief is a fiction, because empirical evidence goes against such a claim.
If you speak of a being outside of space and time, how are we to verify or dismiss it? I don't know how, so I don't know if such a being exists.
If in addition to this a theist says, I believe this being is all good and all powerful then we have plenty of evidence to show that this claim is false, we show them the world.
Quoting Lionino
Most people say yes or now to these questions, but I don't think most people care much about epistemology, or if they do, it's to a quite limited range. But you are asking for certainty, I cannot give you that.
Quoting Lionino
As I said, if you are speaking about the Abrahamic tradition, of which I belong to and whose arguments I understand to some degree, then I am an atheist. I don't believe in heaven, I don't believe in hell, I do not believe a person rose from the dead, etc. Those are rather specific claims, which are capable of being shown to be wrong.
As to whether there is such a thing as "God" or a higher being, I do not know, I cannot verify or deny this. Ergo, I am an agnostic on the God question.
Yet we dismiss a guy sitting on clouds causing thunder. In any case, primitive societies are animists. I remember reading good psychological investigation into animism like how we see faces on rocks and clouds even though there are no faces , without any appeal to the actuality of those beliefs.
Quoting Manuel
It means it is a person, it has a mind, it thinks.
Quoting Manuel
I don't think that is what I am referring to, as "a creator creates something" is a nonsensical phrase.
I am using the most basic concept of God we can deal with before it stops classifying as God. It is straightforward like that. Every God we may find is a mind, it is not fully physical, it is a creator. If something is not one of these, it is not a God. It is a matter of grammar.
Quoting Manuel
No. Every concept is mental. The God concept is a concept that refers to a mind.
Quoting Manuel
You are changing your terms. Empirical evidence doesn't go against the unicorn, there is a lack of empirical evidence for the unicorn. Likewise, there is a lack of evidence for a being outside of space and time.
This question is about grammar in the end.
Quoting Manuel
Are you sure there is no heaven? It is outside of space and time as we know, too.
Quoting Manuel
You can't give me certainty. So let's just say we are agnostic about everything and call it a day. Deal?
Sure. And these are quite interesting to discover out psychological constitution which could bear fruit in other areas of inquiry.
Quoting Lionino
Ha, now I think this is semantic. Ok, there is lack of evidence for the mental entity unicorn. So it is a fiction, fine with that.
How do you know there is no evidence for something outside space and time? Can we go to this place to verify or reject such a claim?
Quoting Lionino
The Christian tradition posits a person who raised from the dead and said there was a heaven. In this world, I do not know of any cases in which a dead person has come back to life after several days.
Ergo, I do not believe there is something called heaven based on this tradition. Such a person today would be called a charlatan, correctly.
Am I certain there is no heaven? I don't reach certainty, but if you like, I'd say I think there is a 99.9% chance that heaven does not exist.
Quoting Lionino
That's too hasty. But if forced between certainty and agnosticism, I think agnosticism is a safer bet. I cannot go outside myself, much less outside of space and time to see what may or may not exist.
The word evidence already invokes a "how to know". Next you will ask me how do I know that I know there is no evidence.
Quoting Manuel
Because it is, the issue is that you are not being consistent. You want to be sure about some things and but then claim you can only be unsure about a specific matter for no reason.
Quoting Manuel
Again lack of evidence. It doesn't prove there is no heaven.
Quoting Manuel
Degrees of certainty. See:
Quoting Lionino
Quoting Manuel
Ok, so we don't know anything for sure, not just the matter of whether there is a God. handshake
Where primitive cultures had incantations and spells, dances and chanting to ask supernatural beings for magic solutions to their problems, modern religions have prayers and processions and church services and hymns to ask one of their gods for miracles.
It's all just looking for a parental figure to fix things in our favour.
Another thing both kinds of religious ritual have in common is fire - bonfires, torches, sconces, candles. I think we still haven't quite gotten over the magic/miracle of tame fire.
Well, the first half of that is debatable, but let's save that for another time. You seem to have agreed on an agnostic position.
From observation of philosophical debate it is clear that both (some?) theists and (some?) atheists agree (though I've not seen either side explicitly acknowledge the fact) that the question whether there is a God is empirical. Let's have a closer look at it.
First, it implies that there is a concept of God - in fact several concepts, but let's take the minimalist one. Let's treat it as a hypothesis. Both sides, presumably have an answer to the question what is to count as evidence, either for or against. It comes down to experiences. Theists will cite certain experiences, which are not universal, but are not uncommon, and the various mysteries that exist in the sciences, and possibly the idea of an experiment, in the form of prayer. Atheists will cite the lack of any experiences that specifically prove God exists (and discount all the evidence given by the theist). On top of that, I think that they will not be able to explain what experiences might convince them. Certainly, I can't and I've never seen anyone try.
There has been considerable debate about where the burden of proof lies. Each side makes a case that the burden of proof is with the other side. So no agreement there.
Transcendent experiences may well convince the person who has these experiences, but are of little or no value to the atheist, because they are so subjective. Experimental prayer doesn't stand up to scrutiny by the standards commonly applied in science. A God of the gaps certainly won't convince anyone who isn't already convinced - it comes down to interpretation of the evidence.
Atheists seem to be in a stronger position if the burden of proof lies with the theist. However, proving that unicorns, for example, don't exist is at least very hard. Arguably the only reliable case is a proof that they could not possibly exist - i.e. that the concept of a unicorn is incoherent in some way. The same applies to the concept of God. But that's not going to convince a theist.
I don't see what might happen to resolve this. Suggestions welcome.
For me, both theism and atheism are irrational, even if they are empirical claims. Which leaves agnosticism as the only rational position.
Not to re-bump that extremely frustrating argument from earlier this year but this is a common problem with misusing the word 'atheist'(or, at least, not adequately paying attention to it). There are four words we can use to adequately, discreetly and clearly delineate the four positions of relevance:
A. Theism=I know there's a God;
B. Atheism = I do not know whether there's a God;
C. Agnosticism = I cannot know whether there is a God; and
D. Anti-Theism = I know there is not a God.
Given all discussions that refuse to accept an adjustment such as the above all turn out into the same mess of bollocks every time, It doesn't matter to me that others might disagree on the format. The above solves the semantic issues and makes it quite clear which position makes the most sense given any S's particular perspective. From my perspective B. is the only rational take. For others, the other three may meet that benchmark based on what they believe.
I remember that discussion. Thanks for the reminder.
In the context of the assumption that it is an empirical debate, I'm content with C. In favour of it is the idea that existence claims are always empirical. That's more complicated than it appears.
But in any case, the fact (and I do think it is a fact) that the empirical debate cannot be resolved suggests that it is not simply an empirical debate. The heart of the problem is that the debate is not about the evidence, but how the evidence is interpreted. That means that the proposition that God exists is not empirical, but is a principle of interpretation.
Short story, it is an extension of the concept of a person and the associated language-games. The gods of animism are much more like a personification of their various powers than anything else and monotheism is an extension of that.
So that brings into question whether there is a coherent minimalist (or maximalist) concept of God. I think that there is not. D may be more appropriate to that.
But if I think that theism is irrational, I must think that anti-theism is also irrational, which suggest that D may be more appropriate.
Who cares about divine favor, especially if you don't believe in God? Your argument, if you want to call it that, assumes that some religious God exists. Your presupposition that God exists, forces you to assume that divine favor is important. It's rather circular.
Do you not think this could just be a result of 'mistake'?
That there really is possible 'evidence' for God which is 'true' regardless of how any particular human sees it? This is essentially my position. I don't know why we would somehow attribute an ontological free lunch to the concept of God simply to avoid having to resolve the issue.
Well, I was accepting the widespread belief that the issue is empirical and trying to think through the consequences. I hope I demonstrated that, as at present conducted, the debate will not be resolved, because the two sides talk past each other. On that assumption, agnosticism is the only rational possibility.
I don't rule out the remote possibility that something might turn up that would work as empirical evidence for God. But I can't imagine what that might be. If God did turn up in some way, I would have a great many unanswerable questions to discuss with them.
My actual position is that the concept of God is incoherent, which means that I can neither assert not deny that such a person exists - the concept would have to be coherent for either assertion to be meaningful. So I can't classify myself under any of the four propositions you listed. (I suggested D earlier, but I've changed my mind.)
However, on my understanding of what a religion is - a way of life and a collection of practices and attitudes, if the existence of God is treated as an axiom, it may well be rational. Atheism, then, would be the adoption of the non-existence of God as an axiom, and could well also be rational. (Geometries based on different axioms are all rational - consistent and complete.) Axioms are not adopted on rational grounds, they can only be assessed by their results.
Quoting AmadeusD
I don't quite understand what you mean. What could I do to bring matters to a head?
Ah ok, this clarifies. Thank you.
Quoting Ludwig V
LMAO yes - this might be the more intractable issue.
Quoting Ludwig V
Perfectly reasonable, IMO. It does seem to exist by definition, rather than anything else (conceptually).
Quoting Ludwig V
I don't quite understand why this would be the case? There's no commitment at all behind atheism, on my account (and the one i'm importing into the above table of possible positions.. feel free to just not use them though. That' sjust my account).
Quoting Ludwig V
I think what I'm highlighting here (and in retrospect, is not likely to be part of your position) is that many agnostics (on the account given above) take that position to avoid the discomfort of either anticipating, or failing to find, the evidence required (the latter would be your religiously-inclined atheist, the former, the neutral atheist) for God. A girl/woman (dunno what she'd prefer) from my class last night was outlining why she thinks objectivity is impossible, but it boiled down to just not liking uncertainty. I think this the case for a lot of agnostics - they can just leave off the issue entirely by claiming that looking for the evidence is a fools errand.
I'm a full-blown unbeliever in any and all of the theist stories, and I will not wimp out with the "maybe there is a supernatural something somewhere" agnostic line.
Yes. The trouble is that believers wouldn't buy that. They think that God is real, so the problem is to discover and describe him/her/it.
Quoting AmadeusD
I was thinking what might persuade me to think that a religion was rational. If someone posited God as an axiom, and thought through the consequences for their life and lived accordingly, that would be rational, wouldn't it? Then, if religion was rational, atheism could posit (or just not posit) the axiom but still be rational, if they thought through the consequences and live accordingly. However, if both ended up living the same sort of life, it would follow that the axiom was unnecessary and could be abandoned. That would be a rational approach to religion. Not altogether implausible.
There is a school of theology, known as presuppositionalists, (look up a theologian called Van Til) who do adopt this approach. However, they posit that the Bible is true, which is a whole different ball game. I've never seen a philosophical discussion of this, but that's understandable. If you presuppose that the Bible is true - well, other than as a historical document and evidence for history - there's very little to argue rationally about.
Quoting AmadeusD
"Can't be bothered" as opposed to "Don't know". I'm sure there are people, perhaps many, who are like that. They'll go with the crowd in the end.
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes. A lot of philosophers are very bothered by that, as well.
A good strong position. I hold the same view regarding such stories. But isn't there something "behind" the stories that a person cannot wimp out on even if she tried?
Like what?
Sure there is: human psychology. That subject interests me greatly in all its variety and complexity. I'm interested in mythology and anthropology. Obviously, the lure of magic, wish-fulfillment, personification of natural phenomena and all those impulses that begin with ritual and eventually culminate in huge international institutions like the RCC, is very much a part of that interest.
But if you mean some kind of anima or spirit in the real world, no, I don't think there is such a thing.
RCC = Roman Catholic Church?
Quoting Astrophel
For me, phenomena like personification and our ambivalent (or complicated?) attitude to animals is a clue. The concept of a person can be applied to things that are like people in some ways, but not others and it is particularly tempting for societies that don't have the benefit of modern science. If you think that some sort of super-human being is throwing the furniture around in heaven it is less alarming than not knowing. You can take steps to appease its wrath, which is comforting even if ineffective.
I have a feeling that some conspiracy theories have the same origin.
Yes; I believe it's the biggest and most powerful religious organization in history.
I don't put much credence in the scary thunder idea. We evolved in the natural environment, including weather. We've been hearing thunder since the development of an auditory organ, and it's always been associated with a certain kind of weather, from which all animals take shelter if they can. I think explanation of cause only gains importance after the concentration of humans in walled cities - after we cut ourselves off from nature and felt we had to master or conquer nature.
However, in native mythologies, it's common to put human-like gods in charge of natural phenomena, where thunder, lightning, wind, rain, fire and heavenly bodies become tools, weapons or vehicles for the use of the gods. These stories are a way of 'taming' natural phenomena: if there is someone made in our image who can control those forces, perhaps we can convince that entity to refrain from using them against us. In some mythologies, of course, the storm or fire is itself depicted as a personality with a human-like mind.
Much more important than stories about the elements are stories about dead people. It's very difficult to accept the loss of people we love and depend on. The idea of ghosts, spirits, transformation into trees or stars or guardian angels - essentially, denial of their death - is a way of coping with grief. From this kind of make-believe come all the rituals of burial, grave decoration, markers, shrines, funeral pyres, feasts in honour of the departed; caverns, pyramids, cemeteries and mausoleums to preserve the remains.
Like screaming children in burning cars. Suffering, that is. That is not a story.
Not that. To talk about such a thing would imply one understands what existence "really is," meaning, you can't go on about how spirit is not the case if there is no existing basis for what is the case, and this is impossible: existence as such doesn't have an identity one can talk about. If you say there is no spirit, loosely construed, in the real world, I would ask, what is it that you refer to when the matter of thoughts and feelings and intuitions arises? If one is curious or envious, say, this surely is outside of the category of being a couch or a shoe. This is purely a descriptive matter: things and not at all like state of mind.
The idea that because people are necessarily limited, you're allowed to rationally reject, wholesale, the concept of god (not God) is bizarre to me. Its patently not rational.
This is weird wording though - obviously you're allowed to do what you want intellectually - I'm pointing out the hilarious irony in trying to rationally achieve a position which is irrational.
My internal experience. Quoting Astrophel
Without intelligent makers, there would be no couches or shoes.
Of course some matter is alive, while most matter is inanimate. But what's that to do gods? Zebras and lemurs don't worship anything, and they do all right in what's left of their environments. Human are story-tellers. It's not likely other animals make up stories.... though I sometimes wonder whether cats, dogs and apes star in their own imaginary movies that same way humans do.
Fair enough. We can be bizarre to each other.
Errrr, really? My question asked about what could be "behind" those old bible stories so easily dismissed, referring tosomething substantive to religious belief and practice that is logically prior to story telling, as, say, there was ethics prior to politics. You see? Children in burning cars was just a vivid example of what this could be. "Suffering" I did explicitly indicate was what I had in mind.
This is a question about your reference to "spirit". So when you examine your internal experience, what you find is a kind of content that really doesn't conform to the standards of existence that are generally in mind when one dismisses this concept. What you find is an undeniable qualitative distinction between this internal world of moods, attitudes, thoughts, ambitions, fears, desires and on and on, and whatever external world descriptions you can think of.
Put it this way: when you say you don't think there is such a thing as spirit, you implicitly draw on some standard of what the world really is that rejects the positing of spirit, and so I am assuming this standard refers to what is not your internal experience, but in your external experience. But since the two, internal and external, are qualitatively so different, one is given to wonder why the internal should at all be subject to what the external standards have to say.
Quoting Vera Mont
Couches and shoes are objects. The point really was to simply say that a human "world" when observed closely, as a scientist would observe, is found to be not a world of objects. An inquiry intent on discovery of the nature of what is "there" in one's "internal experience" will notw above all that this is nothing at all like the external counterpart of this world: the world of shoes, rocks, telephone polls, morning dew, etc.
Before there was worshipping, Gods, and all the trappings of these churchy fetishes (I like to call them), there was a basic problematic built into existence that gave rise to the worshipping and the rest. It is not psychological because psychology presupposes this fundamental problem. Fetishes are parasitic on a more basic phenomenon. Here, I am asking what this "original" problematic is. One has to move to another order of questions, those about the presuppositions of psychology, biology, and any other category of science. Why? Because the discovery of what spirit IS lies outside of these. After all, if one is going to dismiss spirit, it has to be made clear what the term even means apart from the mundane casual thinking. One has to inquire after it, so to speak.
I don't understand. What is the standard that comes to the general mind when [some?]one dismisses the concept of spirit? Is there some reason I should meet that putative standard?
Quoting Astrophel
Is there a boundary between internal and external experience? How does one discern that boundary? And these very different kinds of experience transmit different kinds of information? Can you give a neurological explanation as how that works?
Quoting Astrophel
Sorry. I can make no sense of that paragraph. My best guess is something like: delving into the human psyche reveals that it differs from inanimate objects. That much, I have already stipulated as self-evident. If that difference between life and non-life is supposed to be a "spirit", I accept that as a metaphor, not as a physical entity.
Quoting Astrophel
That's a widely held opinion.
Yup. Ignorance of causality.
Well, it was you who brought up "my internal experiences" so I was just moving forward with this. It was the denial of spirit and the acknowledging of internal experiences that gave me pause to think: Internal experiences are of a certain kind of "being," as you affirmed when you said the thinking, feeling, valuing, being amused, sad, and all the rest refer to internal experiences. What are external experiences things about vis a vis internal things? This would be the question that creates interest. It is not about neurology, for this is an external matter, meaning to find such a thing one goes to the same places one goes to find external things like fence posts, tin cans and other external things. Brains are external things, no? They are entirely unlike internal things like the above thinking and feeling and the rest. Qualitatively unlike each other, right? This is how I understand your "internal experiences" reply.
Quoting Vera Mont
But you don't need a metaphor to simply describe what is there right before your eyes, so to speak. It does take a certain suspension of assumptions about what things are to allow them to stand on their own. I am simply saying, in a non reductive way, that feelings, thoughts, attitudes, moods and everything else you might include in your "internal experience" are qualitatively different from those posited as external. Just this. It isn't about life and non life, neurology, or really anything outside the manifest qualities themselves. Indeed, I thought this entirely without issue since I was arguing on the assumption you provided.
Quoting Vera Mont
Opinion? Opinion about what? I mean, I am not clear what you are agreeing to.
I didn't bring them up. I responded to:
Quoting Astrophel
Where you take that, I don't quite follow. Is it that you want me to agree that there is some kind of otherness in sentience? Something beyond or behind the processes of the brain? I can't do that, because I do not believe that.
Quoting Astrophel
I have no idea: it's your distinction. You have not explained the difference between internal and external experience. Are you just getting all this mileage out my using the word 'internal'? It wasn't essential. It has nothing at all to do with spooks.
No! Brains are inside the skulls, which are part of the bodies and inside the skin, of sentient organisms. Everything in sensory and conceptual experience is neurological. Everything we know about the inanimate world comes through neurological process. You can't think, intuit, feel, remember or discern any external things without your brain!
Quoting Astrophel
about Quoting Astrophel
I do not agree with that opinion. I do not see a problem in existence.
As in not knowing, say, disease to be caused by microbiology. Not so much about causality itself, but of what causes what. On the other hand, the question remains, what is there that is IN the causal matrix of the world? If it is asked, what is a force? a physicist can't help you. She can SHOW you, but really, force is quite invisible. All one can witness is movement, change, and one can quantify these in endless ways, but force itself is not an empirical concept. Nor is the basis for all this talk about theism and atheism. The world is simply there and all the religious thinking comes from it, but the world as such is simply given.
So "behind" all the churchy fetishes, in the world, there is its own givenness, and here we find the mystery of value and ethics. This is what is behind all those stories.
But consider: you don't think there is a basic problem with our existence that stands outside of, and prior to, the language and cultural institutions that rose up out of a response to this? Why are we born to suffer and die?
Nope.
Quoting Astrophel
We're not born to suffer and die. We're not born for any reason at all. Life begets life, willy-nilly. The universe expands.
Humans would like to find a reason, a purpose, a great big invisible thingie that explains it all and makes us the one special jewel in the crown of creation. I don't subscribe to any of that. I don't believe in magic and don't need it. Being just is. We make the best and worst of it.
I don't know about "more important", but I agree that this is something that is addressed in all religions, and it is important to people.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, of course this is also part of the mix. The book of Job comes to mind.
Quoting Vera Mont
Of course, and so it is easy to see why creation stories are included in so many mythic cycles.
Quoting Astrophel
Quoting AmadeusD
It is not enough, it seems to me, to dismiss the whole business as superstition. We can't pretend that it isn't still important to human beings. It would be reasonable to suppose, wouldn't it, that religion addresses issues that are still important to us? The question of it's historical origin is one way, though it is unlikely that we'll get more than plausibility this far from the events.
Quoting Vera Mont
Causal explanation in our sense is a more recent development. It is part of the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. But walled cities, agricultural technologies and religion (in our sense) all seem to have arisen at, very roughly, the same time. (Some people talk of an Age of Wisdom.) It makes a lot of sense to see them as interlinked and interdependent. There are many themes built in to religion. It addresses human concerns, but also, as Nietzsche so emphatically pointed out, is involved in the power struggles in the new, complex human societies in the new cities. I think he missed a trick, in fact. Religion gave power to a new version of the shaman - the priest - and supported or enabled much larger human societies. But it also gave a voice to people who are oppressed in those societies.
Quoting Vera Mont
It seems more plausible to me to see the sharp distinction between animate and inanimate - and conscious and not conscious - is a product of our times, specifically of - again - the scientific revolution. In natural language, there is no sharp distinction between action in the sense of what human beings do and action in a broader sense. I mean, quite simply, that we talk of, for example the wind blowing the door shut, the lightning striking a tree, the sun drying the washing without batting an eyelid. We all know the difference, but that's because of our intellectual training. Personification of the inanimate in that way is built in to our language.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes. I do accept that it means something to those who talk about it. My problem is that I don't really understand what that meaning is. Too often, it seems like a way of escaping awkward questions.
Not believing it doesn't mean I dismiss it as unimportant. I can both interested in and sympathetic to a belief without subscribing to it myself. What I reject out of hand is that lukewarm admission that there may be some kind of supernatural something behind or underneath of the universe, and that something could be called God - because we can't prove it ain't so. Why should we bother with such a fruitless conjecture? Just not to be called atheist?
Lots of things that are important to people have no basis in material fact, but originate in human groups: nationalism and partisanship come to mind; adherence to leaders who deserve no such loyalty, reliance on luck or fate, etc.
