Monday, December 27, 2010

Believing the Christmas Story

What does it mean to believe in the Christmas story? In terms of substance and significance, what does it mean?

I’m not asking about facts. I’m not asking for a recitation of one or more of the Christmas narratives with the concluding remark, “To believe in the Christmas story is to believe that these events really took place.” If there is one thing that bothers me more than anything about biblical literalists, it’s that their religion is, far too often, so shallow. Their faith becomes about affirming that this or that happened, that this or that factual claim is true. There is no effort to really dwell on what it means to live as if this is true, to let one’s attitudes and choices, one’s patterns of engaging with the world, be informed and transformed by a narrative vision. When I ask what it means to believe in the Christmas story, that’s what I’m asking for.

I ask for it in the midst of my own finitude. I live with a constant awareness of my limitations, limits which I feel in so many different ways. My wife is a triathlete. She’s run marathons, swum unfathomable (to me) distances. Recently, my 7-year-old son has taken up running—and I’ve found myself called upon to keep up with him in the fun run or the 5K at an area event while my wife runs a longer distance. And so I’ve been trying to run, to build my stamina. I’ve been feeling and pushing the limits of my aging body.

One can extend one’s limits, but they remain. I might find myself huffing less intensely after a mile on the treadmill. I might stretch the distance I can cover without a walk break, until I can run around Boomer Lake in Stillwater twice without a rest. But the limits will remain. And starting to run in my forties means that I do so with a clear awareness that whatever limits I stretch will soon close back in on me, as countless little signs of age have their inevitable cumulative effect.

My father was recently diagnosed with cancer. He will be having surgery in a little over a week. This fall, a fellow violinist and retired music professor in my congregation passed away, and I sat at his funeral listening to the testimonies of his violin students and remembering Bernie, my own wonderful violin teacher, who’d passed away decades ago. This summer my wife’s grandfather died, and so I found myself thinking about the deaths of my grandparents—one dying in indignity and anguish, the other with unexpected swiftness. A few months back, Dame Joan Sutherland—La Stupenda—breathed her last. Only recordings of her exquisite breath control remain (many of them in my music collection). All of us confront this ultimate limit, the outer boundary of our mortal life. The generations take turns pushing at it.

Our consciousness moves inexorably forward through time. Even if Einstein is right and we live in a “block universe,” one in which time is just another dimension of reality—even if my experience of “now” is a kind of illusion of consciousness, and that past (and future) are every bit as real, every bit as much there, as the present—even so, it remains the case that my experience of time is sequential, that I am caught in a current I cannot turn against or step out of.

That current not only points me towards the limit we call death, but constrains me at every moment—constrains me in every moment. I’m visiting my parents, who live in the same house I grew up in. Earlier this week I drove past the home of my childhood friend Doug. I’ve reconnected with him recently on Facebook, so I know he was in Buffalo this summer, emptying out his childhood home. I saw the “Sold” sign out in front of Doug’s house, and I saw the bronze eagle that his family had installed over the garage decades ago. I wondered how long that ornament would last once the new tenants moved in.

And I remembered playing in Doug’s basement. I remembered his mother coming downstairs with toast slathered with raspberry jam. I remembered the taste of it, the crunch of toasted Wonder Bread and the burst of sweetness. And for one anguished moment I want to visit then. I wanted more than just the memory, the ghost that haunts the present. I wanted to be that child playing with that friend, tasting the flavors of that moment. And it seemed a terrible injustice that one can travel to old familiar places but not to old familiar times.

The other experiences of limitation are more personal, having to do with my incapacities, my inability to find the right words or gestures to help or comfort those I love. Presented with their needs, I come face to face with my faults. Too often, because I don’t know the right thing to do, I do nothing when something is urgently required.

My “pleasure” reading these days is Stephen R. Donaldson’s fantasy novel, Against All Things Ending. If anything—like all his novels—it’s a narrative meditation on finitude, on the flaws and limits that not only constrain us but define us. His characters’ flaws are always extravagant, their brokenness almost unendurable. And he casts these broken people into a mythic universe which reflects and magnifies that brokenness as well as their beauty, an environment whose threatened virtues demand their self transcendence.

In this novel, Thomas Covenant—who in earlier novels sacrificed his humanity to become an integral part of the mythic Arch of Time—is thrown back into mortal life due to the extremity and reckless urgency of his former lover’s (Linden’s) efforts. Towards the end of the novel he finds himself wrestling with what it means to be a finite mortal creature again, and he has these thoughts:

Now he was human again: he could no longer see past his limitations. Like every creature that died when its time was done, he could only live in his circumscribed present.

This was the truth of being mortal, this imprisonment in the strictures of sequence. It felt like a kind of tomb.

In his earlier state, he had recognized that this prison was also the only utile form of freedom. Another contradiction: strictures enabled as much as they denied. The Elohim (mythic beings of pure “Earthpower”) were ineffectual precisely because they had so few constraints. Linden was capable of so much because her inadequacies walled her on all sides.

Now, however, he had to take that perception on faith.

In the Christmas story, Christians affirm something like what Covenant strives, in the midst of his limited perception, to hold onto on faith: the idea that limits can encompass redemptive possibilities.

One of the most extraordinary images to come from the Hubble Space Telescope emerged when the telescope was pointed towards an area of seemingly empty space. What would the telescope reveal? The answer was galaxies. Galaxies upon galaxies. Multitudes of galaxies filling that tiny sliver of darkness. The vastness of the universe, the immensity of creation, came to light in a stunning way.

To believe in the Christmas story is, first, to believe that behind that immensity is an infinite creator whose vastness dwarfs His creation. The creation itself is one that we cannot even begin to fathom, and which demands our stunned silence—but that stunning immensity is only a symbol of the magnitude of what lies behind.

Second, to believe in the Christmas story is to believe that this infinite creator descended into His creation to take on the boundaries of matter and time and vulnerable flesh. All that immensity, all that unfathomable vastness, became paradoxically defined by mortal limitations: the strictures of sequence, the inevitability of death, helplessness, susceptibility to despair.

Our anguished consciousness of our limits, our fallibility and fragility, finds no purer symbol than the wailing infant, the baby whose only power is to scream out its need. And in the Christmas story, that symbol of frail finitude is juxtaposed against the heavens: the blazing star over Bethlehem, the heavenly host that comes with terrifying splendor to the shepherds—or, in the language of our own age, the vastness of the universe, galaxies upon galaxies that fill up one sliver of darkness in the sky.

But part of the message is that what the child represents is something far greater that the teeming enormity of the physical universe, despite the strictures of sequence, despite mortality and frail flesh. The eternal Logos, the Word that from the beginning was with God, one with God, fully present in a child stripped of any trappings of grandeur. A stall. Hay. Outcast shepherds. Peasant parents. It isn’t the emperor who is exalted, who can claim the mantle of the infinite. The infinite presses itself into mortal strictures at that point where its meaning cannot be warped by artificial hierarchies, the imagined constructs we fashion to tame the vastness of what lies beyond us.

We exalt a man in a big room, on a big chair, wearing glittering clothes—and if such a man is the definition of greatness, then greatness is a miniscule thing. It won’t dwarf us. Such a parochial vision of greatness can help us not to think of the galaxies upon galaxies filling up one tiny corner of the heavens. If God came to Earth in such a man, we’d make God as small as an emperor.

But in the Christmas story we are asked, not to tame our vision of God, but to expand our vision of frail humanity. In the Christmas story, we are invited not to hide from the immeasurable vastness of the universe and its creator, but to confront it in the knowledge that we will not be lost or crushed or driven to despair by its enormity. Rather than taming God, rather than putting God in a manageable box, the Christmas story buttresses us in all our frailty so that we needn’t hide from what transcends us. It does so not by making us equal to God; not by erasing our limits. It does so by making the infinite God one with us, by bringing God down into those limits. To believe in that, to believe in the Christmas story, is to be capable of enduring and accepting our limits, our finitude, the strictures of physical existence and the one-way flow of time—capable of accepting them even when we honestly see them for what they are.

And this capacity in turn enables us to do what inevitably exposes every frailty and imperfection in a blazing light. It enables us to look to the infinite, to open ourselves to it, to face the mysterium tremendum with the joy of relationship rather than in despair over our own inadequacy.

And to believe in the Christmas story is to set aside the fear of inadequacy and all the ugly things that go with it: the jealousies of others’ accomplishments; the envy of others’ talents; the shame of being merely human; the other-directed judgments and condemnations that are really about misdirection, about getting those around us to look somewhere else so that they don’t see our own glaring sins; the self-directed loathing and despair that comes when we cannot hide from our own sense of insufficiency; and all the superficiality, the consumerism, the empty entertainments that we throw ourselves into in the hope of distracting ourselves, of keeping ourselves from noticing our staggering limitations.

To believe in the Christmas story is to look at all this friable life, in ourselves and others—this life constrained by mortality and sequence, impotence and ignorance, sin and fallibility—and to treasure the precious reality that dwells within those limits, rather than the vast nothing which lies beyond them.

109 comments:

  1. Fascinating post, as always. I do wonder if you may have answered your own objection to those who insist that Christmas actually have happened, albeit unintentionally. First you write:

    "I’m not asking about facts. I’m not asking for a recitation of one or more of the Christmas narratives with the concluding remark, 'To believe in the Christmas story is to believe that these events really took place.' If there is one thing that bothers me more than anything about biblical literalists, it’s that their religion is, far too often, so shallow."

    But later you note:

    "I wanted more than just the memory, the ghost that haunts the present. I wanted to be that child playing with that friend, tasting the flavors of that moment. And it seemed a terrible injustice that one can travel to old familiar places but not to old familiar times."

    I suspect the same impulse which causes you to see memory as inadequate similarly causes many Christians to feel that a Christmas based only in the idea of a loving God made manifest, and not the reality is a Christmas very much diminished. Your desire to actually inhabit the past, and not merely its echoes, is not quite the same as those who wish Christmas to to have truly occurred, but both are based on the notion that what actually occurs in this world is greater than a mere internal intellectualization of it.

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  2. Yair--I agree. My objection was not to those who say that the events of Christmas actually happened (especially not those who affirm the theological claim that God became incarnate in Jesus), but those who take believing in the Christmas story to involve nothing BUT affirming the truth of certain factual claims--specifically, nothing but affirming that the Gospel narratives of the events surrounding Jesus birth are factually accurate.

    I think acknowledging biblical scholarship which implies factual/historical inaccuracies and narrative tensions in the biblical Christmas stories is entirely compatible with seeing those stories as testifying to something profound that really did happen--something that at once happened at a specific time and place in history, thus characterized by limitations and finitude, and whose significance transcended those limits.

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  3. I was going to say what Eric said:-) I take it on faith that the birth of Christ happened pretty much like it is described in the Bible--except maybe the details were a lot different. Why do I believe? Partly because of hope--I hope it's true that Jesus really is who Christians say, that God looks just like Jesus. Can it be proved? Probably not (I know I can't prove it) but the world is filled with true stuff that can't be proved, necessarily every person believes stuff to be true even though they can't prove it. In these kinds of discussions people all the time bring up Occam's Razor, as if there is a logical reason we should expect things to be simple rather than complex. But in the end, Occam's Razor is just our way of saying that we hope the world is beautifully simple. It's an embrace of hope. The same as my faith in Christ.

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  4. "The creation itself is one that we cannot even begin to fathom, and which demands our stunned silence—but that stunning immensity is only a symbol of the magnitude of what lies behind."

    This is an absolute classic of theology- the conviction that you know something that you don't know at all. And the denigration of what you do know as "just a symbol" of whatever it is that you don't really know but think you do. Why not dial it back a notch, lower your desperation for transcendence, and appreciate what exists in existence, confined, constricted, or whatever you interpret its problems being?

    This is not to say that our universe is not a fundamental mystery, but to say that whether it is stunning or not is a matter of speculation at the moment. It might be 42, or it might be a Lie group. The post otherwise seems largely devoted to positive thinking.. laudable psychologically, but not always philosophically, as it trends towards "beliefs" in imaginary things, such as the Christmas story.

    .. "treasure the precious reality .." Very well! We can agree on that. Happy new year!

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  5. Eric,

    I agree that limits are often a good thing. So, for example, if our body were not subject to limits then there wouldn’t be any sports and all the joy that comes with it. If our knowledge were unlimited then there wouldn’t be any courage and the personal value that comes with it. Indeed I hope that contrary to traditional theistic belief our individual existence will not be eternal, for this strikes me as an ultimately lonely future, and also kind of pointless.

    I’d like to point out the worth of limits in the context of art. Without the limits of language there wouldn’t be any poetry. Neither would be there any sculpture without the limits of the material used, be it clay or stone. I think that art is at its best when the artist submits or respects some set of limits and then strives to create within them. The great artist, after mastering such limits, may end up slightly transcending and thus transforming them. I think that in art limits are not limitations, but quite on the contrary rather set the stage or the space for the work of art to be created.

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  6. Hi Burk: So you claim religious people don't know their religious beliefs are true. Well, I'd say there's a whole lot of philosophy about what counts as knowledge, and it can be very tricky to define it. One thing seems certain to me: knowledge isn't limited to that which you can prove to other people to be true. I know that I have certain experiences, and I interpret those experiences in various ways. Do I know that yesterday actually happened (as opposed to being merely a memory implanted in my mind by something)? I'd say I do know that, if the word "know" doesn't allow me to properly say I DO know then the word "know" is pretty useless. Still, I can have no evidence that this is the case. Do I know that there's a God? I feel pretty strongly that there is, I am not as confident about that as I am about the existence of yesterday, but I feel pretty sure given my intuitions about things. More specific Christian details, I am less sure of, but I TAKE it that they are true on faith, this faith seems to fit with my basic intuitions about God and it helps make sense of my experience of right and wrong and love. I see no epistemic duty to not avail myself of this.

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  7. Hi Keith

    The problem I've always had with the intuitive brand of knowledge you explain here is simply that two people's intuitive knowledge can be contradictory. So for example, you feel strongly that there is a God, in just the same way that I feel strongly that there isn't.

    This appears to mean that either we are forced to say 'my feeling is accurate, while yours is faulty' and I'm not sure on what grounds one can do that, or we are left concluding that such intuition is a lousy guide to truth (which takes me to agnosticism).

    In essence this is why I put so much faith in verifiability. It leads to a set of beliefs that are shared rather than personal, and becomes a building block for collective discoveries in the future. If I were to believe yesterday happened in a certain way, whereas everybody else told me I was wrong and produced evidence (photographs say) to the contrary, I would be very inclined to believe I had experienced some sort of delusion.

    I am all for people holding personal beliefs, I for instance believe Leonard Cohen to be a genius, but raising such beliefs to the level of knowledge would seem to require either evidence or a kind of intellectual arrogance.

    Bernard

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  8. Hi Bernard:

    You make a good point about the problem with differing intuitions. But I claim the problem is inescapable. The very same faculty that allows you to know that other people even exist is the one the one that convinced you of the truth of X even though other people have conflicting intuitions. What you seem to be saying is that an intuition that X has been confirmed by other people is a very reliable intuition while an intuition that Y is true combined with an intuition that other people disagree with you about Y is less reliable. But they are both intuitions--there is no way to confirm that the confirmation has happened (or to conform that the confirmation OF the confirmation happened etc.) Also, when you can neither confirm X or it's contrary, what do you do then? As the "confirmation of the confirmation of the confirmation..." illustrates, there is necessarily a starting point that itself cannot be confirmed. And what about moral intuitions? We cannot verify that racism and homophobia are wrong, that we ought to treat everyone with dignity and compassion, and there are people who claim to disagree with those things. But I am definitely not prepared to ignore my own moral intuitions just because other people disagree. Does that mean I have to conclude that I am right and they are wrong? I think it does, but I believe I can and ought to show what Eric called in his book a "beautiful modesty" about it. I could be wrong about anything so I have little excuse for arrogance, but the fact is, if I think X is true then as a matter of logic I think the contrary is false. Even if I know there's a good chance that I'm off my rocker.

