Thursday, March 1, 2012
New Statesman essay on the New Atheism
A friend called my attention to an essay that recently appeared in the New Statesman--The God Wars--which may be of interest to readers of this blog. The author, Bryan Appleyard, is a self-described agnostic who finds the neo-atheism disturbing. I know that some regular followers of this blog will be quite sympathetic...others far less so. Thoughts?
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Thanks for the link. Sorry about the length of this. I get diverted into the Fodor topic ...
ReplyDeleteI find his portrait heavily over-drawn. In any debate, one could pull out wingnuts from the twitterverse to construct a cloak of victimization. I think we need to keep our eyes on the overall cultural setting, where we still have people like Rick Santorum running, apparently legitimately, for president and defending the most retrograde America-for-Christians message. And bishops apparently telling our legislators how to keep our sacred uteruses under lock and key.
I think it is understandable that, once an individual escapes from the overwhelming nature of religious indoctrination, and sees that the emperor, for all HIS pointy hats and shiny surplices, has no philosophical clothes, one is prone to a bit of over-reaction, to the point of casting religion as all-evil as well as all-lies and gimcrackery.
From what I understand, this doesn't apply to Dawkins and Hitchens, however, nor to myself. We are just animated by the vast disparity between religion's philosophical credibility and its cultural influence (and, as noted, the 9/11 and Bush travesties). A few harsh words are used for their age-old purpose of raising consciousness of this absurdity, which they have apparently done. Much of the atheist movement, as noted here, has moved on to mellower pursuits and views, concentrating especially on our human psychological weakensses and predilections that form the wellspring of religion.
The author pines for NOMA, but it really is dead. We see all around us that religion makes clearly scientific claims. It has never accepted NOMA, so nor should anyone else. The only way to save NOMA is to follow Jung and make of religion a fully psychological enterprise.
Here we get to his counter-attack by way of defense of Fodor's "What Darwin Got Wrong". Reading the review on which that was based, it becomes clear how Fodor's view exemplifies the poverty of contemporary philosophy.
... cont (1 of 3) ...
"Darwinists have been known to say that adaptationism is the best idea that anybody has ever had. It would be a good joke if the best idea that anybody has ever had turned out not to be true."
ReplyDelete"Here’s the problem: you can read adaptationism as saying that environments select creatures for their fitness; or you can read it as saying that environments select traits for their fitness."
It isn't Darwin's fault or that of succeeding scientists that Fodor can't understand the basics of selection and chooses to formulate a linguistic pretzel for his own amusement. And then on top of it to denigrate the whole enterprise top to bottom on the basis of a few minor points of critique. Selection acts on whatever pokes up its head in the world of ecology / biology- individuals, groups, traits .. everything. But the only heritable element in the whole mix is DNA with its rather indirect effects on all these higher levels. So change via selection only happens when there is change in the DNA composition of succeeding generations. This could be the extinction of whole species, or it could be the finest adaptation of male wing colors to female taste.
.. and so it goes. Biology is not simple, but this article is built on seeminly intentional misunderstandings, as was the whole intelligent design movement, etc. etc.. Fodor misrepresents the relation of selective breeding to natural selection, one of Darwin's most important points. He fatally anthropomorphizes genes and mother nature.. it is a travesty, really.
"... were polar bears selected for being white or for matching their environment? Search me; and search any kind of adaptationism I’ve heard of."
This is a simple example. It is obvious enough even to a child that a black bear in the arctic would have a more difficult time hunting than a white bear. Fodor's question is nonsense, even in a linguistic sense. They were selected to be white because their environment is relentlessly white and their practical success depends on blending into that environment for very specific reasons.
"The breaking news, however, is that serious alternatives to adaptationism have begun to emerge; ones that preserve the essential claim that phenotypes evolve, but depart to one degree or other from Darwin’s theory that natural selection is the mechanism by which they do."
This is false, due to his use of the word "alternatives". The extra mechanisms of biological change that he is alluding to- drift, epigenetics, developmental canalization, and the like- do not supplant the fundamental nature of adaptation by selection to drive biological success and diversity.
... cont (2 of 3) ...
"The high tide of adaptationism floated a motley navy, but it may now be on the ebb. If it does turn out that natural selection isn’t what drives evolution, a lot of loose speculations will be stranded high, dry and looking a little foolish."
ReplyDeleteWell, the problem is that biologists seek to explain biology, not defend adaptationism. The view in the field as it stands is that adaptation by natural selection is by far the leading force for positive (adaptive) change in biology, even as many other forces are at work, either providing variation (neutral drift, mutation, even pre-adaptation of spandrels, etc.) or keeping change at bay (developmental cannalization). So while it is certainly fair to take pot-shots at just-so stories and excessive claims of pan-adaptationism, this does not amount to a foundational critique of either Darwin or the current field of biology. Or of its critique, in turn, of the pseudo-biology pushed by religion.
My conclusion- this is a series of cheap shots, which in no way justifies the statement "... a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently."
Going on with Appleyard, here quoting Fodor some more...
"I think the story is that we are supposed to understand why there is religion on Darwinian grounds without having to raise the question as to whether it's true."
Well, we have already insistently raised the question of whether it is true. All on this blog seem to agree that while we may have "faith" of some sort, we can't say that it is true, because there isn't the evidence to suport such a claim. So the question turns to why the issue itself is so darn persistent, and that naturally brings us to psychology.
Finally, we get to the bottom line:
"The answer demonstrates the futility of the neo-atheist project. Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance."
We agree it is natural. That is why psychological questions are raised. How is it legitimate? That is precisely the main question. Is it philosophically legitimate? Not in any strict way, since its pose of scientific insight / truth is without foundation.
Is it still legitimate as a field of moral philosophy? Well, if its scientific pretentions of access to "other" "realities" and godly diktats are blown away, then it stands as simply a deeply historical cultural artifact, a form of psychological art, one might say. Surely it has been concerned with all the questions of power, ethics, social control, patriarchy, and the like. But that doesn't mean that it has acquitted itself with any super-human level of probity. La cosa nostra has been a field of moral philosophy as well, with which many are likewise fascinated.
I found myself, as I’m sure you can imagine, agreeing with Mr. Appleyard as to the gist of his argument. The fact that there are agnostics like him out there, gives me hope.
ReplyDeleteI think much of what he writes also dovetails with many of the points I was trying to make in the post “Shook v. Craig”. I think there is a sense (amongst the commenters on this blog) that somehow philosophical naturalism/materialism/empiricism is/are neutral objective views but they are clearly philosophical positions. This isn’t simply my opinion—there is a fairly large amount of literature dealing with this. When I am given reasons for their agnosticism, all the reasons associated with those philosophical positions are noted, but then side-stepped as if they were somehow universal default views. This is simply not so.
Further, Appleyard goes to the issue of noting the difference between trying to prove God’s existence in the same way one might prove the existence of a black hole or Big Foot as the complete category error it is. And, he also notes that because one cannot prove God’s existence in the same way has nothing to do with whether or not God exists. It would only matter (that one could not prove them in the same way) to the person who was already committed to philosophical naturalism/empiricism.
Finally, I would definitely agree that this neo-atheism has all the earmarks of most religious fundamentalism. It is just the other side of the coin.
Some notable quotes:
“By "neo-atheism", I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth…in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position…”
“Ultimately, the problem with militant neo-atheism is that it represents a profound category error. Explaining religion - or, indeed, the human experience - in scientific terms is futile. ‘It would be as bizarre as to launch a scientific investigation into the truth of Anna Karenina or love,’ de Botton says. ‘It's a symptom of the misplaced confidence of science . . . It's a kind of category error. It's a fatally wrong question and the more you ask it, the more you come up with bizarre and odd answers.’”
Burk
ReplyDeleteThank you for saving me the time in responding to the Fodor book as you did. I'm sure I wouldn't have been quite so clear.
I'm not sure why biology is so poorly understood, but it does seem to be the case.
Darrell, it would seem you do wish to continue this discussion after all, which is pleasing.
I don't think anybody on this blog has claimed empiricism et al are not philosophical views. One claim I have often made is that there is a difference between stances that are underpinned subjectively, and those that are not. In the second category I would place, to use the old example, the roundness of the earth.
So, for the sake of clarity, are you saying a belief that the earth is round relies upon a subjective world view?
Bernard
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteTo claim that what we can know is true is something like the earth is round, but that we must switch to assertions of taste or preference (subjective feelings) to assert something like God’s existence is true is drawn from reasons based in philosophical naturalism/empiricism. You seem to want to have it both ways. If all you were saying is that we each have to believe personally, subjectively, and deeply whether it be theism, agnosticism, or atheism—that would be fine with me. As long as what you meant was that such did not conversely mean that one option wasn’t perhaps true while the others false. But, I don’t get that sense from you.
You seem to want people to say, “My belief in God is a personal subjective psychological preference while my belief in gravity is based on a universal objective reality.” But this very view is based in the category error noted by Appleyard. The fact that we cannot prove God like we can gravity doesn’t turn belief in God into a subjective preference, it only confirms one’s commitment to philosophical naturalism/empiricism as to what we can name as objectively “true.”
“I don't think anybody on this blog has claimed empiricism et al are not philosophical views. “ I would disagree—I don’t believe Burk feels this way (he of course can speak for himself). And I’m still not sure how he feels about your view that atheism/agnosticism are psychological twists, or genetic, and self-serving stories. When someone simply notes that he is basing everything on the “evidence” while everyone else is operating by blind faith—he is spouting a philosophical view (empiricism) not some objective neutral default position. And, empiricism is itself incapable of being proved…empirically! It is a faith-based assertion!
I do not believe the roundness of the earth to be a subjective preference or world-view and I also believe that because one cannot prove or demonstrate God’s existence in the same way (observation/measurement/mathematics) that such means God’s existence must be a subjective preference.
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteYou confuse me slightly here. On the one hand you say to call the earth's shape objective and God's existence subjective is a category error.
In the final paragraph you state the shape of the world is not dependent upon a world view (so in this sense is objective and I agree)and seem to say 'God's existence must be a subjective preference'. Again I agree entirely.
I wonder though whether you meant something more consistent with the earlier point, and wished to reassert that the lack of any process by which people can reach agreement does not imply subjectivity. But this leads me to ask, if subjective doesn't mean 'the assessment is affected by the assessor' (which is true for our belief in God, but not for our belief in the shape of the earth) then what could it mean?
Whichever way we cut it, people agree on the earth's shape, but not on God's existence. There is no category error here, the difference is plain and the categorisation fitting.
Now, either this is because some people are simply lacking access to the appropriate evidence, or it is a subjective, taste based decision. To press you on this crucial point, which do you think holds?
Note, I am not arguing that there is no objective truth regarding God's existence, only that given our current knowledge, all statements regarding this truth are subjective.
Bernard
This (Appleyard's) is the kind of text that makes me scratch my head every few paragraphs, wondering what the guy is talking about. Perhaps he is just being provocative for the fun of it, or to please his crowd, but there is very little I recognize between the Fodor nonsense (taken care of by Burk) and the apparently mandatory abuse of Richard Dawkins. By the way, has anyone a source for his comment on Watson & Crick motivations?
ReplyDeleteIt so happens I just watched the recent debate between Dawkins and the archbishop of Canterbury. A very respectful and interesting exchange, more in the style of a conversation between friends. Watch it if you have time. A model of what these things should be.
Bernard,
ReplyDelete“In the final paragraph you state the shape of the world is not dependent upon a world view (so in this sense is objective and I agree) and seem to say 'God's existence must be a subjective preference'. Again I agree entirely.”
You are correct, I forgot two important words, “do” and “not.” Here it is again: “…and I also ‘no not’ believe that because one cannot prove or demonstrate God’s existence in the same way (observation/measurement/mathematics) that such means God’s existence must be a subjective preference.”
“Whichever way we cut it, people agree on the earth's shape, but not on God's existence. There is no category error here, the difference is plain and the categorisation fitting.”
But, as Appleyard also notes, it is a category error in the sense of proving or demonstrating God’s existence because God is not like planet. No one asserts such.
“Now, either this is because some people are simply lacking access to the appropriate evidence, or it is a subjective, taste based decision. To press you on this crucial point, which do you think holds?”
Here you reveal your empiricism. As if we only had the “appropriate evidence” like seeing God on radar or something. You are forgetting that the totality of evidence, existence itself, our experience, history, art, music, literature, science, the network of relationships, and centuries of philosophical reflection are the only evidence one needs. However, we all have to interpret this evidence and we do that by faith. But we have all the evidence we need. You make it sound like further scientific study my allow us to peer into the heavens. Again, this is a category error.
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteIs it empiricism to say there is a difference between an issue upon which all equally informed people agree, and one on which they don't? I don't see this yet, sorry if I'm being dim. I'm not saying that because we have no empirical evidence for God, we can't believe in him. Not at all. I'm saying, because we have no device by which agreement can be reached between people, then thoughtful, well informed people will reach different conclusions. That's all. And I think you agree with this.
The either/or I suggest sets out the way we might then think about why it is people disagree. I totally agree with you, people, in reaching their beliefs, do use the totality of their experiences: intuitions, hopes, moral commitments etc. What's more, this is admirable, and I apologise if you get the sense I've been belittling this process. Far from it. It is those who are intellectually lazy I would perhaps belittle, and I don't find any such people at this blog. So seriously, full respect.
The thing that fascinates me, and indeed for now drives my taste for agnosticism, is why it is believers of any stripe think world views diverge. Why is it we end up drawing different conclusions? One possible answer I can see is simply that our lifelines, our individual journeys, have delivered us to different starting points. And, if this is true, I think, well that means your views are every bit as good as mine, when it comes to the metaphysical, and hence I have no good reason to believe mine over yours, circumstance alone divides us. Agnosticism is an obvious next step.
