rgb's comments (member since Apr 15, 2008)

rgb's comments from the Atheists and Skeptics group.

Jastrow was a good, if controversial, astrophysicist, who self-identified as an agnostic, not a theist. His remarks about "curtains being drawn" simply refer to the erasing effect of the very (very very) high temperature of the very early state of the Universe. Temperature is a measure of "random energy" -- connected to entropy, heat, disorder -- and he is basically (correctly) saying that we cannot easily extrapolate back to the structure of mass-energy in the times preceding the BB itself, any more than we can tell from looking at a cloud of steam that it at one time was an ice sculpture of a swan.

What we can say, very definitely, is that we have not directly observed any act of "creation", looking hard (where at one time a prevailing theory of physicists such as Hoyle was one of "continuous creation", mass energy appearing in space to maintain a constant density as the Universe expanded) to the extent where the law of physics is conservation of mass-energy, not creation of mass energy. That is to say, it is physical law that mass-energy is neither created nor destroyed, and there isn't the slightest reason to suppose that this law does not extend back before the specific time of the big bang.

In my opinion, the scenario that is the most consistent with our general knowledge of physics is of an infinite cycle of expansions and contractions. An interesting question is whether or not the infinite cycle is ultimately periodic (with a very, very, very... long period). If the underlying dynamic is closed and deterministic on a discretized metric, it would be. If it is truly infinite (unbounded, with uncountably infinite continuous spacetime(s)) it need not be. I find it somewhat implausible that there would be a single cycle of expansion as it would break the kind of symmetry that reigns everywhere we look between the past and the future.

Symmetry, you might ask? Absolutely. The only asymmetry observable is information theoretic -- a progression from a less probable to a more probable configuration in a vast configuration space. The progress of entropy is the only thing that appears to give time an arrow, as microscopic physics is essentially reversible (as even Hawking now reluctantly agrees). Even black holes cannot remove information from the cosmos, they can merely hide it where it is difficult to retrieve.

The problem with entropy is that it is in some sense an illusion, a measure of our ignorance that disappears in any global statement of time evolution of "everything". The real question is -- is our Cosmos everything that is, or are exotic theories of additional dimensions or multiple Cosmi true? If they are, our Cosmos is not closed, it is open. In that case, even things like mass-energy conservation become global laws of the multicosmic Universe and Cosmos-local energy/entropy conservation might be violated.

Two books (yes, it is a book list!) that explore this possibility (out of many that exist) are Asimov's The Gods Themselves, where he explores the energy/entropy violating consequences of opening windows between an infinite sequence of multicosmi in a damn good and thought provoking story, and Stephenson's recent Anathem which I've finished and will give five stars and a damn good review to shortly.

In recent years, the only philosophers worthy of the name have been SF&F writers. Terry Pratchett, for example. Stephenson has elevated himself to perhaps the head of this list between this book and the Quicksilver trilogy. The philosophy -- and physics and speculative physics -- in Anathem is absolutely brilliant, and the story is very entertaining as well.

In the meantime, I applaud Alex's imagining that God lives in another space and time and acted in that spacetime to "create" this one. Out of what, Alex? Perhaps the contents of that spacetime? What rules govern the spacetime in which God lives? How does God exist to think, if thought and the experience of time require entropy? Entropy contradicts omniscience.

There are some mathematical and logical issues associated with the rigorous postulate of God that theologians refuse to face (or more likely, are simply incompetent to face, as people who can do math and physics only very, very rarely manage to suspend their disbelief enough to become an actual theist these days). I personally think these issues are fascinating and completely legitimate subjects for metaphysical speculation, but the speculation needs to be done with some sort of rules lest one spout nonsense.

In particular, making the Cosmos appear out of nothing -- that's a neat trick, don't you think? If nothing exists, then God doesn't exist because an existing God would not be nothing. If God has always existed in an entropic spacetime with rules and structure (things that seem essential for thought to occur, one might think) and at some point caused the Cosmos appear out of himself, then the Universe has always existed, and was not created. Then either God is the Universe, or God is part of the Universe. In the latter case, God is arguably not God.

All of which is the kind of speculation that is entirely permissible in mathematics or metaphysics or even theoretical physics or an intersection of all three, as it is the kind of "semi-bullshit" reasoning that is disconnected from threads of evidence in this Cosmos, at least as far as we can now tell. However, reasoning out various conclusions from various postulates can sometimes suggest experiments that could be done to increase or decrease our degree of belief in assertions in those meta-theories.

Alex doesn't like it, but I'm quite serious when I invite Jesus to tea. Jesus promises a number of absurdities in the NT. Among them are great powers over the physical cosmos -- the ability to heal, speak in tongues, raise the dead, move mountains, ask for anything in Jesus's name and have it granted. Jesus promises to return in the lifetime of his own Apostles. Jesus endorses the story of Noah as literal truth, the story of Jonah as literal truth. Jesus thereby openly invites empirical verification of his claims of Godhead -- we would know that he was indeed God if his claims were enduringly true.

They are not. I ask Jesus to stop by for tea (or a glass of wine) and he does not show. He is all powerful, created the entire Universe without effort as a direct manifestation of his simple whim, and could satisfy my request more easily than I can strike a single key on my computer. I am quite sincere -- I want nothing more than to know the truth about the Universe as best as I can in my lifetime with finite experience. Yet in spite of my sincerity and the ease with which my request could be granted, it is not.

Obviously Jesus also lied when he promised to return in his Apostles lifetimes. He lied about moving mountains and healing the sick on request (I've certainly tried that one, oh yes I have) and about apocalyptic events. Or rather, Jesus most probably did not lie. From the evidence I personally have accumulated by asking him to fulfil simple requests that would serve to verify his objective existence to me and getting null results, I conclude that it is rather improbable that Jesus (if an individual by that name ever existed) was anything like "God".

This isn't bashing Jesus, or bashing the Bible or Christianity. It is simply stating the results of empirical experiments. Anyone can perform such experiments, just as anyone can measure g, the gravitional field near the earth's surface, or verify the laws of electricity and magnetism. The interesting thing about such experiments is that when they are done under anything like controlled circumstances (that eliminate the bias of the observer) they never return a positive result, where when measuring e.g. g they always return a positive, and consistent, result.

That's why I believe in gravity, and why I don't believe in Jesus. Lack of proof is not proof of lack, but systematic lack of proof is also the lack of a good reason to believe almost any of the infinity of propositions one might choose to make. All it would take is a single successful experiment to increase my degree of belief, of course. In other words, Jesus can show up in my den at any time, and after a chat and a few miracles, I would be absolutely charmed to endorse his probable existence.

rgb

You have a bad habit in some of your posts of dropping in insulting remarks or accusations that are often innacurate and work against your arguement.

Note well that I replied above entirely before reading this line. Obviously I wasn't trying to be insulting, or I was insulting everything that has a brain. What I was trying to do is get you to look at whether or not "emotional" knowledge is in some sense actual knowledge, or if it is a mix of wishful thinking and evolutionary imperative brewed up from chemicals your body and brain mix up in response to various ways of indulging your emotions. The point was (and is) that a junkie is a slave to a chemical hunger, not its master. It really hardly matters if the hunger is a natural one (how could it be otherwise) or if the satisfaction of the hunger is artificial, mental, or natural. The fact that our thoughts are essentially electromechanical waves in a very complex biochemical structure is reason to doubt them, not the opposite.

I encounter this all the time -- students (and my own sons), when asked a question, not infrequently try to "shoot from the hip" and answer it intuitively, instinctively, immediately, based on what they "feel" is the right answer. It takes time and discipline to learn to think clearly, systematically, and reasonably from a question to either "the" answer (in the case of a well-defined mileau, such as "classical physics" or a plausible answer, one that is better than alternatives in the metaphysical or ethical regime.

I certainly didn't mean to offend you, Alex, and I apologize of my discourse either offended you or caused you any pain. I will, however, maintain my point. You offered up "emotional knowledge". I argue that emotional knowledge is not knowledge at all, not until it is founded on something more solid than feelings, and that it is intrinsically suspect because of its origin.

Isn't this a frequent argument of apologists? Aren't our evil impulses the work of Satan, whispering in our minds or something like that, and not to be trusted? I'm just pointing out that all the whisperings of our mind are untrustworthy, and it takes a lot of work and a great deal of skeptical inquiry to establish a foundation for thoughts that might be trustworthy or that we can in some sense are probably trustworthy. Saying "my heart tells me that God exists, so it must be so" isn't an argument, it is an unfounded assertion about your feelings. I am happy to grant that they are your feelings. I'm equally happy to doubt your feelings. I doubt my own.

rgb

Nothing happens without a first cause , the big bang requires a Big Banger. The consequences of the big bang theory for theology are profound.

This is a bare, naked, assertion. It is completely unsupported by observation. It is unsupported by logic -- imagine saying "There can be no numbers without a first number" (if you say this, I'll have to introduce you to my little friend, the real number line).

The consequences for theology of the Big Bang are nonexistent, and if you attempt to claim otherwise, I will ask you to prove it. Which you will be unable to do, save by begging the question, just as you did above.

rgb

Alex wrote: "I loved your last post, very interesting, except the part where you called me a junkie:)
"

I called myself a junkie too, if you look carefully. We are all junkies -- addicted to the neurotransmitters and hormones that make our brains work and that impel us to do things like eat when we're hungry, become sexually aroused, run like a bunny when we're chased by tigers, fight like a tiger when attacked by killer bunnies of Caerbannog, bond with our mates, care for our offspring, seek power and security and wealth and reproductive rank in our tribes. Most of those chemical systems are very ancient, tied into our reptile brains, as they are essential to survival and reproduction. Animals without strong responses failed to eat, failed to run fast enough, failed fight hard enough, failed to gain enough status to win a mate, failed to sire a child, failed to protect the child until it too was able to reproduce. Wherever the chain failed, wherever the animal's release of chemicals or response to the chemical's released was too little or too late, the genes of the loser were eliminated, wherever they were adequate, the animal (and its equally successful offspring) lived to breed and breed again.