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  9. Keith

    Yeah, the problem may well be inescapable. Certainly no philosopher has yet established a starting point that is itself beyond the charge of being in some sense arbitrary.

    What some suggest, and I like, is this idea of using as our starting point some basis upon which we can all agree. Of course, that other minds even exist is a hunch, but as it's a necessary hunch if communication with other minds is to take place, it seems reasonable one to bank early in any social enquiry. And we find, that seeking to start with core facts, we are able to then build up a methodology that serves us best when it comes to expanding the reach of these facts, which in essence is what the scientific method is.

    So, what I would keep insisting upon, is that the fact of the way we observe gravity to work is quite different from the fact of God existing. By the standards that God exists is a fact, then so too is it a fact that God does not exist. Not so with gravity. In this sense, if we stick carefully to that methodology that produces shared understanding, and resist the urge to call our stories facts, then the bind is escapable, at least in this limited, pragmatic sense.

    And yes, it does lead to moral relativism. What is right and wrong is measured not against some absolute values, but rather against a given society's ambitions for itself. I find this an uplifting thought. Issues like abortion, for me, show how quickly moral absolutes turn to dangerous farce.

    Bernard

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  10. Our intuitions are part of the way we experience life, and that way is not a given but depends on many factors including on our past choices, on the path each one of us has opened for one's life. On the religious worldview there are many paths open to us, and there are paths which lead to error and misery, and there are paths which to truth and self-fulfilment. And those who follow the later paths tend to experience life differently, to have intuitions which are more conducive to truth and to the good life.

    But how do we know that the religious paths are not a case of a nice self-delusion? Well, one can certainly device an epistemology such that one ends up being incapable of knowing anything whatsoever. After all, how do we really *know* that the external world exists? We only assume it exists for pragmatical reasons. And also, suppose one meets somebody who was hungry, ate a hearty meal, and now feels satiated. Would it make any sense to ask that person how she knows that her meal was real and not some kind of self-delusion?

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  11. Hi Bernard:

    Well we both agree that our knowledge that other people exist is based on trusting an intuition,and it is not something that can be subjected to the "accept only what we can all agree on" criterion. You suggest a reason for accepting the intuition is that we MUST accept it if communication is to be possible. I'd say I accept it because it is the strongest intuition I have--I feel more convinced that my experiences reflect interaction with the external world than any other intuition.

    But then I don't know why I ought to refuse other weaker intuitions just because they are not universally shared. To get the picky part out of the way, applying the "universal agreement" criterion would require me to (a) talk to everyone in the universe and (b) limit my belief set to whatever schizophrenics and sane people could agree on. Neither of those seem very practical:-) But perhaps a bit of common sense is advised. I've met people who are sane and smart as far as I can tell. I can choose a truth seeking methodology that seems likely to produce stuff that sane and smart people would agree are true if those people also applied the methodology. Science satisfies that rule. But why SHOULD I refuse to believe things that seem true to me? Moral claims for example. Why SHOULD I refuse to trust my own moral intuition even when other people disagree with me? My intuition that God exist, while not as strong as my intuition that other PEOPLE exist, is pretty strong. Why SHOULD I refuse to trust that intuition? Also strong is my intuition that the basic outlines of the Gospel of Christ fits real well with my intuitions about God thus justifying my life long experiment with following Christ. Why should the fact that other people disagree with me make me reject that intuition?

    I suppose that only accepting those things that can be scientifically tested would reduce the number of false things I accept. On the other hand, it would also reduce the number of true things I accept, since there are surely many true things tat cannot be scientifically tested (most of the really important things in fact, it seems to me). I don't see why I should fear being wrong more than failing to be right.

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  12. Dianelos

    I agree with you on this. Our only difference is that my experience suggests that the non-religious path can also allow one to lead a highly fulfilling, satisfying, challenging and deeply human existence. I find it most nourishing.

    When I read Eric write about the hope the religious stance gives him, I think 'funny, that's exactly the hope I get from living as if this is no God.'

    I don't however assume others will find it this way, and suspect we must all imagine our way to fulfillment within the context of our unique cultural and biological histories. I just find it a little odd that anyone would think their own peculiar imaginings were somehow universally true.

    Bernard

    Bernard

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  13. HI Bernard: I find Eric's phrase (He attributes this phrase to Schleiermacher in his book I think) "beautiful modesty" rings true to me. I believe what I believe but I recognize that given how dumb I am I am in no position to arrogantly declare people who disagree with me to be wrong. I guess I'd say my peculiar imaginings ARE universally true if they are true at all--that's part of the nature of being true. I am not certain of much, but I am FAIRLY certain that I haven't cornered the market on truth, I am sure that kindhearted theists of all different faiths and kindhearted atheists like you and Burk can teach me a lot (and I appreciate it). Still, since the foundation of everything is I claim intuition, when I have a strong intuition that God exists, that means that it seems to me very likely that people who think God doesn't exist are mistaken about that. You have different intuitions? I respect that, but I don't HAVE your intuitions, I have my own.

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  14. Great post and good conversation in the comments! I think there is a tendency for folks to conflate deeply held beliefs for arrogance. I think it is all about how the beliefs are wielded that makes the difference. Those who insist that others follow their or be punished, damned, etc. are being arrogant. Merely saying my intuition and hopes lead me to this position is not.

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  15. Hi Keith,

    You ask why you should refuse to believe things that seem true to you. I suppose this is an individual thing and it of course depends on the importance of the issue but, as for me, I certainly don't take my intuition or feelings as an indication of truth. One's very strong intuition that P is true may be contradicted by another's strong intuition that P is false. This shows, I think, how unreliable intuition is. How could I believe that my intuition tells me the truth while others may have equally strong intuitions that I am wrong? To do that, I would have to believe that my intuitions, for some mysterious reasons, are better than those of other people.

    This applies of course to questions about which we have no other source of information. In practical matters, intuition can be trained and, in areas we know a lot about, we can intuitively feel our way with some success.

    Note that I am not saying that intuition absolutely cannot serve as a pathway to the truth (I don't believe it can, but I cannot be sure about this). But if it can, it cannot do so in a reliable manner. Even if, hypothetically, some persons had reliable intuitions about ultimate reality or whatever, how would we know which? Without a way to identify these correct intuitions, they would be all but useless.

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  16. Hi, Keith-

    If I could jump in here, the issue is that intuitions only take you so far, epistemologically, while humans have developed way better methods beyond intuition to systematize and validate knowledge. Which is to say ... reason and empirical engagement with the reality that the intuition is supposedly about.

    So there is a hierarchy of ways to knowledge. Intuition is great.. knock yourself about with it! But it isn't comparable to publically critiqued, reasoned, and tested knowledge, if the subject is reality in all its manifestations. Now it might be that what religious people have intuitions about is so esoteric (yet so momentous) that it just can't show itself to the garden-variety rationalist/skeptic/empiricist. Not in the present day, at any rate, us being in some kind of fallen age. It then remains an open question.

    But you have to appreciate that making such a claim puts you into some pretty uncomfortable company- with all the psychics, spiritualist mediums, and so forth who similarly claim special dispensation for their powers of perception of a reality that sober observation fails to confirm.

    Indeed, it is more likely that the intuitions that are so insistent concern psychological realizations and proclivities that are very common among humans (father-worship, magical thinking, etc.), rather than intutions that accurately reflect physical reality, super or otherwise.

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  17. Hi JP: Let me try to explain myself here (I often have trouble with that, which causes me great pain, what with what my wife calls my pathological need to understand and be understood:-). Here's what I claim:

    1. You have no choice BUT trust your intuition because you depend on your intuition to go FROM having certain sensory experiences TO "there are other people in the world who don't agree with me about stuff". If you seriously doubted the reliability of your intuition you could not trust your evaluation of evidence or logical arguments or ANY memories or sensory experiences.

    2. You suggest that because people have conflicting intuitions, therefore intuition is unreliable. Leaving aside the issue I brought up in (1), I don't think your conclusion follows from your premise. At most what would follow is that a LOT of people have unreliable intuitions, but it wouldn't follow that any particular individual did. For example, if your basic intuition says X and only a few people agree, that result is perfectly consistent with your intuition being reliable. I anticipate and objection and I'll address it...

    3...here:-) Your presumed objection is that since you have no reason to think your intuitions are especially reliable, you ought to conclude that yours are mostly like among the majority which are unreliable. But this objection cannot work (I claim). I don't know if you are an atheist but for the sake of discussion I am calling you one. This means your intuition tells you that universe could POSSIBLY be the result of matter following the laws of physics. A whole lot of other people disagree with you about that--their intuitions differ from yours. But since you believe rather strongly that an atheistic universe is possible, you are logically compelled to think that on this issue at least your intuition is more reliable than theirs. If not, then you'd have to assume that since most other people think God exists, they are probably right and you are probably wrong.

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  18. Hi Burk:

    I think you fail to recognize the degree that intuition informs your own thinking (in fact all thinking). Perhaps I need to clarify what I mean by "intuition". I'd say intuition stands for the inner sense one has when some seems true. Given that understanding of the word I have a few questions.

    1. You have experiences that you interpret as other people confirming or disconfirming some claim. Why do you think those other people really exist?

    2. You have experiences you interpret as memories of past events. Why do you think past events really happened.

    3. You believe that the scientific method is a reliable way to determine the truth about things like the basic structure of matter etc. Why do you think it actually tells us those things (as opposed to, say, just being a fiction that is a useful way to generate technological advance.

    I believe all those things too, of course, but I think that a serious attempt to answer those questions will help clarify what I am trying to say about intuition. So I appreciate your tacking a whack.

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  19. Hi, Keith-

    I don't disagree that intuition is where this all starts. But in the case of the existence of other people, I have some other tools at my disposal, such as my inability to make others follow my thought commands- they insistently have their own gestalt, including physical extent, motivations, and contrary opinions. This can be checked, double-checked, and calibrated as much as I care to (as these comments keep doing!). So I no longer am relying on intuition for this knowledge.

    Reason and empiricism are also a powerful mechanisms, since logic (a truly transcedent bit of reality!) allows us to make and verify claims, with relatively few givens. So, given my intuition that unicorns exist, I can search for them, and then not find them. So they don't seem to exist, for me or for other reliable authorities. Given my intuition that god exists, I pray alot, and nothing unusual seems to happen. Perhaps my theory of prayer=>answer is just wrong. Perhaps god doesn't address me specifically, but still guides everyone's life for the best. Then I hear that many people suffer, losing their jobs, their lives, etc. So perhaps my theory of god's goodness is incorrect. Well, what is left? Not much of my intuition.

    I realize that some might claim that since the starting point is intuition, everything is based on it, and we can't get beyond it. That seems quite incorrect, in light of the effectiveness of re-checking, empirical calibration and engagement, and reasoned critique of hypotheses. We simply are not trapped at the starting point.

    cont...

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  20. I also realize that many claim that we trust authorities for most or all of our knowledge, thus we are sort of adrift in a fog of competing claims of authority, to which our only solution is to use our ... intution. One purpose of science education is of course to disabuse students of this kind of thinking, by letting them check a few important claims for themselves, in the lab, in the flesh. But this can admittedly only cover a few claims, from the vast number we learn in school and elsewhere.

    The key issue is how an authority founds its claims- whether the grounding is any good, and whether the grounding corresponds to the reach of the claim being made. These are again matters of reason and empiricism. A political system, for instance, should be judged, not by some a-priori empiricism or reason, but by its fruits, since its purpose (presumably) is to run a happy society. If Fascism makes everyone happy, by some popular metric, (hopefully with due respect for the suffering of the few, not just the contenment of the many), then so be it. This is entirely intuitive, since the point of the entire operation is to make us happy, which is inherently an intuitive and subjective state and metric.

    Likewise, if religion claims to make us better and better-behaved, this can be judged by its fruits.. sometimes yes, sometimes no, given these intuitive terms. And if religion claims to set forth a factual picture of reality, with god, magic events, souls, answered prayers, etc.. this can all be checked on its own terms, i.e. empirically. Sadly, it fails these tests (at least in any positive sense). So while the intuition may be strong, the individual claims can be checked in an appropriate manner- to each type of claim. Some are found wanting, some are found to be correct or perhaps undisprovable.

    I hope this approaches some of your questions.

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  21. Hi Keith,

    I think there are two threads here and we're both pulling in different directions.

    First, there is the “foundation problem” and I believe this is what you're interested in. How do we know, how can we justify our knowledge, how can we go FROM having certain sensory experiences TO "there are other people in the world who don't agree with me about stuff", and so on. While these are important issues, I must confess this is not something I worry about very much. However, I believe there is no way to build a sound logical foundation to knowledge without making more or less arbitrary assumptions. You appear to base your approach on the reliability of intuition but as a starting point it must be left unjustified, or assumed, like any other. Moreover, I strongly suspect that the only way to make sense of our capacity to acquire knowledge without running in circles is through an evolutionary perspective. This is a point I have been trying to make in a previous exchange (perhaps badly). The circularity involved, for instance, when trying to justify induction (because it worked in the past) has some similarity to the chicken-egg problem and both can be solved, I think, by using an evolutionary (or historical) approach.
    [...]

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  22. Keith,

    The end of my message keeps being deleted. I will try to rephrase it.

    The other aspect of the question is what interests me more. You agree that there is a common body of knowledge we (almost) all agree on. We know what works and what doesn't.

    In this context, we may ask of any proposed method of acquire knowledge whether it is sound or not. More specifically, what can we say about “intuition”? Is an instinctive feeling that something is true any good as an arbiter of truth? I think the record is clear – it does not work well. For example, almost all humans have a strong intuition that time is an absolute but we've known for a hundred years that this is false.

    Intuition may be involved in believing sensory data. In fact, it may be necessary for us to have an “instinctive feeling” that the model of the world built from sensory data is true – otherwise, we might not be able to act on it. But going from “necessary in one instance” to “sufficient in others” is an unjustified inference.

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  23. Hi Burk: Thanks for your response to my questions. This of course raises in my mind some other questions:-)

    1. You describe a process that you say allows you to verify the existence of other people. You listed this:

    The inability to make others follow my thought commands- they insistently have their own gestalt, including physical extent, motivations, and contrary opinions.

    But how does that show other people exist as opposed to your just not being able to completely control your own imaginary encounters with imaginary friends?

    2. About logic, consider this syllogism:

    A. P is true
    B. If P is true then Q is true
    C. Therefore Q is true.

    This argument is logically valid of course, but suppose I (being a crazy person) agree with A and B but deny C. How do you know I am wrong?

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  24. Hi JP: Please forgive me if I misconstrue your argument. I'll be asking a lot of questions, mostly because questions are the easiest way for me to think about stuff. So here goes:-)

    1. Let me tell you I also do not worry at all about how to justify the step "FROM having certain sensory experiences TO "there are other people in the world who don't agree with me about stuff". BTW I am going to call that step the Realism Principle (RP).I mention that "problem" because I think it illustrates that intuition is at the bottom of EVERYTHING we know. You seem to describe RP as an arbitrary assumption, and you seem to be saying that we HAVE to make arbitrary assumptions like that if we are to build a logical foundation to knowledge. But that brings up a couple of points.

    A. If the assumption is arbitrary, then why should we think it is actually true? And if we don't think it's actually true then why should we think that any consequences from it is actually true? Doesn't seeing RP as an arbitrary assumption undermine empiricism entirely?

    B. And doesn't the argument that we need RP to make knowledge possible boil down to "I WANT knowledge to be possible, therefore the world must be arranged to satisfy my wish? How is that just wishful thinking? [continued]

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  25. More to my friend JP:

    2. I don't think you DO accept RP as an arbitrary assumption. I think you accept it because you find yourself believing it's true. And THAT is what I mean by intuition. You do not and cannot have evidence that RP is true but you believe it's true nonetheless. It is the lens you interpret your experiences through, it is not itself an empirical data point, it transcends the data. But if you think your intuition generally leads you astray then how can you trust RP?

    3. Do you really find yourself with a lot of strong intuitions that prove to be false? That hasn't been my experience. I have definitely had weak intuitions that such and such might be true, and then found that it wasn't. But usually I don't have strong intuitions about open questions. I am a math dude and I often find my intuitions wrt math are fairly accurate.