Now, is this why you think we draw different conclusions when it comes to our beliefs, or do you think there's more to it than that? I'm not trying to win an argument here, I'm just genuinely curious about the Christian response to this question, and am finding it oddly difficult to draw out any answers.
Bernard
If anyone is interested in the Dawkins-Rowan debate I mention above, here's a link. It's a welcome and refreshing change from all the aggressiveness we too often find in these debates.
ReplyDeleteBernard-
ReplyDeletePerhaps the distinction to look for is between an acknowledgement of philosophical humility (formal agnosticism) and the retention of personal commitment. If we each follow individual paths in our intepretation of what seems empirically to be ambiguous or disputed evidence, (though I think the general attitude from all points is that if you *really* understood the evidence as I do, the you would surely agree with me... ), we each arrive at some point where we have a settled view on the topic, be that religious devotion, anti-devotion, or agnosticism.
It seems part of human nature to form one's own surmises and live them out as a matter of intellectual adventure, if not personal expression. They are bets, as are one's investments, social relationships, and professional commitments.
The problem is whether one at the same time does proper philosophy on the matter and recognizes the hubris involved. This is commonly expressed in non-religious pursuits when various forms of humor provide a bit of perspective on the fundamental tragi-comedy or absurdity of our commitments. To me, it is the lack of humor in (some) religious settings that is the tipoff that something has gone off the rails- that a commitment has hardened into a kind of certainty that is blind to its hubris. (Surely that is Appleyard's mesasge as well, though frankly, I don't think he is quite correct. Each side seems to want to accuse the other of shrillness, militantcy, and humorlessness without giving up its own certainty.)
So, it seems a lot to ask, to demand the believer accede to calling his belief agnostic, when, while it may be formally and philosophically agnostic, (when pressed by critical philosophy), it is personally not agnostic at all, but rather set in stone as a matter of commitment, only to be overturned by overwhelming beat-me-over-the-head counter-evidence ... rather than, as one might hope, the preponderance that would suffice for a neutral observer.
To have the believer admit that his belief is based on faith seems quite sufficient. Reason leads one to know the earth is round, but faith can lead anywhere. It implies fundamental agnosticism, (i.e. reliance on intuition over public evidence and reason), even while it expresses a lack of willingness to admit it.
Hi Bernard,
ReplyDelete“I’m not saying that because we have no empirical evidence for God, we can't believe in him.” I agree. I wonder though how JP and Burk might respond to your statement.
“ Not at all. I'm saying, because we have no device by which agreement can be reached between people, then thoughtful, well informed people will reach different conclusions. That's all. And I think you agree with this.”
I do agree. I have not been very clear in my responses. Allow me to flesh out something I think confuses some. I certainly agree that we each have to make a subjective, personal, and deep decision about the “big” questions of life. As reflective people, we look at the evidence (summing up all those areas I mentioned and more) and we lean certain ways, even toward perhaps agnosticism or atheism. However, such does not mean that God (or God’s non-existence) is not perhaps true in an objective sense as meaning outside our minds and wills. It will never mean God is like a rock or a star, but objective in the same way we think of something being true in the sense of being outside our minds and wills.
So the process is subjective but that does not mean the thing believed (either for the existence of God or the non-existence) is not an objective truth. In other words, if the atheist is right about God’s non-existence-such is true whether I believe otherwise or not—ultimately. And, visa-versa, if God does exist then that existence is true whether or not the atheist believes. Does that make sense?
So disagreement does not equate to subjectivity. It simply means while the decision is a subjective one it is an objective reality the decision is being pointed toward, and one in which we could be right or wrong ultimately.
“The thing that fascinates me, and indeed for now drives my taste for agnosticism, is why it is believers of any stripe think world views diverge. Why is it we end up drawing different conclusions? One possible answer I can see is simply that our lifelines, our individual journeys, have delivered us to different starting points. And, if this is true, I think, well that means your views are every bit as good as mine, when it comes to the metaphysical, and hence I have no good reason to believe mine over yours, circumstance alone divides us. Agnosticism is an obvious next step.”
I agree completely here, except for two areas. First, why would agnosticism be an obvious step? Historically and empirically (sorry, I had to throw that in!) the “obvious” step has been theism. To the scenario you describe, it seems to me the obvious steps would be practical results and further reflection. Just because we have all been delivered to different starting points, doesn’t mean we cannot judge some views as not as good as others. For instance, I think we agree that the Nazi regime and Stalin’s Soviet Union were not good models. There are some practical walls we run into when we take the view that killing and stealing are good life choices. I don’t think it makes us less humble to look at the Holocaust or the gulags and say the world-views that produced such outcomes suck.
Hi Bernard,
ReplyDeleteI think I need to qualify something. When I wrote that I agreed with this comment by you: “I’m not saying that because we have no empirical evidence for God, we can't believe in him,” I did not mean there is no empirical evidence for God. What I meant is the whole “evidence” card is a sham if what we mean by “evidence” is God showing up on radar or something. I further meant that we all have the same evidence. It is not as if all of a sudden atheists have introduced some new evidence or some new thought that proves or strongly implies God does not exist.
All evidence has to be interpreted and the idea that agnostics and atheists are relying upon evidence while believers only upon faith is absurd and ridiculous. It is a philosophical non-starter. That was my point.
So, if I understood you correctly you seem to be saying in agreement that, yes, the evidence is there for each to see but there is no mechanism (like observation, math, or measurement) by which we can reach consensus. And to that, I would reply yes, you are absolutely correct and that it is also irrelevant since no one suggests that God is the type of physical object, force, or phenomenon that such means of measurement would even apply. Therefore we should expect disagreement because it would be a category error to think we could. And even though we cannot prove God in this way (empirically) such would not make God any less likely to exist.
I hope that cleared my response up a bit.
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the time to clarify. I didn't think for one moment we would end up being that far apart.
Yes, I mean to say the process by which we reach faith conclusions is subjective. Whether there is an objective truth to such matters is, I think, beyond our knowing. After all, maybe there is such a thing as objectively great tasting wine, or objectively worthy moral behaviour, but the only thing we have to examine is the process by which we reach our conclusions, which may be either objective (unaffected by the observer ) or subjective.
So, to return to the crux of my personal interest, what happens when we make what we understand is a subjective judgement, as we agree we do in the case of God? I say agnosticism is the obvious step, for me at least, as to assume that, by some sheer coincidence of circumstance, I have arrived at the objectively true solution, while those around me have got it wrong, feels simply absurd (and more than a little self centred). I'd go further and say, once I understand that the forces at work are subjective (my education, the country I was born in, my personality) then I begin to see any notion I have of God/noGod as an invention of my circumstances. And from here, genuine belief becomes a very difficult leap to make (again, for me).
I become interested then in how others handle this apparent absurdity. Burk suggests we do it with self deprecating humour, an ultimate acknowledgement that this is agnosticism playing out, via self deception, as conviction.
Ultimately this may just be a question of taste. What I am interested in is the way a person whose taste allows them to privilege their instincts over those of their fellow humans, describes this process. How do they avoid the instinctive embarrassment I feel, at relegating the views of those around me as less worthy? I'm not yet sure I understand how you, or indeed Eric, manage this.
And finally, of course, you and I would agree on the moral failure of the holocaust. I'm not sure this implies a match between our subjective judgement here (although we're very close here to a situation than might be universally/objectively condemned) and any actual objective moral truth. I find many acts morally repugnant, while remaining agnostic about the existence of moral truth, in the same way I find many novels excellent, while remaining agnostic about the existence of objective artistic excellence. There is no contradiction here that I can see, although often people c;aim there is. I may be missing something.
Bernard
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteWhile we may not be far apart, there are still (which is fine) several areas of key disagreement.
“Yes, I mean to say the process by which we reach faith conclusions is subjective. Whether there is an objective truth to such matters is, I think, beyond our knowing. After all, maybe there is such a thing as objectively great tasting wine, or objectively worthy moral behavior…”
I think there is some confusion here. No one is saying there is such a thing as an objectively great tasting wine and for good reason, because such is a preference or issue of subjective taste. However, whether or not God exists as something outside our minds and wills is a question of objectivity and the same is true of good and evil. You are equating subjective taste (wine) with issues (God’s existence, good and evil) that most believe are different. You do the same thing when you later talk of novels and events like the Holocaust. For instance, most (both in the academy and the street) believe murder to be wrong not because of a 51% vote or law on a book somewhere, but that it is objectively wrong. The same with God. If God does exist, then that existence is outside a person’s mind of will.
Second, because something is beyond our knowing in the sense of knowing it like we know the earth is round (observation, math, measurement) such does not mean the matter is beyond being true or knowing its truth in a different way. For instance, I love my wife and I “know” that in a deep way. However, I can’t show you a mathematical equation that “proves” my love or measure my love on a scale. And such would never mean I could then not “know” whether or not I loved my wife. In the absence of measurement, I should then not default to a position of agnosticism regarding my love for my wife.
In fact, the most important things in life, meaning, purpose, love, beauty, goodness, justice, and all such things cannot be proved the way you are saying. If we were to then be agnostic about all these things, what a horrible and dark place the world would be. You again are privileging a philosophical view (empiricism) to basically say we can only “know” things we can measure and the rest we have to be agnostic about. The problem is that no one really lives that way. Not only is that impossible, it is impractical.
“I become interested then in how others handle this apparent absurdity. Burk suggests we do it with self deprecating humour, an ultimate acknowledgement that this is agnosticism playing out, via self deception, as conviction.”
Well, if you read the article Eric posted, you will see that the writer is making fun of agnostics and atheists for the very fact they cannot see any humor in their certainties. Have you read Dawkins or PJ Myers when they are attacking religion? Humorless and certain all wrapped up in small packages. Within the bounds of Christianity, there are tons of books and articles written every year (by Christians) that make fun of or point out the idiosyncrasies of Christians. Parodies abound. So I would agree and I also think the neo-atheists should give it a try.(Continued)
(Continued)
ReplyDelete“Ultimately this may just be a question of taste. What I am interested in is the way a person whose taste allows them to privilege their instincts over those of their fellow humans, describes this process. How do they avoid the instinctive embarrassment I feel, at relegating the views of those around me as less worthy? I'm not yet sure I understand how you, or indeed Eric, manage this.”
I do not equate disagreement with being superior or suggesting other views are “less” worthy. I’m not even sure what that means. Again, these are unfortunate sensibilities inherent in dysfunctional personality issues—they are not inherent in the matter of maybe being correct about something. I would also suggest you to turn the question around to yourself. Look in the mirror. Because in these threads you are privileging empiricism and other naturalist philosophical positions. Perhaps the most embarrassing thing is when a person is doing this without even noticing it.
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeletePerhaps we can lay the matter of whether there must be an objective truth to the matter of God's existence to one side, as it's a separate and complex issue. Let's say the statement 'God exists' is either true or false, which is to say it isn't meaningless. Now, we agree that the way a person assesses the truth of this statement is subjective, informed by their own world view.
Now, you think I am priviliging empiricism over other ways of knowing. In one sense this is true, but only in a sense we have already agreed upon. Epiricism, when applied to our models of the physical world, allows us to make best guesses because it contains a method for arriving at consensus. Hence you and I believe the earth is round, and agree this is not an agreement dependent upon world views. So, when it comes to physical models, we can often make best guesses, because often a consensus model exists.
Now, there are other areas where best guesses are appropriate. I agree with you on this. How one feels about one's partner, or what a particular cheese feels like in the mouth, these are areas where the assessor has priviliged access to the pertinent data, and so of course we can make the best guess, and to speak colloquially of 'knowing this' seems to me to be a reasonable and honest use of language.
But, in the matter of God's existence, you have granted that the reasons you and I disagree may well come down simply to world views, to the circumstances that have brought us to the question. Now, I think to say 'I know there is a God, and at the same time you know there is no God' is stretching the common usage of the word 'know'.
I suppose the question I am posing is this; doesn't a knowledge of how our beliefs arose affect the way in which we hold those beliefs? At the point where I realise my tendency not to believe in God is ultimately determined by my past and my personality, I tend to back away from the belief. It is grounded in nothing more substantial that personal prejudice (world view) so why take it all that seriously at the meta-belief level? Now, you accept your belief is formed in such a way (I think) and yet you are happy to embrace it as a true representation of the world. I'm just curious about how you do that, in part because perhaps there's a way out here I've not thought of, and I will be able to slide back over into atheism.
And finally, this morality one is strange to me. Some very thoughtful people believe objective morals exist, some equally thoughtful people think they don't. So, is this also a case of world views, do you think, or on this one do you think it's more some people just haven't thought hard enough about it? I'm unclear where you stand on this.
Bernard
Bernard,
ReplyDelete“Now, you think I am priviliging empiricism over other ways of knowing. In one sense this is true, but only in a sense we have already agreed upon.”
Well, when you equate not being able to “know” if there is a God the way we “know” the earth is round as a reason for your agnosticism, I think I have good reason. No one is saying it is the same type of “knowing” because, again, it would be a category error.
“But, in the matter of God's existence, you have granted that the reasons you and I disagree may well come down simply to world views, to the circumstances that have brought us to the question.”
All I granted was that everything about our decisions is context-laden. I certainly agree with the post-modern emphasis on the fact that we are not objective neutral observers. We are biased, we live in a certain place, we were brought up a certain way, we belong to a certain class, we were “educated” a certain way. However, I am also not a hyper-postmodernist. Because we can recognize all this doesn’t make our faith decisions deterministic as if we had no will or freedom to change our minds. To think we were entirely determined by our context and complete slaves to our circumstances would be quite the radical stance, one which I’m sure you don’t take.