Becoming human in no way eliminated any of these essential neural/hormonal systems in the brain; mammals simply evolved new layers of cortex capable of memory and inference, humans added neocortex with language, logic and reason on top of vastly improved inference and much longer memory. But throughout that process of evolution any human animal who failed to respond to hormonal cues to eat, drink, mate, protect offspring, gain status, fight, or flee had an excellent chance of dying young and without issue, another failed watch produced by the blind and indifferent Darwinian watchmaker.

Note well that many of the chemicals involved don't just have neural action -- they bind to cells all over the body and activate or deactivate protein factories galore in ways that are looped around and fed back through your brain over and over again. You can become sexually aroused "voluntarily" by using your imagination. You can become sexually responding to visual and tactile stimulus from your environment. You can become sexually aroused involuntarily but mentally (e.g. from erotic dreams). You can become sexually aroused involuntarily and purely physiologically. All of these modes of sexual arousal are coupled, so that a dream can encourage imagination can lead to direct stimulus can result in involuntary can lead to dreams once again. The mind does not control the body, the body does not control the mind, the mind is (via its hardware) a part of the body with fully interconnected functionality.

Many if not most of the modern cornucopia of mind-altering pharmaceuticals work by binding to receptor sites in the brain (a few, perhaps, work by altering or depressing baseline metabolism or altering neural function in other ways). One can easily become addicted to many of the responses because we are born to become addicted. It isn't just "orgasms feel good" -- it is "orgasms feed a primeval hunger that we are evolved to feel", just as visceral and essential an evolved response as eating to feed our primeval actual hunger when our bodies demand it.

So we have people addicted to morphine for the pain-free euphoria it induces, we have people addicted to e.g. exercise stimulated endorphins that bind to the same sites and produce a similar effect. We have people who become addicted to the adrenaline rush of risk taking and others who become addicted to the same rush but chemically induced from taking e.g. cocaine or other compounds that provoke a similar kind of euphoria and high. And yes, we have people who become addicted to sex or the feeling of love and connection and others who become addicted to compounds like Ex that stimulate the same receptors associated with the euphoria experienced from sex or love or connection.

Of course I'm "addicted" to many of these feelings, to the chemicals that release them. If I weren't I would only eat as a conscious rational decision because hunger wouldn't make me hungry. I'd never have sex at all -- why bother? The first time my sons annoyed me I'd throw them out into the cold and be done with them. Except that without them, I'd be so dysfunctional that even that much action would be impossible -- we are our brain-body system, and if you take away the chemicals that make us work, we don't work. Take away too much, and we fatally don't work.

The interesting thing about humans, however, is that we have at least some ability to objectify our knowledge, to eliminate the bias of our hormones from our assessment of the Universe and knowledge. We can know ourselves, to the extent where we know when, where, and why what we feel is the result of evolutionary subsystems that largely determine our choices, and sometimes we can even override our chemical impulses with reason, we can turn away from the seductive haze of making our inner reptile happy in exchange for the euphoria associated with doing so in favor of leaving our neocortex primarily in charge. We can endeavor to control ourselves with reason and self-knowledge of our reptilian biases that permits us to counter them and hence function better in complex ways within our complex human society.

You like metaphors, and of course there is an obvious one with that good old garden of eden and the reptile that tempted Adam and Eve in to the fall. Jung would argue that we have archetypes, and that lustful animal serpents are one of them. Modern neuropsychology and Darwin would argue that this isn't a metaphor, that we each have an inner reptile that functions almost independent of our higher cortical self and is quite capable of seizing control, and an inner mammal on top of that, with our human self a thin layer that creates, extends and enhances our "higher functionality" -- reason. But we never fell -- we are being uplifted by evolution every day, with every Darwin award that is granted, with every (often stupid) person that fails to reproduce before their death. And in order for the rational mind, the human mind, to win out in the long run, it has to confront and understand its own evolutionary core, form an accommodation of its very real and reasonable needs, and make that mind the servant of the rational mind and not the master -- not the starved, beaten servant that the Catholic church would have us build in many cases but a well fed, healthy servant, with all of its Maslowian needs met. Self-actualized.

Which takes us around once again to what we know, and how we know it. Sure we have all sorts of built in knowledge, hormonal knowledge, instinctive knowledge, neurotransmitter knowledge, enzymatic knowledge. All of this knowledge was evolved into us to solve certain specific survival and propagation challenges without the need of higher cortical function. Snakes fuck. Wildebeest fuck. Humans fuck. No higher thought required, just let yourself go in the direction demanded by your inner reptile. It requires a lot of cortex and a certain amount of will to override the clamoring demand to fuck (when the opportunity presents itself) if the neocortex concludes that whatever the opportunity, it's just a bad idea.

So you speak of emotional knowledge. I say back to you (as one neocortex to another) -- wow, you should really mistrust the "knowledge" returned to you by your emotional subsystem. I'm in no way denying the sensations -- only denying that the sensations are knowledge. They are much more like built in programming, and as is the case with many programs, emotions accomplish the will of the programmer (blind evolution) and not necessarily our rational choice, even when they are emotional impulses to "do noble things". We must function with a system of values, and some part of those values are derived from our evolutionary biases, but it does not hurt to rationally examine those values, deconstruct them, and rebuild them without the bias or at least knowing why we are choosing what we choose, knowing when our emotional "knowledge" has an objective basis all emotion aside.

You sincerely wish to convince us (and perhaps yourself) that your emotional impulse towards believing in God is a good thing and that having that impulse (if I understand you correctly) is evidence that there must actually be a God that corresponds to it and that created that impulse and instilled in humans as a signpost of sorts. Yet when I examine all of the emotional responses in my repertoire of emotion including that one, I can find quite reasonable alternative explanations for them, all of the ultimately rooted in biochemistry and the evolutionary advantages associated with membership in tribal structures that exploited our inference engine to justify its (often capricious and arbitrary) "rules". The appearance of one thing to accomplish a completely different end is more the rule than the exception in evolution, where nature turns to advantage whatever chance gives it. It would be equally justified to conclude that just because I have an impulse to impregnate nearly every female that my reptile brain finds attractive that this impulse must be a good thing that I should indulge, or that I should eat all I want whenever I'm hungry whether or not I'm already overweight because it is a natural impulse and hence "good" or "true".

I find all of these impulses to be untrustworthy guides to knowledge, and frankly to be untrustworthy guides to action as well. We evolved a neocortex that at least partially controls our limbic and brainstem level responses to stimuli, and using it to do so is a survival advantage because reptiles are stupid and do stupid things on a purely instinctual basis. So no matter how good you assert that believing in God makes you feel, no matter how "right" your emotional thinking may seem, if your emotional conclusions cannot be supported by the usual mix of evidence and rational though, they are at the very least suspect. We may not be able to say that they are false, but we very definitely can say that there is no good reason to believe in them, unless and until you provide us with good reasons, not feelings or emotional reasons or wishful thinking or arguments of good outcomes.

This is why it is important to have a common basis for what we agree is knowledge. You trust your feelings. I do not. I feel my feelings, but I trust my rational process of thought, and indeed trust it to control my feelings and deliver me from entirely rationally predictable evil whenever they, if you will forgive the phrase, lead me into reptile-brain-driven temptation.

This is why I think that Buddhism (as an ethical system) is vastly superior -- really much, much better -- than Christianity. It is nearly myth free, essentially rational, and advocates the systematic development of a control system that places the rational mind in control of the desirous and easily frustrated or angered inner reptile. It's not perfect -- Buddha didn't know much about the actual brain and how it worked -- but the idea of it is quite valid and productive even today. And since it isn't a theism, we can actually challenge Buddhism and change it into something better, using critical thought. Christianity asserts a priori that this is impermissible and invented the term heresy to describe it.

Too bad for Christianity.

rgb

And why would I have faith in the God of the Bible. Because I see the moral law most clearly revealed in this jumble of text, and despite the many different authors from different ages, there is a wonderful unity in the text. When one reads the text with faith and the gift of the holy spirit, the book seems to 'come alive' and 'light up' from within itself.

Alex, one could think that the Bible's moral law is just peachy keen and ideal and perfect (in spite of the thousands of examples to the contrary itemized in the SAB) and that is still not a good reason to have faith in God.

Fact: All human societies have moral systems. It is therefore unsurprising that the tribes in the Middle East, as societies, had a moral system.

Fact: Successful human societies have certain common features in their underlying moral systems. Killing your neighbor tends to be frowned on, for example. Worshipping the local Gods tends to be required. Having strong family bonds, caring for your children, not stealing from your neighbor. These are things present in nearly every stable society that anthropologists have ever studied. It is therefore unsurprising that one society in particular in the Middle East had one.

Fact: Writing is a comparatively recent invention and appeared to first arise in Sumeria although there were probably parallel discoveries in other parts of the world. Sumerian writings (therefore) are among the oldest in the world if not the oldest. The culture of the Hebrews is directly descended from and derived from the culture of the Sumerians -- the Hebrews are one of the many Sumerian tribes that split off from the main culture. They possessed the secret of writing. It is therefore unsurprising that the social moral system of the Hebrews was written down and survived (imperfectly) to the present day. There are many other examples of ancient social moral systems that were written down roughly contemporaneous with the system of the Hebrews that also survived, as well as strong evidence in ones that were written down later (when written language was introduced into a region) that there were oral social moral systems in place nearly everywhere that any sort of society existed in the world, forever.

With all of these systems out there, it is unsurprising that some of them would prove to be better than others at preserving the society in a hostile world and would survive -- memetic evolution works the same way as genetic evolution, and is just as inexorable in its progress. With writing, ones that survived survived as written system as soon as the writing meme arrived in a society. All of the systems -- systems of the Greeks, the Romans, the early Aryan cultures, the Chinese cultures, the Japanese cultures, the Mayans, the Incas, the Aztecs, the Polynesians, the African cultures, the European cultures -- had one or more Gods integrated with their social moral code, and (perhaps surprisingly) nearly all of them incorporate some degree of Deific cosmic justice, the reward of the virtuous and punishment of the wicked, either in life or after death or both.

It is therefore unsurprising that these were features of the Hebrew's system as well.