    4. Here is where the rubber meets the road and so forth. I claim my intuition for theism is more like my intuition for RP than it is like a hunch I have that some testable hypothesis is going to come out this way and not that. Because the reasons I have for believing theism are not even in principle testable (the same as RP). The same is true for my moral intuitions. I cannot test my belief that the Holocaust was immoral, but when I think about it i find myself believing that it was. If I distrust that intuition I might as well distrust RP too.

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  26. Hi Keith

    Indeed, one needs to respect that each carries their own intuitions. But this, I would propose, sits far more comfortably with my agnosticism than theistic belief. So while my intuition is atheistic, I don't yield to it because the evidence isn't there. You and I both have different religious intuitions, and there is no known process for telling which is right, so it is something more than brave to each just assume the other's intuitions are wrong. Better just to believe nothing on such matters, as it is I think on questions such as 'why is there something and not nothing?' At least until some method for choosing between intuitions can be found.

    Now, as others have pointed out, in the material realm just such a method is being pieced together, namely the scientific method. We are learning which habits of mind (or intuitions) are most likely to yield reliable (that is predictive, or technology enabling) knowledge. So, rather than just stop at 'it's all intuition' why not then look at which habits of mind work best? in the material world, we can answer this, and so have facts. In the artistic/spiritual world we can't, and so just have points of view.

    Bernard

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  27. Hi Bernard:

    I posted a pretty long response to JP on this subject but Eric's spam filter seems a little overactive again, and it was all lost. This gives me a chance to retrace some of those points without being repetitious. You report that your intuition is atheistic, but you resist that intuition in favor of atheism. This raises a question or two for me.

    1. As I mentioned to Burk, you have certain sensory experiences, and you interpret those experiences as there are other people in the world and so forth. I suppose that interpretation could be called Realism. But (I'd claim) there is no possible evidence nor valid argument to the effect that realism is actually right. MY intuition, however, is quite strong in favor of realism, and I expect yours is too. So why don't you resist THAT intuition? I am assuming you don't BTW:-)

    2. If you remained agnostic on the realism question, wouldn't that undermine the whole scientific method since you couldn't really trust your intuition that any of the scientific procedures had really happened? Doesn't this show that the validity the scientific method DEPENDS on the validity of intuition?

    3. Do you believe that certain things are evil and certain things are good? How would you test these things by the scientific method?

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  28. Hi, Keith-

    Yes, I have full respect for the brain-in-a-vat line of reasoning. But.. there is no good evidence that says that we are brains in vats, so we are left with the operational and mundane reality we are all used to. It isn't intuition that makes it so, but the plain reality we are dealing with. Positing super-realities, Matrix worlds, and brains in vats is at the moment completely counterfactual and hypothetical, not to say science fiction.

    While I have nothing against science fiction, it isn't the same as philosophy or science.. it may jog our thinking and generate hypotheses, but our evidence all says that reality is quite unitary, we evolved in it, etc., and so forth. Certainly mysteries abound at the edges of our knowledge, but none that lead to a brain-in-a-vat interpretation.

    So, imaginary or not, my friends are real to me in an empirically consistent and logical way that forms my entire reality. Conversely, god, angels, and so forth are real only in the sense that make them up with the help of cultural traditions and imagination. They have zero consistent appearance in an empirical way, whether one "believes" in them or not. They are hypotheses in search of evidence.

    For the second point, you are making it too easy! Your ability to deny C has to logically be tied to a reason in order to work in our language and logical communication system (founded on all the above reasons of utility & empiricism in the world we find ourselves). Otherwise you are not talking sense. That happens frequently enough, but it is supposedly the special remit of philosophy to help us make sense.

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  29. Hi Keith

    Perhaps I've been a little unclear. We must all, to some extent, trust our intuitions. I think everybody in this discussion has made the point that any intellectual framework needs a kicking off point. So, I make certain assumptions, like that I inhabit a physical world and there are other people in it. I make assumptions about rules of logic, about consistent physical laws and so on. I don't know, indeed can't know, how solid these assumptions actually are, but I can nevertheless ask: how effective are these assumptions, and this for me is the key point.

    An example. One person assumes the world is flat, the other round. We could just stop there and say, well everybody is entitled to their assumptions, but that would be a shame. The assumption that the world is round is supported by evidence, and furthermore supports a world of commerce, communication and travel. To claim the right to maintain, on intuitive grounds, that the world is flat is not only mad, but also impoverishing. Luckily, humanity got past just accepting intuitions, and began testing them.

    Now, in the case of God, one person may assume God is real, the other imaginary. But in this case, unlike the flat earth, neither can be dismissed out of hand. Therefore, I claim, intuition about God is like intuition about art or poetry, really just a matter of personal taste.

    Of course, should a belief in God extend, as it often does, into testable beliefs about the material world, say the power of prayer for example, we can begin to dismiss some beliefs as inconsistent with the evidence.

    And again, no I don't belief in absolute moral values. Starting with materialism, I get evolution, move on to psychological and cultural studies and from there conclude that like God and logic, morality is a tool of our own invention.

    Bernard

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  30. Burt,

    You write: “So there is a hierarchy of ways to knowledge. Intuition is great.. knock yourself about with it! But it isn't comparable to publically critiqued, reasoned, and tested knowledge, if the subject is reality in all its manifestations.

    How do you suggest one publically test the question of whether reality is at bottom mechanical and blind (as naturalism has it) or rather personal and purposeful (as theism has it)?

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  31. Dianelos-

    I was not making that particular claim here, but I think even you would agree that bare observation of the world favors naturalism. We all die, first off. That isn't exactly consistent with personal-ness or purposefulness, or goodness. Aside from other people and animals, there are zero personal interactions that come to us without us imagining them. All the angels, saints, deities, etc. show no evidence of existence, let alone personal engagment with us. We are making them up all the time, by any rigorous standard of observation. The rocks, stars, and waters of the universe will just as soon drown us as let us float in them. It is we who have look out for ourselves, lest we die in the void of space, etc.

    To interpret reality as personal and purposeful, we must add extraneous material to our observations, such as adding purpose to the apparent purposelessness of evolution and earth history, or personal interest to our meditations and prayers to the void, or anthropocentric purpose to the origin of a universe that exceeds our scale by tens of orders of magnitude. Naturalists have been seeking purpose for ever, (starting off historically as theologians, as a rule), yet have found nothing. These are all publicly attested observations, repeatable and well-understood in practice and in theory. No need to cite intuitions, private mystical experiences, etc.

    Nothing would win the plaudits and laurels of society faster than finding real purpose behind the randomness of existence. This is shown by the outsize credence paid to intelligent design over the last decade, despite its critical failures. An aspect of human nature is that we crave narrative and remember facts better when placed in a narrative. So it is natural to conjure a purposeful narrative of our origin and existence. But no such narrative has agreed with the facts of the matter, as so far determined by rigorous observation. Randomness remains random, and unforgiving.

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  32. Hi Burk:

    Certainly there is no evidence for the Brain in a Vat (or for the Brain in a test tube, or the IT Must be Something I Ate, or...). Neither is there any evidence or valid argument for the truthfulness of Realism. I claim that's the point: you (me too) accept Realism not because of any evidence but because it seems true to us--in other words by intuition. You object to positing Superworlds but you (me to) DO posit a superworld--that world is the Real World that exists independent of our sensory experiences of that world.

    You seem to allude to a pragmatic acceptance of Realism--your imaginary friends are real enough to you so that's good enough to live your life. Not to be argumentative but I'd bet that your Realism isn't a pragmatic thing--you really believe in Realism. But if a person were really a pragmatist then it seems to me they'd see no problem with a pragmatic theism.

    Realize we are talking about a special subset of claims: claims for which there is no way to even apply the scientific method. Moral claims would be among these claims, as are the kinds of intuitions that lead people like me to belief in God. Realism is also one of these untestables. All we have in favor of the claim that any of those things are actually true is our gut feeling--our intuition. You also responded to my question about logic. I'll get to that in a minute.

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  33. Hi Again Burk: Just to have the syllogism in front of us:

    "A. P is true
    B. If P is true then Q is true
    C. Therefore Q is true.

    This argument is logically valid of course, but suppose I (being a crazy person) agree with A and B but deny C. How do you know I am wrong?"

    You offer an answer. I made it too easy you say:-). Well maybe so, it wouldn't be the first time I walking into something. But I guess I still have a question about your answer. You SEEM to be arguing that it's all about language, I assume you are saying that the way we use the words "if" "then" and "true" are based on logic, so that we are obligated by the rules of language to follow the logical principle. Otherwise our comments don't mean anything. I don't see how that's correct though. I know what those words mean (the hypothetical me challenges you to explain what you mean by those words--he bets he'll agree with you about the definitions:-). And yet he denies C. You certainly understand what he means by his denial, so the words in his denial make sense. So how are you not just REASSERTING the logical principle he challenges.?

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  34. Hi Keith,

    First of all, yes, you are right to say that intuitions can be relatively reliable in some contexts. This is what I meant when I said that intuition can be trained. I understand you've done a lot of math and you find out that, faced with a new situation, you can sometimes intuit pretty well what is going on. The same goes, say, for chess players. An expert can look at a board position and “sense” who is ahead, what are the strengths and weaknesses of each position, and so on, without any detailed analysis. But in these and similar cases, intuition developed over time and is the result of experience. In all cases, a beginner's intuition would not be worth much.

    Now, what is our situation in regard to an alleged ultimate reality? Are we more like experts or beginners? Do we know of any method of studying ultimate reality that is known to produce expertise? I certainly do not know of any and, consequently, I think our intuition should be taken as no more than pure guesswork.

    Your argue, I think, that the formation of every belief involves a step that is not, let's say, reducible to analysis (I'm not too sure how to formulate this). It's a leap of a sort – an intuitive “feeling”. No doubt something like that happens and it's unavoidable. But you make a much bigger (and yet unjustified) leap when you say that, because this leap is present when we form a true belief, therefore its presence is an indication of truth. We know from numerous examples that it is not so.

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  35. Keith-

    "Neither is there any evidence or valid argument for the truthfulness of Realism. I claim that's the point: you (me too) accept Realism not because of any evidence but because it seems true to us--in other words by intuition.

    I would disagree with this. Every stitch of evidence we have corresponds with realism, and not with brains in vats, etc. The problem you seem to be posing is that, given the brains in vats hypothesis, with its perfect replication of realism despite not being realistic, we can't judge between them, thus there is "no evidence" either way. As you can see, it is purely a function of how the hypothesis is constructed, and not any positive evidence that makes this a dilemma. And it is a highly gratuitous hypothesis with no point to it, other than to problematize all the evidence that stares us in the face (courtesy of Plato). I think it is a basic principle of logic to discard unnecessary hypotheses (occams razor and all that), of which this is certainly one. When something more telling comes along in the evidence department, then we can consider it again.

    The one area of evidence we do have are the various odd feelings of uncanny-ness, mystical connection, and other defects of the consciousness machinery that cause sensations of "somthing more". Those are certainly worthy of intent study, but not of prima facie credibility.

    At any rate, this position is not one of pragmatism or even of intuitition, but one of plain evidence- the most efficient explanation of reality is that it is .. real. This is the logically compelling position, given our evidence. Holding otherwise is like all those creationists who insist that god buried fossils in just the right sequence during the flood just to fool those pointy headed paleontologists.. it is a gratuitous and unnecessary position.

    ##

    On logic, I don't say that you are talking gibberish, or not making sense. I am simply saying that you are wrong, given the logic and language rules we are communally working by. You aren't even "challenging" the logical principles at work, but simply denying them without a deeper rationale. And some rationale would need to be supplied to supplant this fundament of logic. Again, it isn't (just) intuition at work, but the whole fabric of how our world hangs together (modeled in our minds) which would fall if your denial were successful.

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  36. Hi Keith,

    A. P is true
    B. If P is true then Q is true
    C. Therefore Q is true


    I take a somewhat formal point of view in these matters. In a formal logical system, you assume a number of axioms and inference rules and see where you go from there. It's perfectly acceptable to try to build a theory without the above (perhaps with weaker replacements) and, who knows, it might produce something interesting. Axioms and inference rules are, logically speaking, arbitrary. In practice, of course, they must be chosen with great care if the resulting theory is to be useful.

    In “real life”, outside of mathematical logic, your inference rule is adopted because experience shows it works pretty well. However, I would not say it is “true” in an absolute sense; what does it mean anyway?

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  37. Hi JP:

    I'm not sure I can buy the pragmatic justification for the basic ideas of logic because I can't see any experiences that would show they didn't work. It seems to me you would conclude one or more of the original premises were false. For example, consider this bit of reasoning my wife used before she got to know me well:

    A. All Kentuckians understand agricultural things.

    B. Keith in a Kentuckian

    C. Therefore Keith understands agricultural things.

    When she discovered I was totally ignorant of all things agricultural (pretty much all I know about agricultural things comes from the song Old MacDonald), she didn't see this as a rare failure of logic but rather she concluded there are more than one kind of Kentuckian. She could have concluded I was lying about being a Kentuckian but she was very convinced on my honesty. But what I claim is that no experience would lead a person to think that SOMETIMES the syllogism fails to work. If the validity of the syllogism were based on empirical observation it would have to be conceivable experiences that would show it failed. I don't think there are any such conceivable experiences.

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  38. Hi Burk:

    It seems to me you contradicted yourself when you said (a) Every stitch of evidence we have corresponds with realism, and not with brains in vats (BIV), etc, but you then complain that (b) I constructed the BIVist hypothesis so that every bit of evidence DOES fit it. But that means that by definition BIVism DOES fit the evidence. And that's the point it seems to me. We have two theories before us. Both of them say "our experiences are caused by X". Realism says X = a world external to our senses that our senses interact with, BIVism says X = some giant computer or something that imposes on us these experiences. The world doesn't look any more Realistic than it looks BIVistic, or any less. The underlying reality in both theories transcends our experiences so our experiences don't give us a reason to prefer one over the other. It seems to me your objection is that you find yourself believing Realism and see no reason to change from that to some theory that was obviously concocted by philosophers to make a philosophical argument. But that's a false choice. The actual choice is between Realism and Agnosticism wrt Realism. There are an infinite number of hypothetical theories that could compete with realism, all of them fitting the evidence of sensory experience perfectly. But you BELIEVE realism. You suggest Occam's Razor as a possible justification, but that raises a couple of problems I'd say:

    First of all, how is the idea that there is a complex world out there that our senses interact with a simpler explanation than there is a computer generating our experiences. The computer explanation might even be simpler. The computer doesn't have to be very complex at all because yuo only have a thoughts in your head at a time. The computer doesn't have to make sure everything you've ever experienced is consistent, all it would have to do is make sure that among the thoughts in your head was the vague sense that these present thoughts are consistent with your vague memory of your thoughts you had before but aren't remembering right now.

    Second, why think things are PROBABLY simpler rather than complex? If you accept Occam's razor for pragmatic reasons then it seems to me we are no longer looking for how things are, and if so then most objections to theism ought to be dismissed.

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  39. Keith

    I don't know about your line of reasoning here. I am entirely agnostic with regard to reality. What the underlying reality is, or indeed whether the notion of an underlying reality is even coherent, is beyond our knowledge. Or so it seems to me.

    And yes, we therefore are forced to make use of starting assumptions, or if you like best guesses, in order to kick off our modelling of and interaction with the world. Some of these assumptions appear to be forced upon us by our very nature (I would say our evolved nature). Others have been eased into place by cultural traditions.

    Accepting all this as our common ground, you appear to want to make the leap from, 'we must make use of intuitions' to 'all intuitions are therefore equally valid', including your intuitions about God.

    Now my case, to restate it, is this. We can assess our intuitions against their effects. So, materialist assumptions give us two crucial things. First, they give us technological progress. Be it GPS, chemotherapy or laptops, technologies that for the the greater part of human history would have been indistinguishable from magic, are now commonplace. Secondly, they create a consensus of understanding which in turn enables more discoveries, more control of our interactions with the physical world. They do this by having a system of arbitration between contradictory theories, essentially via experimental verification.