“ Now, I think to say 'I know there is a God, and at the same time you know there is no God' is stretching the common usage of the word 'know'. “
I disagree. When people hear someone say “I know God” they know the person doesn’t mean he knows God in the same way he knows his barber or the same way he knows the earth is round. And yet, no one, in finding out the person didn’t mean he knew God like he knows his barber or the earth is round is shocked as if they really thought he meant he had God over to dinner every now and then. Why do you suppose that is? Right. It would actually be stretching the common usage to oppose the two as you are doing.
Further, when a person says he “knows” God he is talking about knowing something in a deeper and more meaningful way than the way he “knows” the earth is round and in that deepness and difference we could even say that his knowing regarding God is truer and a much more powerful truth and way of knowing. (Continued)
(Continued)
ReplyDelete“I suppose the question I am posing is this; doesn't a knowledge of how our beliefs arose affect the way in which we hold those beliefs? At the point where I realise my tendency not to believe in God is ultimately determined by my past and my personality, I tend to back away from the belief. It is grounded in nothing more substantial that personal prejudice (world view) so why take it all that seriously at the meta-belief level?”
Well, I think I addressed this above and I will agree that it should affect us in the sense of making us humble. Most of us have had that moment where we learned the thing we thought so true was simply something we had been brought up to believe. Also, I think you are talking about “world-view” incorrectly. Normally, one’s “world-view” is what one believes is ultimately true about the world/universe in a meta-way, thus the word “meta-narrative.” These are comprehensive philosophical views that tell us what a person really believes to be true-sort of sums it up. This is where we get to the “bottom line” and people take their world-views very seriously. These are the sort of views that a Martin Luther King, Jr. will go to jail over. When we are talking “world-view” we are talking about the things one hears people giving up their jobs for, go to jail for, or at the very least cause them deep reflection to violate or compromise. So, I’m not sure your attitude (Hey, I was just brought up to think this way and know it could be a bunch of crap) describes “world-view” and it certainly doesn’t describe what I am talking about.
“Now, you accept your belief is formed in such a way (I think)…”
No, I do not. Our lives are context-laden but not deterministic. We can change our minds. We can learn.
“And finally, this morality one is strange to me. Some very thoughtful people believe objective morals exist, some equally thoughtful people think they don't. So, is this also a case of world views, do you think, or on this one do you think it's more some people just haven't thought hard enough about it? I'm unclear where you stand on this.”
I’m not going to spend much time here because it would require more space and time, but I would say that it is a world-view issue.
Hi Darrrell
ReplyDeleteIt seemed possible you were using the term world view in this way, but I didn't want to assume, so I'm glad you've been so forthright.
You say our beliefs are context laden, but that this context doesn't determine the belief, right? At this point the difference between us is perfectly explicable. If we believe our intuitions reflect something other than our backgrounds, then the problem I'm addressing doesn't arise.
But, new problems then emerge. What could this mysterious force be that drives intuition, if not evolutionary, cultural and personal past?
An interesting question of logic arises. Imagine two people who have the same knowledge of the evidence and arguments regarding God's existence, but one is a theist and the other an atheist. They both, weighing up the evidence, are pushed in different directions by their intuition. Maybe it's you and me, you're just sure there is a God, and I'm sure there isn't. For both of us it's a deep, important feeling.
The question is, why the difference? Well, in this imaginary case it isn't based upon access to evidence or reasoning faculty. It could be based upon our different personalities, upbringings etc. But here you say these differences are not determining, they provide context but not outcome.
So what is left that could drive the difference? What, apart from pure randomness, could our differences in intuition reflect, if they are not determined by circumstance alone? One can appeal to free will, but this only shifts the problem. Why would one choose to believe and the other choose not to, becomes the question? What drives the intuition, if not the circumstances that created it?
Bernard
Burk,
ReplyDeleteThanks for pointing out the London Review of Books page. I have not read Jerry Fodor’s book on Darwinism, but in that page we find him explaining his ideas with some detail. The exchange of comments bellow Fodor’s argument is very interesting too, for one sees how knowledgeable people reacted to it.
Now, one learns both by trying to critically find what is wrong with an idea, but also by charitably trying to find out what is right. Let me here concentrate on the latter.
I think that Fodor is quite right in attacking what Steven Rose in the comments section calls “ultra-Darwinism”, i.e. the idea that the Darwinian algorithm explains about everything. They say that to a hammer everything looks like a nail, and indeed it is common that people tend to overextend the field of application of an idea they like. But to understand well what an idea says entails understanding well what that idea does not say.
Daniel Dennett’s thought about evolution is a case in point. Recently I heard the audio of a lecture by him where he claims that Darwinism explains the wings of birds, explains the building of dams by beavers and by humans, and also explains poems. Now the latter claim is I think pure nonsense. When we speak of poems we don’t mean particular marks on paper (which might be explainable on mechanistic/physical principles) but the value and meaning we perceive in our experience of reading a poem. And here, at the level of conscious experience, there are philosophical arguments which show that consciousness is not reducible to physical processes (and hence not to biological evolution either), and which might therefore give one warrant to believe that biological evolution does *not* explain poems. More importantly, whether a physical process such as biological evolution could possibly explain consciousness is a hotly debated philosophical question (see the so-called hard problem of consciousness) which lies far beyond the science of biological evolution. Dennett’s philosophical views on this matter are well known, but Dennett’s philosophy is not part of science. And when he explains his philosophy as if it were part of science he is fooling others (and perhaps is fooling himself too). We find here scientism gone berserk, and Fodor is right in pointing this out.
The other thing I believe Fodor is right about is his criticism of the idea of biological evolution by *natural selection*. Indeed the expression “evolution by natural selection” is often used instead of “Darwinism” or of “biological evolution”. Fodor’s criticism is conceptual. Darwinism, as any theory of the physical sciences, describes an entirely blind mechanical process, where the concept of “selection” simply does not fit, and is thus misleading. The reason is that the concept of “selection” entails purpose and thus the guiding presence of a mind.
[continues bellow]
[continues from above]
ReplyDeleteOne might think that Fodor’s criticism is merely about the linguistics used, but he points out how often scientists “explain” biological traits by some model of selection which is probably wrong and certainly unsupported by the proper science. I am not sure whether anybody has seriously suggested that humans have evolved the trait of communicating by making noises instead of waving their hands, because of the former method was selected by the tall grass in the savannah, but this example does describe many peoples’ misunderstanding of Darwinism. The comments section confirms what I am saying here. Many of the professionals who write there chose to discuss Fodor’s intriguing question “Were polar bears selected for being white or for matching their environment?”. All responded that polar bears white fur was selected for affording the bears better hiding in the snow.
Is this the right answer? As Fodor puts it: search me. After all, a different answer may also be true: Perhaps in some brown bear community she-bears found white fur more sexually attractive, which taste caused the white fur producing genes to become more populous in the local gene pool. And since white fur affords some hunting advantage in snowy environments, white bears who happened to move north towards the polar regions tended to spread their genes more successfully. Which caused the polar regions to be populated by white polar bears.
My point here is this: Biological evolution is an extremely complex process which depends on a huge number of factors (Fodor is right in pointing out that “environment” is not only the external environment of an organism). I agree with him that there is no warrant for many of the explanations on natural selection many biologists claim as part of the science. Where I disagree though is here: Fodor thinks that explanations on natural selection are part of the theory, while I think that they are part of a misunderstanding of the theory, notwithstanding the fact that the expression “natural selection” is often used in the context of the theory. Now I don’t know exactly what “classical Darwinism” said and so perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Darwin too would give the wrong answer to Fodor’s question. What concerns me here is the right answer from modern evolutionary science’s point of view.
That answer is I believe as follows: Polar bears who have darker fur producing genes will less probably spread their genes in the gene pool than bears that have lighter fur producing genes. Why that is the case may be interesting to investigate (albeit perhaps impossible to pin down), but is entirely irrelevant to the theory. That probability differential will cause lighter fur producing genes to become more populous in the gene pool. Finally, changes in the “environment” (which includes all intervening factors outside and inside of the organisms, including by the way the composition of the gene pool itself) might change the original probability differential and therefore also the future composition of the gene pool.
In short we should understand the theory of biological evolution exclusively as a planet wide and extremely complex physical/mechanical reaction, and abstain from any value or norms related personal thoughts, such as “traits being selected for”. For example, “survival of the fittest” is a misleading expression too (for the concept of “fitness” does not fit with a mechanical/blind process either). If being sickly and dying quickly would for some reason increase the probability of spreading the genes of an organism, then sickly and quickly dieing organisms would become the norm in that organism’s population.
Burk,
ReplyDeleteYou speak of religion’s low philosophical credibility, but I wonder how you would know, given that you have apparently not done any serious effort to study the philosophical grounding of religion.
You say that new atheism’s “few harsh words” are effectively used for raising consciousness about the many absurdities of religion. I agree, but I also hold that the ends do not justify the means. I also think that new atheism’s popular success has put on the table naturalism’s virtually absent philosophical grounding, as well as atheism’s trouble with morality (both on the conceptual and the practical level). Which I think is a good thing. You see, I believe that God has created us with reliable cognitive faculties, and therefore I trust that if people would actually study and then *compare* the intellectual underpinnings of theism and naturalism, as well as their respective ethical adequacy, they will realize that theism is far stronger on both counts.
You write: “We see all around us that religion makes clearly scientific claims.”.
I suppose you mean fundamentalist Christians claiming that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and the like. But that’s not “religion” speaking, but scientifically and theologically clueless people speaking. If you look around you will also see clueless atheists speaking a lot of nonsense. So what? When you want to compare ideas you don’t use their more popular expression, but their strongest expression.
“It is obvious enough even to a child that a black bear in the arctic would have a more difficult time hunting than a white bear.”
True, but that is irrelevant to the question of what has caused there to exist white bears in the arctic. You are in effect arguing that the white environment in the arctic “selected” the white color of the bears, but (as I argue above) it is perhaps the case that the white color of the bears “selected” the white environment in the arctic. It is not clear which way the causality pointer goes.
“All on this blog seem to agree that while we may have "faith" of some sort, we can't say that [religion] is true, because there isn't the evidence to suport such a claim.”
This is an amazing claim, Burk. It seems that communication is much more difficult than I thought.
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteI’d like to offer an answer to the question you ask bellow.
“Whichever way we cut it, people agree on the earth's shape, but not on God's existence. There is no category error here, the difference is plain and the categorisation fitting.
Now, either this is because some people are simply lacking access to the appropriate evidence, or it is a subjective, taste based decision. To press you on this crucial point, which do you think holds?”
There is of course a third possibility, namely that it is difficult to recognize the truth of theism. Let me elaborate:
The roundness of the Earth (as many other physical patterns, such as the existence of trees) is easy enough to detect. Suffice to arrive by boat to a hilly terrain, and observe that one first sees the peaks of the hills and only latter the coast. Other physical patterns are much deeper and you need smart physicists, lots of math, and expensive laboratories to detect them. God is defined to be the metaphysically ultimate and is thus the deepest kind of knowledge possible, the insight that binds all knowledge into a coherent whole. Thus it is no wonder that agreeing on God is more difficult than agreeing on the Earth’s shape.
Ultimately the evidence we have is the whole of our experience of life. The question then is this: What is the ultimate explanation of the whole of our experience of life? The fact that people do not generally agree about the answer to this question only shows that its answer is difficult, not that it is subjective or based on taste. I do think you are making a category mistake there.
What complicates matters though (as we have been discussing elsewhere) is this: The all-important quality of our experience of life is not a given but evolves depending on our beliefs and life choices.
Hi Dianelos
ReplyDeleteYes, of course the reason we have no agreement on this issue is be that it is is difficult, in fact this is my whole point. We lack sufficient evidence to produce a consensus, and all our tortured reasoning produces only options which must then be processed by way of gut feeling (you often speak of finding naturalism to be improbable, which is exactly how I feel about theism).
In exactly the same way, many many problems in science (most of them really) remain unresolved because they are so complex. But, in science, the default position in these cases is agnosticism. We don't scratch our heads and say 'gee, I just like the look of this model, let's go with it). We admit we don't know yet and get on with attempting to learn more.
The problem of God's existence is, as you say, so difficult that we have no consensus. We haven't solved it yet, so why not admit it?
Of course, the individual might solve it for themselves. they might discover which approach works best for them through living out their beliefs. Indeed I am in the process of developing an attachment to pinot noir using exactly this method. But from this approach, the best we can say is' acting as if God exists produces positive results for me' whilst implicitly acknowledging that for others, acting as if God doesn't exist seems to provide the richer life. Is this all you mean by believing, because it seems to be employing the very taste metaphor you object to.
With regard to polar bears, I've worked in a genetic research centre and I can assure you, the caricature of biology Fodor attacks simply bears no relation to the way biologists go about their work. His argument in effect, is attacking not the mechanism of selection, but that subset of the population that doesn't understand it. Which would be fine if it were presented as such.
The two polar bear explanations you offer, by the way, make different predictions about the timing of the colour mutation and it subsequent distribution, so Fodor's 'search me' response shows a lack of intellectual ambition. If we don't already know this (and I'm no polar bear expert, someone else can step in at this point) then finding out seems entirely possible. This is exactly how Darwinism progresses; in small, careful, contestable increments.
Bernard
Bernard,
ReplyDelete“So what is left that could drive the difference? What, apart from pure randomness, could our differences in intuition reflect, if they are not determined by circumstance alone? One can appeal to free will, but this only shifts the problem. Why would one choose to believe and the other choose not to, becomes the question? What drives the intuition, if not the circumstances that created it?”
That is indeed the question(s). And one possible answer is that the difference is God. The totally Other coming to us, outside our minds and wills, because this God exists. This is, after all, exactly what the Christian narrative is all about.