In all of these cultures, their prevailing social moral mythology (written or not) endeavored to explain natural pheonomena (as they were not just moral systems, they were social worldviews, the collective memes of a great or small society to which they pertained). In all of these cultures, the "Gods" were invoked as fundamental causal agents in the world. In many cases the Gods were the "cause" of the world itself (Creation myth). The Hebrew Creation myth (right down to the flood!) is derived from the far more ancient Sumerian myth, which survives in a tablet called the Eridu Genesis excavated at Nippur, apparently scribed roughly six thousand years ago, which is two to three thousand years before Moses.

In all cases the argument that was actually made goes like this. Things that happen must have causes (axiom). Some things first are not, and then are (observation). This "becoming" is kind of happening, and therefore much have a cause (theorem). Some things appear impermanent, many things appear to have first not been, then become, therefore everything must have a cause for its existence (a terrible, flawed, inference, virtually an axiom). The world is a thing, so it must have a cause. Our Gods are therefore the cause of the world (theorem). Furthermore, our Gods are continuing causal factors in the world, responsible for creating life in general, humans in particular, for causing fires and earthquakes and floods and plagues to punish people for wrongdoing, for intervening in wars for the good (of our tribe) if they are pleased and for the bad if they are angry. Good luck is a sign of the blessing of the Gods, bad luck is a sign of their anger, both are a sign that the Gods want to be worshipped as worship is a cause for the indulgence of the Gods -- it alters the outcome of our personal lives in directly observable ways.

Not just the Bible, but in all of them. These are common social religious memes, themes that pervade all of human history, all mythologies. One God or a hundred, it doesn't matter. God's name is indeed Jealous; worship him (according to carefully prescribed rituals), behave correctly according to social norms, and receive blessings and good fortune; fail to worship, behave badly, receive a curse and bad fortune. God(s) must be placated because they are as whimsical and terrifying as the nature they metaphorically represented.

The entire argument for God as put forth in all of these texts -- not just the Bible -- is that the world exists, we are in the world, we all require a cause that is greater than the world and ourselves, that cause is God, Q.E.D. It is all magic and supernatural -- super because it must be to be the cause of the natural.

This entire argument is a self-inconsistent perversion of the process of inference. We are not living in 6000 BCE and do not need to be governed by the ignorant, superstitious, dawn-of-history thinking of the Bronze Age shamans who happened to be the first to write down a mythology that became the basis for many subsequent mythologies, including the Hebrew one and by further extension the Christian one. When we examine the world with actual tools (man, the tool user!) that extend our range of vision, we see that nothing in the world is created, the exact opposite of the axiomatic pronouncements of the ancients. It appears made of eternal "stuff" that merely changes form according to rigorous and inviolate rules. Those rules do not have a cause, those rules are the cause of that which we observe, and the word "cause" itself means something entirely different than it did to the ancients. It now means that "the stuff of existence interacts according to rules that determine its dynamic evolution in time, and those rules all involve interaction between different bits of the stuff". That's it. Causality in a nutshell. One really, really big interaction Hamiltonian coupling "everything" in a unified field theory.

The difference is that where the ancients (as well as an unfortunate number of moderns) would say things like "I am praying for it to rain today. If it rains, it is a "sign" that God exists. If it doesn't rain, it is still a sign that God exists but that God is angry with me or that I failed to pray correctly. Hey, like, it rains, man. It is raining here right now. It is raining because of an enormous thermodynamic system that includes the Sun, the Earth, the Oceans, the Atmosphere and some bloody butterfly in Brazil that beat its wings at just the right time ten years ago, not because somebody prayed (right or wrong) for rain. The Gaps that the ancient Gods once filled are gaps no more. We observe nothing that is inexplicable, only some things that are (so far) unexamined and hence unexplained. Neutrinos were posited long, long before examination managed to verify their existence.

To wrap this long (even for me:-) reply, the actual arguments for God advanced in the Bible are false arguments. We have no reason to believe in a "Creation". By no reason, I mean both that there is no evidence to support it, and that the creation of the Universe by something that is a not a part of the Universe contradicts the definition of Universe. It is logically impossible, a contradiction in terms, for the Universe to have a creator. The existence of a morality in the Bible is unsurprising, and its quality is in no way evidence for its other claims. I can be a peachy guy, the sweetest, best, most lovingkind human you ever meet, with my love and humanity oozing from every pore, and if I say something like "I am really, really good and you really, really like me, so what I tell you must be true", then even if you agree that I'm jut the best fellow you've ever even conceived of that what I tell you must me true? At best you might conclude that I am not deliberately lying, but the best intentions in the world cannot prevent me from being mistaken.

Finally, the old "filled with the holy spirit and light" bit. Come on, Alex. It's a book. It has pages. The only Bible that is filled with light is the SAB, which one reads through a backlit computer screen. The chemical Ecstasy (from what I've read) produces a feeling of deep religious warmth in those that take it, a feeling of connectedness to the world and love for everybody one meets. It is holy spirit and light reduced to a small capsule. The fact that it exists means that we have "holyness and light" receptors in our brains, and the capacity to induce the release of the chemicals like oxytocin that bind to those receptors and produce that feeling. Just as "love is blind" because those sensations overwhelm our ability to think clearly and blind our inner eye, a self-induced spiritual experience blinds you to your own common sense by attributing false causes to the sensation (which is quite addictive, whether it is self-induced or externally induced or chemically induced).

The existence of this feeling is certainly not evidence for the existence of God, no matter how good you feel when you are feeling it, any more than the existence of pain is evidence against the existence of God (where the latter argument is a lot more plausible, however, at least if you posit the usual omnibeneficent standard model of God).

You're basically a junkie. You're addicted to that warm rush of feeling that arises when you feel loved (by an invisible and imaginary friend), when you feel connected (and hence "special" -- with status -- in the Universe), when you read a bunch of incomprehensible garbage, connect it up with your more or less rational moral conclusions obtained through an entirely different process, and feed it back into the release ritual. Sheer idolatry, in the literal sense of the word -- worshipping a thing to get the worship rush.

And when others (such as myself) read the Bible and fail to get that rush? What does that mean? Why, that we're not holding the bong right. You have to inhale man, you can't just watch it smoke from the outside. You have to believe, toke it in righteously, then you'll get the rush.

Trust me.

rgb

So why do people dismiss that which we may know through emotion when it is the very thing that makes life worth living.

I do so hope that by "people" you aren't referring to anyone on this list, suggesting that atheists wander through life desolate, bereft of love, and thereby impoverished. That would be rather silly.

I also hope that you aren't suggesting that any people on this thread have dismissed that which we know "through emotion". But they should, so allow me.

We do not "know" anything through love, Alex. Love, as you noted, is an emotion. As such it is not separate from rational thought as you assert -- if you study the brain (even a little bit) and evolution (even a little bit) you can both see where "love" comes from from an evolutionary point of view on the one hand, can see how important the emotional centers of the brain are to e.g. formation of long term memory and directing our attention, and of course you will have to confront the survival value of love. There's a reason that mammals (higher on phylogenetic tree) love where reptiles and fish (lower) do not, and it is intimately tied into their generic survival strategies.

You are evolved, my friend, to love. Primarily to love your mate and offspring, secondarily to love others in your community. You are evolved to respond positively to being loved and flourish when you are, and to wither and die when love is removed. It all has a purpose -- not your purpose or God's purpose, the purpose of the invisible hand of Darwin -- social groups that were bonded by the stimulus-response chemicals that are the physical basis of the experience of love won the competition to reproduce relative to social groups that were divisive or whose members were unwilling to behave in altruistic ways, over a hundred million or more years.

However, the human brain is highly complex, and the genetic dance produces a lot of variability. Not everybody can experience love. Love (like anything else in the human experience) is complex, and tightly bound to our reasoning centers. Without, as you note, a "valuation" center in our brains, we would be unable to function at all, because "emotion" -- ranking by value -- directs attention, weights response, fixes memory.

So nobody who is reasonably knowledgeable about the brain would denigrate love as a component of rational thought, but love is not the chemical rush you experience when you sit around going "hey, man, I'm lovin', lovin', lovin', and it feels good" -- that's simple drug addition, addiction to your own supply of oxytocin, the same kind of rush one gets from the drug Ecstasy (which appears to work in the serotonin channel to stimulate release of oxytocin). Oxytocin is the chemical that appears to be primarily responsible for everything from the first rush of sexual attraction to the bonding of a mother with her new babies (although as always in the brain, it is more complicated than "just" that). Oxytocin has showed some promise as a treatment for autism, because disorders like autism very likely are in at least some sense a genetically impaired "ability to love". If your receptors for certain hormones don't work, or your production of those hormones doesn't work, or the stimulus triggers for the release of those hormones doesn't work, one is quite literally incapable of experiencing the emotion because we are a process that runs on mechanism.

So let us be very clear about this. Love per se does not lead to knowledge of anything but itself, the experience. The experience of love absolutely does direct our behavior in many ways, often positive, sometimes highly negative ones (as the soap opera channel enduringly attests). The mixture of highly rational thought in a love-capable mammal is indeed a potent force and an extremely important part of what makes us human, but this is something to be understood and cherished as part of our knowledge of self and world, not elevated to the status of sensual worship by abstracting it as a "thing" that somehow has existence independent of the minds and brain chemistry that produce it, by pretending that it has a "cause" independent of the survival advantage it confers in an evolutionary process.

(As an aside worth pursuing, The Lucifer Principle offers up the hypothesis that our biochemistry is highly evolved for participation in social memetic superorganisms, to the point where we literally begin to die the moment we cease to have "importance" and status in one. Loving and being loved keeps us biologically alive, and when our life experience no longer includes the regular release of love-related hormones and neurotransmitters, it signals that our evolutionary purpose is fulfilled and we die so we can get out of the way of our own offspring. Isn't it almost a stereotype? The big, powerful executive is perfectly healthy until he retires, and within a year he is dead?)

With that said, be assured that I am as addicted to the rush as anyone else, and if anything my objective knowledge that love (both loving my self and others and being loved and valued by others in return) is literally a key to our mutual health and survival enhances the experience, because it elevates it and ties it into a higher part of the cognitive experience than just "feeling" it.

Having said the above, I consult my 'Catholic Christianity' book for clarity. 'Faith is not a feeling. It is simply believing in God. It comes from our own free will. And although it is not a feeling it will produce feelings, and can be aided by feelings. Where as belief is an act of the mind, faith is an act of will.
Faith is an act by which one person says to another; 'I choose to trust you and believe you."