    Now, intuitions about morality, God or artistic value, while they can be shared, can not be arbitrated. You and I can hold contradictory intuitions and that's just something we have to live with.

    So, your belief in God is not of a kind with my belief in the roundness of the earth. I don't knock you for having it, good on you, whatever gets you through the night. I don't even know you're wrong. But it is a stretch to call this style of belief knowledge.

    Bernard

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  40. Keith-

    I don't think you are making a high-quality point here. I am not saying that reality couldn't be some BIV situation. I am simply saying that all the evidence is consistent with the simplest hypothesis, so we should pay attention and not engage in sophistry concerning models with no extra evidence to differentiate them from the null hypothesis. Realism forms the best theory. Theories are always in contention, not matters of 100% belief.

    The basic point is that intution is not the issue- it is the evidence of our surroundings and existence that, rigorously considered, implies the reality and naturalism hypotheses which are the simplest available at the moment. Simplicity is not a matter of intuition either, but of what hypotheses are likely to model reality better, given two choices (an inductive bit of wisdom, perhaps). After all, the Ptolomaic model accurately modelled planetary motions as well, for what that was worth, at least from the earthbound perspective.

    Now, if "belief" in god & religion could be likewise calibrated with respect to its probabilities in light of rigorous evidence and parsimony, in proportion with the agnostisicm you promote with respect to the patent realities around us, we would be a great deal better off, all around.

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  41. Hi Bernard:

    Actually I do NOT say that all intuitions are equally valid. What I am saying is that for each person, at the bottom of everything you believe is intuition. The philosophy of what counts as knowledge is tricky, but IMO I am quite comfortable saying that I know for example that my dogs continued to exist today when my wife and I were riding bikes in Joshua Tree National Forest. But I certainly cannot have any evidence nor non-circular argument to that effect. My belief about our dogs--my KNOWLEDGE about those dogs--is grounded in my intuition about Realism. If my intuition about something is really just a delusion, well then my beliefs will not be knowledge and probably won't even be right. But from the inside looking out, all any of us has is his intuition. Intuition is the only reason you know that other people even exist. Fpr me, realism is maybe my strongest intuition, but nearly as strong are some of my moral intuitions. The fact that someone might disagree with my moral intuition inspires me to critically reconsider, but when my intuition still tells me that genocide is immoral I stick with it.

    Other very strong intuitions of mine are that the universe is more than just matter following the laws of nature, that at the bottom of it all is some kind of Mind, a mind that is responsible for the very existence of the universe, of my existence, a mind that when I think about it should be expected to love us all. In other words, God. Since those intuitions ring true to me even when I consider the fact that some people don't agree--even when I consider the fact that I USED to not believe in God--I by definition believe in God. Do I KNOW God exists? That depends on whether my intuition is a reliable one and I can't tell that from the inside. Only God knows THOSE kinds of things:-)

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  42. Hi Burk:

    I confess ignorance here. I don't know what you mean by

    On logic, I don't say that you are talking gibberish, or not making sense. I am simply saying that you are wrong, given the logic and language rules we are communally working by.

    You seem to be saying the hypothetical me who denied that "P & P implies Q, therefore Q" is wrong, but of course you say that because you know that Q has to be true given the premises of the argument. But how do you KNOW that? You seem (to me at least) to be implying that it's some kind of social convention, that possibly Q could fail to obtain even if P is true and P implies Q. But if it's just a social convention then yuo can't say I'm wrong, just unconventional. But you DID say I was wrong (and I was). So what am I missing? It's not that I am not using the word "true" or "implies' the same way you are--the hypopthetical I assures you I mean the same thing most people mean by those words. So the hypothetical I means the same thing you would mean by the statement "nah, in this case Q doesn't follow from those premises". So what about your position am I missing?

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  43. Hi, Keith-

    I can't help the impression that you are throwing up a lot of chaff here. How do I KNOW that the illogical proposition is wrong? Because it fails to adhere to the rules of logic that we implicitly agree on by having a conversation at all. It is a social convention, but not just that.. it also underpins all our modelling of reality, known by its successful fruits (pragmatic justification). It can also be defended by formal means, after the simplest of axioms are stipulated, again from empirical or pragmatic ultimate sources.

    "So the hypothetical I means the same thing you would mean by the statement "nah, in this case Q doesn't follow from those premises"."

    That is why I said you were making sense, but were wrong. I can parse the symbols, but the meaning is incorrect given the premises. I can't tell you what you are missing, unfortunately.

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  44. Keith

    We appear to be talking past each other. This may be my fault. Yes, I absolutely agree that without intuition, we can get nowhere.

    Interestingly we also agree that not 'all intuitions are equally valid'. What then, by your reckoning, makes one intuition more valid than another?

    For me it is that some intuitions are more powerful generators of knowledge; and this as far as I can see is because of the potential for falsification, verification and hence consensus and progress. But this is a materialist justification, and leaves belief in God as a relatively weak intuition, as it appears to escape consensus forming processes.

    You seem to have a different criteria by which the validity of intuitions can be judged. I think if you were to explain what that is, I'd be closer to understand what it is you're trying to say here.

    Bernard

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  45. Hi Burk: I really am NOT trying to confuse the issue, I am trying to get to the bottom of the issue. I don't understand HOW logic has anything to DO with social convention. It seems to me that logic is a basic fact about how things are. The language we use to express the facts of logic are social convention, but language is a set of symbols, the reality language symbolizes is a separate reality. It seems to me that your objection to hypothetical me when I denied the truth of a claim that followed logically from a set of premises is this: because logic really IS the way things work, if I claim something that conflicts with logic then I am wrong. And my question to you boils down to "how do you KNOW logic is right?". I claim the answer is: your intuition tells you.

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  46. Hi Bernard:

    Here's how I see the faculty of intuition. I had better correct some sloppy language on my part. There is the faculty of intuition, and there is an individual INSTANCE of the working of that faculty which I might have referred to as AN intuition. I'll try to be clearer in this post. Intuition is analogous to sensory perception. I agree with you that one intuition is better than another inasmuch as it is better at generating knowledge But I don't see how the potential for falsification MAKES ones intuition better, no more than said potential would make your eyesight better. Since I claim that we have to use intuition to evaluate evidence and the like, what scientific experiments involves is increasing the set of relevant experiences you have about the subject increases the accuracy of your conclusion. But still, since everything involves intuition, if you flat out distrust your own intuition you can never got out of the epistemic gate as it were. It seems to me that all mentally healthy people DO trust there intuition: when they have a strong sense that X is true they at least think something like this: "I could be wrong about most anything, I'm not perfect, but I'd bet anything X is true". Now some instances of intuition carry more weight than others. For me, I have zero doubt that I am typing in my computer right now, not because of any potential for falsification but because it's totally clear to me what I am doing. My belief in the things that convince me that God exists is not as strong an intuition as that, but it is pretty strong. The same for my belief that beating up gay people is morally wrong--in fact that moral intuition is stronger than my belief in God.

    So what do we do when I report AN intuition that differs from yours? How do we collectively decide which intuition is the right one? That seems to be your question. My answer? We do not, we cannot. And it doesn't matter. What matters (to you) is your intuition. If I disagree with you, how do YOU know I am not right? My answer to that? You listen to me and perhaps I will convince you. If so then when you consider all that you know your intuition will give a different signal that it did. if not and your intuition signals the same thing it did before, then you still think you are right? You cannot escape your own mind to test anything independently OF your own mind and neither can I. Epistemically we have to take care of our own business, we have to worry about the giant log in our own eyes before worrying about the tiny splinter in our brother's eyes, so to speak.

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  47. Hi Bernard:

    Here's how I see the faculty of intuition. I had better correct some sloppy language on my part. There is the faculty of intuition, and there is an individual INSTANCE of the working of that faculty which I might have referred to as AN intuition. I'll try to be clearer in this post. Intuition is analogous to sensory perception. I agree with you that one intuition is better than another inasmuch as it is better at generating knowledge But I don't see how the potential for falsification MAKES ones intuition better, no more than said potential would make your eyesight better. Since I claim that we have to use intuition to evaluate evidence and the like, what scientific experiments involves is increasing the set of relevant experiences you have about the subject increases the accuracy of your conclusion. But still, since everything involves intuition, if you flat out distrust your own intuition you can never got out of the epistemic gate as it were. It seems to me that all mentally healthy people DO trust there intuition: when they have a strong sense that X is true they at least think something like this: "I could be wrong about most anything, I'm not perfect, but I'd bet anything X is true". Now some instances of intuition carry more weight than others. For me, I have zero doubt that I am typing in my computer right now, not because of any potential for falsification but because it's totally clear to me what I am doing. My belief in the things that convince me that God exists is not as strong an intuition as that, but it is pretty strong. The same for my belief that beating up gay people is morally wrong--in fact that moral intuition is stronger than my belief in God...

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  48. more to bernard:

    So what do we do when I report AN intuition that differs from yours? How do we collectively decide which intuition is the right one? That seems to be your question. My answer? We do not, we cannot. And it doesn't matter. What matters (to you) is your intuition. If I disagree with you, how do YOU know I am not right? My answer to that? You listen to me and perhaps I will convince you. If so then when you consider all that you know your intuition will give a different signal that it did. if not and your intuition signals the same thing it did before, then you still think you are right? You cannot escape your own mind to test anything independently OF your own mind and neither can I. Epistemically we have to take care of our own business, we have to worry about the giant log in our own eyes before worrying about the tiny splinter in our brother's eyes, so to speak.

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  49. Hi Burk:

    About Brains in vats vs Realism. You seem to be saying we ought to go with the simpler idea of realism instead of the more complicated brains in vats. I have two questions then:

    1. How is realism the simpler view?

    2. Why other than convenience should we ever pick simpler theories? Why should we apply Occam's razor?

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  50. Keith-

    Your question seems to become.. how do I know what my mind is telling me? Some would construct that process as intution.. whatever pops into my head, whether characterized as "knowledge", "memory", "analysis", "feeling".. all goes into the same epistemological pot of intuition.

    I don't think that is the best way of looking at our mental processes, though I understand where someone might take that position. Nothing is certain, least of all our mental faculties, so a humble approach might be to degrade it all as intuition. But at our best, I think we can carry out algorithms in better fashion than that. Two examples come to mind- empiricism and logic.

    We really can align our models with reality. The competing hypotheses of god causing lightning and electrical discharge causing lightning are competing hypotheses that can, by competent parties possessing high-end mental faculties, be tested and answered.

    Likewise, as you say, logic accords with reality, and thus is a reliable foundation for our algorithmic thought and analysis. We don't need to rely on intuition to judge a logical proposition.. we could program a computer to instantiate the rules we arrive at empirically/logically and supply us with answers in particular cases without calling on intuition at all.

    So to say that everything stops at intuition, therefore my intution is somehow sovereign and can't be calibrated, judged, or criticized, even when it throws up wholly imaginary hypotheses posing as empirical facts ... well, that is what we have spend the last few hundred years (at least) refuting.

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  51. Keith

    Interesting. Much of what you say I agree with. Two things stick out for me though. The first is that it doesn't follow that because intuition is necessary for knowledge, we can not evaluate intuition. If you have an intuition that gravity won't apply to you when you step off a tall building, then your intuition is flat out wrong and likely to be fatal. So we do have mechanisms for evaluating intuition, as Burk notes. Why not use them?

    The second is I don't tend to see intuition as some stand alone thing. Psychological experiments suggest strongly that our intuition changes over time, and is affected by physical cues (so our intuition to trust a person responds strongly to the shape of their face for example). Trying to dig beneath our intuitions and find out why we hold them, and whether they are reliable, seems worthwhile.

    Finally, I don't buy into the radical scepticism, brain in a vat thing at all, simply because I don't think Descartes went nearly far enough. If you're going to doubt the existence of your own body and of other minds, why not go the whole hog and doubt the existence of your mind as well (logic tells you you can't, but that's fine, just doubt the validity of logic too and conclude you don't exist at all). So, it might be true, by this form of scepticism, that we don't exist at all, but because we are having this conversation, we are forced to reject radical scepticism from the get go for pragmatic, rather than intuitive reasons.

    Bernard

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  52. HI Burk: Not much time to respond right now (maybe later:-). Just a bit right now.

    1. I think I AM using the word "intuition" in the broad way you suggest. That's because I am equating the word "intuition" as that faculty that induces in me the ring of truth. Which means intuition as I am using it is INVOLVED with both empiricism and logic. BTW I take "empiricism" to mean sensory perceptions. Is that what you mean?

    2. You offer a reasonable response to hypothetical me and his radical skepticism (btw only crazy people take seriously hypothetical me's skepticism:-). While maybe we CAN'T show realism is right, we are justified in accepting it for pragmatic reasons. I personally don't think anyone really DOES do this, I think we accept realism because we find ourselves believing it. But if we go with the pragmatic justification then it seems to me that one can with exactly the same justification accept theism and even specific religious claims: pragmatism opens a lot of doors.

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  53. Hi Bernard:

    You make the valid point that we ought to be able to test our intuitions. I agree, but I do need to I think reiterate the distinction between the FACULTY of intuition and specific deliverances OF that faculty. You mention someone having the intuition that gravity doesn't work, and acting on that intuition by stepping of a building (not that I expect I'd ever HAVE such an intuition:-). When they fall that would indeed be a test of that particular intuition and I'd agree that testing particular intuitions when it is possible is advisable. But in those situations when it is NOT possible to test an intuition, that's where I don't agree we should radically distrust them. Since every test depends ITSELF on using intuition, if our initial position were radical distrust we'd never get off the ground in the first place.

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  54. On last thing Burk: I think I've read you mention this kind of thing before, but you have contrasted the scientific description of lighting because caused by natural processes and the idea that Goddidit. You say that this is a testable hypothesis. I don't see how since BOTH explanations can fit the data equally well. The theist presumably believes that God is the foundation OF those physical processes. Christian theology often declares God to be the creator and SUSTAINER of the physical universe. Given that view describing the physics of lightning tells us nothing about whether or not God has something to do with it.

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  55. Hi Burk:
    You wrote: We don't need to rely on intuition to judge a logical proposition.. we could program a computer to instantiate the rules we arrive at empirically/logically and supply us with answers in particular cases without calling on intuition at all.

    But the computer wouldn't KNOW that the proposition was really true, it would just be going through the motions. My claim is that you KNOW the logically derived conclusion is true, and necessarily this "knowing" includes the sensation of "ringing true". My claim is you believe X to be true IF AND ONLY IF X rings true to you considering every other thing you believe.

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  56. Hi Keith

    Thanks, that clarifies your position, and our difference, well.

    You and I agree that when an intuition can be tested empirically, it is advisable to do so. We also agree that there would be a problem in radically doubting all non-testable intuitions, on the grounds that the logic by which intuitions are tested relies itself on non-testable intuitions (I think I have you right here).

    I think that you object to my next move, although I'm not sure why. My next move is to say, let's trust intuitions that we can test, and intuitions that are necessary for such testing to occur (on the grounds that we have already agreed testing is desirable).

    So, I do intuitively trust the rules of logic, like the syllogism you outlined, because they are necessary in order for me to accumulate useful knowledge. (To believe A implies B, and A is true therefore B is not true, would quickly have me stepping out in front of buses on the grounds that this causes pain and I don't want to be hurt. This belief would quickly die with me, I suspect).

    Now, when it comes to God's existence, here is a proposition that is neither testable, nor necessary in order for testing to occur. What's more, an alternative hypothesis exists that for some people works perfectly well. So, whilst agreeing with all you say about intuition, it still strikes me as unacceptably arrogant for me to want to believe my own intuition has some access to the truth of the matter while yours does not.

    Why not just say, 'here is something I like thinking because it adds meaning to my life?' without moving to the next step and claiming it's actually true. This keeps religion aligned with other arts; as a potentially valuable, enriching and sustaining activity.

    Bernard

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  57. Hi, Bernard-

    You clean up the case very well. Thanks. Unfortunately, the whole mechanism by which religion is useful demands that its adherents "believe" it, making the kind of justifiable hypothesizing / imagination you portray essentially useless.