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteThe question at hand is this: Given *all* the evidence there is (i.e. given the human condition, given the whole of our experience of life) what is the best way to make sense of it all? What is the deepest order, the deepest knowledge, *present* there? The question is difficult and the two dominant rough answers are that deepest order is of a personal nature (theism), and that deepest order is of a mechanical nature (naturalism).
So it’s not evidence that’s lacking, for the evidence is given. What’s lacking is deep understanding. Some people suspect that there is not one answer, i.e. that theism and naturalism work equally well for making sense of the whole of our experience of life. But this answer is implausible because it requires that the human condition is such that theism and naturalism exactly balance each other out. It is much more probable that one or the other makes better sense of the human condition.
Described in this way there is still place for agnosticism. The agnostic in effect says “I can’t detect with any clarity which view makes more sense”. But the agnostic is *not* saying “it’s all subjective”. For it isn’t. There is a deepest knowledge present in the whole of our experience of life.
You often offer the scientific project as an analogy. I agree this is a good analogy for the physical scientist tries to find the deepest order in a particular part of the whole of our experience of life, namely in the part that encompasses our observation of physical phenomena. This is a simpler problem (because the set of evidence is both smaller and measurable – which latter property allows for the use of math), but is still a very difficult one in its own right. Now I wonder if one can reasonably claim that the scientist who cannot solve a difficult scientific problems assumes an agnostic attitude. What is certain though is this: When faced with some difficulty the scientist where no clear answer and much disagreement exist the scientist does *not* say that the whole issue is “subjective”, or is a matter of “personal taste”.
Here is a current example. Given that QM and GR are incompatible most physicists believe (on faith) that there is a deeper theory that unifies the two. The problem of unification has proven to be a very difficult one, and has not yet been solved. (For all we know it may be so difficult that it will never be solved.) Now some scientists believe that some superstring theory will give the answer, and some think it will not. Both groups give their reasons, but these reasons are not conclusive. Still nobody claims that since there is no agreement it follows that the question is a subjective one. Rather all agree that either some kind of superstring theory is the answer or it isn’t. It is not a question of scientists’ “personal taste”.
In the far larger and far more difficult context of metaphysics the same applies: Either some kind of theism is the answer, or it isn’t. It is not a question of philosophers’ “personal taste”.
Hi Dianelos
ReplyDeleteI think superstring theory is an excellent example. Science is currently agnostic on superstring theory, exactly as it should be. People have hunches, sure, and it is these very intuitions and tastes that drive their curiosity and research. But, if you ask them how they feel about their hunches, they won't tell you they have any degree of confidence in them. Not yet, because as yet it's not, practically speaking, testable. In time it may be, until then the jury is still out, and I would be interested to see if there were any peer reviewed physics papers suggesting that in the absence of such testing, we just believe.
Even at the populist level, a superstring enthusiast like Brian Greene stops short of claiming this theory is the answer. He rather suggests it's an appealing possibility, explains the implications and acknowledges that for now the proposition is untestable. His enthusiasm is subjective, a matter of taste, until such time as it can be tested. The history of physics is loaded with such playful speculation, some of which in time has been tested and added to the ongoing accumulation of best guesses. Agnosticism at its very best.
So, may I perhaps put the same question to you that I put to Darrell, because it is the thing that interests me. In the absence of a conclusive answer, where hunches can clearly take us either towards theism (in your case) or atheism (in mine) why should either of us have any confidence he is right and the other wrong? I can speak of course of the way atheism resonates with me and my experience of life, and suggest this personal evidence is in some way conclusive, but I know full well you can do the same for theism, and respect this.
On solution seems to be to acknowledge the subjectivity of this process, and adopt a pragmatic theism/atheism, whilst acknowledging this is done purely because of the personal satisfaction it brings. Is there another way around it, would you say? I ask this not as a challenge, but because there is something appealing about conviction, and if argument exists for, in my case, atheism, I am interested in pursuing it.
Bernard
Darrell
ReplyDeleteDo I have this right? The reason you believe and I don't is God?
Okay.
Bernard
Hi Bernard,
ReplyDeleteSorry—I wasn’t very clear. Here is what you asked: “Why would one choose to believe and the other choose not to, becomes the question? What drives the intuition, if not the circumstances that created it?”
You have it exactly right—it is a choice. As to why you choose otherwise, only you know. And, what I am saying is that perhaps the intuition is a response to this real God that exists and not just simply the “circumstance”. I think everyone is capable of this intuition and in fact, part of the Judeo-Christian narrative is that we all are capable of sensing God because we bear God’s image.
I think what can hinder or block this intuition are belief systems such as empiricism, naturalism, materialism, and scientism, all of which you seem to have asserted at one point or another in most of the threads on Eric’s blog. Perhaps the way you look at the world prevents or causes you to dismiss this intuition. Perhaps the intuition you have felt when looking at a sunset or something like the Grand Canyon, or during a special moment of reflective joy over something is a pointer or a sign to more. Perhaps these are occasions for further reflection and investigation.
You have agreed that the issue is not “evidence” as that would be a category error and you have agreed that we are not fatalistically determined to believe or behave the way we were brought up (we can learn, change our minds, move beyond our past and so on) so the question is why, given that, do you choose agnosticism? It seems to me that if you were relying upon either one of those supports both have been shown to be rather unreliable.
Darrell-
ReplyDeleteJust a quick thought.. I find it fascinating that you would cite:
"For instance, I love my wife and I “know” that in a deep way."
.. as a mode of knowledge that is not the same as the earth is round... which is to say, not empirically determinable. One could just as well say that I know that I prefer chocolate to strawberry. The categories are the similar (with apologies to your wife..). They are the essence of subjectivity, which you have priviledged access to, and no one else does. They are a kind of status report from your unconscious motivations, which may change the minute something new comes along, like a fresher strawberry, or an affair at work.
This doesn't mean that you should be agnostic about loving your wife, but it does mean that the rest of us, who don't share your inner life, would best be agnostic about it, or simply trust your reports of your feelings as subjective expressions without making them into a cosmic "fact".
I certainly agree that this resembles belief in god quite closely, as something that expresses "deep" emotion and a particular world view, without being empirically about anything exterior.
Dianelos-
ReplyDeleteHere you are making a scientific claim:
"You see, I believe that God has created us with reliable cognitive faculties, and therefore I trust that if people would actually study and then *compare* the intellectual underpinnings of theism and naturalism, as well as their respective ethical adequacy, they will realize that theism is far stronger on both counts."
Doubtless you understand that evolutionary biology makes a contrary claim, which is that our cognitive faculties, insofar as they deal with concrete reality and those aspects that most affect our existence, owe their reliability to selection by those external conditions of reality, winnowing those with unreliable faculties.
As for our cognition of god, the supernatural, and other speculative matters, the theory would specifically say that we are, as we indeed seem to be, spectacularly bad at it, to the point that we believe practically anything, and need the ongoing discipline of empiricism to have any chance of making our imaginations align substantially with realties outside our normal experience.
I'll pass over your theorization about polar bears ... the point is that scientists, by giving stories about such adaptations, are translating the theory of natural selection into a particular example, which may be purely speculative at the moment. That is why biology still exists- to put flesh on those bones of theory, which it has done in plenty of instances, to the point that the whole theory stands up rather well ... even if every instance we seek to explain doesn't have a complete historical/fossil/molecular/ecological trail of evidence behind it. Sometimes our efforts are better spent saving the actual, living remanant than in nailing down every just-so story that comes out of the theory, there being endless ramification and historical contingency in biology.
I certainly agree that it is complex, but chalking it up to "a planet-wide reaction" seems a cop-out when we have much more incisive and explanatory thoughts to devote to the matter. It is an attempt at re-mystification when all we are facing is complexity.
“All on this blog seem to agree that while we may have "faith" of some sort, we can't say that [religion] is true, because there isn't the evidence to suport such a claim.”
This is an amazing claim, Burk. It seems that communication is much more difficult than I thought.
I was hoping that we could come together on one point of philosophical humility, but if you have the truth, so be it.
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteYou write: “ Science is currently agnostic on superstring theory, exactly as it should be. People have hunches, sure, and it is these very intuitions and tastes that drive their curiosity and research.”
Please consider the following interview:
Reporter: You are a physicist who has worked 10 years in superstring research?
Physicist: Yes.
Reporter: Why have chosen to do so?
Physicist: Because I believe that the so-called Theory Of Everything, the physical theory that gives a complete and coherent description of all physical phenomena – the holy grail of physics – will be found within the confines of superstring theory.
Reporter: Why do you believe that?
Physicist: Well, superstring theory is the only quantum theory of gravity we have, that is the only theory that integrates the gravitational force with the other three fundamental physical forces which quantum physics has already integrated. Indeed, it’s not just that superstring theory is compatible with General Relativity, which is the best theory of gravity we have. Rather, you can’t describe the math of superstring theory in a consistent way unless the equations of general relativity are satisfied. General Relativity is thus a necessary part of superstring theory. Moreover superstring theory explains why the so-called Standard Model works. The Standard Model is the most advanced version of quantum mechanics, and indeed the most precisely confirmed physical theory ever. Moreover it appears that there is only one free numerical parameter in superstring theory, versus 18 free parameters in the less ambitious Standard Model. Also, arguably, superstring theory explains the inflationary model which is the currently dominant cosmological theory, and in order to do this requires the inflation of three physical and one time dimension, which is the case in the physical universe we exist. There are reasons galore.
Reporter: But other physicists disagree and think that the solution lies not with superstring theory. Why is that?
Physicist: Well, they have their own reasons. Some object to the fact that superstring research proceeds on purely mathematical grounds instead on laboratory measurements which until now was the norm. Others object to the fact that not only
there is currently no experimental confirmation of superstring theory, but also that given the exorbitant energies that such a test would require it may well be the case that superstring theory is untestable. Others point out the unfortunate fact that today we have not one but a large number of superstring theories, and that it is not clear how to discriminate between them.
Reporter: How do you deal with the objections of your colleagues?
Physicist: Well, I think they are wrong. For example a theory can be tested conceptually too, so it’s not like only laboratory testing works.
Reporter: But you are not sure that superstring theory is the right way?
Physicist: Of course not. It may turn out that I am wrong. There are very few things one can be absolutely certain about.
Reporter: So you are an agnostic in this matter?
Physicist: Not at all. Having thought about all the reasons for and against I think it is very likely that superstring theory is the way to go.
Reporter: You sound quite confident. Actually, how likely do you think that superstring theory will turn out to be the solution?
Physicist: Oh, I don’t know. Something of the order of 0.9 I guess. Enough for me to dedicate my life’s work to that idea anyway.
Reporter: When do you expect to find out whether superstring theory will be the answer?
Physicist: It’s difficult to say. The mathematics are fiendishly difficult and perhaps we need entirely new mathematical tools before making further progress. But I trust a solution is attainable, and I hope it will be found in our lifetime.
[continues bellow]
[continues from above]
ReplyDeleteOK. Now consider this alternative interview:
Reporter: You are a physicist who has worked 10 years in superstring research?
Physicist: Yes.
Reporter: Why have you chosen to do so?
Physicist: Well, I could give you several intellectual sounding reasons, but in fact I work on superstring theory mainly because I really like it. This kind of life work satisfies a deep psychological need of mine.
Reporter: So your choosing of superstring theory as the your research project is only a matter of taste?
Physicist: Yeah, well, pretty much so. I must say I also have this hunch that superstring theory may turn out to be the right one. But it’s all quite subjective really. You see, superstring theory, once you understand the math, is such a beautiful thing. Do not believe physicists when they say they choose their line of research on anything but pure intuition, or on anything more objective than how much they enjoy doing research in that field.
Reporter: Would you then say you are an agnostic in this matter?
Physicist: Yes, absolutely. I have really no grounds to think that superstring theory is more likely to be true than not. After all there are many other physicists, just as qualified as I am, who do not believe that superstring theory is the right description of the universe - and I recognize that they may well be right. Even when I personally find that their reasoning is not convincing, I cannot be as arrogant as to think that just because I feel this way it means that they are wrong.
--
Now, Bernard, here is my question: Which of the two interviews above strikes you as the more realistic?
In my judgment, even though there may be some physicists of the second kind, I believe the great majority have chosen a line of research out of love for truth and not out of love of enjoyment. And also because after much thought they have decided that the way they follow is the best way to reach the truth – and not because of taste. They are respectful of colleagues who disagree with them, while also believing that their colleagues are wrong - and they are willing to explain why they think so. Of course, they are aware that they themselves may be mistaken. Which does not make them agnostic; rather it makes them non-dogmatic.
Burk,
ReplyDeleteI think if you follow the entire length of the conversation between Bernard and me, you will find my responses.
Not to rehash everything, but two points: First of all, to say we can only “know” things by way of empirical proofs is to privilege empiricism. Second, to say we must be able to say we “know” God in the same way we “know” the earth is round is to commit a philosophical category error.
Finally, because it is a subjective assertion or knowing doesn’t mean the object in which it points (God) is not real or objective (that is another question). No one is saying that someone cannot be personally and subjectively agnostic about either my love for my wife or God’s existence, but one’s agnosticism is a separate issue as to whether or not my love or God is real. You are assuming that a subjective assertion cannot have an objective referent. If the assertion is “God exists” then of course the referent is objective (even if the one asserting is wrong about God existing—he is speaking with that meaning). If the assertion is “white wine is better than red” then of course there is no objective referent because no one believes this category (perhaps an ultra-Platonist?!) to be one where there is some objective superior white wine (somewhere) and thus a category error to equate the two (subjective assertions about God and about wine).