Quoting Ludwig V
It is and does. Psychological support is one main function of faith, especially when a person is undergoing some difficult ordeal. Social cohesion is another important function of organized religion - a common core around which the community can overcome its personal disparities. Religious tenets encourage good behaviour toward members of one's congregation. It also matters greatly to people who have that all-too-common human craving for a 'higher' purpose, a meaning to their insignificant individual life, a sense of being 'part of something bigger than themselves'.
These functions are not exclusive to religion, but religion is a well established and universally accepted structure on which people rely.
Nor do I dismiss the magical component. The illusion of control - however tenuous and conditional - over that immense threatening universe of natural phenomena. The hope of immortality; the chimera of miracles. These are very, very strong human desires. Of course it's important.
Moreover, I have met sincere believers who did good works just like Christians are supposed to, as well as hypocrites who exploit true believers. I've known a few dozen people who identify as Christian, Jewish or Muslim and found them selective believers: they accept some teachings and ignore others. I assume this is true of the majority of theists. They take from religion what they need and disregard the rest.
Quoting Ludwig V
How could it be otherwise? The impulse to look for pattern in existence is also the root of philosophy. The fundamental childish questions: What am I? Where did I come from? How do I fit into the big picture? are answered by earliest known origin stories, the established religious texts and the latest philosophical treatises.
I actually don't see the power struggles built into religion itself: the Abrahamic religions are founded in a simple hierarchy of males and the basic structure of the institutions has not changed very much, except for the incursion of women into the lately reformed branches. The churches were always used to prop up the prevailing form of government and vice versa - one leg of the tripod holding a vertical social structure. But that's the institution, not the belief itself. (Of course Nietzsche saw the will to power lurking under every bed and coffee table, so we can take that with a grain of salt.)
Quoting Ludwig V
I think it might be built into our psyche, and got into the language automatically, through our tendency to make a narrative of our experience. Literature, religion and philosophy all grow increasingly complex as man's knowledge of the world grows.
No, no. You misconstrue the word "to": not born to suffer and die one, say, is born to be a dentist, and therefore strives to be one, is destined to be one. Here, the term is applied with complete acceptance of the arbitrary nature of our circumstances. Born to suffer and die means born INTO suffering and dying. Just this.
There is nothing magical about being born, suffering and dying that I can see at all. Look, if you want understand atheism (the OP) you need to understand theism, and to understand this, you have to move decisively away from things "theological" that carry significance already assumed and accepted. This is the way it is with getting to basic questions, making the move to dismiss all that obscures what is essentially there, and with the matter of God and all that attends this in theology, this means dismissing a great deal.
I do appreciate your repugnance for religious thinking, from the churchy trivialities to the thunderous pronouncements, but all I am trying to get across is that when God is, well, put to rest altogether, not a peep, then IN our existence in the world there remains a very important residuum, and here one's repugnance for standard religious things and beliefs has to be suspended as well, just because it prejudices thought. This residuum has to do with our being thrown into a world where we suffer. Period. You can embrace suffering, as Nietzsche did, OR, you can observe suffering for what it is, which is qualitatively very interesting. Not to put even the slightest tendentious interpretation on suffering, but just to make it clear as a bell, suffering is "inherently" repugnant.
So atheism is just a response to theism, and theism is constructed out of irresponsible thinking. Responsible thinking categorically removes these terms to see what is really there, in the world, that is behind it all. This is suffering. Now, one can move further along analytically, but this simple assumption has to be acknowledged.
Oh, and "being thrown in a world" does not here imply that, heh, heh, someONE is doing the throwing. Just in case you are confused by this.
Everybody has to die, but the distribution of suffering is quite uneven. But there was still that "why?" attached to the "just this", which renders your acceptance incomplete.
Quoting Astrophel
Done.
Quoting Astrophel
Where have I expressed any such repugnance? All thinking interests me. I reserve repugnance for exploitation and cruelty.
Quoting Astrophel
I can't wait to see what that's like. Literally: I have 20 years left on Earth, at maximum stretch.
Quoting Astrophel
The third way: avoid it where possible, inflict as little of it as possible, relieve as much of it as possible.
(It's bloody well not 'interesting'. It's pretty much all the same: ugly, degrading and tiresome.)
Quoting Astrophel
I see that all my striving at the keyboard has been in vain.
One is free to move right along.
I gets interesting only when the smoke has cleared after the table has been duly cleared. To discover anything insightful about atheism, theism has to be made clear, and a lot of the clearing requires suspending a lot of what is standardly there, in the culture of believing. It really comes down to whether one is willing to do this, to be fed up with the culture and taking a purely philosophical view, and by philosophy I mean phenomenology: the taking the world to BE as it presents itself and no further, but no less than this. It requires a reduction that suspends all the familiar thinking.
It is said that the Buddha was the quintessential phenomenologist, because serious meditation is so radically reductive: the whole world of historical thinking arrested. Now, what is there, before your eyes? Atheism and its theism have to examined like this. E.g., God the creator? From whence comes this premise? Is it anywhere in the revealed presence or the given world? No. It was simply made up, to put it bluntly. There is a LOT that is made up in our general vocabulary about this matter. Hard to let go, but first, one has to see HOW to let go.
The question so far has only bee about what theism if grounded upon. Distribution is a matter of justice and ethics in the entangled world of evolving affairs, and this is where my question will not go, simply because it is far too complicated: ethics in the world of factual affairs presupposes an understanding of what ethics is . That is, before one is confused about whether to steal the cash from the local store's register in order to pay one's rent, there is presupposed in this that very matter that it all matters, meaning, when one goes through the justificatory process weighing the pros and cons, there is the implcit assumption that what is in the balance really matters: no mattering, no ethical issue. The philosophical question then is, what is this mattering about? This mattering qua mattering that is "in the mix" of our worldly affairs. All ethical inquiries lead to this when taken to the foundation of the issue.
Quoting Vera Mont
No, I mean by repugnance just the intellectual rejection. Not a reference to the strong state of mind associated with disgusting things, though understanding that religious foolishness causes a great deal of trouble for others, and one perhaps would, even should, feel a bit more than simply disagreement. Not that important, though.
Quoting Vera Mont
I do suspect the argument may not be framed in familiar ideas. Philosophy is questions, so here is a first question (and just to keep in mind, this is only the beginning. Proving objectively that theism, beneath all the bad thinking, has a dimension that is deeply profound and real, takes a process).
How is it that knowledge is possible? More precisely, how does anything at all get "in" a knowledge claim.
This is the beginning. One has to stay the course. Of course, you are free to "move right along" as you put it. It may not be a comfortable inquiry.
The hard part is finding the most awkward questions one can imagine and ask about them seriously. Here is a hard question, the second hardest question I can think of: how is knowledge possible? When one goes deeply into this, there is the inevitable discovery that it si not, that is, not be any familiar assumptions about the world at the basic level. Knowledge is impossible unless there is a truly radical reconstrual of what knowing agency is. An epistemic agency is one that knows, and knowing can either be a thoroughly constituted matter (if you read this kind of thing, think of Hegel or Heidegger's historicity, or Kant's idealism), or it can be something that "mirrors nature" such that when I see a lamp, there is in the perceptual analysis something over there and not me. You know, this is the way it goes with epistemology: how much of what I witness is actually IN the constituted perception, and how much is beyond this, "over there" and this is a sticky wicket, for the moment one speaks one's speaking lies with the former.
How does this effect inquiry into atheism? Knowledge claims are about EVERYTHING, and so any respectable discussion about God and metaphysics will begin here and the foundational indeterminacy of knowledge and ethics.
Quoting Astrophel
The two words are no more similar than the two attitudes. Why say one when you mean the other? I came by the intellectual rejection of Christianity first and later all organized religions and religious doctrines, through honest inquiry, not from an aesthetic response.
Quoting Vera Mont
That was by way of a sardonic guess at how long it will take for religion to be eradicated from the world. Not the delving into what's been lurking under it.
Quoting Astrophel
For you. I wish you safe journey. I'm already here.
We should wear our badge with pride and not let the opposition use it as a term of abuse.
I it is a mistake to allow supernaturalists to pretend that the question is an empirical one. That is a wedge argument, designed by believers to open the mind of unbelievers. But stick to the issues.
If someone claims to have seen the Virgin Mary, some will propose an explanation such as a hallucination, or down-right lying, and some will propose an explanation such as a vision granted by Heaven. Which is the most likely (plausible)? Even the RCC adopts the former. (This is a version of Hume's argument against miracles.) The RCC is prepared to consider further evidence, and may change its mind, and adopts the latter. Now, either that evidence is of a kind that anyone can accept it, or it is not. What the RCC considers to be evidence is, I understand, evidence that the visionary has caused further miracles, which is clearly circular. No need to fall for blandishments.
If you really need a bolt-hole, you can insist that, where there is insufficient non-circular evidence, the answer is to classify the event as unexplained.
If you get really desperate, you can point out that if a supernatural explanation were to be established (perhaps amongst the paranormal phenomena) on the basis of normal evidence, (not that I can imagine that happening) the explanation would then become a natural explanation.
I hate to say it, but I would not be able to reject an accusation of "whataboutery" if I tried to change the subject to a general philosophical discussion about knowledge. My reaction may be conditioned by my view that much of epistemology has been thoroughly distorted by Cartesian scepticism and the belief that the only certainty is logical certainty; the latter of course, rules out all empirical knowledge out of hand. There is also a danger that if your interlocutor is not convinced by Descartes, your opportunity to persuade them on this specific issue will be lost. Faced with an argument about the existence of God, you try to prove that we don't know anything anyway. No, I don't think so.
Mind you, with a suitable interlocutor, I would be inclined to try to persuade them that the question of God's existence cannot be answered by purely empirical evidence.
What difference does it make whether something you might choose to call God exists in a non-empirical dimension?
None. We are bodies. If God had no relation to the empirical world, God would have no use for us, and we would have no use for God and no reason to seek God or evidence or any content to refer to in any discussions using the term god.
That's about it.
Stickier than that. Descartes made the mistake of positing the cogito as the only certainty. But an examination of what is there in the structure of the cogito shows that there never was a thinking agency that was a stand alone apart from the cogitatum. In other words, if the cogito demonstrates indubitability, then its object must have the same epistemic value. Descartes didn't see this. SO if you are put of by the doubt that his intrudes upon common sense in affirming the world in simple perception, you might reconsider. A careful examination of the cogito shows exactly the opposite: the apprehended world is just as indubitable as the conscious perceiving agent that affirms it. In an important way, there simply is no such thing as Cartesian skepticism, that is, until one makes the move toward interpretation. One does doubt in ordinary ways, and certainly one can doubt the science and everydayness that is constructed out of the cogitata, things present before us.
As to this "purely empirical evidence" I think you are right. But if one is going to take theism seriously at all, even if the interest is to refute it, the idea has to be delivered from all the traditional thinking that generates so much ado about nothing, like all of those omni's, and notions of the creator and the source of judgment, and so on. Most who take up this issue do not really care to ground their thinking in something substantive, but move directly on to arguing about contrived assumptions.
I argue that it is possible to be quite clear about God. Only one has to lose a great deal of historical metaphysics.
I understand, almost. I thought, well, the OP was about the logic of atheism, and the logic of something goes immediately to its presuppositions where the trouble always lies. It IS a fascinating exposition of theism's basic logic. But if you must be off, then farewell.
Best of luck in your remaining 20 years.
As soon as humans are eradicated.
Ah! So maybe I'll see it, after all. At least part of the process.
Just as long as you dont hope to see it, because hope is more of a religious thing. But yes, any day now. Nuclear holocaust, rogue AI, weaponized virus. Trump. Biden. Putin. Lots of possibilities.
Wrong way around. Hope is a human thing and therefore religion. Some religions tried to take out a patent on it, but we still have some.
That could be the beginning of a long argument, which, I guess, would be a trip through very familiar territory. For me, "Apprehended world" and "cogitata" are the dubious interpretations, not the everyday world. In my view, what Descartes missed was the elementary point that doubt implies the possibility of certainty; doubt would be meaningless without it.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, those are the reasons I think that the concept is incoherent. Getting rid of traditional metaphysics is a lot harder than many people thought in the mid-20th century (and, indeed, earlier, back to the 17th century). I am sceptical about whether it is going to happen.
Quoting Fire Ologist
It isn't necessary to wait that long. There are non-theistic ways of life. Confucius (?), Buddha, Stoicism, Epicureanism.
Quoting Vera Mont
Is there a non-empirical dimension?
I don't think so. Therefore, the god of the gaps is immaterial in every sense.
An odd thing to say. Perhaps you could go into this a bit. Cogitata a dubious interpretation? But it is not an interpretation, just a term that designates the the cogito's objects. And apprehended world, I wonder where your objection begins? And then "doubt would be meaningless without certainty": depends on what is meant by certainty. If this is familiar territory, then I can push just a bit. Take a logician's idea of apodictic certainty, as with something from symbolic logic like modus ponens which is intuitively coercive, but it still can be doubted. How? Because all that can be produced in a knowledge recognition is cast in language. Even as I call logic apodictically certain, I do so in the context of something that cannot be subjected to the same apodicticity, and this is the contingency of language. Language makes thought possible, and when it expresses a principle, like MP, it is not as if doing so discovers the nature of the intuition that is so strong. This is a pretty important insight about apodicticity and terms like certainty: one can ALWAYS doubt anything, because that which is posited is a language event and language is not apodictic. We cannot say what it is (Wittgenstein), because this presupposes language.
But while certainty implies doubt, for all things can be doubted, even logic, you would have to clarify how all doubt implies certainty.
Quoting Ludwig V
Well, it has already been done, but this, of course, has not reached the ears of "people". Kierkegaard started it, then Nietzsche. Then came the phenomenologists, especially Heidegger. I am reading his Nietzsche now and other of his later works, and while one doesn't have to fall in line with everything, one has to admit traditional metaphysics is turned on its head. Especially take a look at his Onto Theological Constitution of Metaphysics and his The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead.
Heidegger will never replace religion for the general public, for this would take a lot of leisure time and a commitment to philosophy. Perhaps after AI has delivered us from drudgery, the world will see that phenomenology is the one true view.
An odd thing to say. Perhaps you could go into this a bit. Cogitata a dubious interpretation? But it is not an interpretation, just a term that designates the the cogito's objects. And apprehended world, I wonder where your objection begins? And then "doubt would be meaningless without certainty": depends on what is meant by certainty. If this is familiar territory, then I can push just a bit. Take a logician's idea of apodictic certainty, as with something from symbolic logic like modus ponens which is intuitively coercive, but it still can be doubted. How? Because all that can be produced in a knowledge recognition is cast in language. Even as I call logic apodictically certain, I do so in the context of something that cannot be subjected to the same apodicticity, and this is the contingency of language. Language makes thought possible, and when it expresses a principle, like MP, it is not as if doing so discovers the nature of the intuition that is so strong. This is a pretty important insight about apodicticity and terms like certainty: one can ALWAYS doubt anything, because that which is posited is a language event and language is not apodictic. We cannot say what it is (Wittgenstein), because this presupposes language.
But while certainty implies doubt, for all things can be doubted, even logic, you would have to clarify how all doubt implies certainty.
Quoting Ludwig V
Well, it has already been done, but this, of course, has not reached the ears of "people". Kierkegaard started it, then Nietzsche. Then came the phenomenologists, especially Heidegger. I am reading his Nietzsche now and other of his later works, and while one doesn't have to fall in line with everything, one has to admit traditional metaphysics is turned on its head. Especially take a look at his Onto Theological Constitution of Metaphysics and his The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead.
Heidegger will never replace religion for the general public, for this would take a lot of leisure time and a commitment to philosophy. Perhaps after AI has delivered us from drudgery, the world will see that phenomenology is the one true view.
I don't think Berkeley would be pleased. But perhaps that's immaterial.
You can. But it is the first step into a swamp that sucks you in... But then, you are mired in it anyway, so perhaps it will help to point out that there are ladders that can get you out. You just need to ask the right questions.
Quoting Astrophel
I deduced that. But it already palms off on me a model of thinking about thinking.
Quoting Astrophel
"Parent" and "child" are interdependent. Both are defined at the same time. This may be somewhat hidden here because of an accident of our language. "Certain" has two meanings, one psychological and one objective. The opposite of "certain" in the objective sense is "uncertain", which seems to have no psychological correlative; but it does exist, since we have "doubt".
Quoting Astrophel
"I doubt whether p" means "I don't know whether p is true or false", which implies "I know that p might be true or might be false", which implies "I know that p might be true".
Quoting Astrophel
The message must be getting drowned out. But you are missing out all the others who have tried. Hume, Russell, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and maybe others.
Quoting Astrophel
Perhaps. But I think it more likely that most of it will immerse itself in games and simulations and internet fora - moderated by AI, of course.
As to "all things can be doubted", do you include "If P implies Q, and P, then Q"?
Phenomenology asks the right questions.
Quoting Ludwig V
That is not the way it works. Once the object is accepted as part of the structure of the cogito, one faces questions about the world and our relationship with it. Ontology is no longer parasitic on the discursive method of deriving objectivity from the thinking ego (as with Descartes appeal to God), but now the world stands before inquiry as it appears. Take a look at the way Henry puts it:
when I say 'I am happy' or more simply 'I am', that which turns out to
be 'aimed at' by my affirmation is possible [u]only insofar as Being has
already appeared.[/u] Thus should not the true object of an inaugural
inquiry be the Being of the ego rather than the ego itself, or more
precisely, [u]the Being in and by which the ego can rise to existence
and acquire its own Being?[/u] This is why the Cartesian beginning is
not at all 'radical',
This "being in" is the legacy of Heidegger, and means being in the world. In the world, that is, of everything you can imagine. Descartes was right to affirm that certainty about the world and its "beings" begins with the perceptual act which is inherently "thoughtful" but wrong to think this thoughtfulness that attends egoic awareness is the true "inaugural" place for ontological study. This "place" is the world, the touching, and feeling, and all of the physical and affective intimacy of our being here. There is IN this that which it is insane to doubt, and this is not a philosophical argument that lies at the beginning of all sound philosophy: it is the world itself. This is Husserl.
Quoting Ludwig V
This appears to be an appeal to the binary nature of language, and of course, you take this to its fullest expression, you encounter Derrida and the "trace" that has in its nature nothing of the singularity we think it has in common references and conversation. To reason this way, one encounters an extraordinary and novel kind of doubt. All meaning is contextual, and it is context that generates particularity, and there is nothing that survives what amounts to a critique of propositional knowledge, and therefore knowledge. Of course, this is self refuting because the thesis itself is expressed in propositions; but regardless, take all this indeterminacy Derrida throws us into (even Heidegger's hermeneutics does not survive. I think H knew this, though. See Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics. I would have to read again), and now , face the world! Literally, observe, feel the fullness of the tactile
"presence" of the cup on the table, the smell of the coffee, and so on. It is not that Derrida is wrong, and I di think he is right, but rather, it becomes clear that when language is "put to rest" so to speak, and one engages with "originary" intent, there is something primordial that has been "forgotten" (Heidegger) that is now allowed to step forward.
This kind of thinking will not set well with most. It does take a certain predilection. But you call into question the post modern concern about language and this takes analysis into a very deep and fascinating rabbit hole. One can find down there things genuinely insightful that go far beyond anything the petty talk about atheism has to say.
Quoting Ludwig V
Consider that there is doubt that runs through the analyticity of this proposition. Mostly, as I pointed out, it is framed in language and analyticity itself is a language construction, and so one would have first establish that language itself is apodictically certain. In other words, even if the stream of implications seems valid, streaming itself can never counter the doubt inherent in implication itself. And speaking of validity, such a thing does not generate insight about the world. Only about itself, the tautological system of self referencing symbols.
Quoting Ludwig V
Wittgenstein was not aligned with the positivism that so emphatically rejected metaphysics. He was different. A great admirer of Kierkegaard, he insisted that meaningful talk had no place in metaphysics because it would offend the most important part of our existence. He writes in Value and Culture: Divinity is what I call the Good. And would go no further. Also, he never read phenomenology beyond Kierkegaard. As to Russell, please no. He is the poster child for what went wrong with anglo american philosophy. Hume is useful. Kant, very useful. Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, perhaps ever.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, as I said. One cannot doubt the apodicticity, but one can doubt the way language takes up the world. How is it that a term like 'certainty' could embody the actuality we encounter when we are "certain"? Logic cannot critique itself.
I can't respond to all of this. I'll just pick out some remarks for comment. I'll try to respect their context.
Quoting Astrophel
How do you know they are the right questions?
Quoting Astrophel
I expect that's true. On another thread recently, someone remarked that he never read Aristotle; from the context, it seemed natural to infer that this was a deficiency. I thought it remarkable that someone would think that any philosopher who had not read Aristotle was deficient in some way.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, his position was much more nuanced than many of his contemporaries. But he had very little, if anything, to say about it. We are left with the business about speech and silence, which is a blank sheet of paper on which we can write more or less what we wish to - and people do.
Quoting Astrophel
He's certainly an impressive figure. But those accolades come and go. They said that about Russell at one time, and Wittgenstein. I'm not good at hero-worship.
Quoting Astrophel
I'm not sure about apodicticity, so if you don't mind, I'll just talk about certainty.
That doubt is unresolvable, because it frames the issue in the wrong way. In the first place, as Wittgenstein argues (mostly in the early period) just as one cannot draw a picture of a picture, one cannot expect to explain in language what the relationship is between language and the world. As he would say, it "shows itself", just as a picture (once we have learned to interpret it) shows what it is a picture of.
But the big mistake is to think that the problem is about the relationship between language (as given, and our starting-point) and the world. Language arose in the world, from the world, to be of use in living in the world. Hence the only question is about the relationship between the world (as given, and our starting-point) and language, just as we assess a picture by comparing it to the world and not the world by comparing it to a picture.
Quoting Astrophel
Language is a construction, in a sense, yes - in the sense that a game is a construction. Actually, it is a set of rules (or several sets of rules). There was not law-giver who laid them down - they evolved in the interchange of our social lives in the world - the useful rules stayed, the useless ones disappeared without trace. What makes those rules certain is that we keep them - nothing else. (Actually, we don't keep them - we mess with them all the time, as Derrida realized, but set that aside for the moment) In itself, however, language is neither true not false. It is the means by which we assert and ascertain what it true and what is false. The certainty that Descartes was after was to be found or lost in the use of language, not in language.