    How well would hell work if its supporters knew they were only suspending disbelief / skepticism in order to enrich their lives with a matter of creative art or tenuous hypothesis? Not very.

    How well would a papal bull work if the pope were viewed as an artisan of highly questionable, but subjectively attractive intuitions? Perhaps that is how many view the papal theater, but Catholics seem to give it more credence.

    How well would the life-changing acceptance of Christ into one's heart, baptism in the water, and rebirth to new life work if the theologians told their flocks that none of it should be believed explicitly, only experienced as uplifting ritual by those willing to put aside factual belief?

    How well would crusades work? How well would the solace of everlasting life work? How well would hate work, without certainty? How would the divinely sponsored moral order work?

    Nope, it won't work, and thus the continual chasing around the maypole that we are doing here.

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  58. Hi Burk:

    You wrote: So to say that everything stops at intuition, therefore my intuition is somehow sovereign and can't be calibrated, judged, or criticized, even when it throws up wholly imaginary hypotheses posing as empirical facts ... well, that is what we have spend the last few hundred years (at least) refuting.

    A question and then a response.

    1. The question, Regarding the part I bolded: what are you referring to here?

    2. The response. I didn't say that one cannot judge one's intuitions. I merely point out that you judge your own intuition with more intuitions, and you judge someone ELSE'S report of an intuition with your own intuition. You (I believe it is you and not just Bernard) have argued that the scientific method gives us a away independent of our intuitions to TEST our claims but since it every time we go from sensory experience X to "fact about the real world Y" we USE our intuition, science isn't independent FROM intuition, it is dependent ON intuition.I don't see that you have successfully refuted my claim.

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  59. Keith

    The spam filter is against us on this one, I'm afraid, and I don't want to clog this up with boring repetition, so very briefly:

    One can and should test intuitions against empirical data when possible. We agree on this. Hence, one needs to put in trust those intuitions necessary for such testing to occur. This is a partial trust, open always to a better performing set of intuitions to replace them.

    Intuitions that don't fall into the categories of testable or necessary for testing, we can then be agnostic about. Our intuitions about God are a good example.

    Bernard

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  60. Keith-

    To your questions.. in #1, I am plainly referring to god and all the associated supernatural phenomena specifically engineered (imagineered, one might say) to evade empirical scrutiny, yet still "believed" in.

    For #2, you claim an infinite regress of intuition, providing ultimately the justification to take your intuition as veridical, as Eric would put it. But then you say that one can judge one's intuitions. How does that compute? It computes because we have a wide variety of intuitions, from the wildest LSD-induced epiphanies to the forced alignment of mental models with gravitation throughout childhood, after a series of scrapes and other empirical experiments.

    Intuition can be trained, and intuition learns, if it is exposed to evidence and correction. That is how all sorts of skills & knowledge are built into intuitions, including logic and math. The better and more grounded intuitions can then judge the more dubious. We contain multitudes, some of which have better critical and logical abilities than others. That is how we can judge theistic intuitions by the standards of empirical science- if those intuitions make scientific claims.

    What happens when one builds a knowledge / intuition base founded not on the bruises and scrapes of empirical experience, but on the stories of very imaginative prior people? One ends up with myth, art, and good story-telling. Material, in short, which may be extremely informative about the human condition and psyche, but hardly about the reality which it often purports to describe. Thus we have creation stories from every culture the world over. What are they worth?

    So my answer is that intuitions are typically not innate or innately correct- they are built by trial and error. Or by indoctrination and parochial schooling, or perhaps by exercising artistic and moral sensibilities in critical settings. Each form of training builds its own intuitions and expertise, but not others. One wouldn't ask a potter to design a spaceship, and one shouldn't ask theism, which works with no rigorous empirical engagement, (indeed is disdainful of empirical constraints), to be veridical about actual reality rather than about imagined realities.

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  61. Hi Burk:

    I knew you were talking about GOD, what I wasn't sure about was what you meant by "imaginary hypotheses posing as empirical fact". I assumed that by "empirical fact" you meant "fact" and by imaginary hypotheses you were making the very strong claim that God doesn't exist. But the adjective "empirical" carries some philosophical baggage and I thought maybe there was more to your comment than just just accusing theists of irrationality.

    Since as you have pointed out Bernard has done a good job of cleaning up the issues, I'll be responding to his posts (that will probably address any points you've made too).

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  62. Hi Bernard: I think we are at the meat of it now: intuitions about things that we cannot test. Among those intuitions: other people exist, those other people have minds and are not nonsentient zombies going through the motions, moral intuitions. And for me, there are those intuitions that lead me to believe God actually exists. None of these cam be tested, and one CAN be agnostic about any of them I suppose, although I don't know anyone who is agnostic about the existence of other minds or other people. You CAN be agnostic about any of these because you don't share those intuitions. But if you DID share them then by definition you WOULD believe them to be true, or believe them to be PROBABLY true, or believe them to be enough POSSIBLY true to live as IF they were true.

    You and Burk seem to be saying that because of the alleged unreliability of our intuitions we SHOULD remain agnostic (Burk actually seems to go further that that about God belief, Burk seems to be asserting that God belief IS delusional) about them unless we can test them. But since our tests DEPEND on intuition then how could we trust the results of our test? That's the real point I think. I claim we have to trust our specific intuitions, and we have to be willing to test them against other specific intuitions as we live our lives, and we have to trust our faculty of intuition to sort it all out. I should point out that depending on the strength of the specific intuition you will experience different degrees of confidence about it. And even if you are very confident, you might also be confident that possibly you are wrong and that more checking is warranted. It might be like how you remember turning off the stove before you left the house--well you THINK you remember so maybe we better drive back home to make sure.

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  63. Hi Keith,

    Ok. You have a strong intuition that God exists and you want to use that to justify your belief. To do so you have to argue that this intuition is not simply one of a special kind, maybe less reliable than others. Instead, you need it to be of the same kind, as worthy of trust as, say, the intuition that others exist.

    But it should be obvious that our various beliefs are formed in different ways. Believing that there is an object in front of me, that I can see and touch, that makes noise when I hit it, for which I have direct sensory evidence, certainly appears to be of a different nature than a vague God intuition with no such corroborative evidence at all. But it won't do – you need these two beliefs to be similar, of one kind, so at to apply the obvious reasonableness of one to the other. For this you need to argue that, at bottom, all beliefs are established through the same “intuitive” mechanism, whatever they are, reducing any difference between them to some trivial detail. In essence, you are saying that the basis for holding that to something is true is to believe it.

    In doing all this, I don't think you're strengthening the case for the God intuition. On the contrary you reduce all beliefs to the lowest common denominator – a feeling that something is true. This makes a mockery of common sense and of all the progress we've made in our knowledge of reality in all those centuries, precisely by looking past our basic intuitions in order to find out what's really out there.

    By the way, I am not saying that believing in God is foolish. There are clearly other roads to faith than your intuition argument – and more reasonable ones, I'd say.

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  64. Keith

    Yes, I agree that we must at some level trust our intuition. Our personal picture of the world is a patchwork of guesses. And at a fundamental level, we do need to be aware our guesses may be quite wrong. This is true of science too, indeed science embraces the concept.

    My agnosticism is about asking two questions. First, why are we more confident of some guesses than others? And second, at what level of uncertainty is it best to opt for no belief over a belief in which we have only a limited degree of confidence?

    It seems to me there are a number of reasons why we might be particularly confident of a belief. Some beliefs are forced moves, much of our belief in logic is like this. To genuinely live otherwise is to die quickly and messily, and I suspect that is a key part of the story when it comes to the evolution of human thinking. Another reason is when the belief matches the evidence, so yielding reliable predictive capacity. Again, we question gravity's capacity at our peril.

    Taken together, these two foundations sidestep the problem of 'testing requires intuitions too'. We essentially bank those intuitions that are a compulsory part of our psychological make up (our intuitive grasp of grammar is an interesting case study here). A good reason to be comfortable with this approach is the remarkable track record of modern science. The expansion of knowledge has been, well mind blowing.

    As for the second question, I think that when we have intuitions that are neither forced moves, nor evidentially based, we should be cautious. To remain agnostic, for me, has two great advantages. It forces a degree of tolerance upon me. I am not in a position to say 'I'm right about this and you're wrong' and so the natural starting point becomes respectful conversation. Fallibilism offers a similar advantage, I think.

    The second advantage is that it presents the unknowns as pressing challenges for the collective human intellect. What is consciousness really, and how does it work? I'm much more excited by a viewpoint that says 'let's see what we can find out' than one that says 'it's a mystery, it can't be studied.'

    Thanks for being so keen to discuss this, by the way. It's how I best learn.

    Bernard

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  65. Hi JP: Oops! Making a mockery of common sense, that CAN'T be good:-). But I don't see how I AM guilty of such. It's not so much that my intuition tells me god exists. It's that my intuition tells me these things:

    1. Materialism cannot account for consciousness. It could at most account for things behaving in that way I associate with consciousness, but on materialism those behaviors would be merely matter moving around according to the laws of physics. I can see how a biological robot could receive external stimuli and calculate its response sort of like Mapquest figures out routes, but without having any experience of awareness. But I know I AM aware and one of my other intuitions is that so do you. None of this seems to me to fit materialism.

    2. Materialism cannot account for morality (as opposed to behaviors that mimic morality). Morality as a concept is about what we SHOULD be doing and it seems to me that on materialism there'd only be what we DO, not on what we SHOULD do. This intuition of mine has something to do with the seminar Eric wrote about and I am interested in reading what he writes on the subject. (continued next post)

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  66. More for JP:

    3. This one is probably weird, but it seems reasonably strong to me. Materialism cannot account for non-material reality, and non-material reality definitely exists. The 12 trillionth digit of the decimal expansion of pi exists and it exists necessarily. Since it is a mental object, it "lives" in minds. Therefore there has to be a necessarily existing mind. On materialism minds would not have to exist, therefore materialism is false.

    There's actually a few more intuitions probably, and when I consider all these intuitions it seems to me--another intuition--that the necessarily existing mind, the foundation of consciousness and morality, is what we mean by God.

    For me, these intuitions are not as strong as my intuition that the real world exists independent of my experience of it, or even my intuition that other minds exist. But all of them are intuitions because that's what intuition is: it's the faculty that produces the "truth ringing experience".

    You want to distinguish between the intuitions of Realism (which are according to you obviously reasonable) and intuitions that lead to theism. If I were to ask you to produce evidence that those intuitions ARE reasonable, you'd be unable to do so. If I asked you to provide evidence for your claim that we have to accept them to survive, you couldn't provide that either. If lack of evidence disqualified an intuition, reason could never get out of the gate. If you believe that theistic intuitions ought to be rejected, you need a better reason, I'd say. In fact, that's all I'm saying.

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  67. Keith

    I've just been reading some Karl Popper on an issue closely related to this. Nothing to do with God, but on the issue of why we accept certain logical propositions. His position, roughly speaking, is that logic is accepted to the extent that it proves reliable. So, should we find a logical rule that takes us from a true premise to a false conclusion, we would reject the rule.

    Now, we can then ask how we know either a premise or a conclusion is true, and I think he would then speak in terms of reliability of prediction, or non-falsification. We could even substitute terms perhaps and say, so long as it does not take us from a reliable premise to a less reliable conclusion.

    Here reliability is measured against prediction, using measures and criteria for success that are agreed upon by all participants in the discussion. And why those criteria and not others, you may ask. Again, it comes down to there being no acceptable alternatives on the table, or so I think. And hence we must always be open to better alternatives becoming available, but in the meantime, we have a very effective means of assessing those intuitions that are testable.

    Those that do not belong in a separate category I think. At this point, my agnosticism kicks in, while you prefer to trust your hunches. To a large extent I judge that a personal choice, so long as the testable propositions are always open for scrutiny, and the difference between the testable and the personally adopted is acknowledged.

    Bernard

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  68. Keith

    Your comment to JP is interesting, because it moves away from just saying 'here is my intuition' to looking at reasons why you think you're intuition on God might be so strong. And so we can move to unpicking our intuitions which is I suppose what philosophy is all about. On the three points you raise I can't sustain a link to God, and hence our intuitions differ in part because of the way we are reasoning.

    Here are my differences then:

    The idea that materialism can not account for consciousness is an hypothesis, and against it is an alternative hypothesis held by many. It is not logically impossible that our conscious experience is entirely the result of physical interactions. It may just be a puzzle waiting to be solved, just as the puzzle of life was once thought irreducibly mysterious. Whether one finds the progress in the field to date convincing is largely a matter of personal scepticism, but to prejudge the outcome of an ongoing investigation requires an extra move (the zombie argument perhaps?) Predictably enough, agnosticism on this issue is for me a better fit.

    On morality, the answer is simpler. Materialists don't look for an explanation for morality in the terms you describe it, the ought kind, because they don't believe there is any such thing. They believe in evolving moral codes that exist within social, cultural and biological contexts, and these are easily explained by a materialist outlook.

    And on the 'out there' option, I've also been puzzled by this on occasion. I like the common sense response, which is - yes, the largest prime yet to be discovered does exist, in the same sense that the greatest love story never written, or the life we could have lived, does exist. These occupy Popper's Third World, the world of ideas or concepts. But what is necessary in order for this world to exist? Probably only the very minds that have the concept of potential existence. So ours. Once we have this notion of unthought thoughts, then these thoughts do exist at least as part of our concept. Why another greater mind needs to exist in order for us to be able to talk about them I'm not sure.

    Bernard

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  69. Hi Keith,

    Thanks for elaborating on your intuitions. I see that Bernard has answered your three points but that his comment has disappeared in spam-territory. Hopefully Eric will be able to restore it and I will leave these points aside for the moment.

    You insist, I think, that realism cannot be proven reasonable. If you mean that there is no compelling logical argument for it, then I certainly agree. I'm very skeptical that logic can prove anything at all about reality.

    Your point that “truth ringing” is a warrant of truth is no different. Certainly you are not claiming that there is any kind of logical argument supporting it? It's just an assumption you have to make to go on. Then, saying that some proposition P is true because it feels so depends on accepting that your assumption is true - because if feels so? This is, it seems to me, as circular as it gets.

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  70. Hi JP: We agree then:-). Let me address a couple of your points:

    1. I agree that I cannot PROVE that my "truth ringing" is reliable. In fact I am not saying that truth ringing itself confers warrant on a belief. I am saying that for each person, you believe X is true IF AND ONLY IF it rings true. It thus makes no sense to tell somebody they should refuse to believe something that rings true to them. You can at most explain to them why it isn't true, or why you are not convinced, or your objection to X, or some such thing. What does confer warrant on a belief? That's a tougher question. I could recommend Alvin Plantinga's "Warranted Christian Belief" for a general discussion of warrant, but I think the issue is tricky.

    2. I'd go farther than to say you cannot logically prove realism to be reasonable. I'd say you cannot provide any evidence or argument at all that it's reasonable. That doesn't mean it's not reasonable to believe in realism, of course it is. But that means that it CAN be reasonable to believe something even when there cannot be any evidence or logical argument that it is true.

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  71. Hi Bernard:

    I don't agree with Karl Popper about why we accept the principles of logic. I hate to keep going back to this syllogism, but

    1. P is true
    2. P implies Q
    3. Therefore Q.

    I'd claim that there is no possible result that would lead you to reject the logical principle of this argument instead of rejecting one of the two premises of the argument. If P were true and Q were false, you would probably conclude that P didn't imply Q (although you might conclude that P was false after all).

    I also wonder about using the ability to form accurate predictions as a measure of truth. I'm not actually challenging that principle, I am asking how one would show this principle to be valid.

    Also, I don't guess I agree that reason requires any person to restrict himself to restrict himself to only those truth-testing criteria that all people in the discussion agree to, not when the person is trying HIMSELF to figure out what's true. definitely if the person wants to convince his neighbor of something the person has to choose truth-testing criteria his neighbor accepts, but why else?