Unless one has already decided that belief in God is like a subjective preference (like preferring chocolate to strawberries), which is a category error- then there is no reason to warrant such an analogy, and if one does he is then begging the question.
Burk,
ReplyDelete“All on this blog seem to agree that while we may have "faith" of some sort, we can't say that [religion] is true, because there isn't the evidence to suport such a claim.”
Anyone is free to correct me if I am wrong, but I only hear you and JP saying things like this, while Bernard seems to qualify this enough to suggest he is saying something different.
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteYou write: “So, may I perhaps put the same question to you that I put to Darrell, because it is the thing that interests me. In the absence of a conclusive answer, where hunches can clearly take us either towards theism (in your case) or atheism (in mine) why should either of us have any confidence he is right and the other wrong? I can speak of course of the way atheism resonates with me and my experience of life, and suggest this personal evidence is in some way conclusive, but I know full well you can do the same for theism, and respect this.”
In my case what moved me towards theism was a sense experience: I saw in the whole of my experience of life a deep spiritual order, on order of great beauty and explanatory power. (And, incidentally, an order which is not only compatible with the physical sciences but illuminates their nature and structure.) Moreover, theistic belief to the small degree that it has changed my life (and thus myself) has proven to be a vast blessing, by far the most precious thing I can call mine. For one, it has revealed to me the splendid beauty inherent in the human condition. And it has given me the strength to live my life a little better than I would otherwise had. (Religious truth is not only a blessing though; for example it makes the weight of one’s moral consciousness much greater, and it makes the realization of one’s shortcomings much more painful.)
Now, in your terminology, all of the above may fall under the concept of “hunch”. But here’s the point: I find that on the purely intellectual/philosophical level too theism works much better than naturalism. I claim that if one picks universally accepted epistemic principles and applies them as objectively as one can on the *strongest* versions of theism and naturalism one can find, then one will discover that theism consistently trumps naturalism. Now religion is *not* about belief, so religious belief is at best a secondary matter. Moreover religious belief moved by intellectual considerations may be far from the norm. Still I find that even on the intellectual level theism is quite conclusively superior to naturalism.
In short: Even though I realize that both naturalism and theism can be compatible with the whole of our experience of life, I find that in comparison theism makes far better sense of the whole of our experience of life.
Which leads us to a follow-up question: Why then does atheism resonate better with many peoples’ experience of life? That’s a hugely difficult question, Bernard, and for many reasons. One important reason, I believe, is that belief and one’s experience of life are not independent. Rather one’s belief about how reality is transforms the way one experiences life.
Now for thousands of years theologians have pondered the question of why some people appear to be naturally born believers, and others naturally born unbelievers. Some theologians have suggested the answer that God has given the grace to see the truth to those predestined for salvation – but I am certain that’s the wrong answer. If anything God cares more about those who are lost.
My short answer to that second question is that the main reason is simply chance. The way some people (because of nature or nurture) appear to be better tuned to math than others, and some people appear to better tuned to the arts than other, some people appear to be better tuned to see the deepest order in the human condition than others. The whole of humanity is the child of God, and the fact that individual humans are different in many ways increases the beauty of creation, indeed the beauty and meaning and fruitfulness of the human condition. We are all in this together you see; in the long run nobody is luckier than the other, nobody better than the other. God dearly loves and also dearly values the worse among us. As long as we don’t see that we won't understand neither God nor the meaning of creation. Indeed as long as we don't do the same we won't realize God in us nor fulfill the end of our creation.
Darrell-
ReplyDeleteI continue to be intrigued by your epistemology.
What do you mean by "knowing" that god exists? Since it isn't like knowing the earth is round, via the usual signs and wonders of empirical logic, and it isn't a subjective preference that expresses your culture, training, intuition, and personal gestalt, what is it?
In my model of epistemology, we start with inuitive hunches, which are spontaneous ideas that arise from frankly unknown sources, expressing some mixture of instinct, culture, perception, and unconscious analysis. This is not knowledge, however "deeply believed", "firmly held" or otherwise self-convincing. It only becomes knowledge when one's normal liability to error and self-delusion are overcome, much as one pinches one's self to be sure it is not a dream. Some mechanism of validation must operate before a hunch becomes knowledge.
Even something like enjoying wine descends from this in an empirical process. One can hardly know one likes it without testing it, even if everyone says it is good and it looks attractive. Likewise with other subjective knowledge. But such knowledge again just reports one's own reactions to the world or the self.
The knowledge of god is putatively not just a report of one's responses or intuitions, but a scientific statement about what holds the world together, and what you personally relate to during prayer and other ceremonial activities (I am only guessing). It is reportedly an independent being with desires, a history, a political program, a purpose, and many other properties. These are not minor claims, or purely subjective ones. So what is the validating process?
As far as I can tell, the validating process is an enormous echo chamber of other people past and present having the same intuitions, and telling each other it is really true. (And throwing in bonus narratives about hell if they are feeling particularly knowledgeable.) If intuition is now specially elevated to "veridical" status, then yes, the evidence is overwhelming, and all is well. But if some more rigorous form of validation is in order, as I think it is, (and as those seeking signs and wonders from time immemorial likewise felt), then something seems lacking.
I believe that something is, as you have referred to in the past, faith. That is the distinguishing factor between skepticism and conviction. But the result of faith is not "knowledge", but belief.
Hi Dianelos
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking so much time on this. I enjoyed reading your physics interviews very much. In a way, which I find more realistic is irrelevant, although from my experience of the scientific community the second response seems the more likely.
I say irrelevant, because I hold up the second type of science as desirable. I think the humility inherent in it is a crucial building block for scientific progress. I think there are type A scientists around, or course, but I am interested in the process that produces best guesses (consensus) and clearly the intellectual discipline of not believing until the testing is done is the process that in the past has produced this consensus. I know some theorists now put mathematical elegance up as an alternative criterion for acceptance, but in my view those who resist this have every right to do so, (because a model is after all only a predicting device, not a description of reality, so a belief that the truth will be elegant is an unnecessary prior commitment) speaking, and it is precisely this resistance that prevents consensus and the non-subjective definition of a best guess.
And of course, the arrogance of scientist A is something I have no personal taste for, and this distaste translates also into my agnostic stance on the theism/atheism debate. (I don't claim they are wrong, it's just that personally I would prefer to avoid such statements of dismissal).
In this respect your answer to why your intuition regarding God is a better approximation of reality than mine is illuminating, and bears a strong resemblance, from my vantage point, to Darrell's. Some people are good at math, you say, some have a facility for theological intuition. The implication being that you do, and hence can gain some intuitive sense of the divine, while I don't.
The atheist runs exactly the reverse argument. There is no God, and theists have deficient intuition, that is more likely to be seduced by comforting but ultimately false myths. They would claim I have this intuitive facility, and you don't.
I have no taste for this tendency to dismiss the other side, and also despair a little of the endless tribalistic sniping it engenders. Conversations like this are, I think, far more productive.
That's all I'm saying. It's not to my taste to dismiss the intuitive capacities of those who disagree with me. Why assume my intuition is better than yours?
Bernard
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteThanks your last response, which after a long and careful conversation sums up our differences rather well. You suggest that something might be hindering my intuition from working correctly, perhaps I am denying the message being sent to me, or have invested too much in a faulty set of philosophical assumptions. And of course, once the assumption that the God you experience is real is made, this stance makes perfect sense.
Likewise, the atheist asked to explain why so many people report a personal experience of God use exactly the same explanation. Because God doesn't exist, something must be blocking their intuition, perhaps fear, an inability to outgrow childish myths, whichever patronising dismissal is to hand.
And so, to answer your question, why do I prefer agnosticism, because I have no taste for these either of these views which, in order to defend their own world view, must conclude the opposing camp's intuition is faulty.
I prefer not to conclude your intuition is faulty, or the atheist's is faulty. I conclude that until there is some non-subjective means of, at the very least, calculating which is less likely to be faulty, I just don't know, and hence need to swallow the slightly unpalatable conclusion that my intuition is just as likely to be faulty as yours. This admission sits at the heart of agnosticism, and is arrived at purely as a matter of personal taste.
The question I naively imagined would be a simple one, with which I started this discussion, was why don't believers find this dismissal of alternatives intuitions as distasteful as I do? The answer, as best I can tell, is they just do. And fair enough too. Each to their own.
Cheers
Bernard
Burk,
ReplyDelete“I believe that something is, as you have referred to in the past, faith. That is the distinguishing factor between skepticism and conviction. But the result of faith is not "knowledge", but belief.”
The result of faith is not “knowledge” in the sense of knowing the earth is round. Obviously faith is not needed to determine that fact but such does not preclude us from seeing that faith is where we all end up as far as believing what is true in the sense that people care about—as to the big questions of life. Faith is what we believe ultimately once we have reflected upon our experience, the lives of others, and the knowledge we have at our disposal. Again, faith is not believing in spite of or without evidence. It is the next step we take once we get to the place the evidence has led us but can lead us no further. The evidence leads to many doors. There is the door of agnosticism, atheism, and theism. But we have to step out, reach, and choose which door to open.
So you are correct, and in your instance the result of your faith too is not “knowledge” but belief…your belief that there is no God. At the end of the day, we both indeed believe (one way or the other) by faith.
Bernard-
ReplyDeleteWell, my ears are burning. But I think there is a false symmetry in your approach. Agnosticism is a call to withold belief in that which is unknown. That is only a hair's breadth difference from atheism, which adds psychological questions about why people so insistently claim to know the unknowable, and asks just where the question that believers are so fixated upon arises from. It is like fifty different string theories all vying for an ultimate explanation, (and for bodies in the pews and dollars in the coffers), none of which have evidence behind them. Why so many? Why so insistently held? It doesn't smell good, to a skeptical person. That is my intuition, added to the basic epistemological point.
Intuitions are, in the end, not mysterious- they are the bread and butter of psychological investigation, and one can envision a time when we have far better knowledge of how our intuitions work and can trace their origins and nature. Indeed, can evaluate their credibility by knowing what they are based on. For instance, our intuition of whether people are lying has been studied in some detail, and been subject to intensive training & improvement. Such knowledge might provide a better basis for giving or withholding credence on the religious topic, but in the mean time, withholding belief is the least we can do.
Now, this is all uncomfortably like the intelligent design-ists, who wield skepticism and disbelief of the complex theory of evolution to argue for agnosticism, as a cover for their preferred theory. They point to the holes in evolutionary theory with glee, and say that an awful lot of imagination is needed to fill them in.
What is the difference between this sweeping imaginative vision justified by rational arguments and a fair bit of concrete evidence, and the religious vision, even more sweeping, which is justified by only slightly less rational arguments, by enormous historical tradition, by wide popularity, and by quite a bit of concrete evidence, for those willing to suspend their skepticism a bit?
It is a pretty difficult question, and the issue is, as always, the nature of evidence, the nature of intuition, and the relation between reason and knowledge. The-earth-is-round-ism is founded on a quite a different plane of reasoning than religion, and evolution falls in between, demanding more imagination and engagement with many strands of evidence, than a simple empirical fact. My main point is to make these differences and distinctions clear, even as the interests of the religious is to muddy them, calling belief "knowledge", and intuition "veridical".
Concerning intuition, is there any good reason to think that it can provide any sort of reliable knowledge about the unknown? Leaving God aside for the moment, if we consider loosely the question of “ultimate reality”, what do we have to go on? Our instruments and senses cannot peek beyond the physical, our theories are constrained by the necessity of confronting them to observations. Is there any reason to think that this mysterious “intuition” we throw about so freely can in fact help us?
ReplyDeleteOur intuition is certainly trained by experience. Experts in any area use it all the time: a film maker will know something does not quite work with a take perhaps without being able to point it out, and so on. There is nothing strange about this.
But, obviously, this type of intuition is worthless when confronted to something it has no experience of. So, how can we justify applying it to finding out about ultimate reality? Get me right: I would love it if it worked – this would save a lot of hard work. But why would it? Is there any non trivial idea of real significance that was discovered purely by intuition and later confirmed by other means?
Another way to look at this is: what should we expect intuition to produce when asked to figure out the unknown? It's natural to think it would pick up stuff from experience and make up something out of it that roughly fits the bill. And, sure enough, this is what observe in the form of a personal anthropomorphic God.
Hi Burk
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I agree that a good way forward is to better clarify and investigate what we mean by intuition. I share your and JP's intuition that intuition itself is a psychological device, a means of calling upon the subconscious to make efficient judgements. JP's example of the film maker is a good one, the drawing on and processing of complex prior experience.
However, the theist has a rather different intuition to call upon, that we live in a God-filled universe, and under this scenario there is a special type of intuition that gives us partial access to these deeper truths. We might say, where is the evidence, and they will say, well it's in my personal experience. We then want to dismiss this as a psychological error, but we must draw upon our own intuition to do so. Which is where the symmetry lies, I think.
Perhaps there is less symmetry when it comes to curiosity. I detect less enthusiasm for studying the mechanisms of intuition from the theist camp, and that's something worth exploring.
I am assuming, for simplicity, that the atheistic position is that we live in a Godless universe, and I am aware that there is more of a spectrum than that, with the boundary between belief and agnosticism fuzzy at both ends. Cleary the symmetry may not hold for two individual cases.
I think their are similarities with the Intelligent Design case in some particular instances. Where the ID proponent argues that they have an alternative physical model of development, they do need to put up the evidence or shut up. Here they are dealing with models of physical phenomenon, where the relationships they are opposing have shown tremendous predictive power, and we are quite within our rights to ask, well how's your model doing on this front? And the asnwer is, as we know, not at all well. So we are quite within our rights to cosider the evolutionary model as the best guess, on the grounds of 'rain makes me wet' logic.