Clarity? What does this mean? Faith is "simply believing in God" (independent of all evidence or reason, we must presume, so it is not a rational belief). This makes it an irrational belief, which is something that many people would call "a feeling", as in "I have a feeling that I will win the lottery tomorrow" (without any good reason for thinking so). It certainly isn't a feeling as in "I have a feeling it will be raining when I drive to work this morning" (because it is raining right now and a reliable weather prediction calls for a high probability of rain later as well). We can see that the term "feeling" is rather ambiguous -- in context it is a synonym for belief, either an unsupported and silly belief or a sound one. Clarity is not achieved by saying "Faith is not a belief. It is simply a belief."

Let's deconstruct "belief is an act of the mind, faith an act of the will", while we're at it. What, and where, is this "will" of which you speak? Oh, wait, it is in the mind. My volition is a part of my mind. I turn my attention to things with my mind, my attention is a significant part of mind. My "will" is what I choose to do, and I make choices with my mind, at least if they are voluntary choices. Are you suggesting that my belief in (say) neutrinos (which I have never seen, simply because it is damn hard to see a neutrino, but believe in quite firmly nevertheless) is not an act of will, it is somehow "involuntary", and to be distinguished from belief in God, which is an act of will?

The only real difference I see is this: I choose to believe in the neutrino because I go through a process of reasoning using ideas that have each, individually, stood up to the test of experience. Those ideas allow one to derive the contingent probable existence of the neutrino (as a consequence of conservation of energy and momentum in certain processes, if you care). Then I learn of experiments designed to capture and measure the neutrino directly -- very difficult ones, to be sure -- and of their success. Finally, I discover that people are actually making progress inferring specific things about the neutrino, that enough measurements have been performed that questions such as whether or not it has a mass are addressable. Yes, it is possible that the entire scientific establishment that reports these things to me is lying, but the social, financial, and legal penalties for such a lie are severe, there is considerable oversight, and I think that is implausible. So I trust these results and think it very likely that the neutrino -- an "invisible fairy" particle if ever there was one, ubiquitous and yet so weakly interacting that it takes detectors the size of small mountains to get a good count rate -- really does exist.

In your statement, when it says "faith is an act of will", what does this mean. It means more or less the opposite of this process. It means that one should choose to believe in God as an unsupported act of will. There is no such chain of reason or evidence supporting the belief in God, but one should believe it anyway using your "will" to do so.

If I suggested that you should believe in invisible fairies, you would quite reasonably say "Why should I?" They are invisible (and hence cannnot be observed). If they interacted in any way with our environment, their existence could be indirectly inferred (as is the case with the almost invisible fairy called a "neutrino") and wouldn't be invisible. You or I could be up to our necks in invisible fairies as I type this and no one would be the wiser. Would it satisfy you, would it provide the slightest bit of clarity, if I said "you should beleive in them without evidence in spite of their invisibility as an act of will, because it will make you happier, because it will cause you to release feel-good hormones and live longer, because it is possible that if you believe in fairies while you are alive you get to become an invisible fairy one day instead of dying." I would hope not.

Finally, "faith" (in God) is absolutely not an act where one person says to another "I choose to trust you and believe you." Faith in that person might be. And that faith is quite likely to be misplaced, especially if foolishly granted. Who do we trust? Those whom experience has shown to be trustworthy. If your life experience has been mostly positive in that regard, you are comparatively more likely to buy the Brooklyn Bridge one day because you will extend undeserved trust to strangers. If your experience has been harsh, you may fail to trust the trustworthy and thereby fail to receive benefits. Good judgement consists of learning through experience direct and indirect (through books) who is likely to be trustworthy, who one can have "faith" in with a comparatively high probability of a good outcome.

rgb

Alex wrote: "When you read the Abou Ben Adhem poem did you dismiss it because there is an angel that appears out of thin air and so on. The supernatural elements of the poem in no way take away from the poem but add to its beauty and the comprehension of its message. "

The difference between fantasy and reality should be familiar to anyone who reads fiction of any sort. When I read Abou Ben Adhem, I am aware at the beginning that the poet made no special claims of knowledge of the infinite. The poem is not divine scripture, inspired by the Holy Ghost and penned by a Church Father as an Authority, and hence a matter of Holy Faith. It is a poem, a little nugget of crystallized wisdom. And what it says is that who gives a damn about how much you love or don't love God -- it has nothing to do with goodness! What matters is how much you love (or more practically, behave) towards your fellow humans that is the true nature of goodness.

Stephen, who consistently exhibits a rare compassion for his fellow creatures on this planet is therefore a better man than Jack Chick who is a complete self-righteous a***ole even if he spends all day every day worshipping the hell out of Jesus and drawing cartoons designed to convince complete idiots that wearing a witch costume on Halloween leads to pacts with Satan and eternal damnation.

Stephen's compassion easily exceeds my own, especially a couple of days after the body of a little girl who was sold by her own mother at the age of five for sexual purposes -- caught on film in the act -- was discovered, dead, out in the woods. I, you see, don't really care if the mother was prostituted a the age of five by her mother, I don't care about her heroin habit, I don't care about whether or not she had a deal where the nice man she sold her child to (who no doubt had a history of evil worked on him as well) wouldn't hurt her baby girl. I just want to get all medieval on their asses.

Sure, innocent until proven guilty, maybe she was just taking the girl to a babysitter she knew and trusted on camera, maybe her confession and statements to the contrary were because she's microdeckic, amarbelous, and borderline retarded, but the moment a jury of her peers determines otherwise I'd be very content with her being taken out behind the courthouse and shot in the back of the head, on the spot. It's that slavery, women are not possessions thing and my silly preconception of evil, you see. Evil on deed no live (bad people don't need to live, palindromic-style).

Once again, the difficulty is where you draw the line between myth and reality, fantasy and fact in the Bible. I cited a Christian website that consists of nothing but apologia intended to make one believe that the Bible is all literal truth, that God really did stop the Earth in its tracks and even spun it backwards to accomplish trivial goals that could have been accomplished many other ways. You read these, go "aha, one cannot stop the Earth in its tracks" and conclude that this never happened, and therefore means something like "trust in God". You read something else that is equally implausible, such as "Jesus died, came back from the dead and hung out with the Apostles for a few days, then ascended to heaven untouched by dirty old Mary but touched by clean old Thomas" and conclude that it is the literal truth, and doesn't just mean "Jesus's apostles really missed him after he died, a rumor that he didn't really die spontaneously arose (as things like this often do and have, historically) and after twenty years and a trip to another world entirely, people who had never met Jesus wrote down this rumor as established fact", something that is a lot more plausible and that actually doesn't contradict the enormous amounts of scientific knowledge that indicate that coming back from a state of actual death is impossible once entropy begins to have its way with the underlying cells.

You see, that's why believing in the absurdities of stopping the Sun, the flood, the Creation myth are so important. Bringing Jesus back to life is easy compared to stopping the Earth in its rotation, compared to creating an entire Universe ass-backwards, compared to causing it to rain enough to cover the Earth to the top of mount Everest in only 40 days and nights and then making all of that water disappear just as rapidly afterwards. Somebody who believes the former wouldn't blink at believing the latter.

Somebody who disbelieves the former, in contrast -- why, exactly, should they suddenly believe the latter? The Old Testament is full of crap. Jesus clearly believed in this crap according to the myth of Jesus. Paul clearly believed in this crap according to his own (supposed) words. We reject it as crap because we have a better standard of knowledge that is contradicted by the crap. We have the same better standard of knowledge that is contradicted by the crap in the New Testament as well.

Either miracles (direct violations of natural law) are impossible or it is impossible to judge which reported miracles are crap and which ones aren't, with no middle ground. In the former case, there is no reason to think that Jesus was divine (even granting that there is adequate reason to believe that Jesus ever lived at all so that what we have are stories of a legendary figure instead of an entirely mythical one). In the latter case, there is no good reason to disbelieve in any proposition, no matter how fanciful. If I attest to you -- honest injun -- that I'm sitting here in my office right now with Jesus, who at long last has taken me up on my offer to pay me a visit and share a glass of magically converted wine, you become incapable of expressing rational grounds for disbelieving my assertion because they are exactly the same grounds you would need to consistently use to disbelieve any personal testimony of similar visitations in the NT.

This sort of thing just never happens, even though there are numerous cases where liars and charlatans assert that it does every day of the year. All efforts to validate the truth of their assertions end up concluding the opposite, which is why I call them liars and charlatans. Their claims violate natural law, which makes them even more unlikely (much more unlikely, as unlikely as you judge the probability of a such a violation given the lack of any evidence for such a violation ever happening. It does not happen now and there is no good reason to think that it ever did, many excellent reasons to think that it never did.

Again, the issue is striving for consistency in your belief system. You continue to make good progress in our discussions, as you are increasingly willing to judge parts of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, as being a complicated form of spiritual fiction, capable of conveying a bit of wisdom but not necessarily any more so than (say) Neal Stephenson novels. Possibly even less. Now apply the same sort of critical thinking to the New Testament.

Trusting in God is not a matter of proof or scientific analysis. Regardless of sacred text or total lack of sacred text belief in a higher power is a personal choice.

What does "trusting in God" mean? Trusting him to keep your life pain free? Not happening. Trusting him to arrange for you to live forever? That's like trusting that you will win the lottery, only no its not. People do, rarely, win the lottery. Trusting that God exists? All of the "good" that follows from this belief comes from your contingent belief that God both exists and acts -- intervenes in the world, enforces cosmic justice, rewards you with "heaven" if you are both good to your fellow humans and quote unquote "accept Jesus as Lord" (whatever that means). It requires that you develop an entire theory of God that permits you to predict how God acts, and my the nature of your own self-imposed rules, you deny any possibility of verifying whether or not your theory is correct! Because the basis for verification is necessarily empirical, experiential.

The only way you can find out if you will live forever is by doing it. I myself seem to have missed half of forever (the half in the past before my birth). I find the prospect of missing the future half of forever about as scary. I wasn't there before (and did not suffer). I won't be there after (and expect not to suffer). In between, joy and pain, love and war, youth, aging, and death -- the entropy-driven experience of time.