Quoting Astrophel
I'm not not particular about where I find good philosophical ideas and I'm quite pragmatic about which school or tradition the ideas originate from. Heidegger and the others have some good ideas from time to time. But I think I can detect eyewash as well. Unless I think of it as a sort of (not very good) poetry.
In any case, it is far too late for an inaugural enquiry. The horse has left the stable and is busy ploughing the fields etc. We arrive or are thrown into a world that includes language and we gradually learn to participate. There are no beginnings or foundations to be found apart from that.
I suppose it depends on one's priorities and how technical the historical analysis is going to be. But then, one can pretty much grasp the ideas in Being and Time without that much Greek (though H would disagree. He though Greek and German as privileged. See his surprise when it was the American William Richardson's "Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought" that got it right: "Who is this guy? So many have gotten me wrong, but here is someone who has gotten me right-and he's an AMERICAN! How is that possible?")
Quoting Ludwig V
He actually petitioned to go to the front lines of the war just to know what it was to face death. And his brothers committed suicide (all of them?) and Witt constantly thought of it. So there is this extraordinary dimension to this rigorous thinker. I think the difference between him and positivists, then and now, is summed up in his letter to a publisher in which he said the Tractatus has two parts, the first is what is said and the second is what is not said, and it is by far the second that is the most important. Otto Neurath added to "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" the idea that one must indeed be silent, but about nothing. This makes the difference clear. Russell called him a mystic.
Quoting Ludwig V
Well, the century has come and gone. The trouble is that philosophy is so split. If you lean continental, Heidegger will not be outdone, and postmodern French and German all work in within the ideas he laid down, agreeing or not. But anglo amercian philosophers no longer deal much with Kant and his legacy (esp the three H's, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger), and they don't want to be bothered with the Greek, German and French. But in the end, it will have to be admitted that once metaphysics is removed from philosophy, philosophy simply vanishes.
Quoting Ludwig V
But this does not show the real problem posed by metaphsyics. Take the position of moral realism. Rejected for essentially the reason you mention: when one encounters the world first, logically first, that is, prior to, presupposed by, all that can be said, one encounters a body of language engagement possibilities, that is, what CAN be said, and this totality is finite, or historically finite, in that the world can only make sense when taken up in the "potentiality of possibilities" possessed by the historical framework that makes for meaningful utterances. So one is always already IN some historical framework (this for Heidegger was the essential ontology for dasein), bound to a particular finitude.
See, I agree with this. But I stand outside both Heidegger and anglo american views here. It is not science that has this privileged relation to the world, but the body of language possibilities that a given culture can yield. Science and its categories are part of this. If ethics is approached with this assumption determinatively in place, then ethics is thereby finitized. Is it?
Consider Wittgenstein's statement in the Tractatus that Ethics is transcendental. But he doesn't make this clear, perhaps purposely. Ethics is transcendental because the ethical good and bad issue from something that cannot be quantified. It is a quality of the world, and like logicality, one cannot get "behind" such a thing, only witness it. Take a lighted match and apply it to a finger and witness "the bad" that is the essence of the ethical rule against doing such a thing. Or the good of hagen Dazs, if this is to one's taste. Note that "taste" is not the issue. The attempt here is not show how all tastes and their variances are finally settled. The matter is value qua value, or, the ontology of value, the radical "other" of this good and bad that drives all ethics.
Another way to put this is to refer to earlier on in the Tractaus when he says the pointof the book is to draw a limit to the expressions of thought. What lies on the other side of language is nonsense, and what is on the other side of language? Metaphysics. But a very real and palpable metaphysics in the burned finger, the falling in love, the heartbreak, the joy, the despair, and so forth. These and the value that is pervasive in our existence, from vague interest to thrill and excitement, literally constitute ethical possibility.
Wittgenstein was a moral realist, though doesn't say this, as in his Lecture on Ethics. The good is the divine, he says in Value and Culture. He is right about this.
Quoting Ludwig V
And they are useful. And this applies to ethical rules as well. Ethics is powered, if you will, by value, but entangled in culture, and culture evolves. If there is an telos to this, it is found in value, not in the language that would "speak it". Language doesn't do this.
Quoting Ludwig V
The idea is that it is nonsense to even speak of a thing "in itself". It has to be kept in mind that everything Derrida wrote was, from an "in itself" pov, under erasure. No context, no meaning. As I see it, there is only one thing that is not nonsense at this level, and that is value-in-the-world, that is, the pain from this broken knee cap is does not issue from a construction of beliefs about pain, and the prohibition against bringing this into the world some from the pain itself, not as the pain is construed, interpreted. Pain qua pain makes sense even though the language that speaks it cannot speak the world, so to speak.
So I agree, there is no true or false outside of context (Structure, Sign and Play). But it is a very sticky matter simply because one has to bite this absurd bullet that says as I acknowledge my cat on the sofa, it is somehow existentially remote from possible understanding. There is this impossible distance between me and the cat that says I know, but I really don't know in the deeper ontology. This distance is about language and the world.
:fire:
There are two issues with this. First, the framework that I have learnt is not bounded, in the sense that it has infinite possiblities within it. Second, it is not a fixed framework, but is subject to change and development - Derrida is acutely aware of this, isn't he? So I ask the question, what tells us that we are "bound" to a particular framework? Awareness of history, perhaps, and/or awareness of change. Perhaps we should think of our historical framework as a starting-point, rather than a prison.
Quoting Astrophel
I can, and do, acknowledge my cat on the sofa and acknowledge also that I do not know - am not aware of - everything that the cat is. Some things may be beyond any possibility of knowing, such as knowing (i.e. experiencing) the lived world of the cat (because I could not be the cat without ceasing to be me, a human being). There is surely, no harm, in admitting my limitations while at the same time acknowledging the cat is "really" there, and on the sofa.
I'm not sure that there are not some typos in this - I certainly can't construe it:- Quoting Astrophel
But, yes, the world resists us and obtrudes on us - however much we may try to control it or ignore it. That's how reality becomes real for us as we exist in our framework - and, of course, how our framework has to stretch and adapt to accommodate it. The limitations we posited at the beginning do not exist.
But this is the real hard question. Being in a prison implies one is not free, so the question then is, what is the nature of freedom? And you likely know that Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and so on, including Kant and his rationalism, all have something to say about freedom. Freedom is temporally conceived and the ontology of time has a long history, but the basic analysis is this (which I imagine most have come across in their reading. I think it is essentially right): In the analytic philosophy I have read, there is a refusal to even glance at Kant and the temporal foundation of our existence, and this makes for a serious deficit in philosophical thinking, In the direct perceptual encounter with an object, whether it be a thing, a feeling, a memory, something imagined, it doesn't matter, anything at all, I do not actually witness what is before my eyes, so to speak. The witnessing is bound up with recollection, so I see a lamp and there is IN this an implicit attending of all I know about lamps, their contexts of what, where, how, when about lamps. But this is sooo fascinatingly sticky, because I also face a future that is unmade, and this occurs, this facing, In the recollection, so the recalling and the anticipating are one. There really is no past of future. These are a singularity and past, present and future are just practical and analytical terms, and merely "traces," says Derrida, " of "difference and deference," who puts even this singularity to rest. You know how Derrida completely flattens language's presumptive grasp of "the world". Context replaces ontology.
But anyway, on freedom, as I observe this lamp, I AM this temporal dynamic of recollection and anticipation, though these are not worn on the sleeve of the perceptual awareness, which is just more or less, there is a lamp. So what. But what happens when you put the lamp in question? Not mundane questions like, what's wrong with the lamp? or, Who moved the lamp? But rather, the kind of question that removes one from all presumption? The Being of the lamp? Not the lamp as A being, but just its being there, not AS a lamp at all. This requires the (Heraclitean) determinative flow of the past into the future (ver fallen, the "they", the "idle talk." See Heidegger's Care as the Being of Dasein, chapter six of the first division. No, I am no scholar of Heidegger. I just read Heidegger). And now one stands in awareness not of this or that, but of one's own existence, which IS the flow, and one steps out of the tranquilized "they" of ordinary affairs, and is free to choose among the "potentiality of possibilities" the they has to offer. One can construct a self deliberately.
So freedom is always there as it is our nature, our existence, to stand in this openness of possibilities, but this is forgotten. See what Heidegger says:
temptation, tranquillizing, alienation and self-entangling (entanglement)characterize the specific kind of Being which belongs to falling. This movement of Dasein in its own Being, we call its downward plunge [Absturz]. Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness.
One's true ontology is freedom. What binds us is our fallenness into, as Kierkegaard put it, the "habits" of (inherited) race. Heidegger got this from Kierkegaard, in part, this idea of this "historical framework (culture, in a word) as a prison, as you said. For K, it is found in the analytic of original sin (The Concept of Anxiety).
Quoting Ludwig V
But this unknowing is inherent in the known, not like some scientific paradigm waiting for an anomaly to be addressed (as Kuhn would put it), but as something in the structure of our existence. This freedom is a dynamic obligation to create one's own existence, and this causes anxiety, but anxiety that is not about this or that tiger or disease, but about nothing, I mean, this nothing is the indeterminacy of our existence, and you know what this is, the freedom right now to jump off a cliff or to give to charity. To live is to choose! when one lives like this--right on the threshold of the unmade future. We "fall" out of this responsibility by forgetting that we are free and we immerse ourselves in a job, a role to play, an identity.
When we fall like this, we are simply unaware, tranquilized, as H put it. To be authentically aware introduces us to ourselves' true nature, which is freedom:
When in falling we flee into the at-home of publicness, we flee in the face of the not-at-home; that is, we flee in the face of the [u]uncanniness which lies in Daseinin Dasein as thrown Being-in-the-world, which has been delivered over to itself in its Being. This uncanniness pursues Dasein constantly, and is a threat to its everyday lostness in the they, though not explicitly.[/u]
Perhaps you see what H is getting at. Just going along, day by day, is a bit like being a thing, for a thing doesn't have choices. To face one's freedom is uncanny, and anxious, and we retreat in the routine of living. This uncanniness of our existence is there, right now, in the lamp encounter. A glace at the lamp and it is just there. But when allow the question of my existence to interpose itself between me and the immediate acknowledgement, now the lamp is not what it was in this complacency. It stands in the temporality of possibilities, for it is received in the recollection/anticipation of my temporality, in the freedom of acknowledging it from OUTSIDE of the stream of consciousness. H doesn't talk about this "outside" as a religious "suprasensible place" of metaphysics (the place Nietzsche railed against).
But I tend this way. Long story.
Quoting Ludwig V
I can make things unduly difficult because, to be honest, when you read as much of this stuff as I have, you begin to sound like they do when you write, and they are way, way out there.Why is there a very defensible law against breaking one another's knee caps? Because it hurts. I mean, primordially this there logically prior to the prohibition, meaning no hurt, no justification for the prohibition. But can one "speak" pain?
Pain is OF the world, not of our laws that deal with pain. Pain is this primordiality, a givenness of our existence, and will not be spoken. Our ethics and therefore our religion is grounded in just this.
External locus of control.
Quoting Constance
Yes, freedom is about possibilities. Prison means that certain possibilities are denied. All of that is true if I am in prison. But what freedom means in that context is perfectly clear, both in respect of the possibilities that are denied to me and in respect of the possibilities that are open to me. Your question implies that something is not clear. For me, the question of the nature of freedom seems to be posed in a vacuum, without context. Some would call this the quest for absolute freedom, but trip up because without context there is neither freedom nor constraint.
Quoting Constance
It can be a bit like being a thing, but it is also being free. It depends how you look at it. Either way, it is where we live.
Quoting Constance
It certainly is a given. I'm not sure what you mean by speaking of pain. We can certainly talk about it, and we do - especially when we are suffering from it.
Quoting Constance
That's (one version of) the question that philosophers ask. But they don't think through what that question means and so end up is quagmire.
Quoting Constance
Quite so. But I'm intrigued that you go through a huge process and end up in the same place that I'm in. Pain is part of life. So what is at stake here?
Quoting Ludwig V
You know, since this really just nails it, I will attend exclusively to this. Rather simple, really, but this is what philosophy is looking for but never finds because it has given up on simplicity. Intellectuals are lost if there is nothing to say. It is a philosopher's job to elaborate.
What if ethics were as apodictic, that is certain, as logic? I will simply hand this question to you to see what you think.
I was not expecting that response. I don't know what to say. So I'm absolutely delighted!
Quoting Constance
That's why their chatter is endless.
Truth is, I don't know where to begin.
I had in mind looking at Heidegger's project and perhaps comparing it with Wittgenstein's (or Kant's or Husserl's or ...)
Or perhaps looking more carefully as Cavell's idea that the roots of philosophy go deeper than its problems.
Or something else.
Quoting Constance
I don't think that I really understand how to follow up your question.
We could start by asking whether logic is as apodictic as it is thought to be.
Your question was why does this analysis of ethics and religion "end up in the same place." I want say that if ethics were just as coercive (meaning one really has no choice to accept constructions in symbolic logic) and absolute (though logic itself is understood in language, and language cannot be said to be apodictic; I mean, when we ask what language is, we don't get truth tables and theorems. We get history and evolving meanings) as logic, then everything would change. Plainly put, our ethics, so familiar and complicated, would be grounded in Being itself. In Being, this qualitative play of good and bad that is our existence is risen to a new order of significance, one traditionally reserved for religion.
Your question was why does this analysis of ethics and religion "end up in the same place." I want say that if ethics were just as coercive (meaning one really has no choice to accept constructions in symbolic logic) and absolute (though logic itself is understood in language, and language cannot be said to be apodictic; I mean, when we ask what language is, we don't get truth tables and theorems. We get history and evolving meanings) as logic, then everything would change. Plainly put, our ethics, so familiar and complicated, would be grounded in Being itself. In Being, this qualitative play of good and bad that is our existence is risen to a new order of significance, one traditionally reserved for religion.
I think given your first premise, focusing on the afterlife, atheism is illogical.
But if one were to approach the question from the perspective, not of the pros and cons of atheism, but of the fact itself, is this a universe with or without a God, it might yield a different response; or the same response, for different reasons.
I'm not qualified to provide specific examples, but I'm pretty sure in my readings I have come across a notable amount of "instances" in Philosophical "calculations" where God must be assumed for the "equation" to resolve a metaphysical or even Ethical question. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Immediately preceding the above, you were describing your pursuit in tge analytical school. Is the above reflective of that? Or was that a follow-up of your own thoughts ex-analytical (so to speak), intended to lead into Derridas?
I'm asking simply to be informed (I.e., not to address some critical point).
It's natural for humans to think they are worth more than other animals, just as other animals care only, or at least predominately, for their own.
'A' is a contradiction of orthodoxy which denies the heretical Gnostic principle that God can be known. So, it should be "I am convinced there is a God".
'B' is, most moderately, "I find no reason to believe in God, so I lack such a belief."
'C' is about right, it being a denial of Gnosticism, which paradoxically orthodoxy also is, rendering it in line with agnosticism, the difference being that the believer has faith in the existence of God, whereas the agnostic finds no reason to have such a faith, nor any reason to have faith in God's non-existence.
'D' is not I know there is not a God", but "I am against the very idea" (for whatever reasons, rational, moral, etc.)
A. I believe in a God.
B. I do not believe in a God.
C. I do not know whether or not there is a God.
D. I claim that 'theism is not true, therefore theistic deities are fictions, and therefore theistic religions (i.e. ritualized delusions) are immoral'.
ABC are standard definitions and D is nonstandard (which I prefer).
I looked at your post again, and now I see better what you - and @Astrophel - are talking about. I got distracted by the question of freedom.
Quoting Astrophel
Yes, that's exactly his argument. What is not clear is whether he thought of that as debunking metaphysics or legitimizing it (in some form)? (Throwing away the ladder once one has climbed up it.) I can't see that he might have intended to allow (or would have allowed), if he had known about it) a project like Husserl's or Heidegger's - both of whom abjured metaphysics (as traditionally understood.)
Quoting Astrophel
I'm all for giving a central place in philosophy to human life. But classifying that as metaphysics is a bit of a stretch don't you think?[/quote]
Quoting Constance
It certainly would. Ethics as we know it would not exist. It would reduce to determinism.
Quoting Constance
That depends on what you mean by "grounded". You seem to be attributing some sort of coercive force to Being and that is the nightmare of a world without ethics or even value.
Quoting ENOAH
You are probably reading philosophers who have an religious agenda.
Quoting Janus
Yes. I don't see that as a problem. We put our families first - not to do so is morally questionable - and we often do so to our own cost. "Putting first" in not simply "prioritizing over everything else". In any case, enlightened self-interest would prompt us to recognize that our well-being depends on the well-being of everything in our environments.
I referred earlier (might have been in another thread) to a distinction between 'nonsense' and 'non-sense'. It is the things of sense which we can treat propositionally, as determinably truth-apt. But the world of sense, as such, is not the most important or highest aspect of human life. Far more important to human life is how we value, or disvalue the things of sense, how we find beauty or indifference in them, how we love or hate them, or disregard them. We can ascend to a sense of reverence for the ordinary world, for life and for humanity.
The value, the beauty, the love, the reverence we find in ourselves for things is the most important aspect of human life, and these dispositions, even though they may be for the things of sense are themselves "non-sense". We all know them, by virtue of being human, but their truth cannot be demonstrated in any determinable way as the truth of the fact of the world of the senses can. As I understand it it is that that Wittgenstein is getting at.
Quoting Ludwig V
Right, so to extend the above line of thought, it is natural for us to value our species, our own families and friends, ourselves, above all else. But this is something we are called upon to overcome, at least intellectually if not "viscerally" in the name of our human ideals of justice, freedom, beauty, love and truth. It is not only our material well-being which is at stake if we fail to care about the well-being of everything in our environments, but also the better parts of our own lives which we would thereby fail to value in any sense beyond our own narrow self-interest, and this would be to live diminished lives.
I don't like "more important" or "highest". Everyday mundane reality is important, not "low".
Quoting Janus
You seem to be trying to say that our values cannot be described in the way that facts can and hence are not true or false and cannot be known, and yet we know them and they are true. I think that's what Wittgenstein was trying to face up to. It certainly seems to follow from the Tractatus that nothing can be said about values. Yet here you are, trying to say something about values and it is not obvious that what you are saying is nonsense or non-sense. I think he was so focused on a certain use of language that he wasn't able to recognize other uses as having a validity of their own.
But there are some other things that seem to belong here. One of the things that he was getting at is that the relationship between language and the world cannot be stated, only shown, just as the relationship between a picture and what it represents cannot be pictured. (I'm not sure about whether logic in general is among the things that cannot be said.)
I haven't said that everyday mundane reality is low, in fact I have explicitly said that it is our disposition towards things which could be higher or lower.
Quoting Ludwig V
I was trying to point to the difference between the things of sense about which we can make intersubjectively definitive claims and the values that we all generally hold about which we cannot make such definitive claims because of the absence of strictly determinable or tangible evidence. I was saying the latter are non-sense on account of the lack of tangibility, but not nonsense because we all generally (at least the non-sociopaths among us) take ourselves to hold such values and thus know what is meant when these values are spoken about.
Usually, we do not 'know' our values in any meaningful sense. It would be helpful to elaborate what you mean here. It seems prima facie absurd.
Values cannot be truth-apt. They are intellectual states of affairs. They are what they are. If we ignore the issue of lying (or, the problem of other minds more fully) then there's no way to claim truth for a value. Quoting Ludwig V
This might explain why it's so silly...
Quoting Astrophel
That's a sharper example which makes good segue into broader understanding...
If that particular ignorance of causality is combined with strong conviction that supernatural entities can and do intervene in our lives and such intervention is guided/established by that entity's(or those entities') judgment of our behaviour, the result can be people believing that sickness is somehow, in someway, caused by the entity(entities) as a direct result/effect/consequence of the individual's behaviour. Such people misunderstand(are ignorant of) causality. As you may imply, they've an idea that things happen for a 'reason', so they may have a clue about the fact that they live in a causal world/universe, but are often ignorant of exactly "what causes what". That is ignorance of causality with efficacy(not really ironic, but very curious, nonetheless). Such folk often hold unshakable belief that everything happens for a reason, and that particular reason(say for a loved one's sudden onset of terrible sickness, suffering and death) belongs to the entity. Combine all that with another strong conviction that we cannot know the 'mind' of entity, and the result is we cannot know the reason(s). This is just off the top of my head, and there's a plethora of examples/explications available. For now, suffice it to say, that when all of that was, is, and/or will remain to be the case for some time to come, the inevitable result is a gross misattribution of causal relationships(layer upon layer of belief system/worldview built upon ignorance of causality).
Of course, by my lights, the whole story is permeated through and through with anthropomorphism, but that's a topic in its own right, and is not limited to only such belief systems/worldviews. All that said...
To be more considerate, given the historical timeframe of the supernatural stories, and the sheer explosion of very complex human thought and belief emerging from written language, it makes complete and perfect sense that such people used language in the ways they did to come up with such explanations for 'why' things were/are the way they were, and/or 'will be'.
Such 'compound/complex' ignorance of causality served as purportedly solid ground for scores of different belief systems/worldviews, many, perhaps most of which included some sort of ritualistic practices("worshipping and all the rest").
Quoting Astrophel
The part of your reply directly above presupposes relevant significant meaningful distinction between my use of "causality" and your use of "what causes what" aside from merely being two ways of pointing out the same thing. It's odd because I'm fairly sure you agreed with what I wrote... as written.
Quoting Astrophel
I do not understand how that counts as being 'on the other hand'. Looks like a different way to say "what causes what", both of which refer to causality, which is what I started with. Occam's razor applies.
Quoting Astrophel
Sensible use of "movement" and "change" presupposes some thing(s) to move, some thing(s) change as well as a means of doing so.
Quoting Astrophel
Presupposes a giver. Occam's razor applies.
Quoting Astrophel
A mystery is behind the stories? Seems like those stories spell it all out fairly clearly. So, I see no mystery to speak of. The stories are mistaken, but clear enough to be clearly mistaken.
Value and ethics are embedded within stories. They grow with stories. They change with stories. So, to say that values and ethics are 'behind' the religious stories, as if they are somehow the basis underlying/grounding of all those stories seems suspect, eh? Cleary not all. Some. Sure.