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  72. Hi Bernard: In my haste I didn't comment on the morality issue. Materialists you say don't buy the morality as being an objective fact, they see evolving moral codes. It seems to me they are talking about something different from what I am. I agree there are evolving moral codes, which I take to mean evolving ideas about what things are right and wrong. It's analogous to the evolving ideas about the physical universe. It was always the case that the energy of the sun came from hydrogen nuclei fusing together, but our UNDERSTANDING of the process evolved and evolves over time. But the materialist view as you describe it seems to me to make morality nothing but a social convention. In that case chattel slavery in the antebellum US South wasn't wrong because the accepted moral code of the South permitted slavery. I does seem to me that materialism requires that conclusion, and since I cannot accept the conclusion, logic demands I reject the premise--it seems to me that materialism is consequently false.

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  73. Hi Bernard: I'm sorry for posting all these ideas in multiple posts instead of one long post. But occasionally the computer kept refusing to accept my longer posts because something was too long. Anyway I wanted to address my argument that abstract mathematical ideas imply a necessarily existing mind. Let me elaborate a bit. I CLAIM that abstract math objects (numbers and the like) exist. The trillionth digit of PI exists, the the next prime number after the largest KNOWN prime number actually exists. I also claim those kinds of objects would exist even if all the minds that could fail to exist actually DID fail to exist (i.e. if all contingently existing minds failed to exist). But since mathematical objects are mental objects, they need a mind to "house" them. Take all these things together, this means that NECESSARILY some mind exists. technically this wouldn't prove that any particular mind is a necessarily existing mind. It could be that any particular mind could fail to exist but it's impossible that ALL minds fail to exist. However, that doesn't seem actually possible to me--it seems to me that if every contingent mind might not exist then POSSIBLY ALL contingent minds might fail to exist.

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  74. Hi Keith

    Yeah, for me it's about pragmatism, in the end. Your syllogism must be accepted on the grounds that if I didn't accept it I would quickly die (see my bus example). That, I think, is an excellent reason for accepting it.

    We accept that the world is real, or at least has real consequences, for similar programmed survival reasons. See the gravity example.

    Why use, as one's testing criteria, those the group has decided upon? Because that is the only way one can be part of a collective search for truth, and again, pragmatically speaking, history has shown the tremendous power of the collective effort.

    So, if one wishes to stay alive, and take part in the collective human programme, then certain lines of reasoning become forced moves (see too the logic of grammar). Belief in God isn't one of these.

    The morality line is becoming confusing for me. Are you saying, because you do not like the idea that some people have different moral codes than you, that you believe them absolutely wrong? But in the abortion debate, some people believe the access to abortion is an absolute requirement for a moral society, others see it as tantamount to murder. How is one to figure who is right, in your world of absolutes? I suspect there's a better way.

    Bernard

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  75. Hi Keith

    Sure, you're free to claim that ideas of themselves necessarily exist; such is the grand Platonic tradition I suppose.

    This wouldn't just hold for numbers would it, it would hold for verbs, or the as yet uninvented word for the itch on a unicorn's knee.

    If ideas necessarily exist, then it certainly might follow that there is a necessarily existing mind. It'll not surprise you one jot that I, along with many others, find the notion of necessarily existing concepts incoherent.

    To loop right back to your central claim though, you continue to claim that a belief in God is reasonable, yet by your standard of truth ringing, a belief in no God is equally reasonable. This strikes me as an anaemic version of reasonable, because by this standard all beliefs are reasonable, just so long as someone somewhere has their bell rung by them.

    Is this actually what you mean? Am I allowed, by these standards, to believe in a great logic eating donkey that created the world by chewing holes in the fabric of reason and allowing existence to gain a foothold? If this rings true to me, and can not be evidentially discounted, is it a reasonable belief? Is scientology reasonable?

    Bernard

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  76. Hi Bernard: let me start off by telling you that I also share your interest in surviving (and since you are a new friend I am fond of the idea that you survive too). Therefore please do not interpret my arguments as a call for you to reject realism and logic:-)

    But I don't think your pragmatism is a legitimate JUSTIFICATION for accepting realism, since it presupposes you are right about realism and logic. Your evaluation of the dangers inherent in rejecting those things depends on your sensory perceptions about the world being at least accurate enough. If that accuracy were in question then you couldn't trust your judgment about how dangerous anti-realism would be. Or so it seems to me.

    About morality. No I am not assuming that my moral judgments and intuitions are infallible. What i am saying is that I believe there is a right answer to any moral question. Very possibly MY answer is wrong. On abortion for example, I believe that prior to a certain point after conception, abortion is just a medical procedure without any moral significance at all. Prohibiting abortion prior to that time would be an injustice. Where that line is, I'm not so sure, and given the huge physical, psychological and spiritual impact pregnancy has on a woman there is no morally safe ground to stand on when trying TO draw the line. So I believe that the morally proper thing to do, guiven our ignorance, is to leave the decision for an abortion to each woman. I know that other people disagree with my moral judgment here. And I don't know how to objectively decide who's right. But I do believe there is a right answer. This is my point actually. Just because there is no objective way to answer a question doesn't mean there isn't an answer--the limit is epistemological, not ontological.

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  77. Hi Bernard:

    Thanks for the discussion BTW. I am enjoying this and all these kinds of discussions help me clarify my thinking for me anyway. I hope you are getting at least some benefit from my contributions, but surely not as much as I get from you.

    1. I DO agree that atheism can be reasonable as well. But I am NOT saying that everything anyone believes is in fact reasonable. I'm not sure how to define reasonable belief; I'd probably define a reasonable belief circularly, a belief based on premises that are reasonably held, which doesn't help much. Truth ringing doesn't guarantee a belief to be reasonable even though you have no choice BUT believe those things that ring true to you. There is an epistemic risk involved in truth ringing, I'd say, but at the bottom it's all we have. Experimentation, science, logic, we cannot depend on any of them unless truth ringing CAN be reliable. How do we tell if a person tends to have a reliable "truth-o-meter"? The real question is: how do YOU know YOUR truth-o-meter is reliable? I don't think the question is answerable. We cannot escape the epistemic risk, we can't really even play it epistemically safe. I think the idea that we can come up with epistemic rules by which we can determine what's reasonable and what's not is a philosophical conceit.

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  78. Keith

    I don't think anybody disagrees that we must choose a starting point, or set of starting points, in oder to form a picture of the world.

    And we also seem to agree that some beliefs are more reasonable than others.

    I am proposing one method for defining the reasonableness of a belief, specifically its ability to generate accurate and reliable predictions. So, reasonable beliefs are those underpinning models that are in principle falsifiable, that as yet have withstood such challenges and, through their testing, have yielded new insights, models and predictions. That the earth is round is, I propose, a reasonable belief for exactly these reasons.

    You are right, in embracing certain rules and realities, I am making a guess, but given there's nobody out there prepared to bet against it (moving train) I claim it's a pretty darned good guess. These are testable beliefs, and every time some unfortunate does indeed get hit by a train, my belief is verified a little more.

    This process of verification, falsification and modification gives my beliefs, I claim, a solid basis. I don't see what the alternative is, beyond yielding to 'anything goes, so long as it feels right.' How do you propose a person goes about building up their beliefs, if not through a process of testing and examination?

    I can see how you are arguing that my system of belief building is not perfect. I readily concede this, as does every scientist. I am arguing only that it is the best we have. So I am challenging you, I guess, to produce the superior alternative.

    Bernard

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  79. Hi Keith,

    If logic and reason alone cannot provide a foundation for knowledge, as I think we agree, then the question is: what are we to do?

    I suggest we simply assume (what everybody believes anyway) that some form of realism is true. Not because we feel it's true, not because it's reasonable or provable, not because anything – we just postulate it, like some mathematical axiom, cutting through all the tedious paperwork. After all, even the most radical anti-realist philosophers still publish papers for their non-existent colleagues and enjoy their imaginary food.

    It is, I think, as sound a foundation we can ever hope to find (if we don't want complete subjectivism) and, once this is done, we can start asking the other questions. It's a kind of wager, maybe. If realism turns out to be true, then it's all for the best. If not, we will still have enjoyed the (real) pleasure of finding things out in an imaginary reality in any case as fascinating as the real one would be. This can't be worse than stalling at the starting line wondering where to go.

    As for determining whether realism is sound or not, I'd say we let philosophers worrying about the issue do the hard work for us. If they end up proving it is true, than thanks to them. If, on the other hand, they prove it is false, well, if they don't exist, why should we believe them?

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  80. Hi JP: I have say I like your particular Wager argument for realism, especially the last sentence of it:-)

    But if we are cool with accepting axioms for pragmatic reasons instead of because we think they are actually true even though we can't provide evidence for them, then I think I'll accept my own intuitions wrt God axiomatically. I know you see things differently, but that doesn't mean we can't be friends:-)

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  81. Hi keith

    Your last comment pinpoints exactly the moment in your case where you lose me. Yes, we accept some points must be accepted essentially as axioms in order for rational and empirical discourse to do its work. But the leap from there, to saying therefore any intuition can be accepted on these grounds, I don't see at all.

    If we agree that some beliefs are more reasonable than others (round earth over flat earth) then we are in a position to ask which axioms allow us in the first instance to develop and test the round earth hypothesis, and the second instance to judge it preferable to the flat alternative.

    So the choice of axiom appears to me to be in this instance legitimised by commonly accepted criteria.
    Now, for the God axiom, I thin you said that the no-God axiom is equally reasonable. I agree, and for me this makes forming no belief on the matter more reasonable still.

    Imagine a person delves into a bag of an equal number of blue and yellow marbles and pulls one out in a closed fist. The belief that it is yellow is as reasonable as the belief it is blue, even though one of them is quite wrong. I suppose the attitude of 'yes, it's just definitely blue, I can feel it' rubs against my instincts somewhat. Knowing full well that it may well be yellow and my intuition is really just a guess pulls me back form forming any sort of belief at all. Does that make any sense to you?

    There is the pragmatic question then of whether believing nothing imposes its own cost, an interesting question I think and one I can sometimes waver on.

    Bernard

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  82. Hi Burk,

    I trust it is settled then that it is not like the naturalist has some “test” for naturalism whereas the theist lacks a similar test for theism. I stress this because in my experience naturalists tend to exact from theists epistemic principles they themselves fail to fulfil. In general I find that naturalists fancy that their worldview is based on some solid epistemic groundings, which is simply not there.

    I’d like to comment to this bit you wrote: “To interpret reality as personal and purposeful, we must *add* extraneous material to our observations, such as adding purpose to the apparent purposelessness of evolution and earth history, or personal interest to our mediations and prayers to the void, or anthropocentric purpose to the origin of a universe that exceeds our scale by tens of orders of magnitude.

    First of all it is generally agreed that the world around us, and particularly the results of evolution, look prima facie very purposeful indeed. Therefore it’s naturalism that carries the burden to show that they are not really purposeful. Has naturalism showed that? If one rigorously considers the science of natural evolution it turns out that it hasn’t. For the actual scientific theory only shows that it is *possible* that the living world is the result of purposeless forces, but not that it is so. Given the actual state of knowledge we don’t have any idea about the probability that given the initial physical conditions unguided (i.e. purposeless) natural evolution would produce the highly complex organisms required for intelligent thought. So, for all we today know, that probability might be very small, in which case the science would actually falsify naturalists’ belief in unguided evolution. Naturalists unfortunately misinterpret what the science actually says, or else wildly extend what it actually says according to their own preconceptions.

    [continued in the next post]

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  83. [continued from a previous post responding to Burk]

    (my previous post failed to appear, but according to Eric’s idea I will not try to repost it but wait until he does so)

    Secondly, I am surprised at your charge that theists must “add extraneous material” to our observations. After all, when we make a hypothesis in order to understand some observation or fact we normally “add” something. That’s why we believe that, say, forces such as gravity exist, or the Big Bang has taken place, or that electrons exist, or that the electric charge of electrons exist, and so on. One cannot reach some understanding without “adding” something to what one observes. The only question is whether the understanding reached is true or not.

    But perhaps you mean that theists add *too much* invisible stuff. In another post of yours you argue that naturalism’s model is “the simplest available at the moment”. If so, I’d like to invite you to study what naturalists are saying about reality as a result of the unexpected findings of modern science, namely the existence of invisible multiverses within invisible multiverses (not to mention the existence of spooky electrons). By any objective measure such beliefs are complex beyond imagination and violate the principle of parsimony in a most extravagant manner. It seems that the confidence that many naturalists feel is based on equal measure on their ignorance of theism and on their ignorance of naturalism.

    Finally I would like to make an epistemic charge against naturalists, namely that they don’t take all facts into account. In a manner which I judge to be extravagantly misguided they remove themselves from the picture, as if their personal condition did not really exist. So, when naturalists are asked about how their worldview accounts for consciousness, or for qualia, or for beliefs, or for intentionality (in the philosophical sense of “aboutness”) they in general express the faith based position that science will some day find a solution, as if science’s job were to solve naturalism’s metaphysical problems, or as if there were a thread of evidence that it is possible for science to solve such problems, or as if there were the smallest bit of advance in solving these problems based on scientific knowledge. And when naturalists are asked about how their worldview makes sense of morality or of freedom, which in my judgment are as basic facts about our condition as any, they in general respond that here we suffer from some kind of illusions.

    As far as I am concerned naturalism floats in the air sustained by nothing except some kind of imagined connection with science. Perhaps I am wrong to think so, or perhaps I am less charitable than Eric, but I cannot see how a reasonable and free-thinking person who actually studies the issues may be a naturalist.

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  84. [continued from a previous post responding to Burk]

    (my previous post failed to appear, but according to Eric’s idea I will not try to repost it but wait until he does so)

    Secondly, I am surprised at your charge that theists must “add extraneous material” to our observations. After all, when we make a hypothesis in order to understand some observation or fact we normally “add” something. That’s why we believe that, say, forces such as gravity exist, or the Big Bang has taken place, or that electrons exist, or that the electric charge of electrons exist, and so on. One cannot reach some understanding without “adding” something to what one observes. The only question is whether the understanding reached is true or not.

    But perhaps you mean that theists add *too much* invisible stuff. In another post of yours you argue that naturalism’s model is “the simplest available at the moment”. If so, I’d like to invite you to study what naturalists are saying about reality as a result of the unexpected findings of modern science, namely the existence of invisible multiverses within invisible multiverses (not to mention the existence of spooky electrons). By any objective measure such beliefs are complex beyond imagination and violate the principle of parsimony in a most extravagant manner. It seems that the confidence that many naturalists feel is based on equal measure on their ignorance of theism and on their ignorance of naturalism.

    Finally I would like to make an epistemic charge against naturalists, namely that they don’t take all facts into account. In a manner which I judge to be extravagantly misguided they remove themselves from the picture, as if their personal condition did not really exist. So, when naturalists are asked about how their worldview accounts for consciousness, or for qualia, or for beliefs, or for intentionality (in the philosophical sense of “aboutness”) they in general express the faith based position that science will some day find a solution, as if science’s job were to solve naturalism’s metaphysical problems, or as if there were a thread of evidence that it is possible for science to solve such problems, or as if there were the smallest bit of advance in solving these problems based on scientific knowledge. And when naturalists are asked about how their worldview makes sense of morality or of freedom, which in my judgment are as basic facts about our condition as any, they in general respond that here we suffer from some kind of illusions.

    As far as I am concerned naturalism floats in the air sustained by nothing except some kind of imagined connection with science. Perhaps I am wrong to think so, or perhaps I am less charitable than Eric, but I cannot see how a reasonable and free-thinking person who actually studies the issues may be a naturalist.

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  85. Hi Dianelos

    Nice to hear from you again. You write:

    "I cannot see how a reasonable and free-thinking person who actually studies the issues may be a naturalist."

    which is a pretty strong statement. I wonder if I can help you see (always the optimist).

    It's purely a matter of attitude, I think. There are many many things we do not fully understand, from our current quantum models to how consciousness works. The question becomes, what to do in the face of mystery?

    We can say, well it's just damned mysterious, and that's all there is to it.

    We can say, well it looks mysterious, but here is an untestable explanation I rather like, so it must be true.