The one thing I agree with you on is that belief or not in any sort of theory of God is a personal choice, with or without the sacred text bit. Sacred texts we should almost certainly mistrust, as there are lots of them, and nearly all of them are inconsistent with science (where we have good, or at least defensible, reasons to believe in scientific knowledge), they are mutually inconsistent, they are internally self-inconsistent, and our reason requires at least near-consistency for our knowledge as a coherent whole for us to consider it knowledge. If you are coming around to the point where you are actively doubting your favorite sacred text, you've made great progress towards a reasonable worldview and I congratulate you.

Scientifically, once you strip away the scriptural text and ask the up-front theoretical metaphysical question "is it reasonable to believe in God", you have to treat it exactly the same way one would treat a question in theoretical or mathematical physics.

First of all, it is IMO not an a priori meaningless question, falsifiable or not. I can ask "Does the Universe continue on for an infinite distance in all directions?" Any mathematician or physicist understands perfectly well what the question is asking once one has clearly defined infinity and asserted it by a suitable axiom), even though by the very nature of infinity it is not verifiable, and where we certainly haven't falsified it yet by observation (and there are excellent reasons to believe that we never will, because the answer might well be "yes").

"Does God exist appears to be a similar sort of question. Perfectly meaningful, but only after the concept of God is suitably defined in non-self-contradictory ways. Certain definitions, such as "God is an omnipresent being that is visible when viewed with ultraviolet light" can be immediately falsified by experience, showing that there is nothing intrinsically self-contradictory or meaningless about omnipresence. Space and time appear to be omnipresent (almost tautologically so) -- there is nothing intrinsically contradictory about many of the "infinite" properties found in many common models of God.

There are many physical theories that are a bit silly, or that are contradicted (or not!) by experience, but that are still useful in certain contexts. So might it be of a well-formed theory of God. So far, such a thing arguably is not known, but so far, a well-formed theory of physics (unified field theory) isn't known either but we still believe in the possibility, even the probability, that one does in fact exist.

I think it is quite reasonable to remain open minded about God. Most theories of God are trivially refuted by evidence. All the major theisms first and foremost in the list. There exist theories of God that are not refuted by evidence (and that indeed would be difficult to refute) -- they are God and the laws of physics theories, and there is the problem of just what can constitute evidence of the infinite.

rgb

Alex wrote: "The pillory is a pretty savage form of punishment for people just because you dont agree with their beliefs.

/any belief is better than no belief’\

Atheism may be lack of belief in God, in your case because of deficiency of scientific proof. But to have this lack of belief you must have the belief that the only knowledge worth counting is that derived from scientific procedure."

Which takes us around the barn again, back to the fundamental question: "What should we best believe, given the evidence of our senses."

I would argue that it is not belief that is "derived from scientific procedure" as you put it, but that believing things (in the contingent sense that justifies calling all knowledge "strong belief") follows from common sense, and that "scientific procedure" is a particularly powerful and quantitative subset of the general methodology we use to estimate, ascertain, guess, learn, hypothesize, verify, consider, argue about, and otherwise cogitate upon what best to believe about the world.

For example, to me it seems like mere common sense that one's system of beliefs should not be overtly inconsistent. That is because I am familiar with, and can readily demonstrate, the fact that if one reasons from a contradiction one can prove literally any hypothesis. Thus if reason is to be of any use to us in determining proof, our base of premises must at the very least be as consistent as we can make it, given our imperfect intelligence and knowledge and the limits and finite resolution of our experience and senses.

Our wish to make it so won't guarantee it, but I would hold that one small part of "the good" is to do our best to try, because a worldview with overt contradictions is less good than one without overt contradictions. Even if one takes the strictest possible meaning of these terms and apply accept/reject to reject all worldviews with inconsistencies (a thing I don't advocate, quite, for reasons associated with search procedures and optimization on rough surfaces in phase space, where one sometimes has to tolerate moving through valleys in order to reach better peaks in a dynamic theory of knowledge) inconsistency must be, consistently, ranked as worse than consistency.

Given this, let me turn your observation around: Are you arguing that it is better to hold beliefs that are inconsistent with the knowledge derived from scientific procedures than it is to do the opposite, to strive to ensure that one's general body of belief, one's worldview, is not inconsistent with "science"?

If so, I must confess that I think that is simply daft, a failure of mere common sense. To give an excellent and entirely apropos example, a large body of consistent knowledge based on sound principles of reasoning and widely held assumptions of things like inference and causality and spatiotemporal uniformity (a.k.a. "natural law") suggest that there is no particular reason to believe that the sun should not rise tomorrow, and the day after, for a few trillion more days before the sun reaches its end of life stage and swallows the earth and/or the earth's rotational energy is lost to tidal heating so that it stops, like the moon, with one face always directed at the sun. Yet in a number of religious texts (including the Bible) individuals and/or God have supposedly stopped the progression of night and day, if only for a while.

Here is a short analysis of the situation from a Christian "answers" website:

All of these (rational/scientific) explanations fall far short of the statement that there has never been another day like the one described (Joshua 10:14, cf. Habbakuk 3:11 - “…Sun and moon stood still in the heavens…”).

What really happened on that special day? As with all miracles, it is futile to speculate with scientific theories. The details are unclear, but we know that God could have refracted the light, or slowed the earth's rotation, or stopped the entire universe--all with equal ease!

Time stopped for Joshua, and it ran backwards for Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:9-11).

God used this event as a special sign to show Hezekiah that he would regain his health. The sun's shadow moved backwards by ten steps, probably five to six hours on the sundial. That is, the sun appeared to move eastward instead of westward. The conclusion is again the same, that such a miracle is beyond scientific explanation.

God may have temporarily reversed the earth's rotation, including all its inhabitants, or the miracle in Hezekiah's day could have been local instead of worldwide. The latter view is supported by 2 Chronicles 32:31, which describes envoys who traveled to the land where the miracle occurred.

Joshua and Hezekiah both made lofty requests of the Lord, that the very heavens might be altered. And God answered their prayers. The sun, moon, and stars obey the Creator who placed them in the sky by the power of his word.

Here you can see the problem laid out, absolutely naked to the withering glare of reason. According to the Bible, there was once a minor king who was worried about his health. God altered the entire natural law of the Universe just to reassure this worried king that his health would be just fine -- until, of course, the king died anyway. Or a commanding general was fighting a battle and needed more time to win, and so God once again altered natural law, stopped the earth dead in its rotational tracks, and stretched out a day into two days just so the good guys could win.

Your job, Alex, is to apply reason to these stories. Ultimately, you have to decide whether or not you trust the kind of knowledge that is derived from things like systematic, unbiased observation and common sense, or if you are willing to throw out that entire system of belief any and every time it seems to contradict stories like this one. The good Christians who maintain this website have the right of it. If their belief in God is correct, God can pretty much throw the rulebook out of the window whenever he wants because he wrote it. No miracle, no claim, no absurdity, is too absurd for the Lord God of Israel because knowledge derived from the Bible trumps knowledge derived even from the evidence of our eyes and common sense.

This is, of course, why it is so difficult to argue with a True Believer. Their belief system, while not exactly consistent is based on different axioms than my belief system, starting with the axiom "if the Bible and science conflict, so much the worse for science." For them the conclusions of science, while locally valid, are strictly contingent, contingent upon "the will of God", and hence subject to random, arbitrary, whimsical violations.

You like C. S. Lewis; well, so do I. But even Lewis (on his more lucid days, since he was a overall a raving lunatic as far as reason is concerned) put the following words (approximately, as I'm not digging out my copies of the books to get an exact quote) into Aslan/Jesus/God's mouth -- "Do you think that I would break the laws that I made?" Yet to True Believers, not only can this happen, it happens all the time, and quite whimsically.

Consider Hezekiah. Here's somebody who is sick wants reassurance from God that he is going to regain his health. Choose between the following two options (as God):

a) His illness is caused (as we well know) by itty bitty microorganisms in his body (or misbehaving cells in the form of cancer). A teensy, almost invisible (but thermodynamically very unlikely) shift in the chemical potentials of a comparative handful of molecules in Hezekiah's body would suffice to cure his disease on the spot. A shift in a few more would bring him back to full health or even the full flush of youth and restore him to complete, fatigue-free strength on the spot. So I (as God) decide to break the laws that I made and cure him on the spot, instantly. This is obviously best for Hezekiah, who doesn't have to pointlessly suffer. Shazam, presto chango, and Hezekiah bounces out of bed, fully healed, and says "Thanks, God, I needed that!" (We can leave out for the moment my sadistic malice associated with letting him get all sick in the first place, since nothing that happens happens without My knowledge and will, making me the puppeteer with him merely the puppet).

b) Naaaaah, that's too easy. Besides, I like his suffering -- it is part of my getting even with the remote descendants of that bastard, Adam and his whore-wife, Eve, who betrayed me in that beautiful garden I put them in (with the perfect foreknowledge from the moment of their puppet-creation that they would do exactly what they did). So instead I alter the natural law of the entire Universe by giving the Earth a great big twist backwards so it rotates east to west for a while instead of west to east. Big. Splashy. Pointless on such a grand scale. Yeah, that's so me.

Now a rational person, seeking to believe that which they should best believe, would take note of yet another bit of Lewis's inadvertent wisdom, from The Last Battle. There he puts the following line out there:

Sire, do not believe this tale. It cannot be. The stars never lie, but Men and Beasts do...

The "stars" of course, are angels in Lewis's Narnia, but look at how much better this statement works in our world. If we look at the actual stars, and the planets in their motion aroud the sun (our nearest star), and the Earth itself, we find a grand uniformity, a magnificent and unexpected order. We find natural law, law that absolutely contradicts any such nonsense as the Earth turning backwards or stopping in its rotational tracks for 24 hours so an Earthly general can win a silly battle (why not just intervene so that every single human on the bad guys' side suffers from a heart attack? why not intervene even more subtly and change their hearts and minds so that they ain't gonna study war no more and fall on one another -- as brothers?). We search literally as far as the eye can see, as far back in time as we can reliably go with reasonably accurate, non-mythicized record keeping and as far back in time as our most powerful telescopes can reach (far away is back in time, speed of light) and see no exceptions to natural law. Not even one. Not even for a moment.