I don't see that the disposition to help people in need, to pursue beauty and truth, to eat drink and be merry, to sleep well at night can be put on a scale at all, at least not on any meaningful scale.
Quoting Janus
You are setting up a false opposition here. It is not merely natural for us, it is right. Admittedly, we need to reconcile our love of our own with more universal, and perhaps less immediate values, and the specific values can compete with the universal ones. But that doesn't mean that one is "higher" than the other. "Higher" and "lower" are metaphors and the metaphors should be very cautiously interpreted.
Quoting AmadeusD
The context shows that I was summarizing @Janus view:-
Quoting Ludwig V
Hwowever, I agree that it was poorly expressed.
Quoting AmadeusD
But that is also poorly expressed, in my view. A state of affairs is truth-apt and values may involve the intellect, but not in the way that science, for example, does. A value is more like an imperative than a statement, in that it relates to action in a way that a state of affairs does not. A value can be the major premiss of a practical syllogism; a state of affairs an only be a minor premiss in such a syllogism.
Quoting AmadeusD
One explanation for the fact that he seems to have dropped this topic in his later writing is that he realized that it was, shall we say, the result of a very limited view of language, which he escaped from when he recognized that the meaning of language is in its use, not in "propositions" - which are separated by definition from action, at least in Frege's talk of "entertaining" a proposition.
Quoting Janus
No, no, no. An imperative is not true or false, but is valid or not, obeyed or not. Values are more like imperatives than truths. They are what we pursue. We can pursue truth (which is why it is also a value), but we also pursue other values, and needs (which are not necessarily the same kind of thing).
It is true that establishing (reaching agreement about) values and establishing (reaching agreement about) truths involve different kinds of argument. We think we have a pretty good handle on arguments about truth and a pretty poor handle on arguments about value, and that may be inherent in those concepts. But let's not pretend that it is a simple matter to establish truth and a hopeless enterprise to establish a value; that far too simple a model to be helpful.
Only in terms of degree of caring and commitment.
Quoting Ludwig V
If you think I was aiming to set up any kind of opposition, then you have misunderstood my intention. Higher and lower should be read as better and worse. Sometimes blindly following our "normal" appetites may be detrimental to ourselves and others, so the discipline or moderation that may come with a rational understanding of those appetites is better than an unreasoned addiction to them.
Quoting Ludwig V
Firstly, I am not thinking in terms of imperatives, but in terms of concern or care; our human capacity to care about justice, beauty, freedom, truth, creativity, love and so on. I see these concerns as being truths about the human condition, about being human. Those who care nothing for such things are considered to be not as fully human, and I think rightly so.
Quoting Ludwig V
I haven't proposed that at all. I have said that I think that empirical truths are easier to establish, but that people "know" the other human truths I mentioned above because we find on self-examination that we care about them and that we have good reason to believe that most others do too, even if we don't always act in full accordance with those intuitions.
It is not. A state of affairs is that against which somethign truth apt is held to standard. The state itself is brute (in any sense that can actually be grasped, anyway).
Quoting Ludwig V
I may not be quite understanding what you're saying here, as it seems artificially complicated - but my response is 'no, that is absurd' the same way it was to (apparently) Janus' position.
My position is a value isn't anything but an expression of someone/thing's mental hierarchy of achievable realities. 'Values' in the sense of 'communicable visions for the world' capture mental content in words. Nothing more. They are responses to propositions(or, inductive pre-empts - kinda - to possible propositions). Both yours, and Janus' formulations are roughly the same thing, I also note. Neither has any 'truth' value.
This is why the moral debate between 'objective' and 'subjective' morals is so utterly ridiculous and intractable. They aren't either, independently: They are. together, states of people's minds. They are objectively(again, ignoring dishonesty) the subjective mental states of affairs within any given person's mind, or collective (that one gets murky -but hte principle is the same) in relation to a proposition.
In turn:
A. You're going to need to overturn orthodoxy to establish an orthodoxy. It is orthodox in the Abrahamic's to know God through his works. Not sure where you're coming from here... It also isn't that relevant. Being convinced results in the statement I used. There's no contradiction, even if your point is 'true' as such. /
B. Yes. This is a redundant reply.
C. Gnosis is not Gnosticism.
D. No, it isn't.
Quoting 180 Proof
A. This is not at all how this appears in the world, so I'm just going to say 'no' given these definitions are meant to be practical. All you've done is stepped down to a less helpful version.
B. See above.
C. This is simply not what that word refers to.
D. This is just you being a bit weird, imo - possibly silly.
I gave the definitions to avoid, exactly, the dumb missteps you're making. As below:
Quoting AmadeusD
A prime example of trying to sound cool, while entirely ruining the project.
:roll:
I tried to help clarify your "dumb" definitions, but you're incorrible. Both theism and atheism, as definitions and in practice, are expressions of belief and not knowing; yet, apparently, the difference between 'believing' (that / in) and 'knowing' (how / that / what) are also lost on you; and as an antitheist, your ignorance, Amadeus, of how I/we actually use the term antitheism is "silly" (probably disingenuous too). You can, of course, define terms in any way you like in order to reassure yourself of atheism (or any other concept); for me, however, what matters is whether or not arguments for atheism (or any concept) are valid rather than relying on mere stipulations like you vacuously have done.
I've mostly ignored this thread recently but I do have questions.
Quoting AmadeusD
Isn't the salient part of atheism's position, I don't believe in a god? It is for me. The 'not knowing' comes later and is somewhat tempered by something else, which I generally put down as; 'I have heard no good reason to accept the proposition that gods exist.' Other atheists would claim they do know there is no god - at least, no Yahweh or Ganesh or Allah.
And by the same token isn't a theist someone who believes there is a god? I have a number of theist friends, including priests and rabbis, who would actually count as agnostic theists. They would never say that they know god exists. They would say they believe and have faith. A few of them are even open to the idea that they might be mistaken in their faith. I think many more sophisticated thinkers might self-identify as theists but might be considered atheists by people with different world views - generally because their belief isn't literalist.
I think the way he splits it gets a lot wrong. Even the anti theism one
Well, I can see that there's a difference, but let's not get picky about language. Values are related to action in a way that facts are not. That's the important difference.
I'm aware that many people like to see ethical values as rooted in the human condition living in the world. I'm very sympathetic.
However, we do dehumanize people who behave very badly - and it is not difficult to find people doing things that pass my (and, I hope, your) understanding. However, I think this is a mistake. The people who set up a huge administrative and industrial system to eradicate people of certain kinds from their society (to give just one hackneyed example) are human beings. We are capable of heroism and horror. We should not pretend otherwise even though the recognition is not comfortable.
And there's the problem. If values are rooted in the human condition, how come people behave like that?
Quoting AmadeusD
"States of people's minds" suggests that you are either a relativist or a subjectivist. Or have I misunderstood? I do agree, however, that the binary classification between objective and subjective is most unhelpful when applied to ethics.
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting Tom Storm
Quoting Tom Storm
There is something of a battle going on at the moment between belief and knowledge as the appropriate category. The (mistaken) idea that the difference between belief and knowledge means that saying one believes in God implies some sort of uncertainty, so people who strongly believe in God want to claim to know, while people who don't believe in God (or don't believe that belief in God can be rationally justified) cannot possibly concede that. It's very confusing.
Ok thanks.
When I say I don't believe in god, I also hold that I don't have a robust idea what the idea of god/s even means. It's pretty hard to believe in something which seems incoherent or unintelligible. But not understanding - and therefore not believing - can not be held as knowledge (I would have thought).
There are many potential versions of god - from the magic space wizard (so beloved by Trump supporters), to the highest value in the hierarchy of values, as per Jordan Peterson.
Wouldn't it be the case that to be an atheist or a theist varies radically according to the kinds of god you are or are not believing in, which must surely also impact upon the belief knowledge/question?
Russell thought Witt was a mystic, because Witt thought, in a letter to a publisher, that the Tractatus had two parts, the part that is spoken and the part that is not, and it was the latter that was most important. Heidegger's lecture The Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics, What Is Metaphysics, and in Being and Time's Care as the Being of Dasein, and also in his The Word of Nietzsche's God Is Dead (I happen to be reading these now) shows that he does not cross that line into forbidden metaphysics, but stays always in the historical grounding of Hegelian ontology. "Ontotheology? Understanding Heideggers Destruktion of Metaphysics" by Iain Thomson works this out so well, and I should read it again. Husserl is another matter. His epoche is notoriously borderline, and the so called French theological turn is entirely grounded in Husserl, and I find Michel Henry and Jen Luc Marion to be the torch bearers of this phenomenology that takes what appears before us down to the wire, the pure phenomenon of the encounter. I think they have a very good point: though language is always already IN the manifestation of what is perceived, the "life" of experiencing the world is so vividly there, in the "pathos" (broadly conceived) of our existence, that the metaphysics of that which cannot be spoken stands emphatically clear. It is just insane to think away the reality of this world's engagement, and this has to do with the value in the raw encounter. The pure phenomenon cannot be dismissed as an interpretative indeteriminacy. Its determinacy is AS apodictic as logic. But then, when we speak, we are in this historical ontology. This sounds close to Wittgenstein, no?
Quoting Ludwig V
But what is metaphysics? What does Witt mean when he says the world is mystical and ethics is transcendental? He was not talking about a surprasensory world. What would one classify as metaphysics? Heidegger was very down to earth.
Quoting Ludwig V
But you are talking about freedom. At its essence, religion is not about freedom. It is rather purely descriptive: What is there in the world that makes religion what it is? Talk about creative minds fictionalizing things to make the world more agreeable begs the question: More agreeable? Why is this needed? Then we encounter Schopenhauer very accurate descriptions of our world. Of course, he didn't really understand the world's ethics: Our ethics IS Ethics. This is the dramatic change. As if the gravitas of the Bible were to be affirmed, but minus most of the narrative content, including it metaphysics, and, of course, God: God the creator, God the almighty, God the all knowing, and so forth. All the things the Bible (and other such texts)we may find wise and true are wise and true because that is what they are.
This is where the OP is going. Observe ethics the way it is, and qualitatively, there hangs in the balance matters of profound importance, and here I say, see Schopenhauer. But see that ethics is also constituted by the "optimistic" side, a word chosen just to contrast Schop's infamous pessimism, as well. These are really deflationary terms, pessimism and optimism. One has to move into the language of poetry, from Baudelaire's amazing Flowers of Evil (Better than Schop) through to Emerson's Nature (In a bare common, I am glad to the brink of fear). In other words, to talk about this world's ethics, one has to talk about this world's value actualities (for these are what is in play in ethics, though often not so emphatically of vividly , and these are powerful; as powerful as burning living flesh and ecstatic visions of "holiness". We don't have language that can give such things their due place beyond "the Good" and "the Bad". These are simply their "own presupposition" entirely resistant to analysis (which is a major premise of the OP). AND: they issue from the world itself. One may be miserable because of condition she caused to be, but no "caused" misery to be there AT ALL.
Quoting Ludwig V
Not to personify Being at all. The matter is simply descriptive. The ground of something is that from which it comes. The ethical imposition upon me not to strangle my neighbor and steal his money is traceable to the value in play, which is simply "there".
The Op asks, what is behind "such explanations"? "Behind" here is, of course, not a determinative matter. If it were, the human existence would be VERY different. Religion is about metaphysics, even though those etymological stories and crowd the issue with imagination. Clear the board of all that fabrication, and what is left? It is not nothing, but is the isolated condition itself, there to examined, not unlike that way a geologist well remove isolate quartz from granite or a psychiatrist will seek out more primary pathologies to explain behavior. Certain thing must be cleared away to discover what is there. Call this a scientist's reductive effort to research something. She may find plate tectonics, or childhood trauma, but to do this, a great deal has to be dismissed as incidental.
But here, the matter is metaphysics, and empirical (a category that has rather arbitrary boundaries) research will not do. Ethics is transcendental. One has to see this before moving into the argument all all. Seeking out causes is certainly important, but first one has to see clearly what one is trying to track down, and if analysis stays at the level of story telling in ancient texts, then analysis stays with cultural anthropology, or the literary classics (I took a course once called "The Bible as Literature"), or mythology. But this is just not interesting philosophically.
Philosophy wants to know what things are at the most basic level of inquiry, and the narrative account is the first thing to go. What does it mean to be "thrown" into a world like this with this impossible ethical dimension? The being thrown into disease, and countless miseries, as well as the joys, blisses, and the countless delights? Ethics does not simply deal with such things; it IS these things, meaning none of this value dimension, then ethics simply vanishes. No bads and goods, to put it bluntly, then no ethics (or aesthetics). And as the OP says, religious is the foundational ethical/aesthetic indeterminacy of our existence.
Quoting creativesoul
Right. What is IN the causal matrix of the world is not causality itself, but the world that is being observed. The qualitative matters of ethics and religion are not addressed if the essential meanings are not recognized. So ethical situations like returning an ax to its enraged owner bent on revenge have a great deal of content that has nothing to do with the "essence" of ethics. Metaethics asks, what IS it about this that makes it ethical AT ALL. What makes something ethical at the basic level? What is the "good" and the "bad" of ethics?
Quoting creativesoul
Givenness refers to "being thrown" into a world that is foundationally indeterminate. How is it foundationally indeterminate takes one to the issue of language. Language deals with the world, but does not speak its presence, so to speak. Long and windy issue.
Quoting creativesoul
It is not the story itself, but what gave rise to the story. Jump to the chase: Religion is all about our being thrown into a world to suffer and die. Because this world is foundationally indeterminate, this "throwness"
has no identifiable cause that can provide remedy. So understand what religion IS, we have to understand the very real presence in the world of value, a general term that designates a dimension of our existence which makes ethics possible. The issue takes thought deep into metaphysics.
That's just about where I'm at. That's why I'm taking an interest in this thread, but not adopting a position. I do have various theories, but none of them would be of any interest to a believer. For a start, I'm not merely interested in monotheism. Polytheism (which historically, I think preceded monotheism and derives from it.) is pretty clearly a sort of personification of important elements of ordinary life. "God" in modern religions seems to be a keystone for a way of life and a system of values, rather than an empirical reality. There's also the idea that religion is part of the system of social control that became necessary when cities and agriculture developed. Finally, there are those self-certifying experiences that people have.
Quoting Tom Storm
I wasn't aware of Jordan Peterson's theory. It seems like a version of Aristotle's theory of the Supreme Good.
Quoting Tom Storm
I would agree with that. There's a wide range of different views in circulation. Far too many to classify into just four propositions - unless you think that God is an empirical hypothesis. It's curious, though, that there seem to be both theists and atheists who prefer that approach, no doubt in the belief that favours their case.
I'm not sure what you are addressing here Ludwig; I was making a distinction between moral imperatives and moral intuitions and relating the latter to aesthetic intuitions, love and care.
Values are related to action, but they are also related to concern, love, intention and judgement.
Quoting Ludwig V
For me ethical values are rooted in caring about how we are to live. My earlier talk in terms of higher and lower was meant to show that I think living with care, concern and love for others and for the whole environment, the whole Earth, is a higher form of life than living without such care.
I don't agree with dehumanizing people in the extreme, but I do think it is fair to see people who have no such care as being less than fully human. By human I mean something like "able to transcend being ruled by mere self-interest and the passions of the moment, able to be aware of and care about one's effect on other beings, both human and animal and even plant".
I am not sure what you mean by "eradicating people of certain kinds" so I can't comment on that other than to say that I think certain kinds of people certainly need to be restrained; namely those who possess little or no self-restraint or even self-awareness.
I think values are rooted in the human condition, but it does not follow that all of us will be able to live up to those values, perhaps none of us perfectly and all of us only more or less. And that refers only to those who are actually aware of and care about those values; some may have no awareness of them, or even if they do have some awareness, do not care at all about them.
Of course. But concern, love, intention and judgement are all realized in actions.
Quoting Janus
If you had said that living in that way was a better form of life, I would entirely agree with you.
Quoting Janus
I'm not sure why I express my thought in that way. I was referring to the holocaust in WW2. Of course it is right to restrain people sometimes. The problems arise when you think that some people are not really people.
Quoting Janus
Even "less than fully human" is problematic. There is a concept of "human rights", which aims to establish minimal norms for the treatment of all human beings. Once you have branded a group of people as "less than fully human", you have licensed excluding them from those rights. As so often, a lofty and entirely praiseworthy enterprise is undermined by the exclusion of our enemies. This issue underpinned the battles about the rights of the "common man", women, slaves, and so on.
I don't for a moment think that you intend to do this. But this kind of language is very, very prejudicial to values that we ought to hold dear.
Quoting Janus
In a way, there is nothing wrong with that. Limiting one's scope to narrow self-interest is certainly a bad thing. But it is right to look after one's own interests. I don't see that it is a "lower" value than helping other people to look after theirs. What is wrong is not looking after and helping others as well.
You are forgetting that it is quite easy to do terrible things in pursuit of a selfless ideology - indeed, I sometimes think that a set of values is often the basis for worse things than self-interest - like tyranny, torture and genocide.
No, it is neither logical nor illogical.
Happy to. First, while you are correct that religious faith does not present answers, you missed the point that those particular "questions" are not merely unanswered, but are in fact unanswerable. Thus the status of "unanswered" is moot.
Second it is an error to equate the lack of "answers" to "fallacious".
Sure, they can be realized in actions, but they are not necessarily.
Quoting Ludwig V
That was just what I was saying, only I used the term "higher" instead of better while meaning "better". I prefer the term higher, despite its possible metaphysical baggage, because I tend to think in terms of greater love, freedom, moral sensibility, sense of justice and creativity as manifesting heightened states of consciousness, that is I think there are higher and lower states of consciousness.
Quoting Ludwig V
We are all defined biologically as being human, and as members of societies we are all defined as being people. I'm not concerned to define some individuals otherwise, but was merely pointing to the common tendency to think of those who completely lack empathy or moral sense as being less than human and worse than animals.
Quoting Ludwig V
I'm not advocating removing the anyone's rights. That would be in the domain of legal policy and that is not what I am addressing.
Quoting Ludwig V
I haven't compared looking out for one's interests with looking after the interests of others, or helping other to look after their own interests; what I've been saying is that one who is concerned only with their own interests is morally lower than one who is concerned with their own interests and the interests of others.
I am also not advocating ideologies of any kind.
I didn't see that.
Nonsense.
"Behind" is [hide]the term used to denote, stipulate, and/or otherwise point out[/hide] one spatiotemporal location(or set thereof) based upon others. "Behind" is a spatiotemporal relation between things from a particular vantage point. This necessarily presupposes(requires) a plurality of locations. At least three.
"Behind" is also used to determine where we look, as in "Hey Bob, look at the cat. She's behind the fridge!"
Your use of the term is the single greatest determinate of how others take you to mean whatever it is that you claim to mean by such use. You do not seem to be following those 'rules'.
What "behind" means to you, good sir, determines what you mean to say, what you mean by what you say, as well as what I take you to mean after such usage had begun.
The assertion "Philosophy wants to know what things are at the most basic level of inquiry" is attributing wants to things that are incapable of forming/having them. I'd charge anthropomorphism; however, humans are not the only creatures capable of wanting things.
Philosophy is something that is practiced. Practices are not the sort of things that 'want to know' anything. Practitioners are.
What would 'the most basic level of inquiry' be in complete absence of narrative account. I mean, the suggestion neglects the fact that it quite simply cannot be done. There goes the only means/method available to us for seeking such knowledge.
I can think of a few different sensible uses of that term. It may indicate situations when/where one's spatiotemporal location is drastically changed as a result of being hurtled through the air, against their will/choosing/wishes. It may refer to all the different subjective particular circumstances during the adoption of one's initial/first worldview. It may refer to the fact that no one chooses the socioeconomic circumstances they are born into.
If you're attempting to equate ethics with "being thrown into disease, and countless miseries, as well as the joys, blisses, and the countless delights" then I'll have to walk. That makes no sense whatsoever.
Quoting Astrophel
Not only is this a performative contradiction, at best, it is self-contradiction. If we put the first step earlier offered by you into practice now, we would throw out your reply here. Self-defeating, impossible, and/or unattainable standards/criterions are unacceptable.
Quoting Astrophel
Yup. Thousands upon thousands of pages. The introduction story in On The Way To Language is some of Heiddy's best work. Too bad he wasn't around enough individual's to grasp the full meaning underlying "that which goes unspoken". He was thrown into a different world, evidently where there were not enough Japanese traditionalists around him to help build correlational content.
Quoting Astrophel
Jump over the burden much?
I offered the single most comprehensive description of one thing that helped give rise to religious stories. Narratives such as yours are discussing all the different conditions/subjective circumstances into which one is born in terms of "being thrown into the world". That's certainly not enough to ground the claim that values and ethics are behind all religious stories. Some values and ethics emerge by virtue of those stories. It may be impossible to separate values from the stories in some cases.
Our dispute is beside the point of this thread. Another may be on order.
Oh, some scriptural passages are unrealistic and some traditions are nonsensical. I just don't define "religion" by those passages and traditions. Much is made in philosophy forums about, say origin stories, but religious folk generally don't currently use religion to determine the origin of the universe.
Surely you don't mean that love or concern may never shows themselves in any actions at all? The moral worth of that is, let us say, debatable.
Quoting Janus
There's that higher/lower metaphor again. But I can't see just what you mean without examples.
Quoting Janus
Those laws have been developed from what many people think are moral imperatives. Think of Kant's categorical imperative.
Quoting Janus
I'll just substitute "worse" for "lower". OK? Certainly most selfish people are hypocritical at some level, since their personal interests depend on mutual recognition of other people. My property is my own, but only because other people have the same rights as I do.
Heh, heh, no, creativesoul. I don't mean behind the refrigerator. I referred to metaphysics. This is about the lack of fixity our ideas have at the basic level. Ideas' meanings are derived from the contexts in which they are found. But contexts are determinative or finite. "The world" possesses in its meaning "that which is not contextual" I am arguing. It certainly possesses interpretative values of language, but it is the "fleshy feels" and the palpable engagements that stand outside of the way context confers meaning. This is the metaphysical ground of ethics, where ethics, and therefore religion, acquires its foundation.