The furhter ID argument that some evolutionary leaps are impossible to explain under the existing model is, as we know, logically flawed, and there's no need for agnosticism in the face of faulty logic.
However, there is a flavour of ID theory that has the characteristic of the agnosticism I propose, and it is the argument that says we must be careful not to read too much into evolutionary theory. Accept it as the best explanation of the physical mechanisms of development, but beware the leap into the Just So world of post hoc story telling, or the 'hence there is no God involved' non-sequiter.
If teacing the controversy meant a critical examination of evolutionary psychology, or a thoughtful examination of the relationship between evolutionary theory and religous belief, I'd be all for that sort of agnosticism.
Bernard
Hi Bernard,
ReplyDeletePerhaps we're using the word “intuition” too freely. It would not necessarily make for a stronger argument but I would try to formulate this differently. It is certainly a fact that intuition is, at least partly, a sort of psychological device and you put it very well: the drawing on and processing of complex prior experience. Part of this might also be innate.
Whether there is more to it is, as far as I can tell, unknown. I would choose not to accept the very special type of intuition the theist relies on until there is some evidence or reason to think it's real. This is why (lacking any evidence) the question of precedent is, to my view, so important: is there any case in the history of ideas that would lend credence to this peculiar kind of intuition? And, yes, the fact that theists show so very little interest in this is very puzzling.
Now, is this intuition that tells me to be skeptical of this kind of intuition? Perhaps, in some sense, but also not very useful. What would be is some manner of assessing this intuition, based on historical data or otherwise. Lacking this, invoking it may not be distinguishable from story telling.
Bernard-
ReplyDeleteAny thoughtful form of teaching would be beneficial, of course.
"However, the theist has a rather different intuition to call upon, that we live in a God-filled universe, and under this scenario there is a special type of intuition that gives us partial access to these deeper truths."
Not to be overly fractious, but this is the whopper to take them all. It is one thing to ask forbearance for one's acknowledged leaps of faith on matters of guesswork. It is quite another to claim special powers and discernment into scientific matters of the greatest import that just happen to agree with one's cultural entrainment and personal biases. This is where the con starts, inducing others bow before those with secret shamanic portals to the unknown.
Nope, we all share the same basic cognitive capacities and defects. Anyhow, the proof of superior insight is in the pudding, which should look uniform among those doing the discerning, and convey novel and verifiable truths commensurate with the momentous claims. None of which is compellingly apparent. My social intuition tells me this is four parts self-delusion and one part hucksterism (with apologies to those subject to true religious experiences, which come under a different heading of entirely honest, but even more clearly psychogenic involuntary conviction). And I might note, with JP, that social intuition is, in general, a far more finely honed apparatus than is our cosmic origins intuition- on evolutionary grounds, at least.
Hi JP and Burk
DeleteYes, I absolutely share your scepticism. It's exactly this my agnosticism rests upon. If nothing else, the tendency of intuition to pull different people in opposite directions is a good indicator that it's often unreliable.
The question of course is not whether we can find reason to be sceptical of the intuition upon which religious belief is based, but whether an atheistic argument can be constructed that is not exposed to the same style of scepticism. I'm arguing that I don't see how, at least not if we define atheism as the belief that God does not exist (as opposed to the milder belief that specific renderings of God are implausible). After all, theism might be right, despite all of its various cultural incarnations being inadequate. I suspect many of the theists on this blog would argue exactly that.
The intuitive leap I see the atheist having to make is the leap that says our puny human brains, shaped by the vagaries of evolution, aren't missing something crucial about the nature of existence. Doesn't the atheist have to rule out the possibility that beyond the reality we can conceive of, there lies something something simply unimaginable, that renders our mechanistic description of the world absurd. Something, in other words, God-like.
And shouldn't we just be as sceptical of this leap, for the sake of consistency?
Bernard
Bernard-
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I am not skeptical of such a leap at all. We are very limited beings, and clearly do not yet understand the underpinnings of the reality we find ourselves in.
The question is not whether such inconceivables are conceivable, it is whether each self-appointed mystic and religionist has, in fact, reliably conceived of them, or are passing off propositions and experiences of a completely different nature (i.e. psychogenic, tinged with self-interest, imbued with cultural origins and functions ...) as their version of such conceptions. And if so, which one.
As even modestly skeptical observers, the demands we make of human intuition in judging such claims as delusions are far less than those made on the other side to claim contact with the creator of the universe, the universal father figure, discernment of objective morals, etc... The assymetry of these intuitive claims couldn't be wider.
Hi Burk
ReplyDeleteI agree with this. If our claim is not the claim that there is no God, then the symmetry doesn't hold and the scrutiny we put claims of intuitive truth under becomes, I think, entirely defensible.
This is why, although it does read like pedantry at times, insisting upon the difference between agnosticism and atheism can be helpful. So often in discussions here the theistic rejoinder is, but what about your own intuitive leaps? An attack is launched on the ultimate difficulties that come from a hard line defence of naturalism/materialism/empiricism, as if the deficiencies exposed then grant some special licence to play fast and loose on the other side.
However, because I don't think any of us are defending that brand of naturalism, (and here I am arguing that your position has many of the hallmarks of agnosticism) making this clear may perhaps help focus some of the debate? Such is my hope, anyway.
As a good example, Darrell uses the metaphor of the person emerging for the rationally considered evidence and then, in order to interpret it, having to choose to walk through the theistic, atheistic or agnostic door. This is, to me, a misleading image. It seems to me there is no door marked agnosticism. Agnosticism is the choice not to interpret, or rather, to own the interpretation for what it is, a meaning making story of one's own construction, useful but not necessarily truthful. A taste, if you will.
I maintain there is something embarrassing, for me at least, in trusting one's own intuitions without having available any means of verifying them. And on this, I suspect we agree.
Bernard
Bernard,
ReplyDelete“As a good example, Darrell uses the metaphor of the person emerging for the rationally considered evidence and then, in order to interpret it, having to choose to walk through the theistic, atheistic or agnostic door. This is, to me, a misleading image. It seems to me there is no door marked agnosticism. Agnosticism is the choice not to interpret, or rather, to own the interpretation for what it is, a meaning making story of one's own construction, useful but not necessarily truthful. A taste, if you will.”
In the above however, you note: “Agnosticism is the choice not to interpret…” Well, there is your door. You do make a choice. And there are positive reasons (as you have been explaining) for why you choose not to interpret and those reasons are…interpretations! There is simply no way around this. You are trying to stake out some neutral ground upon which to stand, but the moment you begin telling us why you are agnostic the ground begins to disappear.
Also, just to clarify, I did not mean to say “in order to interpret” we must choose. I meant once we have considered the evidence, our experience of life, the lives of others, and as many factor as we must (and this is an ongoing life-long dynamic) - once we have come to the place where the evidence can take us no farther, we must choose. And one choice is agnosticism. Now, were we interpreting the evidence, our lives, and everything else all a long? Of course, because everything is context laden. But at the end of the day we still choose, even if the choice is to “believe” that withholding judgment is the wiser choice. It is a faith choice, as is belief or atheism.
Lastly, I still do not think Burk sees his atheism/agnosticism as not truthful just useful (that is something he would say of religion). I don’t think he sees his atheism as a taste or preference on par with or as true as any other preferences. I think he believes there is no God in the same way he believes the earth is round—but again he can speak for himself.
Hi Bernard,
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely: our human brains may be incapable of conceiving of this elusive “ultimate reality” and, in fact, I take this as very plausible. This is a very intriguing and fascinating thought. One is free, no doubt, to call this “simply unimaginable” something “God-like”, but doesn't that take away from God all intelligible attributes he (it?) might have? The word “god” then becomes almost empty of meaning.
Which leads me to a question I have been asking myself: what would happen if I suddenly believed in God (no matter how, let's only say it would be totally compelling)? I assume of course that nothing else would change: no sudden miracles, or voices in the night, and so on.
Somewhat to my surprise, I realized I couldn't tell at all, because I have no clue what exactly I would believe in. What I would need is some way to relate this belief to something concrete in my life – otherwise it does not mean anything. The fuzziness of the idea of God remains indeed a frustrating aspect of theism.
For example, let's say the belief involves only the idea of a prime mover that set things in motion and then step aside. I can't see how this would change anything. Of course, were I a physicist, it might make the search for the ultimate laws of nature less interesting because they could simply represent the arbitrary whim of a God.
Perhaps this kind of “thought experiment” is a fruitful direction for further discussions. Or perhaps it is hopeless and the idea of God cannot be made precise in this way. What do you think? Any insight?
Maybe theists will also want to answer the opposite question. Any taker?
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteOn thing I've tried to stick with here is the difference between comonly held evidence, commonly held standards of reasoning, and intuitive leaps, necessitated when we feel the need to move beyond the first two. You and I agree the first two don't take us all the way to religious belief or disbelief. So, should we wish to move beyond the evidence, and embrace a belief, we need to rely upon our intuition.
Now what of the person who chooses, as you rightly note, not to embrace belief? Is this perosn making an intuitive leap also, by the very choice not to embrace belief? This appears to be the case you're making, and if so I'm not buying it yet. It's a choice, sure, but it's not a commitment to trusting the reliability of one's instincts. You speak of the leap that says that withholding judgment is the wisest choice. And here may be where we differ, because this is not a leap I am making. I am noting that, according to our shared understanding of reasoning, that the trusting of one's unverified intuitions has certain logical implications. And I am then noting my distaste for these implications.
Now, for this to be a leap of belief, there would have to be something in these two moves that is open for public disagreement. I certainly see why, from a debating point of view, it would be useful to paint agnosticism as similarly reliant upon leaps of faith, but I think this task is trickier than you make it appear. You sometimes say that in order not to believe A, you must have a positive belief in B. But this misses the possibility that B may itself be a shared belief, which is to say one can reject an intuitive leap by embracing a non-intuitive one.
So, where precisely is the intuitive leap of which I am accused? I accept there may well be one, but until it's pointed out, you'll understand my scepticism.
Bernard
Bernard-
ReplyDeleteThe fact is that it is highly difficult/unusual for people to not trust their intuitions. We have them so that they be trusted. That is their purpose. We trust them in a thousand ways every day. It is the achievement of the scientific method to train people to take a step back, and consider whether their welter of intuitions about "reality", writ large, are accurate or not, and if so, by what degree. That goes for other fields like the law, economics, and even philosophy, when properly practiced! It is not always successful even now, since scientists, as anyone else, hold to their theories with typical emotional tenacity. [One might well note in this connection that while philosophy may properly start with intuition, it had best not end there.]
So I think agnosticism is not realistic as a practical matter of psychology. And Pascal's wager is even worse, inveigling one to give up ones' own intuitions (or reason)- the freedom of one's conscience- in favor of the basest self-interested, mercenary, and social motives.
More importantly, however, agnosticism fails to plumb the true depths of this matter, which is- how & why the question is formulated in the first place. Why are we spending endless electrons debating god? Not because of any serious evidence for such a proposition. Why are you agnostic? Not because you are agnostic as a matter of course on every large and small decision where there is uncertainty.
Agnosticism is a special response to a very peculiarly posed question, which is- do you lend credence to a fantastical and on its face ridiculous proposition of sweeping character which, however, has immense social force behind it, and expresses the intuitions, whether entrained or spontaneous, whether "deep" or ecstatic, of many others? On any other matter in your life, you would scoff and go on with more important pursuits. ESP, UFO, Hari Krshna, and similar cults with great claims come to mind. In this one, you are forced by the social and historical weight of the questioners (Pascal comes to mind) to answer. And the most diplomatic one is agnostic, with regard to any particular god version, and possibly towards them all, even when they are mutually exclusive. The framing technique is well known in propaganda, actually.
So, while agnosticism is technically correct not to mention diplomatic, and even Dawkins, the atheist high priest, says that god is only ... highly unlikely ... the need to deal with this putatively "big" question at all and take such an artificial position of formal agnosticism is due to its false frame, which descends from, by my intuition, a long and Freudian trail of psychological issues that cultures typically play out with great gusto, but with little truly critical thought. Oh, the humanity!
Hi JP
ReplyDeleteI think you're right, and the God no-God dichomtomy probably is an unhelpful oversimplification. I think, if I believed suddenly that there was something out there, but I didn't know what that something was, it would be unlikely to add anything meaningful to my life. The exception, I guess, is if my prior belief that there was no such thing, or that we couldn't know, had in itself informed certain attitudes, in which case they would be brought into question.
So can we then say that the difference between belief and disbelief kicks in only when the belief is a belief in something more concrete than the unknowable. Indeed, all God centred religions do appear to attribute particular characteristics to their God, and at this point the question of how this knowledge was obtained, and what makes us think it is reliable, becomes pertinent, and there is an odd lack of fascination in this question amongst theists, as best I can tell.
Is it even the case that a circularity creeps into the reasoning. I believe in God because this truth has found its way into my heart. And how do you know it's the truth, well because God put it there. I don't kow if that's a fair characeristation, but it sometimes seems that in order to justify one's belief in God, first one must believe in God.
Bernard
Hi Burk
ReplyDeleteInteresting, as always. I think I come to trust my intuitions more or less as evidence accumulates in their favour. The decision to take a gap in the traffic when driving is an intuitive one, I don't sit back and calculate speed, distance etc. And backing one's intuition in this case is a life and death matter. So we set in place processes, like driving lessons, to fine tune the intuition, match it with the world.
In the case of a coin flip, I may well have an intuition leading me to heads or tails, but experience has taught me this intuitive device is purely wishful, and I have no capacity for fine tuning it to the world of experience. So I trust it not a jot.
So I think we often have a rough and ready inductive process available to us in terms of intuitions, as JP mentioned. I think for many many cases, the evidence is lousy and psychologically difficult though it may be, I do attempt to train myself into agnosticism in such matters, rather than leap into that always tempting intellectual tribalism.