So, my good friend, I can do no more than repeat Lewis's words back to you, as the very reason you should trust the knowledge derived from science, from common sense and experience, far more than you should trust words in any human book, written by men who are after all merely evolved beasts:

The stars never lie, but men and beasts do...

Mere common sense.

rgb

So I think most people will pursue what ever beliefs they want and if they see truth in Christianity or atheism then so be it, it is not for me to lampoon their thought processes or to force my own upon others. The goodness of the particular belief system will speak for itself, and will draw people to it accordingly.

Although I would have said correctness of the particular belief system, since a belief can be true and "bad" or unattractive from the point of view of humans as easily as it can be highly attractive and appealing and "good" but still false, this is still well said, Alex.

I'm sure you're familiar with the following poem, but it is one of my favorites and at any rate apropos of this conversation.

Abou Ben Adhem

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight of his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:-

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
'What writest thou?' - The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered 'The names of those who love the Lord.'

'And is mine one?' said Abou. 'Nay, not so,'
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said 'I pray thee then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.'

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names who love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

Leigh Hunt

Loving God is a bit difficult if one does not find good reason to believe in God. Loving the specific vision of God promulgated by the Bible is almost impossible because it is an evil, wicked, stupid vision quite aside from the lack of sound observational support or any approximate correspondence or consistency of the surrounding text with scientific or (for the most part) historical evidence. But one thing a theist, an atheist, a heretic, an apostate, a Buddhist, an agnostic can all agree on is that feeling compassion for one's fellow humans (still don't like the term "men" used to embrace both sexes) is a good thing.

rgb

Stephen wrote: "Rgb,

Your use of the word evil requires definition (or substitution with another word). I’m never sure what it means. It conjures up the idea of someone doing a violent deed specifically with a ..."

Granted and agreed. What you are observing is that in a presumably deterministic Universe, if one follows causal chains backwards all causes are outside of ourselves, and outside of all of our fellow creatures, and free will is a part of the illusion of sentience, that our actions are in some sense self-willed instead of ultimately brought about by chemical reactions and electrons doing their electron dance completely beyond "our" control as they are "us" just as much as the program (code, memory, hardware in combination) of a self-aware computer is that awareness and at the same time is traceably non-free.

So granting all of that. However, it's still one of those things -- we all use the word quite frequently, we have a shared understanding of what it means in the context of presumed free will and society. On the morality thread, we observed the difficulty of getting general agreement towards the question of "what is the good" (or its opposite, evil) in part because of the underlying difficulty of getting general agreement as to what we should best believe about the Universe we appear to see.

This leaves one with the problem of bootstrapping. We can talk about good and evil (and do!) without having a clear or shared idea of what they are, and predictably enough will have violent disagreements that lead to inconsistencies such as individuals who nominally ascribe to religions that condemn violence committing violent acts in the names of their religions. Or we can say that this is a bad thing to do (something we might be able to get agreement on, since the inconsistencies are not easy to doublethink away and ignore), look for the root cause of disagreement, and attempt to deal with it first in hopes that it resolves the rest.

Or, as you note, we can make the whole world "rich", because people who have their Maslowian needs met (adequate food, shelter, safety, love, security, personal status, a good education and lots of free access to information and intellectual stimulation) are measurably more likely to become self-actualized, and self-actualized people are (presumably -- and I'm not certain I agree) less likely to perform "mad gleam" acts.

This still leaves us with the considerable problem of widespread stupidity, widespread personality disorder ranging down to raging psychosis, but it would I agree make things much better. Where we definitely disagree is that most of what I was actually referring to in my first reply is a) my statement of a personal perception of evil, where my thoughts on the subject are clear (to me) and based on a social contract definition of morality with some fairly straightforward underlying principles, so it wasn't subject to observations that it disagrees with many other individual definitions of evil -- that was granted in the premise that my purpose is to address the root cause of this disagreement; b) even your correct observation is incomplete. I was referring primarily to war -- large scale social conflicts -- where the underlying motivations are often evolutionary and probably near-instinctual. Greed is an evolutionary virtue. Killing off competitors (or driving them away) is an evolutionary virtue. Accumulating power and tribal status is an evolutionary virtue. Supporting a worldview (which can and usually does include religious belief, social ethic that may derive from religious belief, political structure that not infrequently is tied into the social and religious ethic) that provides you with social security, status, and a degree of wealth historically has entailed obligation to engage on large scale conflict with competing systems -- war -- and consequent short term human misery for both sides followed by enormously enhanced wealth and social status for the winners, and anything from extinction to enslavement to mere reduced wealth and social status for the losers.

This is the "evil" to which I was referring, not suicide bombers (although granted suicide bombers in such a smoldering conflict are on the same plane). So what are the main sources of "evil" in the world today:

a) North Korea -- a conflict nominally about "religiously" held social ideology, actually about power, wealth, status for the leadership as not even the North Koreans could possibly fail to understand that giving up their social and political ideology would lead to vastly increased wealth and personal freedom individually.

b) The greater Middle East -- a conflict that is really religious. Make Islam, Judaism, and Christianity disappear from the world tomorrow, cause short term amnesia concerning which bloody tribal group one belongs to and whose remote ancestors once resided on whose land because some imaginary God gave them title, and in a decade Centrasia would emerge in much the same way that Europe has, as de facto a single economic and social region with common goals and resources. There are plenty of people and groups exploiting religion to further their individual ends, but without the religion, those they would exploit would laugh at them.

c) India and Pakistan, still high on my list of countries likely to fight the next nuclear war. A conflict that is historically religious and evolutionary in nature, dating back to the Muslim invasions of India.

d) China vs Tibet. No surprise there, a mix of religion and ethnicity, who is going to rule an enormous region filled with rich resources -- the indigenous Buddhist population or the anti-Buddhist invaders greedy to possess the resources and exploit them using the human population that they externally rule.

e) Russia? Question mark because its conflicts are internal and (for once) mostly POLITICAL-religious, back to that issue of whether or not there is a One True Social System, where one's answer is likely to be dictated individually on the basis of whether or not one benefits maximally on a personal basis from the one or the other (lacking clear agreement on a social ethic).

In all of these cases, if you were king of the world and could impose freedom and prosperity by fiat, I agree that in fifty years all conflicts would fade away and a new world order might well emerge that is actually rational, equitable, and free from toplevel "evil" beyond the usual associated with personal competition for status and wealth that we probably shouldn't seek to eliminate if we don't want to altogether stagnate as a species. In the meantime, well, history has shown us the power of words and concepts, clearly articulated, in bringing about enormously accelerated (and sometimes even non-violent) social change. We've lived through much of it. The Internet makes it possible for a clearly articulated idea to penetrate the world consciousness remarkably quickly.

IMO, this means that philosophers who aren't "just" into shooting the shit about the whichness of what and whyness of where need to spend at least a little bit of their mental energy on examining root causes of the global obstacles to uniform human freedom and justice (in human terms) and do their best to come up with a "magical" articulation of the case against those root causes. IMO this may not matter much -- the collective human superorganism, the one that truly does unite the world and knits it together into a single common culture has already been ignited and is growing and extending its nervous system, with new constructs such as google and youtube providing enormously high bandwidth channels between human "neurons" in its brain. It's already thinking about the problem but as yet is far from united and coherent in its thoughts. Sooner or later, a nucleating idea will emerge and everything will change, accomplishing the "inconceivable" in a decade or two. But the lovely thing about the human superorganismal neural network is that the neurons themselves are enormously enhanced neural networks capable of self-directed computation. The global construct is more like a beowulf than a single computer -- a network with highly parallelized computations going on all the time. A good programmer can imagine ways to create a good program that will capture the attention of a good majority of those processors, with care, and hence nucleate the desired phase transition.

That may sound like bullshit to you (and in one sense it is, fair enough) -- but it is quite clear to me and as I said it is my "goal", which I work on in my spare computational cycles.

What emerges in the end might well best be called the Geekworldview. Completely open, fully global interchange of ideas and information, global processing towards general global agreement, with the same kind of self-correcting activity that is clearly visible in the open source world. An open source, fully criticizable, self-programming worldview.

rgb

For Conrad fidelity is the barrier man erects against nothingness, against corruption, against the evil that is all about him, insidious, waiting to engulf him, and that in some sense is within him unacknowledged.

This might all be true -- faith might well be a barrier humans (I dislike using the gender-specific "man" to imply gender neutral human because it doesn't) erect against the inevitability of their own death, against the visible suffering of the world that only a mix of chance and skill holds at bay, from their own wish to have it all, to be King -- and still be wrong. It might even be a source of evil in and of itself. In fact, historically, it certainly has been, as often as the opposite.

The only question that can be sensibly addressed regarding belief is: when, and why, are beliefs well-founded? Until this question is answered, your beliefs are as good as mine, as good as a Buddhist's, as good as a Muslim's, as good as a Wiccan's, as good as a paranoid schizophrenic's belief that they are God, as good as a young child's belief in Santa Claus, as good as anyone's belief that the laws of physics correspond to an objective reality.

All discussions are pointless until agreement is reached on this issue. Otherwise Santa, Odin, Satan, Stan, Allah, and countless Gods and Demons with names long forgotten must be given equal weight in the list of the possible. Is your criterion for faith "I believe what I want to believe because it frightens me the least"? Is it "I believe what best corresponds to the world I seem to see?" Is it "I believe what I can best understand, because the world couldn't be more complicated than what I can understand"? Is it "I believe what I am told to believe by authority X because X says that it is true and I therefore believe it" (fill in the X of your choice)?

You can see why these questions are important to sort out. If you believe in X just because, and I believe in a consistent system that is in the best agreement with the world we seem to see (so far), when X is inconsistent with that system, how can we ever agree? About anything? You might as well be asserting "Santa is real because X says he is!" where I'm asking you to show me the physical plausibility for Santa, given all the evidence.