Quoting creativesoul
It is rather a simple statement referring to the telos of philosophy: if there is a question begged, then inquiry will follow. Philosophy begins where specific inquiries in specific fields end. Physics does not ask what a force is. Philosophy does. Science does not ask about the nature of knowledge relations. Philosophy does.
"Attributing wants to things"? A bit left fieldish.
Quoting creativesoul
The narrative account in question refers to the religious narrative that is the stuff that sermons are made out of, and all the bad metaphysics. Not about narrative as such.
The most basic level of inquiry deals with epistemology and ontology.
Quoting creativesoul
Thrownness (geworfenheit) a term that refers, plainly put, to the condition of our being in a world always already endowed with the terms of meaningful possibilities. One sees this in moments of reflective thought in which it becomes clear that one has been "thrown" into a world of entanglements where one is a teacher, a lawyer, a wife or husband,has a language,or any of what Heidegger called "factical" identities. We move through life never questioning these engagements in a culture, and as a result, we never realize our "true" nature.
You are close when you say "It may refer to the fact that no one chooses the socioeconomic circumstances they are born into." Right. But when one does choose, she is already IN a lifestyle, a language, a body of meaningful institutions. This is one's throwness.
Quoting creativesoul
The full meaning of that which is unspoken? Pray, continue.
Keep in mind that when it comes to metaphysics, I do not share Heidegger's commitment to finitude in his Ontotheology Constitution of Metaphysics (and in Being and Time's Care as the Being of Dasein, and elsewhere). In fact, I reject this way to ground metaphysics. Which brings me to what I call "value-in Being, the Being of Value.
As to "that which is unspoken" Heidegger is notorious for dismissing ethics and value (value, in the way Wittgenstein refuses to talk about it). Here, both Kierkegaard and Heidegger fail to discover (at least analytically) the most salient feature of what we are. It is our existence's value dimension. Discussable.
Quoting creativesoul
Just ask, what IS ethics? This is not to ask Kant's question, or MIll's, but it is a question of ontology; not what should one do, but what is the very nature of the ethical and therefore religious imposition. So if you take no interest in such a thing, then you probably should, as you say, walk.
But keep in mind that this is not a study in Heidegger. Rather, Heidegger provides the language tools for presenting ideas. Throwness is a VERY useful term for ethics regardless of whether he talked like this. He didn't because he didn't care about ethics and value, which is appalling. Husserl didn't talk like this either, yet you will find a great deal of neo Husserlian thinking in the French Theological turn, so called; there is Michel Henry, Jean Luc Marion, Levinas, and others, all who take the Husserlian reduction down to the wire. Henry is magnificent. His complaint against Heidegger rests with his (derived from Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety) notion of the angst one experiences when the "nothing" of encountering being as such appears. Henry's point is that if one is going to give this angst an ontological status (not merely ontic) then he has to allow for the entire range of affectivity, for anxiety is a mode of affectivity. And HERE is where the issue of the logicality of atheism begins. Theism has to be delivered from religious narrative (recall how Lyotard famously referred to the post modern move past "grand narratives" of religion, and reason, as in the "age of Reason") in order find what is there that was not constructed by creative medieval minds.
One cannot understand the "logic" of atheism if one doesn't understand what theism is. Theism has to be purged of incidentals.
No, jumping To the burden, and bypassing the endless parade of descriptions of God that are entirely fabricated. God the creator? But where did this come from and why is a theistic view committed to this? To be the creator now puts the burden on this concept of God to be accountable for everything, and you end up with impossible contradictions and, say, theodicies to explain them All along, the entire issue was that God as a concept had never been thoroughly purged of invention. God is omnipotent, omniscient, the greatest possible being?
You perhaps see how the posts that try to talk about God are all bound up in fiction. God has to be reduced to its essential meaning before one can talk about why one should believe in God. Prior to this is the worst kind of naivete. I mean, a metaphysical entity? And one has not examined at all what metaphysics is.
It is perhaps unlikely, but not impossible. Some may live solely by the principle of "do no harm", for eample. Also I was thinking more of sitiations than of whole human lives when I said that moral feelings may not be expressed in action.
Quoting Ludwig V
Perhaps thinking in terms of the arts and greater and lesser works of art representing more and less heightened states of consciousness. Think of a heightened state of moral awareness and feeling and that should give you the pic ture.
Quoting Ludwig V
Sure, in some people's thinking a moral intuition may be transformed into what they think of as an imperative. But I don't see morality as primarily consisting in following rules but as being guided by human feelings.
Quoting Ludwig V
I'm not sure why the higher/ lower terminology is giving you trouble. Is it because you associate it with religious thinking?
Quoting Constance
For me 'God' signifies nothing beyond the highest feelings and principles that humans aspire to. Unconditional love, unwavering steadfastness, indomitable bravery and so on,
Nah. It did not begin by thinking about thinking practices as subject matters in their own right.
Ya think?
How do you know without knowing what "the basic level" includes?
Assertion, not argument.
As if all religion is existentially dependent upon a fairly recent philosophical practice we've named metaphysics?
Nah.
Bullshit.
The narrative in question was all narrative.
Still having problems with spatiotemporal locations I see.
No, it's right there on everyone's screen!
That's not true.
Quoting Astrophel
Right?
They don't get to choose so it makes no sense whatsoever to say otherwise...
Geez.
Who needs goalposts anyway?
Ethics is not equivalent to spinoffs and extrapolations from/of Heiddy's thought.
But metaphysics is not about thinking practices. These are hermeneutic. No, religion is about the dimension of our existence called value. Religion is about metavalue, metaethics, metaaesthetics. This is what Heidegger did not understand.
One discovers the basic level through inquiry. Heidy found there to be no single primordiality (as with the Christian God), but rather, a complex ontology of equiprimordiality, and if the matter were about language, then I would agree. But religion is not grounded in this.
True. I am referring the argument at hand, though. Here is what I wrote in response to Janus just now:
Janus wrote:
For me 'God' signifies nothing beyond the highest feelings and principles that humans aspire to. Unconditional love, unwavering steadfastness, indomitable bravery and so on.
I responded:
Perhaps there is something to this, in fact, I would say there is, but this still remains distant from the affirmation of divinity. It is the same kind of thinking that gave rise to those pesky "omni this and that" that engendered so much empty metaphysical theology. In order for the "highest feelings" to be liberated from finitude, so to speak, feelings have to examined for "properties" that can do this. I recall Moore's analysis of ethics and "the Good" in which he called this a non natural property. Curious the way this goes, for it requires an examination of the finite and accessible occasion of the good. That is, an ethical or aesthetic example. What makes this apple's taste "good" to me? But first, because it is good to me, it becomes a possible object of some ethical problematic. If it were not in any way good to me, and this may include my concern for others for whom the apple is good, then there can be no basis for an ethical complaint regarding it. The point is, it is this mysterious goodness that is among the various other properties, the sweetness, the texture, the complex taste features, etc., that makes the apple ethically viable.
But back to the good. Why mysterious? And why did Wittgenstein call value transcendental? To me, this is a fascinating question, for note as one enjoys the apple, and all of the empirical predications are analytically exhausted, there is this residual good. What IS it? One cannot observe it, and this raises eyebrows as to whether is "exists" at all. It is invisible, as odd as this may sound. But take a stronger example, much stronger, like falling in love and being ecstatic or your "unconditional love." Here the residual good (as I will call it) still cannot be empirically identified (it is not, after all, an empirical property) yet "it" dominates entirely the analysis of this love (or happiness. Love is happiness with an attachment).
Think of the other dimension of ethics and aesthetics, the Bad. Not observable, yet apply the thumb screws and the bad is now this overwhelming presence.
There is a reason Wittgenstein in his great book of facts has nothing of ethics in it (see his Lecture on Ethics). The good and the bad are transcendental, but one more thing has to be made clear: The good and the bad are apodictic, or apriori, if you like: universal and necessary in what they are; non contingent.
No. Metaethics is discovered IN the analysis of mundane ethics. Ethics has its grounding in the value dimension of our existence. This is an apriori argument about the structure of experience. It has nothing to do with how recently the argument and the language came into being.
No, you are mistaken.
And a nervy thing to say entirely without warrant. When I say religion has to be delivered from traditional narratives, it is simply to say that popular religions are constructed out of a lot of assumptions that are unsustainable on face value. Religion generally calls upon faith rather than justified belief. The idea here is that faith has driven religion into absurd reasoning. This can be overcome by phenomenological analysis.
Hmmm. Cryptically succinct.
No, no, my good friend. You are being invited to think a bit. When you raise your awareness to philosophical thought, you find you are always already (a Heidy term) IN a culture, a language, a "potentiality of possiblities" (Heidy yet again). In this, you have been making decisions all your life. But I cannot, for example, decide how to dress for a formal dinner in Indonesia.
The matter here is not about goalposts, though. This is the trouble with not reading closely. This is a descriptive argument. It is not about making things fair or just.
:cool: Have a nice, day creativesoul. I find your conversation....too vacant.
Quoting Constance
Do you have a list of things found at the most basic level of inquiry?
Quoting Constance
Red herring.
Some religion was before all such practices began. Not all religion is/was about thinking practices. Metaphysics IS a thinking practice. Some religion was before metaphysics.
Quoting Constance
Quoting Constance
It follows that religion is about that which is discovered IN the analysis of mundane ethics. That's not true either. Religion was around long before we began doing that sort of analysis.
*sigh*. The more philosophy i do outside of this forum the less appealing smart-sounding, but un(der)regulated discussion becomes.
As best i can bring myself to adopt a label, its emotivism. Quoting Ludwig V
There is nothing coherent about claiming a belief and not knowledge unless you also claim the thing cannot be known - that would relegate the position, though. I don't see any problem there, myself. You may not be able to apply a certain framework to the claim, but I "believe" there's a Yule log in my fridge, it's because I have sufficient reason to believe so. That is, on the personal level, knowledge. If someone is claiming 'knowledge' having had no experiences that would actually indicate to the person the thing they believe - they are just being dishonest or are deluded. I actively discount those scenarios because I don't think we're taking about those people..
I always resist labels. They are supposed to be shorthand for complex views, but in practice they enable people to pigeon-hole where they have arguments prepared. It saves thought, which is almost always a bad thing. The objective/subjective distinction is another example of the same kind.
Quoting AmadeusD
That seems paradoxical. But if one believes on faith, especially in the case of religious belief, one may well believe that what one believes cannot be known, on the assumption that knowledge requires evidence and proof.
I think that "believe" has special connotations that get neglected in philosophical discussion, and perhaps in ordinary discourse as well. It can be used to declare trust or confidence in something. This is particularly prominent in religious discourse. If one believes on faith, it is not really appropriate to claim knowledge (because, perhaps, one also acknowledges that rational proof is not available).
But this is incompatible with the widespread idea that belief implies one is not certain (and knowledge implies one is certain). I'm happy to assert that that is not the case, but I doubt if anyone will pay any attention.
But I would say that a belief must be capable of being true and most people think that religious doctrines are true or false.
I haven't been contributing to this thread, but I'd like to pitch in here. The question is the criterion by which one decides what is true?
Plainly if the question is an empirical one, then the criteria can be provided accordingly - if I believe that 'ice melts at 0 degrees celsius' then it's not hard to validate or falsify such a claim. And there is a massive network of interlocking facts which can be validated according to those criteria, or according to valid inferences based on them. That is, of course, the nowadays massive body of facts established by the empirical sciences.
Religious doctrines are not empirical as a matter of definition (even though many religious texts contain purportedly first-person accounts of real experiences.) So the question becomes, how to ascertain their likely truth or falsity? The fallback for a lot of people is, if they're not empirically verifiable, then they are a matter of opinion, or perhaps of individual conviction. But both are in some important sense subjective, or, one is tempted to say, merely subjective. As distinct from the vast domain of facts which are verifiable 'in the public square', so to speak. Objective facts, in other words.
Quoting AmadeusD
The difficult point about religious doctrines, in particular, is that they generally demand certainly qualities of character. There are things that 'only the wise can see'. And why? because you have to be wise to see them! One can be worldly-wise - 'Oh, they're all like that when they start out. Just wait a while and see what they think after a couple of years!' And that comes in many varieties. But religious insight, and also philosophical understanding, which are related, if not quite the same, requires something else - a quality of character.
Here is a statement from a highly-regarded Catholic philosopher, Joseph Pieper, with whom I have only passing familiarity:
Myself, I'm not Catholic, but this nevertheless rings true , at least to me (source).
I think this is ultimately why I am an atheist and you are some type of 'believer'. I think what we call reality (human thought and perspectives) are contingent artefacts (products of social construction and language) which more or less work pragmatically, and none of our experiences are 'true' in any transcendent sense. Truth is not about accurately representing reality but rather about what works within a particular context or discourse. God (or any analogue of god) lacks coherence or substance from where I sit, but is understandably used by many to fill the big hole of ignorance and fear most of us hold, not just about death, but also the fear that human life is essentially pointless. I think this is the joke whose punchline most people spend their lives resisting.
I know this is pretty much anathema for you - the height, perhaps, of post-enlightenment drivel - but I always find such perspectives exhilarating and unavoidably built into my experience of life.
Your pitch in is welcome, indeed. But you must have expected to encounter disagreement - you've been involved here for quite a while.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm happy to agree that religious beliefs, on the whole, are not empirical - although Christ's Resurrection is often claimed (isn't it?) to be a historical (empirical) fact. But the idea that believing them requires certain qualities of character looks like an empirical claim to me.
I don't have any proper empirical evidence, but anecdotally, I've found all sorts of people hold religious beliefs and not all of them are particularly virtuous in any conventional sense. Scandals occur in amongst religious believers as well, you know.
Your quotation doesn't seem to deal with religious doctrines specifically, but with truth in general. There is a good deal of philosophical discussion of epistemological virtues and there is much to be said for that idea. However, I'm not aware of any specific arguments that everybody needs a radical transformation of character in order to know anything.
I'm not aware of purity as a moral virtue. Could you define it?
I do hope that isn't a version of the old argument that atheists are wicked. I thought we had got way beyond that.
I agree that everything is contingent. The Buddhas dying words were supposed to have been something like all compound things are subject to decay. But your sentiment is ultimately a form of relativism or scepticism, I would think. The difficulty is, that to even attempt to name or indicate something beyond the contingent or constructed, brings it within the scope of a community of discourse which is once again one of social construction and language. But I think theres been an awareness of that for as long as religion itself has existed. I believe that this was why the origin of the now-tired name Yahweh was a string of unpronounceable consonants - a name so sacred that to say it, brought it into the profane realm.
Quoting Ludwig V
On the contrary, I think classical philosophy has always demanded something of that approach. Im thinking for example of Pierre Hadots Philosophy as a Way of Life. Look at the origin of philosophy with Socrates - his constant search for the real meaning of justice, of virtue, of piety. The way the classical tradition developed. Theres a term I learned of - actually, it was in an interview between Jacob Needleman and Krishnamurti - which is metanoia. It doesnt take a lot of knowledge of Greek word roots to guess what that connotes.
As for Hadot,
[quote= IEP; https://iep.utm.edu/hadot/] According to Hadots position as developed in What is Ancient Philosophy?, philosophical discourse must in particular be situated within a wider conception of philosophy that sees philosophy as necessarily involving a kind of existential choice or commitment to a specific way of living ones entire life. According to Hadot, one became an ancient Platonist, Aristotelian, or Stoic in a manner more comparable to the twenty-first century understanding of religious conversion, rather than the way an undergraduate or graduate student chooses to accept and promote, for example, the theoretical perspectives of Nietzsche, Badiou, Davidson, or Quine.
For Hadot the means for the philosophical student to achieve the complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the students larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things (PWL 84). Hadots use of the adjective spiritual (or sometimes existential) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta, despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. For this reason, they call upon far more than reason alone. [/quote]
As regards the empirical claims of religious traditions - of course it is true that these are made, but reproducibility is another matter (especially in respect of the resurrection!) But I recall an instruction I read once, that the student (prokopta, or preceptor) can become aware of certain kinds of evidential experience in their quality of life as a consequence of right realisation, although for obvious reasons that is not necessarily something ascertainable in the third person.
I am not asserting that first half. It follows from wanting to adopt degrees of belief (which Manuel did), except for hinge propositions such as logical laws and such (the existence of God is no such proposition non-presups would agree).
Quoting Ludwig V
Quoting Lionino
Quoting Ludwig V
The debate happens when people concede to theists the definition of 'atheist' "explicitly stating the non-existence of God", instead of the normal "not believing because there is no reason to believe":
Quoting Lionino
Quoting Wayfarer
It isnt robust relativism that leads to skepticism, but Idealism and empiricism, by not realizing that the practices of meaning we find ourselves enmeshed within are already real and true, already of the world, absent of any need to valid them on the basis of conformity to anything outside of these already world-enmeshed practices , beyond the contingent. As Merleau-Ponty says
Looking for truth beyond the contingent is the best way to court skepticism. Critics of relativism ignore the meaning of the word, that it is fundamentally about relationality, and instead associate it with incommensurability and failure to relate. For authors like Kuhn, a paradigm or worldview only appears incommensurate with ones it has overthrow from the vantage of the non-relativist and the scientist still wedded to the older paradigm.
There is nothing beyond the contingent, but this doesnt mean that the intimacy and intricacy of our experienced relation to the world we are immersed in doesnt evolve. Our understanding doesnt evolve by more and more closely approximating some foundational content but by using our past world-engaged practices to construct more intricately relational forms of understanding.
It would have been helpful if you had mention Hadot in the first place. Philosophy as a way of life is a recognizable topic within philosophy. I've never been convinced by any proposals I've seen. So I fall back on Socrates. As you point out, for him the search was the philosophical way. I think that many of us do that. Some people give up, but it is hard to know whether that's because they have found their answers or because they have despaired of finding any. Some people don't seem to be bothered by the question at all.
Quoting IEP
Well, light-bulb moments do occur in secular contexts. The term metanoiais quite rare, but seems to be used in quite ordinary contexts, and ancient Greece didn't discuss religious conversion in this sense, so far as I'm aware. However, metanoia isn't mentioned in any Ancient Greek philosophical work, or so Liddell & Scott tell me. I can't help feeling that both Plato and Aristotle would have insisted on rational persuasion as the only sound basis for philosophy. It is mentioned in Acts and Hebrews, but I assume that's the religious meaning.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, you can't expect to name or indicate something without a social context and a language. I think language does quite well in dealing with the world. I doubt it would survive if it did not.
Quoting Wayfarer
H'm. I doubt that would stand up to even the mildest philosophical scrutiny and suspect that it would carry with it great moral dangers. But if it makes them happy and they do no harm, who's to complain?
Quoting Lionino
Well, I'm not fond of degrees of belief. But there are certainly ways we can qualify our commitment to what we believe. I don't think it is impossible to accept a logical law hesitantly or doubtfully. I read somewhere that Van Til's presupposition is not that God exists, but that the Bible is true.
Quoting Lionino
Yes, I can. There is no evidence that it is possible that there's a green donkey behind Jupiter.
Quoting Lionino
I think that some religious people will be quite happy to engage in debate with you on the basis that you need reasons to believe. But I suppose that does mean accepting the burden of proof. I would be absurd for an atheist to accept the burden of proof, because proving that something doesn't exist is much, much harder than proving that it does.
Quoting Joshs
I'm more or less with you on this, though I'm doubtful about what "beyond the contingent" means. But why do you classify that as relativism?
Quoting Joshs
Yes, I think that's about right. Foundationalism seem to provide endless questions, rather than a secure foundation.
Well, I don't want to enter into a long dissertation on Buddhist philosophy, other than to point out that the early Buddhist texts insist that:
[quote=Nibb?na Sutta; https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.8.03.than.html]There is, monks, an unborn unbecome unmade unfabricated. If there were not that unborn unbecome unmade unfabricated, there would not be the case that escape from the born become made fabricated would be discerned. But precisely because there is an unborn unbecome unmade unfabricated, escape from the born become made fabricated is discerned.[/quote]
But this ought not to be thought of as a 'philosophical absolute', in the way of Western philosophical idealism. The principle in Buddhist philosophy is that it is something the individual has to know and see for him or herself by the path of insight.
Quoting Ludwig V
Only came to mind as I composed my reply to your earlier post.
OK. Thinking on one's feet is allowed.
For the purpose of learning philosophy, time spent actually reading the classics is more productive than arguing with idiots in the hopes of the occasional informative post.
Well, I think that the opportunity to discuss them with other people who have also read them helps a lot. That's my biggest problem. Perhaps I should try to start some reading groups.
Anyhow, any meaningful discussion to be had is covered 90% in the IEP/SEP page of the respective philosopher whatever can be added by amateurs is going to be a connection between different sources or just factually wrong.
I've been aware of some of them. I suppose I'll just have to experiment and see what happens.
Quoting Lionino
That suggests one could start a useful discussion from the relevant pages of the encyclopedias - and then read the book. Standing on the shoulders of the giants.
As for the argument that its just a waste of time because there are so many religions and you will likely never find the right one, you can group them. If there really is a God, probably a lot of different religions would be based (unknowingly) oh the same entity. And if so many religions have truth, does it really matter that much which one you believe in as long as you get the basics right?
Specific religions are only necessary (in my opinion) if you are seeking out truth, but if you just want to be saved, categories should do just fine.
I think claiming belief and not knowledge is paradoxical. The claim to 'faith' is, to me, an indication of dishonesty or delusion.
Quoting Ludwig V
+
Quoting Ludwig V
If these two hold some water (I think your wording is a little confused, but I'm with you generally) then belief implies one is certain. If that is hte case, then belief implies knowledge, even if it isn't claimed. Its a foundational aspect of certainty, even if it's misguided or unjustified (which would be the case here - hence, delusion - I use that word with faarrrrrr less disparagement than is usually imported, btw**).
Quoting Ludwig V
Hmm. This is an odd one for me, because in practice i'd have to nod along to this and roughly agree. But, on consideration, I don't think belief is apt for something capable of being "true" in the sense of 'veridical'. Belief is redundant in any scenario that this is the case. Belief is simply jumping the gun and, again, I think a form of either dishonesty or delusion as a result. "my truth" is where people get away with holding "veridical" beliefs that are, in fact, not veridical at all (perhaps your objection to the objective/subjective split gets some air here).