This doesn't preclude making a guess and living it out, but the key point is a lack of faith in the truthfulness of this guess. It's acting pragmatically, choosing the course of action that seems to offer the greatest personal reward, because not choosing is disastrous. Some defences of religious belief are purely pragmatic in this sense, and I have no argument with them. The person who believes a God narrative because of the joy it brings them is, to my mind, being supremely rational. I do think there's a contradiction that emerges when this living out spills into a claim for truthfulness though, because it muddies the water between private and public truths.
Unlike you, I don't find the persistence of the religious question at all vexing. We are forced to have a position because it is our nature to make meaning of the world, surely. Isn't this where art and literature come in? Aren't we, above all, the makers of stories? Working out what these stories might be, and how best to interact with them, seems to me to be the most pressing of human questions, and even if the God metaphor disappeared to tomorrow, that task would still remain as urgent, wouldn't it?
Bernard
Bernard,
ReplyDelete“So, should we wish to move beyond the evidence, and embrace a belief, we need to rely upon our intuition.”
As already noted, I prefer to use the word “faith” rather than intuition. Intuition has connotations of coming to conclusions without any reasoning process. That is not what I’m talking about. Faith is that step we take after reasoning, after considering the evidence, after reflection—again that dynamic process I talked about.
“Now what of the person who chooses, as you rightly note, not to embrace belief? Is this perosn making an intuitive leap also, by the very choice not to embrace belief? This appears to be the case you're making, and if so I'm not buying it yet. It's a choice, sure, but it's not a commitment to trusting the reliability of one's instincts.”
Again, I don’t think they are making an “intuitive” leap. And as already noted “faith” does not mean in spite of or without evidence. I am saying the agnostic, like the atheist and the theist, has reflected upon and considered the evidence. They have thought about their life experience thus far; they have considered the lives of friends and family. They have considered history and what we might call the human experience. They have considered the “big” questions of life. I am saying at this point, we all have to choose and it becomes a faith decision more in the sense of giving ourselves to something. We come to those things we truly and deeply believe about meaning, purpose, values, and the other “big” questions.
“Now, for this to be a leap of belief, there would have to be something in these two moves that is open for public disagreement. I certainly see why, from a debating point of view, it would be useful to paint agnosticism as similarly reliant upon leaps of faith, but I think this task is trickier than you make it appear. You sometimes say that in order not to believe A, you must have a positive belief in B. But this misses the possibility that B may itself be a shared belief, which is to say one can reject an intuitive leap by embracing a non-intuitive one.”
I do think that for us to doubt something (this thing—whatever it might be) we do so because we believe this other thing. How would “B” being a shared belief make any difference? It is still a positive belief or assertion. It is not a neutral spot—it is standing somewhere. For instance, if one says I doubt there a god because I believe in empiricism, he is asserting a positive belief in another direction. It doesn’t matter that this might encompass a shared belief like the earth is round, because it is a category error to think we can prove God in the same way we ascertain the earth’s shape as we’ve already discussed.
Even if belief “B” is something like “I don’t think we can trust our intuition” or “our beliefs are just a product of our environment and education”, these are all positive beliefs that have a basis in some world-view in some philosophical perspective. I really don’t see how this helps or what your point is. I am not accusing you of an intuitive leap. I am saying your agnosticism is a reflective and considered belief based upon all the assertive and positive reasons you been giving throughout.
I’m not interested in advantages for “debating” purposes. I really do believe that whether the choice is agnosticism, atheism, or theism we are choosing by faith as I described above. In that sense, we all do stand in the same place and in my view that should lead to a sort of humility. I do not stand above the fray- I stand in the same place as everyone else.
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteWhat you say is entirely reasonable, given what you describe here as faith. Yes, under this definition, we all make faith based decisions. How could we not?
However, it is perhaps worth reiterating that this is not the aspect of the decision making process that drives me towards agnosticism. You ask how would B being a shared belief make any difference, and here is the crux of the matter. You say, when the evidence is considered, we must then move on, commit to something. Well, what do we mean by evidence? Don't we mean that store of knowledge that sits agreed upon in the public domain? So, if the B upon which we stand is commonly held, then it is evidence, rather than faith based, is it not? And so we can reject faith based proposition A without committing to any other faith based proposition, if the grounds are attachment to proposition B, which is commonly held, or what we would call evidence.
So, I am proposing that agnosticism of following evidence (or shared belief) as far as it will take us, and no further. If, beyond that point, we wish to explore the implications of various private beliefs, then of course we should. I'm interested though in whether a problem occurs (it does for me) at the point where we wish to affirm that these private beliefs say something about a reality that extends beyond our own head. If intuition /faith can lead two different people in opposite directions, and no reason or evidence can resolve this difference, then what are the implications of assuming one is right and one is wrong?
Three implications that encourage me to be cautious here are these. First, I end up having to explain why my intuition is better than yours, as you did when you raised possible reasons why my intuition has led me away from the truth of God. The second is, once this methodology has been licensed as reasonable, how do we mount an argument against, say somebody whose intuition tells them the divine plan includes marginalising homosexuals? Third, is there a resulting cultural bias against investigating the workings of the intuitive/faith forming process? If the result of my faith leap becomes too important to me, is there then an incentive not to pursue lines of inquiry that might undermine it?
Now, all three of these concerns are highly subjective, and speak to my personal condition and taste. And so I don't argue agnosticism is in any sense superior, I just wish to point out what I see as the potential implications of faith based reasoning, both because somebody may be able to contradict them and ease my fears, and because others who share my tastes may be able to reflect upon and modify my argument. Both are excellent outcomes, for me.
Bernard
Bernard-
ReplyDeleteYou pose a fair question of whether a god, or god-like, metaphor is useful at all. There are so many questions thrown into this pot that it seems useful to make a taxonomy of some of them: How did the universe begin and what holds it together? Is there life after death? Does my life have meaning beyond what I give it? Is there a cosmic Big Brother totting up our merits/demerits? Are morals objective, and if so, what created them? What is the nature of information, logic, mathematics, and similar abstractions?
To be brief, I will only mention a couple. For questions of the nature of the universe at large, history shows that we (via intuition) have made such hash of asking and answering them, that I am completely agnostic and content to leave it to professionals in physics, who even now acknowledge enormous holes in our best understanding. I am even agnostic on the question of whether such questions are answerable at all.
The question about life after death is where my patience runs out. The answer is no. All reason and evidence shows that our brains do information processing, and this information processing only happens in material media, thus our conscious experience and everything else about us dissolves on death. Naive intuition certainly screams otherwise, but as you note, despite all my encomiums to intuition above, our intuitions need to be trainable to be optimally useful, and if we can't retrain our intuitions to deal with this most basic fact of death, it does not speak well of our abilities as humans to deal with reality.
On questions of personal meaning, a brief way to put it is that Shakespeare investigated such issues with some depth and nary a mention of god at all. So the god metaphor is hardly necessary to deal constructively or deeply with them. Indeed with the way it is habitually reified into "belief" & certainty, and gathers up tangential theories, social purposes, & political functions as an unwieldy, ponderous, and intellectually flaccid "theory of everything" doesn't speak well of it at all.
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteI certainly appreciate your patience with me and I see your point. I too think you are looking at this very reasonably and openly.
“You say, when the evidence is considered, we must then move on, commit to something. Well, what do we mean by evidence? Don't we mean that store of knowledge that sits agreed upon in the public domain?”
Only partly. I also mean the reflections upon our life experience, other’s experiences, history, and our best attempts to reflect upon the wisdom we encounter in literature, music, art, poetry, and philosophy. Knowledge is much more than knowing the sun is hot. Further, as already discussed, just because knowledge like the earth is round is shared and public, it has nothing do with the question of God’s existence. Again, that would be a category error. God is not like a planet. We cannot detect God on radar or see God through a telescope. So it is false to say that we cannot “know” God exists because we cannot “know” it like we know the earth is round.
“So, if the B upon which we stand is commonly held, then it is evidence, rather than faith based, is it not? And so we can reject faith based proposition A without committing to any other faith based proposition, if the grounds are attachment to proposition B, which is commonly held, or what we would call evidence.”
No, I do not believe we can only call empirical knowledge “evidence.” I believe I made that point very clear when I said, one, it would be privileging empiricism—a philosophical position (which is what you are telling me you are not doing in this process), and two, as noted above, it would still be making a category error to think it applied to this conversation (whether or not God exists). Also, as noted already, I think evidence encompasses much more than empirical knowledge.
“Three implications that encourage me to be cautious here are these. First, I end up having to explain why my intuition is better than yours, as you did when you raised possible reasons why my intuition has led me away from the truth of God.”
Well, if I said my intuition was “better” than yours I apologize. I did not mean that. First, again, I am not talking about intuition in the same sense as you—clearly. I should have said my “faith” and I would mean in the sense I have been describing, which is not in spite of or without evidence. And I don’t think I said your intuition had led you away from God. I believe I said that empiricism, naturalism, or scientism could hinder one’s “intuition” from being able to “see” God or consider that possibility. I should have not used the word “intuition”. I should have said I think those things can hinder a person from reasoning to and stepping out toward (faith) a view that God indeed exists.
Again, we all have the same evidence—shared and otherwise. We all participate in the human condition. We all have the same intuitive capabilities. We all stand in the same place. Because I have come to a different conclusion, such says nothing about my intelligence, intuition, or reasoning abilities.
Honestly Bernard, I think these faith decisions we make (whether agnosticism, atheism, or theism) are a mystery. They are personal. They are deeply held. I would even say that we ourselves are sometimes not so sure why we have made these choices. Why do we love the woman (or man) that we do? Why do we have the passions we do? Why does a song, a book, a movie, or a sunset strike us they way they do? I think these faith decisions fall into that same category. Interestingly enough, all these things have a shared aspect to them and they are true in a way (a much more important way I might add) that the earth’s roundness can never be as true.
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteThanks for sticking with this. It may be we're approaching the point of going round in circles now, but let me try a couple of points:
I think, as always, the way we use certain words, like evidence, knowledge, intuition, can cause confusion. If we are to use evidence to mean the sum total of our experiences, as you suggest, then I certainly need to recast my argument. I am interested primarily in that data available to all, which is to say that with described/measured/adjudged in the same way by all participants. It is that which is commonly available, if you like. The way you are using evidence here is entirely valid, but takes away from this commonality, so can I perhaps use the term 'common experience' for what I'm trying to get at?
I don't think there's any category error here, in part because the claim itself is so often question begging, but also because in this case it is precisely the difference in categories that I'm pushing. The way I know I love my wife, don't appreciate jazz or am bored by action movies is clearly different from the way I know rain makes me wet. The difference seems to be that the first is a commentary upon my private experience of the world, the second a commentary upon our public experience. I don't think my response to jazz has anything useful to say about how others might hear it, but I do think what I know about the link between rain and wetness applies beyond my internal experience.
So, rather than be happy to call the whole belief thing mysterious, mine is a nature that prefers to dig away and see if this distinction between private and public knowledge has something interesting to tell us about the implications of the way we understand and talk about belief and disbelief in God. I'm proposing, as you seem to be, that here we are talking of a different category of belief/knowledge, and am asserting it has much in common with other private beliefs. What is unique, however, is the way the belief in this case is interpreted, as pertaining to something beyond the private experience. At this point, I claim certain implications can be teased out, some of which I find uncomfortable.
I'm not sure you buy this private/public distinction, however, and if I'm right about this, perhaps I can ask you why you don't?
Bernard
Hi Bernard,
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking about this public/private distinction and I wonder whether there is an equivalent (?) formulation in terms of processes.
You describe the difference in terms of available data or evidence, shared (or widely available) in the case of public knowledge and, well, private in the case of private knowledge. Presumably, we can all draw similar conclusions from shared evidence.
The alternative definition I have in mind would define the very meaning of a “public” proposition in terms of some verification mechanism, or process, or relevant experiments we can run. Thus, the proposition “the Earth is round” means that, if you do this or that or look at this data, you will get this result. There is no such mechanism for subjective statements (“I don't like Jazz”).
While one definition is “static” (referring to shared facts and evidence), the other is dynamic (referring to well-defined processes). I'm not sure they are equivalent but but perhaps it's useful to look at this issue in these different ways.
By the way, I think your last comment never appeared on the blog – presumably lost in the spam folder. (I got it as an email follow-up). Perhaps Eric could try to restore it.
Hi JP
ReplyDeleteI think any framework that help clarify the distinction is helpful. Perhaps the problem with using the verification process as the basis for a distinction is that the process itself relies upon an intuition (regularity) that isn't itself verifiable. Those who dislike the private/public distinction will perhaps wish to suggest a double standard here, and then from there construct a case that says, given verification alone doesn't work, the distinction we're after isn't tenable.
So, I tend to think it's better to talk about the output (consensus) rather than the process, as I think all participants in the debate can begin by finding the consensus beliefs upon which our privates worlds are then built. Having said that, this approach still seems to be taking me round in circles, so there may be a smarter way of doing it.
Bernard
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteI apologize for taking so long to respond, I didn’t see your response until recently.
“I think, as always, the way we use certain words, like evidence, knowledge, intuition, can cause confusion. If we are to use evidence to mean the sum total of our experiences, as you suggest, then I certainly need to recast my argument.”
Yes I had hoped you would see that. I’m sure you would agree with me that as to questions of the type discussed on this blog, “evidence” must take into account the sum total and not just knowledge like knowing the earth is round. I’m sure you agree that knowledge is much more than knowing the sun is hot. A cat “knows” that about a stove. So what?