What, you ask, am I doing with my life? I'm trying, very hard, to get the entire world to confront this one essential question. I think it has a best answer, one that humans can agree on (at least mostly). I see the bulk of the human-originating evil in the world as coming from precisely the weakness of our collective answer to this question over our entire prior history. Until it is answered, until we as a species come to a general agreement on it, then we will continue to fight wars over whose particular view is going to be imposed by fiat by the winners.

rgb

Tyler wrote: "I don't actually think your axioms are "deeply" flawed; to grant charity to the argument it would be more precise to say that I think your approach may be incomplete."

I not only agree, I include incompleteness explicitly in its definition (in the book), since Godel forces a choice of incomplete or inconsistent on any theory capable of expressing or containing the expression of arithmetic. Which English certainly is. So my approach is incomplete, necessarily so. Which leaves it at least a chance of being made consistent -- so far -- which I think is by far the more important of the two.

What I'd like it to be is a sort of "open source" book on building worldviews, not a prescription that it is the one true worldview, which can never be anything but a question-begging announcement.

So anyway, I'm all for returning the thread permanently to its primary topic, although because metaphysics is a wee bit foundational and because without common assumptions to begin with, it ends up being a necessary component of even discussions on ethics. Hence Dan's request that Alex clarify if any Jesus-free moral behavior would qualify as being "good", or if Jesus is simply one of Alex's prime axioms, not to be challenged by silly things like contradiction and evidence from other axioms Alex does not share.

rgb

Tyler wrote: "Dan wrote: "I think we should move the whole axioms discussion to a new thread, and reboot it while we're at it, because it's getting to the point where I don't even know what everyone's positions ..."

Works for me. Or we can drop it entirely, as from Tyler's last response I think that we are within a few definitions of agreement anyway. I didn't find anything to radically object to in it from a practical point of view, although I could pick a few nits about just what an axiom is vs reality and whether or not God is "necessarily" an unsupportable assertion. Calling knowledge of the real world contingent knowledge instead of doubtable knowledge is a trivial shift of language and I use both phrases myself (depending on context).

rgb

Your arguement is an old one, you seek to define my beliefs and Christianity as a whole on terms that suit your hypothesis, usually by selecting the extremes, then showing it up as the normal for the purpose of trying to nock down my beliefs.

I don't seek to define your beliefs. I read the Bible. You have asserted, repeatedly, that you believe in the Bible. When asked why you believe in the Bible, you have replied to the effect that it is because it contains a beautiful, perfect, morality (I can go back and find quotes if you think this isn't true and I'm putting words in your mouth). Furthermore, you wish to claim that every single human should be guided by this morality, and that the core of this morality is to accept Jesus as God and Love Him. Again, quotes on request.

As for this:

ou use these literal readings of the Bible as fodder and to turn peoples eyes from the true message of the scriptures - of compassion, justice, equality, dignity, forgiveness, charity and respect for other people. Even after I have shown that an absolute literal reading of the Bible is unecessary. It is clear to myself and to many people what the true message is.

As the Pope identified in his recent encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Love in Truth): "Love is God's greatest gift to humanity, it is his promise and our hope."

What you are saying is that the Bible is perfect truth, except where it isn't. Where it isn't, it is still perfect truth, it just isn't literal perfect truth. You cite the message as compassion, justice, dignity, equality, etc. I can, and have, easily provide examples that refute each and every one of these, but then of course you will say that I'm being literal, ignore the contradictory parts, and cherrypick another verse that supports your conclusion. Which leaves us with little to discuss, really. You cannot be proven wrong in your own mind, because anything offered as proof can be rejected as "history", or "metaphor", or "myth" while things you (and even I) believe anyway become proof of its perfection. We seem to have divergent definitions of "perfect".

For example, you can accept one single verse in one single chapter (like the famous one from Isaiah 7) and misquote it utterly out of context (as Matthew did) and ignore the rest of that chapter because the verse is part of the message in a secret code, but the rest of the chapter is just history, or metaphor, or myth, and not at all a proof that Isaiah was simply a false prophet who peddled prophecies for a living. Or you can reject it. You can pick and choose verses out of context to "prove" anything you like because the Bible is nothing if not an enormous Rorschach diagram, an ink-blot that each person can use to justify their own particular ends.

But as Dan has pointed out a number of times, the real problem is deeper. You quote the Pope as saying "Love is good" (and good things must come from God, so the existence of love is a proof of God?) Yet you seem to reject the idea that a non-Christian can love, an atheist can love, a Buddhist can love, godless communist Chinese people can love, and that all of them can do it without ever having heard of the Bible or having heard of it, studied it, and rejected it as arrant nonsense. You reject the very possibility of a person being good without God, and are unwilling to examine evidence that suggests that people who believe in God (by any name) are on average no "better" than people who don't. This is so well known that in my country people drive around with bumper stickers that proudly proclaim "I'm not perfect, just forgiven". They can kick the living shit out of you if you bad mouth their God or Country (worship of the two go hand in hand around here) but it's ok, they're forgiven.

No one (that I know of) denies that there is "good" to be found in the Bible. Not one single line of it is either unique to the Bible or original, but it is there. Look, I'll provide a link from my favorite online Bible to demonstrate it:

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/go...

There you have it, the good stuff, pretty much all of it, filtered. All 274 entries (many of them redundancies). If you visit this site and go to the top, you can contrast this with the other thirteen categories of bad stuff, each with just about as many entries. The Bible is roughly 13 to 1 evil crap.

So there's the eternal question. If God is Love, and the Bible is Perfect Truth (in secret code), why exactly did God hide all of that truth so carefully, mixing it in with all of the crap? Why do we need a moral sense outside of the Bible just to figure out what is good and what isn't? Why did we have to invent science to learn facts about the Universe given that we already had Divine Revelation in the Bible (that proved to be wrong right down to the last line of it)? Why is this God of Love that you assert as the real God of the Bible quite clearly a monster in roughly half of it? My name is Jealous? Ecocidal floods? Plagues? Infanticidal genocidal sprees? Puh-leeze...

I think people need to be guided in moral matters. My observations in China of how the Government educates people and creates a sense of community and the encouragement to do good and so on, is for the good of the country. For the nation, so patriotic propagander is very heavy and in every aspect of society.

I personally find this statement deeply suspect in so many ways. The US Constitution and BIll of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, asserts more or less the direct opposite. These documents collectively establish a framework not of moral guidance but of law (and there is an enormous difference between the two, the latter being a social contract entered in for mutual benefit and not really requiring moral sanction beyond that which a society chooses to put into its contract).

If you are arguing that the people of China need to not be subjected to "moral guidance" and should instead be left free to choose their own way, subject to laws established by mutual consent instead of moral fiat by idealogue authorities, then I agree. But in that case, your sentence should read that people do not need moral guidance, they need freedom.

Moral guidance of adults smacks authoritarianism. It has been used throughout history to justify horrendous and repressive acts. "It's for your own good" we once said as we put black people in chains. "Your Judaism is morally reprehensible and you must convert for your own good" was the litany of the auto da fe in Spain, the many pogroms in Russia. Wars have been fought over just who gets to pick the "authority" that will be imposed as "guidance" on the unwilling. A global war is underway right now between two branches of the old, wicked, house of Abraham over whose flavor of mythology, whose particular set of man-written crap is going to be used as a basis for authoritative moral dominion over the world. Islam takes its "moral guidance" obligations very seriously and will cheerfully administer a public whipping to transgressors, such as a woman with the temerity to hang out in a Western style bar and drink a beer with friends outside of a burka.

So I utterly reject your proposition. People do not need moral guidance, nor is there an authority on Earth capable of providing such guidance that is not, ultimately composed of people or the words of people. I reject the clear implication that you have some sort of right to determine the kind of "guidance" I should receive for having the temerity to disagree with you. I reject the "safer" proposition that perhaps I don't need moral guidance but the Chinese clearly do. Say what?

One of my personal moral axioms is that there is one person that has the right to provide moral guidance for an adult person, and that is the person (excepted by a limited right and even obligation to provide some very necessary ethical and legal guidance to pre-adults to prepare them to live in their society as adults) . Society has the "right" (in social contract) to establish laws that the person must obey (or not) and can even provide education and rehabilitation to lawbreakers as long as it is done in the context of a free society where the laws being obeyed are collectively agreed upon and where the laws themselves are constrained by documents like the Bill of Rights. Not even the law can compel personal moral belief, however, and even an individual who obeys the law can disagree with the law and say so and work to change it.

You see, Jesus is not Lord. Christ is not the King. There are no kings anymore, and there should not be -- this is a good thing! One of many, many examples of moral shortcoming in the Bible is that Jesus supported human Kingship explicitly, and his own authoritative dominion implicitly. Jesus is not our brother, he is not our friend, he is our Judge, our Ruler, our Superior. Bow down before him. Kneel and humble yourself. Give up your will unto His will.

Think carefully upon this. You can truly love, in the non-biological agape sense (excluding sexual love and love of puppies and small children and love of things), an equal. Any love that has a greater than or less than in it, any love that tends to worship (of the greater) or condescension (to the lesser) is a less perfect love than that between free equals.

If I am wrong, and Jesus really was a transcendental incarnation of God, it doesn't worry me in the slightest. I will look him square in the eye, equal to equal, unashamed of believing that which was most reasonable. I will not be a pet, not even God's pet. If you are content to pretend to be God's pet, well, good luck with that.

Sit! Stay! Roll Over! Good Dog, here's a tasty treat! No, I told you not to pee on the floor! Bad Dog! Now I'm going to have to roast you over a slow fire and eat you in a broth made up of your own puppies, but maybe I'll spare a single breeding pair and start over!

Is this the standard of morality of the Bible? It is.

rgb

One cannot characterize self-referentially. That is where the question-begging comes in.

I don't know what this means. Please elucidate. Who has tried to characterize self-referentiality. What is characterizing self-referentiality. I've never heard of any such thing.

The question begging comes in when you do things like invoke OR without acknowledging that a) it's an axiom; b) it's not even a proper axiom, more like a "suggestion" that sometimes works out (probably because under some very specific circumstances it is a theorem of probability theory, sort of like the second law of thermodynamics); c) is often wrong. Sometimes the simplest explanation is not the correct one. Often, even.