**to me, delusion implies that someone has simply formed a conclusion without adequately assessing the relevant states of affairs. That could be for any number of reasons, but suffice an example where someone has read a meme on Instagram about how something in psychology works and forms a belief about it. Totally unjustified and so the belief is a delusional, rather than the person is deluded. They might just be lazy. That may need further parsing, i'm aware. The addition of actively refusing to review one's beliefs is another matter.
Quoting Wayfarer
About the preceding paragraph: I think I roughly agree, but I think the demands on one's character for religious purposes are systematically learned through manipulation of hte mind. With philosophy, i think it's a "If you're this kind of person, you'll be apt for such and such". The former seems to be capable of intercession regardless of one's "base" character for lack of a better term.
On the quote itself, several points to me make it entirely ridiculous and incoherent. I'll quote the points at which this became apparent to me:
Alll three of these lines render the rest of the passage nonsensical, and clearly manipulation into religiously informed worldview instead of a logical.
Well, I'm inclined to agree with you at least this far, that "I believe that p and that p is false" is a contradiction. "I believe that p and that p might be false" is not a flat-out contradiction, and could be described as paradoxical. "I believe that p and that p cannot be known, even though p is capable of truth and falsity." is extremely odd, but, for someone who believes on faith, comprehensible.
The resolution is a bit complication. When I say "I know that p", I am endorsing p as true. When I say "AmadeusD believes that p", I am reporting that AmadeusD endorses p as true. I am not asserting that p is true or false. When I say "AmadeusD knows that p" I am reporting that AmadeusD endorses p and endorsing p myself. When I say "AmadeusD thinks that p" I am reporting that AmadeusD endorses p; but I am endorsing p as false.
It's a bit of a side-issue, but it's the only way I can make sense of the "phenomena".
Quoting AmadeusD
That seems a reasonable idea. Maybe a bit harsh - people can be misled even if they do their level best to check things out properly.
That is by definition, proving a negative. What's absurd is your explanation. You are in fact, conflating positive/negative with existence/nonexistent.
Positive: There's a dog in my room.
Negative: There isn't a dog in my room.
What's also absurd is you think that "proving a negative" means that one must prove all negatives.
I don't think that proving a negative means one must prove all negatives. However I do think that the only negative that can be proven is a determinate negation, i.e. one which is explicitly contradicted by empirical or logical reality.
1. There is a spectrum of consciousness, with beings more and less conscious than each other
2. There is no good reason to assume that human beings represent the highest form of consciousness (ontogeny and phylogeny both substantiate this)
3. Therefore it is probable to a near-certainty that there are higher forms of consciousness in the universe than human (given the expanses of time and space involved).
So if your definition of God is that God is the highest form of consciousness, then God by definition does exist. And even if you choose to stipulate that God must exhibit far-beyond human abilities, it is still likely (based on the empirical history evident from the evolution of consciousness on this planet) that God does exist (qua that definition). And at least possible that God exists. So atheism is illogical.
It isn't about whether some random person's characterization of God is illogical (an enormous white man wearing a crown directing human affairs from a cloud-realm somewhere). It is whether, for any given individual, that individual himself can logically envision the state of godhood consistent with what is known about reality.
Whatever that means, it's not that. Usually atheism is a reasonable rejection of 'any god described by theism' (with predicates entailing empirical facts about the universe which are lacking ...) just like other imaginary entities.
You say. I say, the logical concept of god is what is logically possible to each and any given individual person, based on that individual's experiences. Are you saying that, if I don't ascribe to some specific religious credo, I can't have a concept of God? Because that is definitely not true. It is manifestly evident that there is a huge spectrum of characterizations of Godhood, ranging from the anthropomorphic pantheon of the ancient Greeks to the apex enlightened-consciousness of the Buddha.
If you are going to logically deny the existence of God, then it must be at the logical-conceptual level. If you are contradicting nothing more than some specific narrative-version, then you aren't denying the possible existence of "god", you are just critiquing a cultural construct.
Belief operates like knowledge but is not knowledge, so I agree, it maybe paradoxical to claim a belief.
But dishonesty and delusion??
The problem with that are all of epistemological problems of knowledge in the first place. If logic tells us we cannot have faith or believe in anything absent nonsensical paradox, then, because of the same logic, and the frictions with things in themselves and absolute truth, we cant know anything either.
There is some degree of faith, or more simply, of choice and willingness, underlying any admission one would make about the things one knows, let alone believes.
Its dishonest for any logical scientist to say this is the absolute truth, and all statements to the contrary must be delusion.
We are stuck with having to make a choice, even about what we claim to know.
I've no quarrel with that. Of course folks are entitled to their own idiosyncratic, placebo-fetish (i.e. cosmic lollipop) of choice. My quarrel is, however, with theistic deities of religion: they are demonstrable fictions, and therefore, it's not "illogical" to reject them as facts (i.e. real, intentional agents).
And this depends on which "concept of god" is at issue, doesn't it? In sum, clarify your "god-concept" (my preferred conception is ).
Such as the value of logic. The lollipop of logic. Or the applicability of logic to explain what an explanation should be, or has to be (logically of course).
I don't disagree, but I don't think its relevant. This could be the case,and it would still logically be incoherent to claim belief without knowledge. The justification isn't that relevant here IMO.
Quoting Pantagruel
You're not talking about atheism, so that's cool.
AFAIK, "logic" doesn't "explain" anything; its "applicability" consists in providing formal consistency to arguments (re: valid inferences, sound conclusions).
Quoting Pantagruel
Anything can exist as soon as we arbitrarily and unilaterally change the definition of "anything". But what we get is not informative, it is a tautology.
We get what we are essaying to conceptualize. If you assume the conceptualization entails the non-existence of the thing then perhaps it is the conceptualization that is flawed. I fail to see how one position begs its question more than the other.
If the conceptualisation of something is flawed because it entails contradiction, what people have in mind is demonstrably false and what can exist is something other than what people have in mind. Assigning this or that label to this or that conceptualisation doesn't change the facts about the world (up yours, Early Wittgenstein).
That's right. And my definition is empirical. Given that consciousness obviously exists, and there are gradations of consciousness, there is come greatest extant consciousness. I have as much right as the next person to flesh out the concept of God in whatever ways make the most sense to me. You think that each and every individual has a concept of god that reduces to whatever they read about in some piece of orthodox literature? Even if so, every person would have a slightly different defining set of references, based their unique intake of information.
No, that fact that my conceptualization is empirically sound isn't a weakness to me. However, if you persist in wishing to maintain that the actual concept of God is logically unsound, only for the purposes of therefore denying the concept, well, that is very much a dogmatic assertion. You choose to support an invalid version of a concept that you want to deny.
Do you then grant that I have all the rights to flesh out the concept of God as the banana that I will eat in 15 minutes before leaving for the gym?
If that seems reasonable to you. It doesn't strike me as something someone striving to frame a credible concept would do though. Rather, someone striving to frame a flimsy concept for easy criticism. If that's an argument for atheism, then I'd say it qualifies as illogical.
Just checking for consistency.
Is the above a God for you? In the universe of Ridley Scott's Alien (which wasn't even supposed to be an Alien movie but alas), going off your definition, the answer should be yes. Yet, nobody in the academy, when discussing philosophy or theology, has the above in mind when talking about God. Redefining words to mean something completely different from what they do is not interesting. There are non-flawed definitions of "God" that don't entail talking about the above.
What academy are you referring to? The main defining feature of a "god" is having abilities which transcend human understanding. That's really not a very high bar....
If you are going to set yourself up as presenting an authoritative definition of "god," I would think that advertising yourself as an atheist isn't the most credible first step.
Let's face it. Atheists, by their own declaration, are really only qualified to speak about what god is not.
The one that academics are part of.
Quoting Pantagruel
Cambridge dictionary seems to disagree:
In any case, that is not a defining feature because it is nonsense. Our modern ability to solve differential equations in our head transcends the human understanding of Bronze Age Europeans, and yet we are not gods.
Quoting Pantagruel
The epistemic stand of a person has zero bearing on whether they are qualified to define something or not. In fact, nobody is qualified to define anything, there is no such thing as a private language, the definitions are given to us by the society around us. Whether someone is qualified to redefine a word depends on whether they are an authority in the field that that jargon belongs to.
Sorry, that's just plain ridiculous.
Quoting Lionino
This doesn't in any way shape or form contradict the generalized description I provided.
Quoting Lionino
Exactly. Every other concept that mankind has ever entertained has evolved into more sophisticated forms as our species has evolved. So why should the concept of god not likewise be amenable to...refinement?
Quoting Lionino
Of course it does. If you claim not to believe in atoms, you are certainly the last person that someone should talk to who is interested in developing a theory of atoms.
Well, this "atheist" certainly is "qualified to speak about what" theism "is not" the sine qua non claims of theism¹ are demonstrably not true.
from 2019 ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/350947 [1]
My sine qua non theistic claims are that there are greater-than-human conscious entities. And that the most general definition of a deity is a being possessed of abilities that humans don't understand. Whether such beings are then worshipped, feared, etc. is about how human's react, not about what those beings in essence are.
As far as I know, there is no universal consensus that could legitimately be called the "sine qua non" of theism. i.e. you are making it up in order to then argue against it (as I have repeatedly pointed out).
edit: Among (many) other things, the Wikipedia article on God notes that "God is often conceived as the greatest entity in existence". This agrees perfectly with my approach since there is certainly in reality a referent.
Ok, I challenge you to bring up any academic citing (not mentioning) another academic using the word "God" in a way that is not supernatural.
Quoting Pantagruel
The definition of mathematics doesn't contradict the definition of banana, and yet the two are not the same thing.
Quoting Pantagruel
Not slightly the point of what you are quoting there, but Spinoza and neoplatonists refined the concept of God. What you are doing is not refining a concept but changing the meaning of a word completely. In any case, everybody is free to reject your definition, so they can stay atheists.
Quoting Pantagruel
Unintentional denial of the scientific method and proofs by contradiction right here.
Ever hear of pantheism?
Quoting Lionino
This is a complete non-sequitur. I said that the description of the being(s) that I provided did not preclude them being consistently identified with the being(s) that conformed to the Cambridge definition that you supplied. Which isn't to say the Cambridge definition is authoritative, because it isn't.
Quoting Lionino
Refining a concept could certainly ultimately end up in changing the meaning of the word. That is entirely the point.
Quoting Lionino
What does this even mean? I certainly did not deny the scientific method or proof by contradiction. I pointed out that someone who is authentically interested in framing a concept should not appeal to someone who denies the validity of the concept.
In common speech, it is silly atheism dressing up with the robes of changing the definitions of "God" and "universe" the former which you are doing. If you are talking about Spinoza's God, it is the first motor, where the lines between natural and supernatural blur. I will challenge you once again to bring up an academic. Note that Spinoza's God is quite in line with Cambridge's definition.
Quoting Pantagruel
Of course, the "highest form of consciousness" does not preclude being a spirit that controls reality. "Being a banana" does not preclude from "being 5 feet long". Yet, being 5 feet long and being a banana are not the same thing. Your definition and the accepted definition of God are not the same thing, they often don't overlap, like banana and being 5 feet long, therefore your definition is wrong. This is not a "non sequitur" (incorrectly used and hyphenated), or a false analogy, it is a perfectly descriptive analogy of your complaint.
Nevertheless, you say "the main defining feature of of a god is...". "Main defining feature" of something is exactly a definition, your definition of god is wrong, as the dictionary and any attentive English-speaker will confirm. When someone is learning English, no one teaches "God" the way you think of it, they teach it as it is in the dictionary.
Quoting Pantagruel
The Cambridge definition gives a good definition of what people mean by the word 'God'. You can complain about authority as you give the ability to communicate with fellow English-speakers.
Quoting Pantagruel
Most atheists don't deny the validity of god, just don't believe in its materiality. Your comment that atheists should not comment on god is ridiculous. Mathematicians prove theorems by showing its opposite is impossible. They don't believe in the opposite and yet they are working with it. Some physicists who work with relativity and the theory behind white holes, with string theory don't commit to the idea that those structures actually exist. Many philosophers who work with ontological proofs of God don't actually believe in god or in the effectivity of ontological proofs.
Your comment is plainly absurd and sophomoric.
You also should not comment on God, as what you understand by the word "God" is completely distinct from what God actually means. You don't necessarily believe in God as what the word actually, otherwise this discussion wouldn't be happening.
The redefinition therefore is wrong and would be refused by any lexicographer.
This is not a matter of metaphysics or theology, it is a matter of language.
Your muddled interpretations aside, the actual state of affairs is that the concept of "God" exists across all cultures and in such variety that your claim that there is some definitive version of that concept that anyone wishing to discuss the concept must adhere to is trivially false.
As to your position. You reject the supernatural concept of god because it is illogical. Fine. But then you reject my non-supernatural characterization...because it is not of the supernatural variety. Your dogmatic mind is evidently in a state of blatant self-contradiction. One of the hazards of dogmatism.
Quoting Lionino
Surely you see the irony of someone who denies entirely the notion of God setting himself up as an authority on "what God actually means"?
Based on Abrahamic, Hindi, pantheonic Greco-Roman-Egyptian-Babylonian-Persian-Mesoamerican-Aboriginal traditions, I understand theism as consisting of the following claims:
(1) at least one ultimate mystery
(2) created existence,
(3) intervenes in causes changes (which cannot be accounted for otherwise) to the universe
(4) and is morally worthy of worship.
Cite any deity-tradition, sir, that you consider 'theistic' and that does not conceptualize its (highest) deity with these attributes, or claims. :chin:
Sounds to me like made up woo-stuff :sparkle: just like e.g. "Flying Spaghetti Monsters" ... "The Great Old Ones" ... "The Force" ... nothing to do with any religious expression of theism as such.
This single condition alone defines the being practically and can be the sole sufficient condition to account for your other conditions, such as having created existence. Being morally worthy of worship is a function of human relationship, not an intrinsic property. Having an 'ultimate mystery' certainly doesn't mean anything relevant to the being of the deity, that is a feature of the religion itself. We are not talking about religions, we are talking about conceptualizations of deities.
That condition I agree is universal, and it correlates with what I said, possessed of abilities which humans don't understand. Which is really all it would need to be and, given the limitations of the human mind, isn't all that high a bar anyway, as I mentioned.
Im not saying anyone is wiser than anyone else, or anyone is or is not good - Im saying if I knew there is no god, who cares what anyone else thinks about anything that is not testable in a lab, why ever discuss ethics if there is no measuring stick we all have to follow?
Im not saying you cant discuss ethics as a hobby, or because its just fun to look at all the people struggling with their fabrications called the good and virtue or objective value or natural law - but if none of these held any weight, why take any of it seriously?
Many atheists, like Peter Singer for instance, develop whole ethical systems and rules and judgments on other peoples behavior. I would just be reminded of Nietzsches opening lines to On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense: After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, the clever animals had to die There have been eternities when [the human intellect] did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.
No God, no hope for anything more than nature drawing its breath. Why be ethical at all? Seems philosophy and ethics would be annoying and tiresome.
So maybe atheism is not only rational, but accurate, but if it is so, arent ethics and truth irrational? And by extension, all discussions about these fabrications wastes of breath?
But if you are not an atheist how can you fairly come to that view? You would appear to lack the grounding to make that claim.
Quoting Fire Ologist
There are plenty of such people within the world's religious traditions. I don't think a little thing like god changes people's wiring.
Quoting Fire Ologist
People seem to be addicted to stories of doom and end of times. Media has fed us a steady diet of apocalypse stories for many years.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Well clearly this isn't the case because secular humanists have long plugged away at building ethical frameworks quite consistently and effectively, without need for gods. But I get that for you personally (and many other theists) this may seem incomprehensible.
I agree that is what we do.
But if I thought that was all we could do, I would see it as futile. I see in every age, the same outcomes of all of our politics, all of our civil codes, all of our aspirations for a better world - we get murder, lies, rallying cries for war, etc.
Democracy and capitalism were once the greatest hopes we crafted as collaborations for the community, and today, many think they are evil and doomed to corruption.
Its all bullshit we tell ourselves.
Unless there is a measuring stick that is real that we are collaborating to find and emulate.
Im not saying if I was atheist I would be an anarchistic, hedonistic sociopath, but Im saying I wouldnt bother to try to explain why not or tell some else they were wrong about whatever they did.
To me, its because we collaborate at all about anything that we experience the possibility of God. God is in the collaboration. So you take God out of it, the collaboration falls with it.
And there are a lot of cooky Catholics - AND, for all I know Peter Singer is a saint. Im not judging him (or the nun and priest) - Im just saying if I was an atheist, morality and truth talk would seem pointless.
Free thinking, free living.
For starters, in order to flourish more than languish...
Perhaps they "seem" so to a child.
No more "irrational" than an atheist reducing harm and correcting falsehoods.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yeah, that's how lazy cynics "bullshit" themselves.
This is ethics in a nutshell. It's also why co-operation is such a crucial aspect of being alive. Quoting Fire Ologist
I'm unsure it would. Its just far less high-stakes, i think.
Lots of evidence there is no such thing as free will. The biggest proponents of free will are people who believe in good and evil objectively and a free agent who gets to choose among them, like a Christian does.
Quoting 180 Proof
If there are no rules, we cant languish in the anxiety of breaking the rules. Why invent rules that can be broken and put yourself in a box of broken people. (Find a lot of people in there - maybe the music is good.)
Ethics is like a clear roadmap for how to walk to your best life, then we take a look and see that we are in a boat with no sail. Totally delusional along with the God that doesnt exist.
Quoting 180 Proof
Fairly adolescent response. The premise here is there is no god, no objective truth, and this will all be over soon enough. So lets see what we can agree on and use it to help inform choices that might go against our instincts. And Ive met a lot of annoyed atheists stuck in pointless (to them) conversations. I get that. They were adults too.
Quoting 180 Proof
You sound like the God of Abraham. Or Socrates. Or Descartes. Or the ministry of truth.
Theism and atheism are two different mindsets and neither is logical nor illogical as theists have their beliefs for different reasons other than just divine favour.
That makes sense. So, an atheist can have an interest in talking philosophy, truth and ethics, but in the end, as soon as they hit that pointless wall, the atheist can deftly switch to sports, the weather on upcoming vacation, and needing new shoes - higher stakes conversations. I get that.
I agree, that's why I said nothing about it.
This statement doesn't make any sense
Well, that seems to me a "fairly adolescent" unwarranted "premise".
Where? When? Who? Effectively?
No two philosophers can agree on anything, let alone build off of it together.
Im not an expert on living the atheist life, but I didnt always believe in God. And it was liberating. But also seemed incapable of addressing the bigger questions that didnt go away. If I stayed atheist, I wouldnt have come back to seeking answers, and more to the point, wouldnt be talking about it with anyone else.
Thats the illogical part to me. If three people agree there is no god, there is no objective truth, there is no access to reality as it must be for all, then they should also agree that they have no idea whether each of them mean or agreed on the same thing - collaboration in philosophy and ethics becomes pointless.
You said free-thinking. So you meant free thinking as a result of deterministic neural activity. Got it.
The Declaration of Human Rights.
And I have worked for social justice organisations that were secular, busily providing health and housing services for people experiencing homelessness and mental ill health. In fact, in my city during the 1990's it was secular charities that made religious charities stop treating disadvantaged folk as lepers to be patronized and dragged the welfare system into the present, from a kind of bleak, Dickensian charity model, so beloved by many Christian welfare services.
Quoting Fire Ologist
It's illogical to you. It makes perfect sense to me.
No theist can identify objective truth either. They can only point vaguely to some amorphous god idea (as nominally foundational to whatever they think is real) a deity no one understands in the same way or expects the same things from. Religious wars and internecine conflicts between religions and sects within religions demonstrated pretty clearly that theism offers no advantages to secular thinking when it comes to building a shared understanding.
:up: Exactly. For example, theists cannot demonstrate that their "god exists" is (except only in their minds) an objective truth.
Parfit was a very interesting one as he was an atheist who sought to the very end to come up with an objective ethic. He failed. As all will.
Theists would however argue that their belief in a god is a matter of faith and not proof and therefore under no obligation to provide such proof.
On the other hand scientists dont go around trying to prove or disprove god either because no such experiment can be conducted to detect god.
Plus if god could be detected by experiment then thered be no need for faith which is what religion is in most cases.
That isn't nonsensical though, is it 180? Its simply not veridical. IFF an Abrahamic God exists, then there we have objective facts from on high. Without, we're where you're situating us (and I agree). So, it holds..
I'm not sure about that. If this god exists then it would still be a series of confusions and mysteries. Which parts of the Koran and the Bible would be accurate and which bits not? How would contradictions be understood? Was Jesus god or a man? God might be established as an objective reality, but we still wouldn't be able to determine if this god was good (the Abrahamic god seems to operate like a mafia boss). Does god like what is moral, or is the good that which emanates from god's nature. How would we know?
It's not arguable. In this scenario, its cooked in that states of affairs are relayable by the ultimate being. They are going to be 100% air-tight and unassailable save for dishonesty - which is baked out of hte concept because an objective goodness is baked in. You have to remeber, we're playing by THEIR rules. You can't just question the Abrahamic God if we've established it exists - and not be wrong.
The problem you raise, I see, and it's a fun one to play with ie What would people do about objective facts IFF Abrahamic God exists?? All your questions are live in that arena and imo a lot of fun.
But THEIR rules contradict each other. I would argue that it's far from clear what the characteristics of the Abrahamic god are even to believers. For one thing, is the Bible still a series of allegories in this reality? Which stories are accurate and how do we deal with contradictions?
If the Abrahamic god is real then we still don't know what that god wants unless it says something to us directly. What if his god were real and appeared to us saying - 'The Bible was an attempt to capture my nature for a less sophisticated time. Much of the stories were misconceived and misunderstood.'
But this changes nothing about hte objective facts which exist in the Universe where Abrahamic God created it all.
Quoting Tom Storm
Then that's an objective fact. I didn't note any, so picking apart any particular belief people hold doesn't come across my desk, as it were. It is conceptually airtight that the Abrahamic God existing imports objective facts.
Of course it is, just like your question.
No. It's not. Thanks for playing.
Im saying there is an objective truth. Maybe no one has said it, but because of my faith its worth trying to say something objective, universal, absolute - true for God as it would be true for any consciousness. God or truth or objectivity becomes like a limit we can shoot for.