“I am interested primarily in that data available to all, which is to say that with described/measured/adjudged in the same way by all participants. It is that which is commonly available, if you like. The way you are using evidence here is entirely valid, but takes away from this commonality, so can I perhaps use the term 'common experience' for what I'm trying to get at?”
Well two points: First, again, the fact that there is a universally shared understanding that fire is hot would not address issues such as God’s existence. God is not like fire. Second, the human condition is such that we do share a lot of experiences that cannot be measured the way you suggest. The great majority still knows what we mean when we say our feelings have been hurt, or we love our wives, or we are feeling sentimental, or sad. The fact that literature, music, art, poetry, and drama can echo these shared experiences is “empirical” evidence if you like that it is not only knowledge like the earth being round that is “common” or available to all. And, in fact, it is the kind of knowledge that resonates to a degree much greater and deeper than the “shared” knowledge that the earth is round. So, whatever term you want to use it should encompass the totality and not just privilege empiricism, which if used in this way becomes a meta-physical belief system or faith.
“I don't think there's any category error here, in part because the claim itself is so often question begging, but also because in this case it is precisely the difference in categories that I'm pushing. The way I know I love my wife, don't appreciate jazz or am bored by action movies is clearly different from the way I know rain makes me wet.”
Liking or not liking Jazz is a personal subjective preference. Knowing that rain makes us wet is a universal objective fact. But clearly it is a category error to say that God is like rain or jazz. That is the point. Again you are already presupposing that saying “I believe in God” is like saying “I prefer Jazz music.” That is the very point of contention so you beg the question.
“I'm not sure you buy this private/public distinction, however, and if I'm right about this, perhaps I can ask you why you don't?”
Well I do not when it is incorrectly applied in a conversation like this one for all the reasons already noted. Liking red wine over white is a private preference. Asserting that God exists or that torture is wrong for everyone (even if a law was passed making torture legal) is a statement meant to be objective in the sense of pointing away from my personal preference or will. It means it is “true” in a way quite different than believing “truly” that red wine is preferable to white. That is just common sense; the normal use of language and context.
And this is a distinction that the great majority of people, both in the academy and on the street, have understood for some time.
"But clearly it is a category error to say that God is like rain or jazz."
ReplyDeleteNot clear why this is true, actually. This is really the entire question. What is god? What is it to me? I can see that it is all things and much else to you, but how does that make it anything in particular to me?
You presuppose categories that others don't have any reason to participate in, other than that may share you cultural path and imaginative models. But what makes it compelling and unavoidable?
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteBurk has beaten me to it, but I'm glad you've been so clear because it does help me to restate my central concern.
Yes, we accept that liking jazz or getting wet in the rain are two different categories. Specifically, we accept that the statement 'standing in the rain makes me wet' is applicable beyond my experience. It makes other people wet too, we can think of this as public knowledge.
My response to jazz is private in so much as I readily concede that my inability to appreciate has little to say about the ability of others to enjoy the form. In other words the statements 'jazz is great' and 'jazz is lousy' can be simultaneously valid, as they are reached by people going inward and examining their own, unique repsonses to the shared data (in this case the sound waves, other vibrations and perhaps visual cues).
Now, if I were to insist believing in God is just like enjoying jazz, that would be question begging, in exactly the same way that claiming they're not is question begging. The questions I would ask is, if we are to create a separate belief category for God (and its corollary, objective moral truth)then on what grounds could we do it? We can observe that like jazz, but unlike rain, two observers can reach opposite conclusions. So we can state 'there is a God' or 'there is no God' and it's not at all clear that there is any compelling evidence or line of reasoning that can bring the two together. So in this sense it appears ot fit the jazz category. What then is the basis for believing the extra category exists?
Now, I'm not arguing there isn't a separate category, so I don't think the empiricism charge sticks. Rather, I'm suggesting that if we accept a third category, one in which subjective judgements (by which I mean non-universal judgements) lead to objective truths, some problems seem to emerge.
First, we need to explain either how two contradictory subjective beliefs can both be objectively true, or we need to expalin why some people's judgements lead them to truth, and others don't.
Second, what's to stop us expanding this new third category to include any subjective belief? If a jazz fan wants to claim that like a belief in God, a belief in the purity of jazz speaks to a deep objective truth (or a belief in fairies, or the deeply held belief in the wrongness of homosexuality...) then what move would be left to block them? Haven't we just opened the stable gates?
And finally, at the point where we say the way intuition leads some to truth is simply mysterious, don't we suppress the legitimate urge to better understand what human intuition is, and how it works?
Bernard
Bernard,
ReplyDelete“Now, if I were to insist believing in God is just like enjoying jazz, that would be question begging, in exactly the same way that claiming they're not is question begging. The questions I would ask is, if we are to create a separate belief category for God (and its corollary, objective moral truth)then on what grounds could we do it?”
So, you do see how rain and jazz are not like God—so do we agree there? As to the rest, first, no one is “creating” a third category. The category simply exists as reflected in the writings, musings, and reflections of every culture going back to antiquity. And it has always been understood as something different than a subjective preference. Much of this goes clear back to Plato. I did not dream up a category for God and if you want to know the grounds you will have to trek back through much of the history of philosophy and theology—I am not stating anything new or original—as already pointed out by Appleyard. For recent discussion, you could also look at the work of Gilbert Ryle.
Suffice to say, unless you are aware of a Christian theologian/philosopher somewhere who posits that God is like Big Foot, or Superman, or a UFO, then you cannot keep asserting that God is similar to or meets the same criteria as to what we would normally apply to or discern by empirical proof or lack thereof. It is an obvious category error in my mind anyway. If you do find such a theologian, then you will have great arguments to make with him. Plus, I don’t see how pointing out a category error is begging the question.
“We can observe that like jazz, but unlike rain, two observers can reach opposite conclusions. So we can state 'there is a God' or 'there is no God' and it's not at all clear that there is any compelling evidence or line of reasoning that can bring the two together. So in this sense it appears ot fit the jazz category. What then is the basis for believing the extra category exists?”
I just don’t get this. Your real problem seems to be with the idea of disagreement itself. Maybe that is just a temperament or personality issue with you. Again, the fact we can agree the sun is hot but we have differing ideas of what justice should mean has nothing to do with each other and certainly doesn’t mean that one or both of us could be right or wrong about our conceptions of justice. And when you note “compelling evidence” you are slipping back into the privileging of empiricism. We can reach differing conclusions about God’s existence because God is not like music or sound waves. I will state it again: When someone, in the normal use and context of language, states “I really prefer classical music,” they are not communicating the same idea as when someone says “I believe in God.” I don’t know how to make that any clearer. (Continued)
(Continued)
ReplyDeleteNow, you may be saying something like, “but they should realize they are saying the same thing…” or, “but I wish we could think of belief in God and our preference for classical music in the same way…” but such is a different matter beyond also being question begging. The point for now is that people understand the distinction between personal preferences and statements about matters they believe to be true in an objective universal way.
“First, we need to explain either how two contradictory subjective beliefs can both be objectively true, or we need to expalin why some people's judgements lead them to truth, and others don't.”
Think about how you are framing this. If we are talking about two different subjective preferences like wine tasting, no one is asserting one can be objectively true. But as we’ve already discussed—that is not the same as one person personally asserting belief in God and another asserting disbelief. So that we don’t make a category error (God is not like wine) and if we are going to assume normal usage and context of language, we know that both can assert opposite conclusions and live with the knowledge that one or both could be wrong.
Without begging the question or making category errors you cannot just keep assuming that belief in God is like preferring jazz to classical music and then keep asking me to explain how it is then possible to make God objective or subject to empirical proof. God is not like wine or jazz. When a person asserts he believes in God, no one assumes (unless they’ve made a prior commitment to agnosticism or atheism) that what the person really means is he prefers believing in the God fairy tale over some other fairy tale—is it just his personal subjective preference—not anything he really believes to be true as in God actually existing. Conversely, when a person notes he believes white wine to be better than red, no one assumes he is asserting a universal objective truth. Do you understand this distinction?
To the second part of your statement, as I already pointed out, it is possible that one’s prior faith commitments to empiricism/scientism prevent one from “seeing” or “hearing” a different view especially if that view calls into question their current view and creates a cognitive dissonance or anxiety. I would also ask why this can’t be turned around: How is it that your judgment has led you to the truth of agnosticism while the rest of us have been duped into belief? Are you saying your judgment or “intuition” is better than others? Now, frankly, I don’t care if you are saying that. But it would seem you are violating the very problem you’ve been asserting you don’t like about either affirmative belief in God or atheism.
“And finally, at the point where we say the way intuition leads some to truth is simply mysterious, don't we suppress the legitimate urge to better understand what human intuition is, and how it works?”
I thought I had made this very clear—I am not talking about intuition. And, if understanding that these types of decisions are mysterious suppressed the urge to understand the human condition better, why are there still tons of books written, music written, poetry written, paintings painted, and movies made every year all trying to capture and understand this mystery? These are the reasons a Shakespeare writes. Suppressing? Hardly.
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteI understand you believe I'm attempting to privilege empiricism, by insisting on measurable evidence before a statement can be accepted as knowledge. So, to clear that up first, I'm making no such claim. I am making the much less demanding claim that there is a category difference between those beliefs which are reached by all people considering the issue (and empirical evidence may or may not be part of this process) and those beliefs where people can quite validly reach opposite conclusions. You're exactly right, my taste problem is with the process of disagreement, and how we choose to view this.
The process by which two people reach opposite conclusions, and despite genuinely open minds, can not bring the other around, appears to be a subjective process. It is what the individual brings to the table that pushes them to their conclusion.
I absolutely understand the distinction you are making, that the truth about God's existence is objective (it either exists or doesn't)whereas this need not be true for the existence of, say, the greatest novel ever written. I think this itself may be question begging by the way, but let's leave that aside because it's not crucial to my case.
The point is, the process by which we reach our beliefs about God is subjective. I mean this only in the non-controversial sense that we do indeed find thoughtful people spread across the belief spectrum. And this raises some difficulties for me. The first is, in order to explain these differences, the person who believes their stance is more than a matter of personal taste needs to explain how others hold the different, defective view. And to your credit, you tackle this head on, and suggest there is anxiety caused by dissonance stemming from undue attachment to a particular methodology. It is exactly this type of dismissal I have no taste for. When I go looking for God in my personal experiences, I come up empty handed. Perhaps this is because my mind is too inflexible, and I'm closed to the message, but that's a huge call to make on another's behalf. In my head it plays like arrogance, and so, unlike you, I resist the conclusion that my subjective processes lead me to objective truths.
The second point, which you don't yet address, is that the Platonic hunch that underpins religious belief could also be used to support belief in fairies at the bottom of the garden. If I am to give credence to subjective belief forming processes in one case, then why not in the other? For a great deal of history, many people have been convinced of the existence of the little people.
Your last point, that my agnosticism requires me to dismiss other subjective positions, doesn't seem to work, precisely because my position, I acknowledge, is purely about taste. I'm not saying your position is wrong, I am saying, given its implications, I have no taste for it. The problem of dismissing others as less capable of sensing truth, the problem of having to extend this belief right to all beliefs, no matter how apparently weird, worries me. And, until I can see how these are not logical implications of the beleif position, these worries wil keep me from believing.
I'm not claiming in any way that you should share my worries. Indeed, it seems you don't. Fair enough. What interests me in these discussions is the possibility that I am wrong to draw the conclusions I am, that my worries are based upon a logical inconsistency. Clearly, were that the case, my stance could change and that would be exciting.
Bernard
Bernard,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the thougthful response and I am happy to leave you the last word here.
Darrell-
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can see, there are only a few ways to share ideas. One is by logic or definition.. given the apparatus of math, 1+1=2. The next is by empirical demonstration (plus any logic required). And the last is by appealing to intuition / sympathy / emotion in the listener. That is all the categories I can come up with.
Whether intuition is effective is highly variable, of course, since it is so prone to social influence. Whole populations may share, for example, racist intuitions that are quite strong, yet not in the end terribly defensible when one gets beyond the intuition and social training.
You claim that god is not the former, but also not in the latter class. Are there others? Is faith a special kind of direct perception like seeing red, that some people are blind to, and which is impervious to sharing? If so, then why all the rationlistic arguments from cosmic necessity, moral necessity, etc.? It would be much better to find out what exactly creates this form of perception in our minds so that it can be reproduced and propagated to those who are without, much as night vision goggles are produced, and other sense-enhancing instruments?
I am just groping for a theory of what kind of category the god-idea resides in.
Bernard,
ReplyDeletePerhaps I was too hasty. I do have some further thoughts on this but I will probably post them on my own blog as it is way too much to try and post in a response here and I think this thread is done for now anyway. But if you are interested in my further take on this--I will put something up in the next few days. Cheers.
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteThanks, I'll keep an eye out for it. I think I've tried to post a comment on your site previously and had no luck, so apologies if I'm unable to reply on that forum: nevertheless, I'll read with interest, and no doubt have an opportunity to converse again here at some stage.
Cheers
Bernard
Bernard
Hi Darrell
ReplyDeleteI had no luck posting on your site, it doesn't seem to have an option just for name. Here's what I would have liked to leave:
You make three arguments against my case. The first, that to think in terms of taste still has the implication that my taste is better than yours. The alternative, however, that my taste just suits me better than yours, involves no such dismissal, as it explicitly acknowledges the subjective component of taste claims.
The second presupposes that I believe all religious judgements are ultimately taste judgements. I don't. It may well be some people are making judgements about a deeper reality in which their intuition provides helpful guidance. I am simply saying I have no taste for preferring my own intuition over those of others when the context is objective.
The third, the argument for moral objectivity, relies a little on the second, and the same objection applies. I suspect you and I do have a different model of moral truths, however, but that will require another long and careful argument to untangle.
Bernard