    We can say, it's mysterious for now, it may always remain mysterious, but let's in the meantime keep digging away, looking for new implications and new testable hypotheses, just in case it turns out to be mysterious in the way fossils, or eclipses, or the plague, were once mysterious.

    The first option I find a little uninspiring. The second strikes me as too immodest (and it is an immodesty both scientific and religious communities can fall for).

    The third, essentially agnosticism on those things that can not be tested, I like very much indeed. It has served us very well in the past, and combines courage and caution in a most appealing way. I don't think this makes me unreasonable, unfree in my thinking or ill informed, does it?

    Bernard

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  86. Hi Bernard: I agree that you are a reasonable person, and I don't think that your position is unreasonable. On the other hand, I agree with everything Dianelos said about consciousness. IMO it's not about how far science has advanced so far, it's about the kind of questions science is able to address. It certainly seems possible to me that science could produce a model to explain how atoms could be organized so as to produce behaviors that we associate with awareness and consciousness. But that's not the same thing as explaining how it is that we EXPERIENCE awareness. Awareness, the thing we KNOW we have, is not a material quality and it is not something that science can even touch. We can study how changes in the brain can cause us to experience different things, but that also is not the same thing as showing that our conscious COMES from our brains, the same as the fact that changes in our eyes can affect the way we visually perceive the world, but our perceptions are also not the same thing as the physical state of our eyes. Dianelos and I see this is direct evidence that there is more to the universe than matter following the laws of physics, that reality transcends what is addressable by science.

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  87. Hi Keith,

    I don't want to digress too much but there's something I've been wondering about and maybe you can help me with this one: why is it so important to show that belief in God is reasonable? Why does it have to be so? There is a lot of effort invested in showing this is so and it seems implicitly admitted that it's necessary but I wonder why.

    I am not saying that reasonable persons cannot believe in God. It is an empirical fact that many do and this is not at issue.

    Alternatively, perhaps the issue is arguing that it may be reasonable to take the unreasonable leap into faith?

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  88. Hi Bernard,

    I am rather critical of naturalism, because I find it to be largely based on the myth that science supports it over theism. Perhaps I am not charitable enough, but I feel that if I respect somebody and I think he or she is believing something that is false and moreover is harmful then I should clearly say so.

    I am not similarly critical of agnosticism. The agnostic is somebody who is still searching. The only thing I’d feel like saying to an agnostic is that searching is a good thing as long as one’s mind is set to ultimately finding what one is looking for. Searching for search’s sake makes no sense. I’d also like to point out that failing to hold a true belief is often as harmful as holding a false belief.

    As for “mystery”, as it happens I find no mystery in the whole of my experience of life, both the objective/external and the subjective/internal dimensions. Theism – the philosophical and mystical kind I prefer – makes almost perfect sense of the whole lot. I suppose I am lucky in this respect.

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  89. Hi Dianelos

    Yes, I imagine you are lucky in that respect. Perhaps a lot of it is about finding a philosophy that suits one's temperament.

    I suspect that part of the appeal of agnosticism for me, is that it offers an opportunity to imagine one's way into both sides of an argument, a sort of recreational intellectual exercise.

    I am also ill-equipped to making a leap to either side when it eventually becomes clear (as in our free will discussion) that at the heart of a difference is a pure hunch, a feeling that 'this isn't quite right.' I find it relatively easy to embrace both hunches, and therefore would feel fraudulent choosing one over the other. That remains a great sticking point with any form of theism for me.

    I do think you have constructed a very sophisticated and potentially satisfying notion of theism. I'm just not convinced it's any more sophisticated and satisfying than some of the more refined materialist takes on our existence. I think these things are, in the end, about weaving together personally meaningful stories for ourselves.

    I am also struck by my own personal experience of never having met a naturalist of the type you appear to dismiss. Even the Dawkins and Dennetts of this world seem, to me, entirely agnostic when it comes to those aspects of the world that sit beyond our knowledge frontier. So, in a way, I wonder what it is that you are attacking sometimes.

    Bernards

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  90. Dianelos-

    Far be it from me to try to overturn your intutions. They seem very strong. "First of all it is generally agreed that the world around us, and particularly the results of evolution, look prima facie very purposeful indeed." This is not generally agreed at all. It is a popular view, but as I have tried to make clear, not due to a reasoned approach to nature, but due to our psychological makeup. We are here ... thus purpose? I don't think that really works from any but a narcissistic perspective.

    What is the test? Naturalism is another word for humility in observation- only going as far as observation allows, without adding mythical, projected, etc. elements. Suppose that our world is as portrayed in the scriptures. God speaks to us from all sorts of dramatic vantage points, seas part, the dead are raised, etc. In short, the world is as you would like to see it- not "natural", but clearly run and beset by god in person. Then any reasonable theory about reality would take that into account- we would be compelled to include god in the natural order.

    Naturalism does not thus exclude god, it excludes mechanisms for which we have no evidence. God is included if it is there, or can be reliably inferred. If you say, as you do, that all the randomness of the quantum world "allows" the hand of god to guide evolution, personal affairs, and whatever else needs doing, that would be interesting ... if you had any way to differentiate that state from the randomness being truly random and purposeless. But you don't. The two cases are, in any concrete way, identical, except for your extremely strong intuition that you are purposeful, you are here due to a purposeful agent in the universe, and so is everything else.

    Let me offer a more efficient counter-theory. Which is that evolution has provided us with a variety of instincts helpful to survival. One of which is an intense sense of purpose, which keeps us going through the sorrows, deluges, and trials of this world. This sense colors everything we do and think. The key innovation of the scientific method was to devise a way to insulate us from that sense, through formalism, experiment, critique, statistics, etc. so that the unpsychologized properties of nature could be revealed.

    This process is what has rendered "naturalism" to us, and so far, this naturalism seems to lack gods. This is not for lack of looking (heaven knows!) nor for lack of close observation, but because they aren't there in the natural world as far as we can rigorously tell. So go ahead and insist that, despite this lacking evidence, a god or gods are "ulimately responsible" for it, or some other formulation. It could be. We just don't have any evidence for it, so you are plainly expressing your intuition, and nothing more.

    cont...

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  91. "After all, when we make a hypothesis in order to understand some observation or fact we normally “add” something. That’s why we believe that, say, forces such as gravity exist, or the Big Bang has taken place, or that electrons exist, or that the electric charge of electrons exist, and so on. "

    I don't deny you the use of god as an hypothesis. But it is one that has proven spectactularly useless to date, and remains at that status- an hypothesis only. It is clearly not worthy of "belief", which is the reward given to hypotheses that have satisfied a rigorous (disinterested, scientific, etc.) test against the object that they are supposed to explain- i.e. reality.

    "Finally I would like to make an epistemic charge against naturalists, namely that they don’t take all facts into account. In a manner which I judge to be extravagantly misguided they remove themselves from the picture, as if their personal condition did not really exist."

    This is a very interesting charge. As outlined above, science does indeed remove humans from the equation in the very important epistemic sense of requiring explanations to stand without psychological inputs like wishes, hopes, traditions, hunches, intuitions, and the like. But it certainly does not remove humans from the equation as objects of study. Our biology has most clearly and successfully been put under the microscope. The biological basis of consciousness remains to be worked out, but that is one island in a great deal of knowledge already gained. Qualia, morals, freedom- all these are also scientific subjects, even if their complexity puts them out of reach for the moment.

    I'd be the last to deny the complexity and difficulty of studying the human condition, and also agree that the human condition that is most dear to us is subjective. Whether or not its origins and mechanisms are "explained" to our scientific satisfaction, the experience will remain- rich and unchanged. So I think we agree there that no matter how advanced science becomes in explaining everything, our politics and morals will not be seriously touched- they will still be ruled by our subjective wants and desires, explained or unexplained. We have been through a similar process with the Freudians, a century ago.

    It is ironic, indeed, that those who are most keen to put human subjectivity beyond the reach of science believe that there is nevertheless some objective absolute rule or model to which it hews. It is that opinion which has led the pseudoscientists (and theologians) of humanity most astray- into their idealistic, rationalistic schemes.

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  92. Hi Burk: It seems to me you missed one of D's points when you wrote:

    This is a very interesting charge. As outlined above, science does indeed remove humans from the equation in the very important epistemic sense of requiring explanations to stand without psychological inputs like wishes, hopes, traditions, hunches, intuitions, and the like. But it certainly does not remove humans from the equation as objects of study.

    D wasn't denying that science can study people from the outside looking in, he was saying that naturalist ignore the data we have from the INSIDE looking out. We know that some things are right and wrong, we know there is something wrong with a person who can feel no empathy or compassion for his neighbor in need for example. Naturalism cannot account for that data, I think is what Dianelos is saying (and for what it's worth I agree). And naturalism doesn't really try to account for it. The most a naturalist can say is that our sense of right and wrong ISN'T an actual moral perception, that it is nothing but feeling, perhaps genetically engineered by natural selection, perhaps a social custom, but not a perception of a moral fact about the world.

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  93. Hi Burk: I've been trying to figure out a way to make sure you get what I am asking. I don't think you do because I haven't understood how your answers rebut the points I have been trying to make. It;s probably my fault and possibly you have rebutted them perfectly and it was I who failed to understand YOU. But let me go at this from a different angle.

    This is the epistemology of the hypothetical Burk: We should search for truth using only methods that are likely to PRODUCE truth. So considering some possible methods, here is what Hypothetical Burkism would say:

    1. The wild guess method: very unlikely to produce truth since there are far more ways the world ISN'T than there are the way the world IS, and no one random guess is more likely than any other to be right.

    2. The ringing true method: pretty much the same as the wild guess method because truth ringing isn't much better than random guessing when it comes to producing truth.

    3. The scientific method: this method is a good one because it checks and corrects until the eventual product is likely to be right.

    I hope that accurately sums up your view. So here is my problem with Burkism. The efficacy of science DEPENDS on Realism. It depends on our perceptions more or less accurately reflecting a real world independent of our experience of it, and of our memories more or less accurately reflecting what happened in the past, at least when we take special precautions to counter any errors. But if you apply Burkian epistemology to realism itself, it turns out we cannot have any confidence in realism because it cannot be investigated by the scientific method. Applying Burkism tells us the deliverances of realism have the same epistemic status as wild guess or truth ringing.

    There are ways out of this dilemma, one of which is the pragmatic approach that says we choose realism as a starting point because it's the ony way we will be able to advance the cause of knowledge--if our memory and senses radically delude us then there's no chance at knowledge anyway. But if you take that approach you are removing truth from the table, you are no longer saying that your car really is in your driveway, you are saying "I'll just assume it's there because that assumption makes my life work out easier". But in that case, the relionist who says God loves me can justify his claim by exactly the same principle as you justify accepting realism.

    So what exactly do you say is wrong with my reasoning here?

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  94. Hi Burk: I've been trying to figure out a way to make sure you get what I am asking. I don't think you do because I haven't understood how your answers rebut the points I have been trying to make. It;s probably my fault and possibly you have rebutted them perfectly and it was I who failed to understand YOU. But let me go at this from a different angle.

    This is the epistemology of the hypothetical Burk: We should search for truth using only methods that are likely to PRODUCE truth. So considering some possible methods, here is what Hypothetical Burkism would say:

    1. The wild guess method: very unlikely to produce truth since there are far more ways the world ISN'T than there are the way the world IS, and no one random guess is more likely than any other to be right.

    2. The ringing true method: pretty much the same as the wild guess method because truth ringing isn't much better than random guessing when it comes to producing truth.

    3. The scientific method: this method is a good one because it checks and corrects until the eventual product is likely to be right.

    I hope that accurately sums up your view. So here is my problem with Burkism. The efficacy of science DEPENDS on Realism. It depends on our perceptions more or less accurately reflecting a real world independent of our experience of it, and of our memories more or less accurately reflecting what happened in the past, at least when we take special precautions to counter any errors. But if you apply Burkian epistemology to realism itself, it turns out we cannot have any confidence in realism because it cannot be investigated by the scientific method. Applying Burkism tells us the deliverances of realism have the same epistemic status as wild guess or truth ringing.

    There are ways out of this dilemma, one of which is the pragmatic approach that says we choose realism as a starting point because it's the ony way we will be able to advance the cause of knowledge--if our memory and senses radically delude us then there's no chance at knowledge anyway. But if you take that approach you are removing truth from the table, you are no longer saying that your car really is in your driveway, you are saying "I'll just assume it's there because that assumption makes my life work out easier". But in that case, the relionist who says God loves me can justify his claim by exactly the same principle as you justify accepting realism.

    So what exactly do you say is wrong with my reasoning here?

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  95. Keith- Thanks for your engagement. I will try to clarify.

    For the first note.. "We know that some things are right and wrong, we know there is something wrong with a person who can feel no empathy or compassion for his neighbor in need for example. Naturalism cannot account for that data".

    True, I didn't address this directly, but have before. I disagree with this assertion. As we speak, scientists are working on figuring out exactly what is wrong with just such people- let us call them psychopaths. What is wrong is clearly something in their brains, missing either for genetic, developmental, or socialization reasons (i.e. the entire gamut of possible mental causation as far as we know). They aren't doing seances or praying.. they are doing brain scans, comparing affected people and controls, etc. Far from denying that "there is something wrong", they are trying to find its mechanism and cause.

    On the other hand, whether some things are morally right and wrong is quite another matter. Are "normal" people programmed with empathic senses, along with their senses of taste, touch, balance, etc? Yes. Do all normal people have to regard Sarah Palin as right, and Nancy Pelosi as wrong? Clearly not. Do they have to give money to beggars? Also a matter of some dispute. Moral "facts" are nothing of the kind- they are continual negotiations among our feelings and those of others, moderated by reason and practical considerations. My take is that you seem to conflate popularity of a moral position with it being somehow objective or factual.

    cont..

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  96. For the second note.. "But if you apply Burkian epistemology to realism itself, it turns out we cannot have any confidence in realism because it cannot be investigated by the scientific method. Applying Burkism tells us the deliverances of realism have the same epistemic status as wild guess or truth ringing."

    I can't say that I understand this. Do we have a choice whether to accept or reject reality? Hardly. You admit yourself that ".. -if our memory and senses radically delude us then there's no chance at knowledge anyway.". So there is a necessary relation between dealing with the reality we face and accepting realism, and thus the methods that deal with realism effectively, i.e. empiricism.

    If we lived in the Matrix, we would be seeking to explain that world, whether by its surface characteristics, or by some esoteric theory of its true nature, underneath the surfaces. Realism merely posits that we are engaging with the world before our faces, and not with a counterfactual imaginary world. It does not guarantee that what we see before us is "real". We could be brains in vats. But until we know that is the case, we deal with what is before us. (And inside of us, as part and parcel of the whole reality).

    But to your larger point.. "But in that case, the religionist who says God loves me can justify his claim by exactly the same [pragmtic] principle as you justify accepting realism."

    Let me offer complete agreement. They can be defended the same way. But notice what each claim is actually saying. For realism, the pragmatic defense applies to all our dealings with the "other"- with the vast world we face that is both our own bodies and brains, and the cosmos at large. All this comes under the purview of realism.

    On the other hand, the purview of "what works" for theism is entirely subjective- comfort, personal meaning, one's view of the moral landscape. In that way, god works, and can be defended pragmatically. But so could Santa Claus or Peter Pan, or the works of Shakespeare. All kinds of imaginative efforts can be dragged in to serve as comforts and guideposts to one's subjective life.

    Do they "work" with respect to the cosmos and reality in general? The two don't overlap at all. Despite all the claims and the shouting, the pragmatically defended god hypothesis doesn't begin to engage in reality-explanation, except in the most tenuous, receeding, and indefensible way. So the pragmatic defense of realism is on an entirely different plane than that of religion. If they keep separate, then fine. If not, you'll have some 'splaining to do.

    Note also that the "what works" defense of religion, being subjective to its core, is also not easily transferrable to other people. If it works for you, it doesn't necessarily work for others. Conversely, "what works" in realism is typically something that works for everyone. My nuclear bomb resembles your nuclear bomb, for better or for worse. There is a compelling and necessary identity in everyone's reality, where there isn't in everyone's subjective world, however much theists strain to bring us all into lockstep alignment.