But when I was an atheist, it didnt matter that I couldnt find it, that it might be an illusion - all of it became just as much bullshit as the god idea or the deity no one understands in the same way. All of it.
And as an atheist, it made sense that it was all bullshit. Why make any ethics, full of holes and overly confident in almighty reason and the wonderful ability to judge value? Objective truth, the stuff of reality without appearance was gone, so what use is ever using those words again to defeat appearance (for only other appearances are left when truth is gone).
But the atheists who strive to build a new objectivity, a postmodern wisdom, a new language game, are just as full of shit as the theists seem to be to you.
Without objective reality, who can really tell the difference between BS and something not-BS? No one.
Theres a reason Nietzsche said god is dead when he was saying truth is overvalued and mostly a lie, and metaphysics and absolutes are bullshit, and instinct is the only invisible force that matters; because saying god is dead sums up the rest of it. Nietzsche was consistent enough to remain skeptical of scientists who thought they knew the nature of truth just as much as theists did. Bullshit speaks in every tongue.
Im not saying people dont come up with some great attempts at truth and ethics without god in them; its just that they are attempts, and not successful or effective enough to make a dent in the swamp of BS that we always create along with it. For me, without God, why bother trying again when there is no truth, nothing real about morality, no god?
I havent heard an atheist truly recover a real, relevant case for objectivity and meaning and purpose to philosophy and metaphysics. Nietzsche said you build it on a tightrope at best and inevitably the facade falls down. I agree with that, if god was dead to me.
All youre doing here is saying god equals objectivity. But you cant demonstrate a single belief any god holds regarding morality. Pretty sure you cant point to a single objective truth about that god. And you certainly cant demonstrate a god.
It also doesnt follow that if there are gods that they are (or that they create) morality itself. For all we know a god might simply identify what is good, but not be the source of it. How would we know?
Not sure why you brought up Nietzsche or science. I havent raised them, nor do I have much interest in either.
My point is a simple one. We have no way of knowing what any gods want from us. I am not putting this up against any other system, certainly not science, which can make no value statements or proclamations about truth.
In relation to morality, a theist has no more access to an objective morality than a secularist.
:100: Amen!
If you compare both systems, i.e. religion versus atheism, you can still see different emerging properties.
Nietzsche actually understood what the emerging properties were of a society based on atheism:
In my opinion, the emerging properties of an atheist society are best described by the absurdist philosophy:
In line with what Nietzsche predicted, western civilization is now in a constant rebellion against the absurd, frantically trying to avoid the inevitable final outcome, which is that it will spectacularly commit suicide.
Hence, it does not matter that both religion and atheism would in fact be preaching bullshit, because not all forms of bullshit are equal. Unlike religion, atheism is known to be a dangerous, society-terminating form of bullshit.
Another episode of Yankees trying to lump themselves in with Europe by pretending a shared "civilisation".
Quoting Tarskian
Statistically false by all acounts. The less religious a country is the better it is doing.
As a European myself, I consider the Americans to be an obvious Anglo-Saxon offshoot. They undeniably share their pre-colonial history with the British isles.
Quoting Lionino
For a relatively short time, atheism allows to increase national income. However, it works until it doesn't anymore.
Instead of investing in producing the next generation, they have to import it from people who did. It is a short-term gain that will eventually cost them more in the long run. In fact, it will even cost them everything.
Similarly, you can increase company profits by not spending on the maintenance of the factory. For a while, profits will indeed be better. A car company can cancel all design work for new models. For a while, the company will indeed be more profitable.
With atheism, the struggle against the absurd will sooner or later begin to dominate society, in their vain attempt at avoiding the inevitable, i.e. collective suicide.
The French just had an election on Sunday. The only issue at stake was their impending collective suicide. No children means immigration. Immigration means that the French are getting replaced. It's game over for them, but they will not accept that until they will have to.
:up:
Realistically, there may well be things happening in the universe that the human mind - intermediated by the limited faculties of the human body - may only be dimly able to grasp. The golden ratio has been "known" for millenia; fractal patterns abound in nature. But it is only with the advent of advanced computer modelling that that we have identified the real effects of this mathematical phenomenon in the existence of attractors at the heart of non-linear systems.
Hence, I believe that some people are simply "open" to certain types of experiences which, while "meaningful," may not be immediately reducible to a concrete meaning. Other people, of a more inflexible frame of mind, are not open to these kind of experiences and, hence, simply do not have them. Or, more precisely, do not recognize that they have them.
The substance of any belief is the effect that belief has upon the actions of the believer. Individuals inspired by the sublime, the divine, have created great works of art and philosophy, sacrificed themselves for the common good, and, yes, achieved great scientific breakthroughs. I personally am inspired by the glimpses of the sublime my life has afforded me.
To deny the possibility of something that someone else has experienced because you have failed to experience it seem to me nothing more than a bad case of sour grapes.
Quoting Tarskian
This is not what Nietzsche predicted. Nihilism is not the inevitable result of atheism. In fact , Nietzsche argued in his later works that religion and spirituality are nihilistic, because they represent a negation of life, as does the metaphysical notion of free will. He believed that only an atheistic revaluation and overturning of all religious, ethical and scientific values, such as the value of truth and goodness, can stave off nihilism.
Yes, he undoubtedly does that too, but I do not endorse these views. I consider these to be part of Nietzsche's personal rebellion against the absurd.
Quoting Joshs
The alternative that he proposes is obviously unrealistic. I don't doubt that people have tried his recipe. Nietzsche did indeed rebel against the absurd -- but like everyone else who does -- with nothing particularly interesting to show for. His recipe certainly does not bring hope to anybody who has become hopeless. Any rebellion against the absurd is always in vain, including Nietzsche's.
In fact, I was referring to Nietzsche's idea in the subtitle of the article:
I consider everything else that Nietzsche wrote on the matter to be his personal rebellion against the absurd. He clearly knew that there was a problem. He thought that he had found a possible solution, but he hadn't. Rebellion against the absurd only brings false hope. Salvation will never arrive. Not in the form of alcohol, or drugs, or any otherwise meaningless atheistic revaluations.
Is the only alternative to a dead determinism, a determinism of assigned causes and effects that we invented for the convenience of building stuff, a spirit of some kind? Is life meaningless simply because it doesnt have some ULTIMATE meaning, purpose or truth? Is this what really causes feelings of despair, hopelessness and absurdity? Isnt t a feeling of meaningless in a present situation that leads to such overblown philosophical conclusions about the pointlessness of it all? It is a hallmark of severe depression that the present hopelessness draws into itself the part and future, so that it becomes impossible to envision any change from ones current state. One ceases to be able to remember or anticipate any hopeful state of mind.
We spend most of our lives ensconced within one value system or another which imparts a sense of meaning and purpose to life . It is this participation on the part of individuals in shared cultural practices of meaning and value that allows us to communicate with each other and make the world intelligible. Nietzsche doesnt deny this. His point is that nihilism results from trying to freeze in place a particular cultural notion of truth or ethical goodness. Doing that eventually kills off the meaning of the values we co-create as a society, like repeating the seem word over and over until it loses all sense. To remain within meaning, we must continually renew and transform our understanding of ourselves and the world, not for the seek of some ultimate goal, but for the sake of going with the flow, being one with the process of transformation, enjoying the value systems which give us meaning and delighting in overthrowing them when they have outlived their usefulness.
No one can point to objectivity through reason and science alone. Plato tried, Aristotle, Hegel, Descartes - they are all punching bags to us post modern sages.
If all there is are us people, after thousands of years of bickering over philosophy and mysticism, and science and religion, we have so little agreement. We get Kant where the objective thing in itself is unknowable, we get Nietzsche showing us objectivity is for the weak, we get post modernism where there is no truth, we get Wittgenstein where meaning is a game.
It is fairly popular to say there is no absolute truth, there is only my truth. Fine if someone wants to think theyve said something by saying that, but I call that bullshit. If you think there is only my truth just admit there is no truth at all.
Im saying that if I concluded there was no truth, which is hand-in-hand with there is no god, I wouldnt be writing home about it trying to convince people how much I knew this to be correct (cant say true). If I concluded there was no god, I wouldnt be writing down the new Ten Commandments of morality for all to learn from.
No objective moral position to guide us - then who the hell cares what anyone thinks?
Thou shalt only call someone by the pronoun they have chosen, even if that pronoun can change without any visible indication of what that pronoun is. Lets try to collaborate on a compromise with that starting point.
Objectivity has been so deconstructed, gender itself is just another pile of bullshit we tell ourselves.
No objectivity is like a religious belief.
So is objectivity.
Im saying that I happen to believe in God. And I happen to believe people DO know the truth. These are beliefs. I, like Aristotle for instance, think there can be a science of this objective world, that we can discover and share in discussion. Because of those beliefs, discussion with other people about what they think about morality and truth has value to me. I can learn something objectively true - gain wisdom.
Im not wasting my time spinning wheels talking about what is correct and what is not correct about truth and morality when, if I was an atheist post modern thinker, the end of every conversation is well well never know, all we can do is make up our best, and go on with our lives in our bubbles of bullshit.
As believers in God and therefore in hope, we use a very simple -- largely auto-suggestive -- trick to address the issue: We simply hope that God will take care of it. In fact, we are convinced of this. The catch is that it only works for the ones who believe that it does.
I doubt that Nietzsche's alternative has the same properties.
If Nietzsche's "atheistic revaluation" really worked, why doesn't the suicide prevention hotline use it to give hope to their clinically depressed users?
The world needs a solution for the second leading cause of disability in the world. In fact, we have always had a solution until atheism started spreading.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Quoting Tarskian
No, it doesn't.
Quoting Tarskian
There is no meaningful correlation between religiosity and birth rates. Atheist Czechia has much higher birth rates than deeply religious Spain, Greece, and Italy.
Any other malformed idea of yours that you want me to educate you about?
Then why speak? Its all babble. No one will ever truly know anyone or anything if its all subjective any way you go. Nothing is left to share among people in discussion. Anything shared would be objective.
Speak to the waitress when you are ordering dinner; speak to your kids when you are telling them it is safe to cross the street; speak to your politician when you disagree with a new law about traffic signs.
But if anyone says Laws are good. Or Community is important or there is a natural kind of person, and a built in morality of doing no harm or any such universal concoction - tell them blah, blah, blah. Remember thats subjective BS, as equally meaningful as laws are bad and community is unimportant. and any response thrown out among other subjects is your own attempt at wish fulfillment.
Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus, was known to reply to arguments by wiggling his finger. He believed all was so subject to change, nothing could be fixed long enough to be objective or truth - with his finger he showed he understood what this meant for philosophy, for speaking.
In the end, I think the subjectivists, the no-truthers, those who drain all meaning and purpose and value, are just wrong. I totally get their position. I admit they may be right (although being right is an objective statement and the first crack in the position). Im saying if I stood still on their position, talking about morality or metaphysics, or good or justice or truth would be like talking about God or fairy elves or human progress - just another no sum game.
Quoting Tarskian
Nietzsche often considered suicide due to his physical suffering. It was his philosophy which rescued him. But as you said, any approach only works if one believes in it. Or more precisely, one can only absorb a philosophy to the extent that it is relevant to and consistent with their way of life. Any therapeutic approach can help someone in distress if it resonates with their outlook, which is why a suicide helpline can encourage one persons atheism and anothers religious faith without compromising its mission of saving lives. . Of course an idea can change the way we look at things, but even here, we must be ready to integrate what it has to teach us in order for it to benefit us.
The biggest cause of depression and despair is breakdown in interpersonal relations. Our self-worth, and the meaningfulness of our world, are dependent on our ability to form bonds with others and successfully navigate conflicts with people we care about . This requires insights into why people do things that surprise, disappoint or anger us, why trust and loyalty breaks down. If we leave the answers to these questions to our gods, we will not develop the skills to discover the perspective of the other from their vantage. Getting along with others is the most difficult challenge in life, and making progress at it is our responsibility, not the gods.
We do not "deny" anyone's "experience" only observe that such "experience" does not correspond to anything outside of your head. The experiential difference between us, sir, is not that we 'have failed" but that you seem to emotionally need to take fantasies (of "possibility") literally and we do not.
Yes indeed, consider (e.g.) cults, asylums, prisons, casinos, p0m0 seminars, MAGA/Klan rallies ... ye shall know "beliefs" by their fruits. :mask:
:smirk: :up:
Quoting Fire Ologist
:rofl:
Would it work for anybody else?
Quoting Joshs
The problem of getting along with others is not new. It is the society-wide inability to deal with the problem that is rather new. By destroying the old system, without bringing a new one, the atheist impetus has left a lot of people stranded.
People used to be able to deal with difficult life circumstances.
The standards of living in past centuries were in comparison very low. People even had to deal with famines, wars, pestilence, high child mortality and largely inexistent health care, but they seem to have been less traumatized than people today.
It is not possible to bring back spirituality to people who do not believe in it. So, that is not what I am advocating. I guess that instead they will have to try something like Nietzsche's "atheistic revaluation". Maybe it works for them.
Or you have failed to observe the evidence in the events comprising your own life due to your own attitude, or simply some inherent limitation of your cognitive makeup.
"In general, if an argument is to convince you, then, first, you must be capable of understanding it; and secondly, you must accept the truth of its premises. You may be capable of grasping arguments (say, in some of the more esoteric branches of mathematics) which others are quite unable to understand; others may have no inkling about the truth of certain propositions (say, in the history of logic) which are utterly familiar to you. For such simple reasons an argument appropriate to you may be inappropriate to me."
(Annas & Barnes, Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism)
Quoting Fire Ologist
Its actually intersubjective , at least with regard to empirical truth, and the intersubjective intertwines itself so inextricably with the subjective that it is only in a move of abstraction that we can claim to separate them.
And given that the objective is a product of intersubjective coordinations and material practices, the objective does not come before the other two but is derivative. What comes first is a world which is always intelligible and understandable in some form, due to the social and linguistic practices that we share. You dont need a god or a notion of absolute truth to explain why we understand each other. The question is not why we understand each other, but how are systems of values and knowledge formed through interaction , and how do they change over the course of history, such that communities of divergent intelligiblity arise? Once we have embarked on this line of inquiry, the search for the really real truth may come to be seen more and more as a way to freeze the progress of inquiry in its tracks, rather than as the best way to enhance our ability to get along with each other.
:roll: Ad hominem, not an argument. Quite telling.
"In general, if an argument is to convince you, then, first, you must be capable of understanding it; and secondly, you must accept the truth of its premises. You may be capable of grasping arguments (say, in some of the more esoteric branches of mathematics) which others are quite unable to understand; others may have no inkling about the truth of certain propositions (say, in the history of logic) which are utterly familiar to you. For such simple reasons an argument appropriate to you may be inappropriate to me."
(Annas & Barnes, Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism)
edit: In other words, no more or less ad hominem than your criticisms of my experiential claims. And I like my substantiating argument far better. I love scientific realism, because the first tenet of science is to acknowledge its own limits, including its approximate nature. I don't know what the limits of possibility are, but given what I can see of them in the span of one little human lifetime, I'd assume that much vaster intelligences would compass magnitudes more. Same thing with abilities.
But what happens when you realize that everything we construct today will utterly change and be wiped away? What happens to the objectivity that is derived from the shifting sands?
It never was more than an illusion. Intersubjectivity only becomes objectivity by convention.
Look, I think there is an objective, mind independent physical world, that is intelligible to minds to varying degrees that can be logically tested, and that logic reflects the fact of objects being in the world. There is truth and wisdom to be gleaned FROM experience.
But I only think this because nothing else makes any sense at all. If I thought no-god and no-truth made sense, then no more objective mind independent reality and all intersubjectivity is a game played in the phenomenal world, as reality is always once step removed (if it exists at all).
Quoting Pantagruel
:sweat:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Changing is not the same thing as being wiped away. Ill give you an example. In the shift from Newton physics to relativistic and quantum physics, was the Newtonian description of macro phenomena wiped away? No, it continues to be useful. Non pomo-oriented philosophers of science will say that we continue to understand the Newtonian concepts in an unchanged form, and merely correct or supplement them when dealing with sub-atomic phenomena. Postmodern thinkers argue that when in using the Newtonian concepts today, we alter the sense of meaning of this system of terms ( terms like mass and energy), but in ways that are subtle enough that it appears for practical purposes as though we are accessing their original meaning. I think this is a good example of how our concepts evolve and change in ways that are subtle enough that we can move back and forth between the older and the newer senses of meaning in ways that are useful to us. Progress may change our older concepts , but it also depends on them, references them, builds on them. It just doesnt do so in a cumulative, linear, logical manner. We can agree with Kihn that a new paradigm is better than an older one, that it makes progress over the older one, by solving more puzzles But we can also agree with him that assuming a linear , cumulative progress in thinking is really no progress at all, because it just recycles the older concepts and adds to them. Real progress requires real change in ideas, and real change in ideas demands qualitative , gestalt shifts in the axes of meaning within which empirical concepts get their sense.
The fact that our schemes must be turned on their heads from time to time doesnt mean that they arent in touch with a real world , as though only the schemes changed but the world remained the same. We can say the same thing about the world around us, the real, material world that we interact with , that matters to us, as w can about our schemes. That real world is constantly turning itself on its head as well. We as human knowers are qualitatively changing our understanding in conjunction with and in relation to a world which is changing its relation to itself, and to us, over time.
Well, if you stick to such straw men then this conversation won't go anywhere. And what's with the wacky Jordan Peterson style utterance? Isn't his bogyman the 'postmodern Marxist?
My argument does not take into consideration postmodernism, of which I know little. It does not explore atheism, as this not relevant to the points made. It does not take into consideration what truth or objectivity are - different subjects entirely.
These are points you seem to have raised to distract from my key argument which is even if you grant there might be gods you can't demonstrate which one is real or what god's moral system is. That's all. In other words to say god is the source of morality is functionally irrelevant since there is no agreement about what that morality is or which god is true. There is no objective morality from god you can point to.
So it's clear that the atheist and the theist can both do little more than explore morality through an ongoing conversation and via a community coming to agreements about the behaviours we believe avoid suffering and promote flourishing. Which is pretty much what we do.
:up: :up:
Sounds like fantasizing on your part, to me.
Do you see yourself as someone likely to commit suicide if you came to have an atheist perspective? If so, do you think that might just be a personal issue you have?
Im not arguing why I believe in God and objective truth. You are asking me to justify my beliefs to you as if I was using my beliefs to justify something about atheists.
Im simply saying if I personally did NOT believe in objective truth, I wouldnt see the point of philosophy, and if I didnt believe in objective morality, I wouldnt see the point of any morality.
The thread is about whether atheism is logical or not. Maybe there are no gods. Maybe atheists are right about that. Im just saying what I think logically follows from an atheistic worldview - absolute truth and objective morality disappear as well, from what I can tell. This isnt an original idea. Nietzsche called one of his books beyond good and evil and belittled those with a will to truth as lying to themselves, and said God is dead to make his point thoroughly.
Quoting Tom Storm
Ok, but that is a different issue. If we grant that there is objectivity and God serving as judge of moral objectivity, now it is worth struggling to find out what God means, what is truth. It is worth having this discussion.
Im willing to keep searching and talking about it, because I believe there is an objective truth.
Which brings me back to my simple point. If I didnt grant (by belief and my own reasons) that there was truth and objective morals, then I would see no reason to argue about it.
Ill give you an example of where this is coming from.
There is a whole thread on here asking if there is a physical basis for an object.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15297/is-there-any-physical-basis-for-what-constitutes-a-thing-or-object
So philosophers can doubt the difference between an apple and a tree trunk is anything more than a mental construct. The world-in-itself is unknown to us, and the lines we draw around things are only lines in our minds.
This is a real epistemological and metaphysical issue. Its a conclusion that is currently popular (been around since Socrates). Its how we show that gender isnt fixed for instance - we draw the lines we want to draw as there are no lines in an objective world we have access to (if such a world exists).
I live in the same world as those philosophers. I get the epistemological and metaphysical issues.
But I just think we have a lot more work to do to demonstrate the objective. I dont therefore think there are no differences in a physical world apart from me. I believe those of us who think every object we take up is ONLY constructed by ourselves, are just wrong, because there is an objective reality with mind-independent distinctions in it.
The problem with what is an object doesnt lead me to believe there are no objects it leads me to believe we have a lot more to investigate about the world and a lot more to clarify in our discussions about it.
The problem with what is the real God, and what does it matter to me anyway doesnt lead me to believe there are no gods it leads me to believe we have a lot more to talk about.
This is because I believe there is an objective world or truth and morality.
I get thinking there is no truth. I get thinking there is no god. I dont get philosophizing and developing ethics despite those facts. You can, but I wouldnt.
I am not talking about objective truth. Whether it exists or not is irrelevant to my point.
Take care - TS
The following view is ascribed to Nietzsche:
The absurdist philosophy also suggests that atheism leads to this result:
I am not an atheist. I cannot imagine ever becoming one.
I dont blame you for ending the conversation. Its actually is an example of the point I was making.
And? Is this meant to be an argument from authority? Nietzche having made predictions about the future based on his limited perspective isn't something I am all that interested in.
In any case, it doesn't seem to respond to the questions I asked you.
Your position seems to mostly amount to an appeal to consequences fallacy. Suppose a substantial portion of our fellow social primates can't cope emotionally with having an atheistic perspective. Do you recognize that that doesn't have any bearing on whether God exists?
Explain.
So, why do you want to discuss the matter? My starting point has always been this view ascribed to Nietzsche.
Quoting wonderer1
I have never used this argument to "prove" that God exists.
I consider the objective impartial position to be that we cannot rationally know that. This decision can only be made at the spiritual level. It is an individual choice to make.
But then again, the abjuration of spirituality is known to have potentially dangerous consequences.
As an atheist, Nietzsche was clearly aware of that. He proposed that an "atheistic revaluation" could be an alternative to religion. In my impression, his solution hasn't gained particularly much traction.
In the meanwhile, the ongoing atheist rebellion against the absurd continues unabatedly with no solution in sight.
You see, God does not even need to exist for religion to develop survivorship bias. Since atheism exhibits a very noticeable tendency to drop out of the race, religion will trivially win by default.
There is simply not enough time to keep struggling with vaporware such as Nietzsche's "atheistic revaluation". Either you manage to keep the absurd at bay or else the absurd wins.