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  97. Hi Keith

    The pragmatic position you advocate seems to fail only if it claims too much.

    I claim pragmatic justification for science's foundation assumptions thus: We assume certain things to be true because making these assumptions yields increasingly accurate pictures of the world. A round earth is a more accurate picture than a flat earth, it predicts and explains a wider range of features, from trade winds to polar nights. Nobody, as far as I know, disagrees with this.

    We claim pragmatic justification for religious belief thus: believing in God makes me feel good.

    So, the equivalence holds if, and only if, we stick to claiming religious belief is a way of making us feel good, in the way that enjoying the arts makes us feel good. The pragmatic defence of religion reduces it to an art. Which is exactly as I see it. The same defence paints science as a way of building accurate pictures of the world, also exactly as I see it.

    So I totally buy your notion of pragmatism.

    Bernard

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  98. Hi Burk: I've been trying to figure out a way to make sure you get what I am asking. I don't think you do because I haven't understood how your answers rebut the points I have been trying to make. It;s probably my fault and possibly you have rebutted them perfectly and it was I who failed to understand YOU. But let me go at this from a different angle.

    This is the epistemology of the hypothetical Burk: We should search for truth using only methods that are likely to PRODUCE truth. So considering some possible methods, here is what Hypothetical Burkism would say:

    1. The wild guess method: very unlikely to produce truth since there are far more ways the world ISN'T than there are the way the world IS, and no one random guess is more likely than any other to be right.

    2. The ringing true method: pretty much the same as the wild guess method because truth ringing isn't much better than random guessing when it comes to producing truth.

    3. The scientific method: this method is a good one because it checks and corrects until the eventual product is likely to be right.

    I hope that accurately sums up your view. So here is my problem with Burkism. The efficacy of science DEPENDS on Realism. It depends on our perceptions more or less accurately reflecting a real world independent of our experience of it, and of our memories more or less accurately reflecting what happened in the past, at least when we take special precautions to counter any errors. But if you apply Burkian epistemology to realism itself, it turns out we cannot have any confidence in realism because it cannot be investigated by the scientific method. Applying Burkism tells us the deliverances of realism have the same epistemic status as wild guess or truth ringing.

    There are ways out of this dilemma, one of which is the pragmatic approach that says we choose realism as a starting point because it's the ony way we will be able to advance the cause of knowledge--if our memory and senses radically delude us then there's no chance at knowledge anyway. But if you take that approach you are removing truth from the table, you are no longer saying that your car really is in your driveway, you are saying "I'll just assume it's there because that assumption makes my life work out easier". But in that case, the relionist who says God loves me can justify his claim by exactly the same principle as you justify accepting realism.

    So what exactly do you say is wrong with my reasoning here?

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  99. Hi Burk: Let me go at this from a different angle, and you can tell me where my reasoning goes wrong.

    This is the epistemology of the hypothetical Burk: We should search for truth using only methods that are likely to PRODUCE truth. So considering some possible methods, here is what Hypothetical Burkism would say:

    1. The wild guess method: very unlikely to produce truth since there are far more ways the world ISN'T than there are the way the world IS, and no one random guess is more likely than any other to be right.

    2. The ringing true method: pretty much the same as the wild guess method because truth ringing isn't much better than random guessing when it comes to producing truth.

    3. The scientific method: this method is a good one because it checks and corrects until the eventual product is likely to be right.

    I hope that accurately sums up your view. So here is my problem with Burkism. The efficacy of science DEPENDS on Realism. It depends on our perceptions more or less accurately reflecting a real world independent of our experience of it, and of our memories more or less accurately reflecting what happened in the past, at least when we take special precautions to counter any errors. But if you apply Burkian epistemology to realism itself, it turns out we cannot have any confidence in realism because it cannot be investigated by the scientific method. Applying Burkism tells us the deliverances of realism have the same epistemic status as wild guess or truth ringing.

    There are ways out of this dilemma, one of which is the pragmatic approach that says we choose realism as a starting point because it's the ony way we will be able to advance the cause of knowledge--if our memory and senses radically delude us then there's no chance at knowledge anyway. But if you take that approach you are removing truth from the table, you are no longer saying that your car really is in your driveway, you are saying "I'll just assume it's there because that assumption makes my life work out easier". But in that case, the religionist who says God loves me can justify his claim by exactly the same principle as you justify accepting realism.

    So what exactly do you say is wrong with my reasoning here?

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  100. Hi Bernard:

    The foundational ideas of science a method are pragmatically justified because they allow us to get a progressive more accurate picture of the world you say. But this seems to me to raise a question: how do you justify the claim that your picture IS progressively more ACCURATE (as opposed to allowing you to come up with fairly accurate predictions of specific experimental results)? The question is kind of weird actually. So let me phrase it differently: it seems to me the principle of your pragmatism says "being able to come up with accurate predictions is EVIDENCE that your model is accurate". I am calling that principle into question and asking you how you would justify it. My claim is you CANNOT justify by using the scientific method because that would be circular.

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  101. Hi JP: I love your question! You asked: why is it so important to show that belief in God is reasonable?

    I'm not sure it's even important for theistic belief to BE reasonable. Suppose for the sake of discussion that it is very important for you to believe in God--perhaps supremely important, perhaps if you fail to believe in God you will be lost forever in everlasting torment. Now I DON'T believe this, mind you. I, like Eric, am a Christian universalist (which is different from a Unitarian Universalist). But moving on, if it is important to believe in God then it would be better for you to irrationally believe in God than it would be to rationally NOT believe in God.

    But suppose you are a person who cannot believe in God if you think theistic belief is irrational. Then it might be important for someone to show you that theistic belief ISN'T irrational (assuming as I do that theistic belief isn't irrational AND assuming God belief is an important thing to have).

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  102. Keith

    Let's be clear. I am indeed making the claim that the round earth hypothesis is a more accurate representation of the world in which we live than the flat earth hypothesis. Do you really disagree with this?

    I make this claim on the grounds that some of the the implications of the flat earth hypothesis can be shown to be false, they fail an evidential test that the round earth passes. So, whatever the truth of the matter actually is, the round earth is a better approximation of this truth in that it contains fewer false statements about our physical environment. (And here I am helping myself to a logical rule regarding contradictions).

    Now, you may say I can't in turn ground this logical assumption, but I disagree. It is the best assumption we know of to serve the means of providing increasingly accurate predictions of our world, and I suspect you are unable to provide a counter example.

    So, rather than be sidetracked by any talk of how the world 'really' is (which may not even be a meaningful concept), we can return to saying that pragmatically, science is the method by which our predictive knowledge of the world increases, and religion is a method of making some people feel better about the world in which they live. There is no circularity left in these statements, I don't think.

    Most people will choose to then make the leap that predictive capacity and fidelity to reality are linked (I do) but you are right, we can't logically force it upon them. If people choose to believe they are indeed a brain in a vat, or exist in a world where a mischievous imp is systematically deceiving them, all power to them. The defence you are proposing for a rational belief in God is however aligning you with such fantasists. Not sure if you want to go there.

    Bernard

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  103. Hi Bernard: Of COURSE I think the world is round, I'm not crazy:-) How come whenever I ask questions about the justification for holding some very commonly accepted idea, people assume I am questioning whether or not the idea is true?

    Here's my claim: whatever the data is regarding the shape of the earth, there are practically an INFINITE number of hypotheses that could fit that data, some where the world is round and some where the world is flat. It's not the case that the data contradicts every possible flat earth theory, in fact I'll bet there are members of the Flat Earth Society who could offer an interpretation of the data that was consistent with a flat earth if they chose the specifics of their theory appropriately. So the question would then be: why go with the round earth since there are lots of flat earth theories that COULD fit the data. The usual response to questions like these would be Occam's Razor. Which raises my question here: other than convenience, why assume reality fits Occam's razor?

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  104. Hi Keith

    Well, if you do think the earth is round, the question becomes, why do you think this?

    For me, I take my cue from Popper. His argument goes a bit like this:

    We can't know whether a theory is true or not. We are forced to guess. We can however make judgements about whether a theory is better or worse as an approximation of the truth.

    A falsified theory (flat earth) is judged a worse approximation on the grounds that there are a number of predictions (falling off he edge) where it fails. So here the assumption being made is that a theory with elements that have been established to be false is less likely to be a good approximation of the truth than one that has not.

    At this a point a flat earther can attempt a rescue, as you say, by ad hoc adjustments after the fact. And so there is a second assumption. That is that a theory that extends our range of predictive knowledge is better than one that does not. It may have done this by pure fluke, of course, but there is a better chance it didn't, and we are just trying to justify guesses.

    So, at the point we had a round earth theory, Eratosthenes could make novel predictions about the angle of the sun at various places, and he turned out to be right. Similarly we are impressed that general relativity predicts light being bent by gravity despite having no mass, and this turns out to be the case.

    One test of these two assumptions is the power, thus far, of the methodology. Considering the advances in sanitation made possible by the development of germ theory, the prognostic capacity of modern x-rays and scans, the efficacy of vaccination programmes etc etc, I am left with the impression that these are pretty good assumptions. Crucially, I can't think of a set that would do a better job.

    So, it really is pragmatism all the way down. There is nothing dogmatic about scientific methodology. If intuition alone could be shown to yield better results, we'd leap at it.

    Bernard

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  105. Hi Bernard:

    First, to take your question literally: why do I believe the earth is round? I believe it because when I was a kid the science books I read told me it was round and I trusted them. I later saw actual photographs taken from space, I saw TV pictures from the Apollo moon flights of the earth as a ball, and I trusted those not to be fakes. And I assumed that light travels pretty much the same way it seems to on earth, where if a photo of something looks round it actually is round. That's why I believe the earth is round. But...

    If I were living at a different time, and all I had was the kind of data you mentioned (no reports of ships falling off the edge of the earth, the round earth model producing all kinds of predictions that are later observed to obtain and all), why should THAT make me embrace round earthism? The LACK of reported ships falling off the edge doesn't really falsify flat earthism--maybe they didn't go far enough, or maybe there was a magic tunnel when ships get near the edge, or maybe all kinds of other ridiculous rescues I could create. Of course you'd suggest that ad hoc rescues counts against the theory, but why should it? Occam's Razor?

    And about successful predictions. Why should I take THAT as evidence the theory is accurate as opposed to being a nice myth that happens to produce nice predictions?


    Realize I am not challenging the validity of the scientific method, I am just asking what JUSTIFIES it? It seems to me that pragmatism means the theory is produces useful predictions, not that it gives us a more and more accurate information about how things really are. But it seems to me that we assume that we wouldn't be getting successful predictions if our model WASN'T a better a better picture of how things really are.

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  106. Hi Keith

    Yes, I agree with you. In a previous time people did indeed embrace round earthism because it hadn't been falisified. Eratosthenes' prediction that the sun would shine at different angles in different places was a prediction made by the round earth theory, and differed from the prediction the flat earth version yields (same angles). The subsequent measurements were taken as powerful evidence that round earth was a better theory. this became a steeping stone for a whole new range of discoveries and hypotheses. Such is scientific progress.

    And I agree again, materialists do tend to assume that models that give better predictions are not only better predictive models, but are also a closer fit with reality. In doing this they/we are ruling out a reality where everything we sense is in fact cleverly or coincidentally designed to systematically fool us.

    So, when I look out my window and see the broiling sea whipped up by a vicious nor-wester, I do choose to believe it isn't actually a small chocolate bar and my senses aren't just being deceived. Is this a logically necessary assumption? I'm not sure. It is a dominant assumption, and a perhaps even a psychologically necessary one.

    One way of looking at this, as I think I do, is to say, well what do I even mean when I say something is real? I think I probably mean only that it conforms to all the predictions associated with it actually existing. When I say my car is real, I mean I predict it will feel hard to touch, will support my weight, transport me places etc. Now by this definition predictively accurate and reflecting reality converge and all we have here is a language problem.

    But, it's not immediately apparent to me what reality means if it is not a quality that conforms to the expectations created by an accurate representation of it. Does it work to posit a reality where the more accurately we modeled it, the more inaccurate our expectations became? I struggle to make that coherent.

    That aside, we are left with:

    The scientific method takes us closer to accurate predictions about the world we live in.

    Religious belief feels right to some of us and enhances some lives.

    Both of these are respectable pragmatic valuations, I think. Perhaps if we leave out all talk of reality here, these might be statements we can agree upon?

    Bernard

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  107. Hi Keith

    My last comment has dropped off, but I've been thinking since and would enjoy the chance to reformulate slightly.

    If we can agree that pragmatically speaking, the scientific method, with an emphasis on novel prediction and testability as a way of comparing the merits of opposing hypotheses, is the best way of moving towards successively more predictively accurate theories of the world, your question about assumptions becomes important, and it's made me think, exactly what do I assume here?

    My current position, although it's slightly unclear to me, is this. I assume successful prediction is a marker for closeness of match to reality. So the more successful the prediction, the more likely our model faithfully represents reality. Now, your excellent question becomes, is there a justification for this?

    I think my justification is that a picture of reality whereby to build a clear picture of what is going on is to become progressively less accurate in one's predictions, makes no sense to me. I can't imagine what that means. When I say my car really is parked outside, I mean all the predictive statements that follow. If I look out my window I will see a blue Honda. If I try my key it will fit the lock, etc etc. I think this is all I mean by reality.

    To say 'that looks like an ocean, but really it's a chocolate bar, even though believing it's a chocolate bar will cause you to drown' seems to be using the word 'really' in an odd way. Are you able to help me here?

    Bernard

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  108. Hi Bernard:
    I share your respect for the scientific method and I agree with the idea that a history successful prediction is pretty good evidence that your theory is probably a pretty accurate account of how things really are. I would even go so far as to say that in those areas where science is done, science is the best source we have for gaining knowledge abut those areas (I am saying that modern humanity has made the optimum choice for truth seeking in those areas). Of course the question is how one approaches those questions science CANNOT approach. But that may be a question for a later time. The current question is:

    what JUSTIFIES the idea that successful prediction correlated with an accurate account of reality?

    I don't much know, honestly, I believe it because it seems true to me. I agree with you that the idea that successful prediction moving us AWAY from accuracy doesn't seem right at all. But that wasn't what I was meaning. I was wondering about the hypothetical possibility that successful prediction is UNRELATED to the accuracy of our account of how things really are, that coming up with a theory that produces a bunch of successful predictions is a sign that you have a machine that produces successful predictions. Until it produces a wrong prediction, then you call the theory "falsified" and you try to find another prediction machine. Now THAT would be pragmatism, I claim, but I do not believe that scientists see their task as such. I think scientists see themselves as teasing out the way things really are, teasing out the hidden nature of the universe. So what justifies that belief? That's the question I am aiming to ask.

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  109. Hi Keith

    I think there is one little tweak we can make to your pragmatic description, which is perhaps significant.

    Falsification tends to come about when a new theory creates a prediction that the old can not explain (think of relativity and the light bending properties of gravity, there's nothing in Newtonian physics to explain this). At this point general relativity becomes accepted as a better, or more complete, description of reality, even while we understand it may still have all sorts of holes in it. The fact that it doesn't mesh well with quantum theory may be, for instance, a hint that there's much more to come.

    This comparative nature, the idea that we approach reality, may overcome the 'what say predictive capacity is coincidental?' objection. It may be the case that the predictivity is misleading us, indeed early success can lead us astray, but the claim is only that it is less likely that the coincidence has occurred for a non-falsified than a falsified explanation. That would require a bigger coincidence, and all we are talking about is likelihood.

    Thus we can reasonably conclude that science is taking us towards explanations that are progressively more likely representations of reality. That appears to be a claim that no other methodology has available to it, and underpins Popper's attempt to draw a demarcation between science and other forms of human knowledge (more a gradation than a line).

    This still relies upon some base assumptions about logic, particularly probability and induction, but if we give those up we're in trouble anyway.

    So, what do you think of this?

    Bernard

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