Well I understand you dont believe in god or religion, and you dont seem to be an Aristotelian platonist about objectivity, so if I was you, I wouldnt argue with me either (which was my point).
While this is true, it does not go to the argument I have been making.
This is, perversely, actually an argument I first heard in the Baptist community I grew up in. It came up in the context of Christians who thought gay people were destined for hell and that homosexuality was against god's morality.
So here it is, one more time: Religions disagree about god's moral system. Even within the one religion people can't agree about how god wants us to behave. Theists therefore have no access to an 'objective' or god given moral system. Our Chaplain put it something like this - 'The faithful are in the same position as the secular humanist. We can debate what is right and wrong and we, as Christians, can invoke god's name, but we don't have any certain way to establish how god wants us to behave. Only the literalists will make such an argument and even they will be at odds over the conclusions.'
All the religious person can do is interpret scripture or respond from personal perspectives regarding how they 'imagine' god wants them to behave.
Again - this is not about the nature of theism or atheism, it's about the nature of moral systems which can help but be pragmatic, adaptive and evolving.
:up: :up:
Quoting Fire Ologist
... then (a) "God" is not an objective fact that is either directly or indirectly observed.
As per Plato's Euthyphro, 'morality is objective' because (a) "God" says so and not that (a) "God" says so because independent of all subjects including (any) "God" it is objective? :eyes:
Your confusion, in part, comes from equivocating, or conflating, "object" (ontology) and "objective" (epistemology), Fire Ologist, which is typical of p0m0s / idealists / platonists. :sparkle:
I.e. assert without argument or non-arbitrary grounds. :roll:
Aspirational beliefs are incredibly autosuggestive.
For example, if you do not believe that there is hope, then there isn't. If an athlete does not believe that he will win the gold medal, then he won't.
These things are ultimately self-fulfilling prophecies.
The ability to strongly believe -- "lying to themselves" -- is a survival skill.
That is why the most repugnant individuals are the ones who destroy other people's hope:
- there is no hope for you
- you cannot do it
- nobody will help you
- you will fail
- there is no god who will help you
- ...
By destroying other people's hope, they cause untold damage. The step from unbeliever to satanically evil is very small. All one needs to do, is to project one's own despair onto others. It even works because misery loves company.
That's hilarious.
Might as well say this of theism:
By destroying people's freedom and ability to think, theism can cause untold damage. The step from believer to satanically evil is very small. All one needs to do is project one's own nihilism and religious absolutism onto others. It even works because fanaticism craves converts.
Religion does not destroy anybody's freedom. Religion just reminds you of the fact that some forms of freedom are fake. If you do not want to keep the laws of God, then don't. Religion merely reminds you of the fact that it will backfire, if not later in this life, then in a later life.
:halo: :up:
I agree we dont have any certain way (that comes from anyone else but our own selves) to establish how God wants us to behave. God doesnt send everyone text messages. How we each decide to actually behave and what we actually do is for each of us alone, even alone from God. So I can sit with that part of the quote.
I also agree that when we are together talking about how we might behave, building moral systems together, we struggle to interpret the words and traditions. And this debate among even members of the same religion, is really the same activity (just a different subject) as people discussing the best government or best economy, or even the best interpretation of any data into any system.
But what are these debates for? What will my behavior actually be? What can I use from outside of my own wits to inform this behavior? Is there any objective end to the debates and interpretations?
Personally I have to believe the reason for certain debates is to find one truth, one morality for all of us equally, for all minds and for all gods.
If the above Christian who says he has no idea how God wants him to behave, and who said we must debate interpretations when talking about it, if he ALSO thought there was no such thing as objective truth, and no actual knowledge of God was possible at all, then what would be the point of all the debating? He may not particularly know Gods will, but if he thought he never would or could know Gods will, why ever discuss Gods will again? And if that was his final lesson to you, he was a poor priest, at least on that occasion.
Im not disagreeing with the conundrum it is to be a human being, to figure out what is the right thing to do is, to know no matter what happens at least I tried the best that I could. Its as hard for a theist as it is for an atheist to figure this shit out.
But from that starting point of nothing to go on, just like anybody else (no one telling me how to behave, free to figure it out), I happen to believe we can get somewhere together, that that are a few places all minds are already participating in, and that is objectivity, or truth, or when universalizing moral systems, for me, God is equivalent to objectivity or truth.
If I didnt think there was anywhere in the universe where the truth was laid bare for anyone to see, where something good was only good and so forever good, then I (ME, doesnt have to be anyone else) wouldnt talk to Christians or argue with atheists, or theists or philosophers about any of it.
And just because I cant prove to you what the objective truth is, doesnt mean it is not still apparent to me that it exists.
I tried to show you how it works for me, just to attempt to fight off the tactical straw man accusation.
Like proving I have a body, and there is a physical world of causes and effects. I cant prove any of it is real to a well schooled modern philosopher, but I have no problem believing it is real and even obvious at times (pain and pleasure), as it gets murky at other times (hallucinations and dreams).
Just like that, I see objectivity all around me. And in the objectivity of morality, Insee God. So now its worth trying to articulate what I see to other people, to debate, to have discussions arguing scriptures or eastern mysticism. There really is truth, so its worth the struggle.
But if I didnt think that, I would understand not seeing the point to any debate, to any label or objective truth, to any indication that X is something God must want.
Quoting Tom Storm
All the religious person can do is the same thing anyone can do.
Think of it this way: objective truth is to logical discussion, what God is to moral behavior - its the reason to pursue the activity, and join others to the debate for as much help as we can get.
If didnt believe in God, Id see no point in debating moral behavior with a bunch of other monkeys like me - I already know you, just like me, well never settle any debates. And similarly, if I didnt believe in objective truth, Id see no point in debating really anything philosophical. Just like if Indidnt really believe I had a body, living in an ecosystem on earth, Id see no reason to debate biology and physics or anything philosophical. (Body is a no brainer to me, yet people debate it.)
Objectivity, like God, is there. For me. Just there.
Or I wouldnt see the point in debating.
I truly wish I could show you, to give you the meat you seem to be demanding (which is not my point and why we are talking past each other, or at least Im talking past you).
Here, Ill try. Proof of objectivity and a pointing in the direction of God.
Objectivity is the law of non-contradiction. It is math and logic itself. We cant speak at all, and language would never have developed if there wasnt before this development an objective world of many different objects in reasonable, intelligible relations. Just is. Like gravity. There is shot that can be known for what it is. Thats the shortest way for me to say why I believe (not know for certain) that there is objectivity. I dont see how objectivity can not exist without it not existing in the context of an objective world (so it still exists). An object cannot both be, and not be, in the same sense, at the same time. You need an object in this world for non-contradiction within that object to be in this world.
As for belief in God, there is no way to be short. But maybe the most logical thing to say is, if I believe in an objective world I can truly know (once in a while), and I see there are other people like me who see this same truth (or are capable of it), and they share their lives with me, and we need there to be a moral system among us all, wherever we together call something good, this moral good between us is now personal; its something now shared only among persons, and so this shared good may as well be God, and to me, is in fact God. By seeing, for instance, that it is good to sacrifice to save the people we love, to go to work to help not yourself, but others, I see this love itself between the two people as part of the substance of God. Its tied up in words and actions and intentions and reasons and meaning - all things human and Good, are of God, with God, in God, and if we choose, for God. We make God up together, and when it is good what we have done, God is really there. And immediately God is so much more than that, while at the same time, that enough to know all of God.
But Im not going to be able to prove God exists or show you something objective about God. Only grace will open you up to that, so that is up to you and your God, or maybe you know there is nothing objective to ever know about God so Ive just been talking to myself again.
I dont have to prove that to make my point. I know you arent seeing my point without some example of one objective truth or something objective about God, so I gave it a shot.
I keep just saying my point is simply that, if I didnt believe in God, Id lose sight of all objectivity among us people, and so I wouldnt bother to philosophize about morality anymore.
That's all I am saying. At last we got there. :wink:
I wrote the rest of that for nothing?
You wont speak to my point at all?
You cant get there? Its a simple point: why make moral laws we all should follow if there is no such thing as laws we all should follow? Simple, didnt work and you asked for more, so I wrote more and showed you I understood you.
Have no idea whether you get what I said. Just that you dont like it.
All you were saying misses my point, and I responded to it anyway.
Thanks for the winky face :broken:
Morals =/= laws; your question doesn't make sense.
Quoting 180 Proof
Started this few posts back saying if I didnt believe in God and objective truth, Id see no reason to make moral laws or argue with anyone about them.
Does the above make sense to you now?
You just showed what the source of your problem. It's not atheism/atheist or theism/theist. The source is you. You weren't seeking answers when you were an atheist. Now that you've become a theist, you still aren't looking for answers. Instead of looking for answers and think critically, you assumed that the answers are about being an atheist or theist, and that objective truth is contingent on being one of those.
No. Again, morals =/= laws. :roll:
I don't believe in "God" ... and, because there are objective truths, I'm a moral naturalist.
:up:
No, thats backwards. When I was an atheist, I figured out that there has to be an objective truth. So I was still thinking critically ( not about morality because that seemed pointless). But once I realized I couldnt shake objectivity, in my case, it eventually led me back to theism (along with other things).
If there is no objective truth, questions and answers about morality are pointless. The answer to every question is the same - well never know for sure, because there is no absolute objectivity.
You would want to refute that instead of diagnosing my problem.
Why make moral laws we all should follow if there is no objectivity we all must follow?
If there is no possibility of obtaining objective, universally applicable truth, why would we bother to debate universally applicable morality?
How about now? You seemed to understand it before. Just a rephrase of a simple question.
Why bother with ethics if there is no chance for a standard, any standard?
There, I said it again. How about now?
Well then you might be agreeing with me!
Some people who dont believe in God, also say things like there is no truth or there are no absolutes. So, again if you didnt believe in any of that, why play moralist.
But you, you dont believe in God, but you do believe there is objective, universal, natural law. An absolute standard. So something is there for you to work out a morality.
If, along with God, you did not believe in objectivity, what do you think would animate a debate over some moral law? I found, not enough.
I'll go you one better. Show me where this thread is about the defining attributes of "theism".
This thread is about whether atheism is illogical. Atheism isn't about refuting theism. Atheism is a disbelief in the existence of god or gods.
I continue to dispute that theisms accord with your ad hoc criteria. Simply put, your criteria don't appear in any definitions of theism. The "ultimate mystery" condition is completely vague, therefore meaningless. Being "morally worthy of worship" isn't true. The gods of the Greek pantheon exhibited no such consistent morality. Nor the Egyptian. As I said, that is about what humans think about gods, not what gods might be in and of themselves.
But all of that is moot, since none of that is relevant to the belief in "the existence of god" which is black letter by definition atheism. Which just goes to show, I guess, how illogical some atheists are prepared to be in defense of their dogma.
Non sequitur. It was you, Panta, who asserted without argument that my sine qua non claims of theism, which are easily falsified (i.e. atheism), is "ad hoc" or that I "made it up" and so I'm requesting of you to put up respond with a citation that counters my concept of theism (yeah, we both know you cannot :sweat:) or shut up.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/915456
Quoting Fire Ologist
I definitely do not agree with your "some people" as my previous posts point out. Maybe below (A, B, C1, C2) my reasoning will be clearer to you.
Yes, see (B) below.
(A) I believe there are objective truths.
(B) I believe moral naturalism consists of objective truths
which can be demonstrated using sound arguments. No doubt, open to discussion and debate. "Why bother?" you ask. To expose the flaws in the argument and explore via thought-experiments / scenarios moral naturalism's (as conceived here) pragmatic plausibility because we are thinking adults instead of dogmatic or supertitious children.
(C1) I do not believe (theistic) gods are anything more than subjective (ideas fictions or dreams) without any objective referents (i.e. enpty names).
(C2) I believe that any 'morality' based on or derived from merely subjective ideas like (theistic) gods are also merely subjective (i.e. arbitrary, relativist, emotive, dogmatic, superstitious, etc), therefore not objective.
Is that why after I completely debunked your claim about birth rates one page ago you disappeared from the thread only to come back to repeat the same clownish nonsense that was already disproved much in the same way that several of your claims throughout the site have been shown to be factually false or nonsensical?
It's a non sequitur to argue within the stated parameters of the question? That is a very strange conception of logic indeed. Which IS precisely to the heart of the stated parameters of the question.
But again, as to your idiosyncratic characterization of theism (as a complete tangent), the burden of proof is, of course, on you to establish that your framework is valid. I challenge you to provide an authoritative source corresponding with your views. In addition to which, I did provide the counter-examples you demanded (to which you once again failed to respond).
Whatever might be the specific details of any and all theistic religions are incidental to the salient fact, which is the possibility of the existence of the deity at the core of theisms. And THAT most certainly is what is in question, per the OP. The Aztecs, Egyptians, and Greeks all incorporated sun-worship in their pantheon, with vast differences in detail. But there is no question that they were all talking about the same sun.
Doing the same action repeatedly expecting a different result is not a contradiction either, but it is illogical. The logic of human actions is not entirely compassed by formal symbolic logic. But if I had to put it in propositional form I would say:
1. The universe is full of things that are beyond human comprehension.
2. Some of those things might be deities.
3. Therefore the proposition that no deities exist is illogical.
Then what specifically do you mean by "illogical" if not "contradictory"?
Do you just mean that the proposition "no deities exist" is insufficiently justified?
You could state it thus. This is the problem with symbolic logic, the elevation of form over content. Existence is not purely logical. Certainly quantum physics is not, as many quantum phenomena transcend traditional logic.
So, yes, it is not "logically substantiated" to arrive at the conclusion that "no deities exist." Whereas, based on the experiences I have had of a kind of overarching meaningfulness, I have at least some kind of empirical basis for intuiting the operation of "occult" (literally, hidden or concealed) connections between events that could be consistent with something like the existence and operation of a transcendent entity.
Are these propositions insufficiently justified?
P1. Zeus does not exist
P2. Odin does not exist
P3. Shiva does not exist
P4. None of the Greek, Norse, or Hindu deities exist
Is the "Sun" of the geocentric cosmology the same as the "Sun" of the Heliocentric cosmology?
If you say no, then possibly Odin does not exist. If you say yes, than any and all references to any and all transcendent beings are logically flexible in the same way.
I'm asking what you think. Is it "illogical" for to believe that the Greek, Norse, and Hindu pantheons are a fiction?
As I maintained early on, the "story of god" has as much right to evolve as does the "story of the atom". Only a fool would deny quantum theory by refuting Democritus.
This is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless, i.e. illogical.
I would say that it is reasonable to believe that Zeus does not exist, that Odin does not exist, that Shiva does not exist, that Allah does not exist, that Yahweh does not exist, and that a supernatural intelligent creator deity does not exist.
And I already provided the example by way of analogy with the theory of the atom. We have no problem seeing Democritus' theory as a "precursor" to a more cogent theory that evolves in light of the progress of civilization. What possible reason could there be for not allowing for the same possibility with respect to theories about "transcendental entities"?
Anything that isn't a contradiction is possible. It doesn't then follow that it is not reasonable to believe that some possibilities are true and some are false.
It is possible that deities exist, but they don't.
Yes, that is precisely my point. As I said, my experiences on earth have included events indicative of meaningful connections that transcend current scientific explanations. It is a very well-known fact that cognitive predispositions can dramatically affect not only how events are experienced, but whether they are even observed at all. If your experience doesn't support the inference, then it doesn't. Is it because you have a pre-existing bias that is preventing recognition?
I'm currently reading some classical Scepticism. It is a powerful presentation of the benefits of the rationale of "suspending judgement". I highly recommend.
I avoid responding to you because your comments are replete with ad hominems.
As I have already asked you in a previous remark, why don't you talk with someone else instead? Why don't you discuss with someone who actually wants to speak with you? I don't. I really don't see the need to converse with someone like you.
Additionally, the whole foray down the tangent of theism is misdirected. Most major religions include a core "monastic tradition" whose emphasis is decidedly on the individual experience of the divine, not on the narrative details of scriptures. Arguably, monks, and not priests, are the keepers of the faith. Priests are just the popularizers.
I will do you one better, why don't you Quoting Lionino
Great! Interesting. Do you agree with me then, that anyone who does not believe in natural, objective truths, really has no ground to stand on to build up a morality?
Would you call your morality utilitarian? Its built in part based on pleasure and pain and the habits we can build around these indicators?
Quoting 180 Proof
Is it necessary logically that any 'morality' based on or derived from merely subjective ideas like (theistic) gods are also merely subjective? Just because God said to Moses thou shalt not murder, steal, and lie doesnt mean any 'morality' based on or derived from merely subjective ideas like (theistic) gods are also merely subjective and needs to be thrown out. Its still an objectively good idea to say murder is wrong, no matter how you derive that idea. Or at least it can be.
Arent suffering, pain and pleasure subjective, and in part used by you in your argument to develop morality?
Im picking up that you look down on superstitious children who say God emotively. Thought Id let you know, Im a thinking adult.
Replace x² by u and then solve the resulting quadratic polynomial in terms of u.
This is not interesting. This is not math. This is procedural symbol shuffling without any further insight. It amounts to doing manually what a machine can also do, only much slower.
So, now my question:
Where exactly is the general solution for the quartic polynomial implemented in the source code of the Maxima computer algebra system?
https://github.com/calyau/maxima/blob/master/share/algebra/solver/Solver.mac
Does the source code explicitly mention the general solutions for quadratic, cubic, and quartic? Where?
I know from using Maxima that it will still try to solve quintic and higher degree polynomials in terms of radicals. How exactly does it do that?
An online maxima solver: http://www.dma.ufv.br/maxima/index.php
Quartic:
Quadratic:
The discriminant for the quadratic in u turns out to be zero. Would maxima use the same substitution to lower the degree of the polynomial prior to solving it? By the way, the first version of Maxima's source code was written in 1968. Programming the Maxima source code is the real math. Any paper-based fiddling to solve the problem manually, is not.
Found it. As expected, Maxima does indeed "know" the general solution in terms of radicals for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th degree polynomials. They are implemented separately in the solvelin, solvequad, solvecubic, and solvequartic functions.
https://github.com/calyau/maxima/blob/master/src/solve.lisp
According to the source code, they wrote the first version of their polynomial logic in 1982.
It is 8th grade math you didn't even bother to compute mentally.
Quoting Tarskian
I don't know neither do I care about some fringe github application you pretend to know about, crank.
Do you want to run your "atheist countries don't reproduce" drivel again so I can expose you one more time?
Well, I successfully scripted it online to locate the roots of a polynomial. So, what exactly did I pretend?
I used to have it installed locally, but nowadays, I am less interested in it than I used to be:
I am interested in different things than you are. This is normally not a problem but with you it is.
It is interesting that Christianity calls the human-God, Jesus, Logos, where we get the word logic from. This, in some way, makes Christianity logical by default. We could, then, call atheism more anti-logical (a rejection of (a) Logos) than illogical (an absence of sound reasoning). I dont know if we can call Christians anti-logical in this context.
isn't an equation :D
No, of course not. One does not entail the other. Besides, it's more adaptive (or pragmatic) than not, to have a morality (from the Latin word mores meaning 'customs') like developing and using a common language or practicing good diet & hygiene.
It's a form of negative consequentialism¹ (i.e. my term for it is aretaic disutilitarianism meaning 'virtue-based harm-prevention/reduction').
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_consequentialism [1]
The ancient Hebrews like all other tribal peoples survived, in part, because they had adopted customary prohibitions "not to murder, steal and lie" long before any elder heard a voice telling him/them to do so. 'Core morality' long precedes religion and, in fact (re: anthropology), makes cults & reiigions, as well as trade & politics, possible, and therefore is based on human eusociality (& empathy) constitutive of being a natural species.
'Killing is wrong' (all things being equal) because everyone fears being killed. This core moral idea is, afaik, an objective requirement of every eusocial grouping especially but not limited to humans.
Not exclusively. We are harmed by and suffer from whatever makes our kind (species) of natural being dysfunctional. This harm and suffering, while experienced subjectively, is also objective, which is why the old maxim "A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient" is more often than not a true statement.
I find it interesting how often unsophisticated theists I have met think that if there is no god than everything is permissible (presumably borrowing from Dostoyevsky). I recall Slavoj iek making the entirely reasonable riposte that, 'If there is a God, then anything is permitted'. Given the atrocities which take place in theism's name it's clear that all too often the most dangerous and unethical people on earth have been theists.
Do you think that the development of morality is a significant aspect of our evolutionary trajectory? We are stronger in groups and groups are stronger when there is mutual respect, predictability and safety. Any thoughts on this?
Billions of theists for thousands of years, since the time of the Shaman and medicine man - all of them so unsophisticated.
They probably dont even know when they are being insulted - need a priest to tell them unsophisticated is bad.
I think that might be an exaggeration and I see why you or others might argue this. I would say that people generally are unsophisticated. Including atheists. The worst atheists are those who argue that because the Bible stories are myths that this disproves god. This does not make any sense and doesn't take into consideration the long history of allegory used to understand spirituality and our relationship to the divine.
Is unsophisticated bad? It can be, but not always. Sometimes it can be an advantage. I think it depends on where that unsophistication leads you.
We would need an objective judge to settle the issue. Otherwise we can make it bad, or good, or neither, or both. And we could argue it all day.
Thats certainly fine.
Would you agree that communities do change and change their minds, so the agreements reached can revise and change as well?
That may be all there is. Rolling with the change.
Its getting along in a world where there are no absolutes, no agreements that all communities for all time would make. Again, no absolutes, only temporary agreements subject to revision and just change, may be all there is for us.
Thanks.
Like e.g. absolute ends justify/excuses all relative means (Biblical / Quranic theodicy); "teleological suspension of the ethical" (Kierkegaard); etc ... but (iirc) it was Camus (or Voltaire) who said something like even godlessness does not imply that nothing is prohibited as a riposte to traditions of theologically rationalizing atrocities committed "in the name of God".
Yes, I think morality as such, like language, gives our species some adaptive advantages.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Nature might not be "absolute" but for all natural beings, including we humans, Nature is sovereign and inescapable.
All one needs to do is think of a society where murder within one's tribe is not punished. I can't reach any conclusion other than this being a huge evolutionary disadvantage for that group.