If you carefully qualify it with an all things being equal the simplest explanation is the "better" explanation it serves to give direction to a search for what is best to believe, as long as you understand that the simpler explanation may not be correct, best or not, and that things are actually only rarely truly equal.

Magnetic monopoles or not? None have been observed, but many if not most physicists kind of believe in them even though it makes E&M more complicated. However, an EM field theory with at least one monopole offers an explanation for why charge is quantized. So one can choose between charge quantization by a possibly very, very rare monopole or no monopoles at all and an equally undiscovered alternative reason for charge being quantized. Neither is supported by evidence, both seem to exhaust the possibilities. Which one is simpler? Which one is more plausible given the sole evidence of charge quantization?

Ditto with the Higgs particle. OR becomes really useful only to the extent that it can be at least somewhat objectively quantified. Otherwise it becomes a fancy way of saying "because" in a debate. I do like it as a metaphysical axiom, but a "soft" one that is open to judgement and seat-of-the-pants estimation, not a rigid rule.

Because rgb is a deist, I understand why he wishes to herd axioms into a self-referring system. I am going to expand on this when I respond to his post.

"Because I am a deist" you understand what? Great. Now there are two mind readers in the conversation. Tyler, I don't "worship" God, and don't give a rat's ass if you do. I am not a deist first and a physicist and philosopher second. Remember that Hume and Russell are my home boy philosophers, not Descartes and Kant.

I would suggest that we table a discussion of my deistic hypotheses and the reasons that I find them plausible as they are utterly irrelevant to the question of whether or not one must make question begging assumptions in order to move past Hume and put non-tautological knowledge of the Universe on a sound logical foundation. If you think you can do so, I'm all ears. I've tried, without success. A dazzling array of philosophers beginning with Kant and ending with Russell have tried, without success. I had thought this issue was pretty well completely resolved roughly 100 years ago when it was demonstrated that you can't even but mathematics on a sound basis without axioms, and that nontrivial axiomatic systems (which the Universe certainly seems as thought it might be) cannot be put on a completely deductively sound basis even then.

You can convince me, very simply, not by arguing on the basis of statements that are obviously axioms or by using even mild ad hominem (rgb is a deist, his reasoning must be unsound) but by presenting a clear and obviously correct proof of a necessary connection between your sensations and a knowledge that cannot be mistaken of an external reality, without a single assumption. Not the law of causality (an axiom). Not that the Universe is necessarily external and real (an axiom). Not that inference is a valid way of arriving and definite truths (in inconsistent restatement of a theorem, not even an axiom). Not that simpler statements are more likely to be true that complex statements (an axiom, and again one that is inconsistent with induction remarkably often). Not that our ability to use reason must follow from our experience of an external Universe (axiom axiom axiom, count the beggings of the question and additional axioms required to say that this is even more reasonable than asserting that our ability to use reason follows from the fact that we are all fragments of an infinite mind that has no inside or outside or that we are nothing but our sensations and are all that exists).

The latter, of course, is experiential empirical Cartesian truth. You may use that. Following Descartes you have cleverly observed that you exist because you experience the sensations of existence. Fine. Now prove that there is something besides those sensations as a theorem without begging the question with your assumptions.

Nobody can establish certainty or knowledge on the basis of an endless regress of self-referring assumptions.

Nobody can establish certainty (of anything but their own existence, as long as it lasts) period. Get used to it.

Knowledge in the form of less-than-certainty can indeed be established. All you have to do is assert some question begging axioms and you're off to the races. There is no reason to think that there is even a single unique way, given that we are all throwing around two or three examples that have been known for four hundred years that demonstrate that it is not a unique one to one and onto map between our thoughts and some presumed external territory.

What I don't get is that -- given the direct counterexamples, given that you seem to acknowledge that they are counterexamples, why do you seem to keep arguing that there is a single basis (yours) that must be correct?

Anyone who inverts the hierarchy of philosophy by switching an evaluative branch of it for either of the fundamental branches is making a huge mistake.

Sigh. Prove that there is a necessary hierarchy of philosophy by proving your hierarchy of philosophy in the first place, without assumptions. If you make assumptions, then you are inverting the hierarchy of philosophy in order to prove the hierarchy you prefer, begging the questions.

If you don't need to beg any questions, then the game is over. Certain knowledge awaits. This state of affairs actually exists for the one thing we know without begging any questions. We are existing, thinking, feeling, remembering, sensing this instant moment. I may not have certain knowledge of the objects of my sensations, but the sensations themselves are me, and in having them I am.

And I say this not disagreeing with you, by the way. But it is very, very difficult to explain why it is a huge mistake without making a statement that the listener cannot doubt, in which case you would have to say is PROBABLY a huge mistake -- but there is a small chance that I'm wrong. Or better yet, you'd have to try to convince the listener by starting with something like "It seems reasonable and desirable for us to agree that..." instead of "It must be true that..."

Reason is based on common sense even before it is based on logic. And I mean the phrase literally in many distinct ways. The common sensations that constantly change and self-organize that are our selves, the spatiotemporal commonality of our sensations that lead us to accept an external world as by far the simplest and best thing to do even if we aren't certain that we are correct, the commonality of our sensations with others who appear "like" ourselves when we establish communication with them. We share a worldview. A rational worldview, the "best" worldview for us to share is one that makes common sense whether or not it is formally provable.

That isn't to sneer at logic, just, as you say, to establish that it is our tool, not our master and not our selves. At its best, logic is magnificent, but it is not magic, it does not lead to truth (only to the lack of apparent contradiction) and adoring it will not relieve one of the empirical necessity for unprovable assumptions that may not be correct to establish something to reason about.

rgb

Dan wrote: "He read an article somewhere where a guy was talking about the probability that we live in a computer simulated reality designed by some future civilization in order to study its past. He how he d..."

Oh God, I'd never thought about that possibility. You mean I don't really exist, that I'm not even a power unit in the Matrix, I'm just an NPC in a video game being played by spoiled rich kids with a really, really powerful Windows based computer? Wow, that's harsh.

Listen up, you twerps playing this, I'm gonna kick your asses, just as soon as I can figure out who you are.

I'm gonna kick

I'm

*** Stop: 0x00000AC2 Unhandled exception

rgb

Nathan wrote: "I agree that it's generally useless to give any brain-in-vat scenario equal priority, or even any priority, to the observed world.

I believe you and I both know there is a 33.3% chance that we a..."

Hmmm, maximum entropy estimates give equal probabilities to all possibilities in the absence of any prior information. So, 1/3 for reality is real, 1/3 we really live in the Matrix -- what's the last third?

rgb

It is the striving for the moral law for what one knows is right, striving for a higher sphere of goodness. This is one of the faults of humanism I think up till today there is is still no humanist ontology that fully embraces the phenomenon of human existence and human dignity. But in Christianity human dignity comes from being made in the image of God the Creator.

Or, in Christianity
there is a story about how humans were made
(with no evidence for any Creation)
by a Creator
(with no evidence for any Creation)
that makes humans out to be special
placed literally in the center of His Universe
with the Sun the self-luminous Moon
the Stars themselves created
solely
to revolve around us and light our night
all 27 billion light year sphere of them
mostly invisible unless you look real hard
on a dark night from far above the atmosphere
so special that God incarnated himself here
and not in a distant invisible galaxy
a trillion trillion to one
so that he could allow himself to be killed
as a sacrifice to appease
himself
in his own just anger
that these special humans that he Created acted
freely
in their utterly preordained ways
to do things like slaughter babies in His Jealous name
at His command
an example of moral perfection
until he decided that this
and wiping out all but a few pairs of animals
a drunkard human animal with wicked sons
with a flood was over the top
a bit
he's sorry won't do that again
and that love and forgiveness would be the order of the day
but only if you listen to a bunch of old men
wearing ridiculous costumes with tall hats and costly robes
that Jesus would have laughed at
making the Pharisees he mocked seem as thrushes to their vain peacockery
as they tell you how you should behave
starting with accepting all of this into your heart
not your head
as your moral precepts
so special
not looking too closely in case you see that it is
cracked, cracked, cracked, broken
not a statement of dignity at all but rather
an extended
and complex
lie.

rgb

When someone asks why we believe the real world corresponding to the evidence of the senses is any more defensible than a Matrix-like deception, he’s asking why an unseen and complex phenomenon isn’t as likely as simple observation. Absent any basis, who would give a speculative idea equal priority to the observed world?

I agree. The point is that you've just stated a metaphysical axiom right here:

Absent any basis, who would give a speculative idea equal priority to the observed world?

With or without a basis, why should we give any idea precedence over any other. Without axioms to specify things like "greater than", "less than", and "equal to" how can we even speak of ordinal ranking? Without still more axioms to specify things like a real number scale, how can we quantify how much more precedence we should give to any given idea than to some other idea?

The point isn't that we don't do these things automatically. Of course we do. Even Hume fully acknowledged that. The point is to try to establish a consistent way of deciding what best to believe, ideally a quantitative one.

The best shot at the problem that I've encountered are the Cox axioms, as developed by Jaynes into what he calls "the logic of science" -- probability theory. Even here, though, one encounters some very serious practical difficulties, because one's estimates of Bayesian probabilities depend strongly on one's priors. How does one set the metaphysical priors?

To continue:

rather, it demonstrates that the nature of reality is axiomatic.

Again, the nature of reality isn't axiomatic. The nature of our approach to knowledge of reality is axiomatic. We require an initial axiom (whether or not we are aware of it being an axiom) "there exists an external reality that corresponds to my sensory stream, memories, and thoughts". But I think that we pretty much agree, even though we might say it slightly differently.

Reality is the broadest of concepts.

I disagree. A concept is a mental object. That's part of the problem. It is extremely easy to conceive of many, many consistent realities that are perfectly consistent with our sensory experience, memories, and so on. Then there is the world of ideas, of mathematics -- ideas "outside" of external reality unless you are an idealist. Finally, given that concepts are in the real human mind with more presumed reality outside of it with vastly greater information content, our internal concept of reality is a pale and fuzzy shadow of reality itself.

The only thing that could be broader would be an unreality that subsumes the real. That’s where God resides, along with the results of deductive reasoning applied out of place to ontological observations.

I have no idea what you mean when you say that God resides in unreality. God either exists or does not exist. Physics in hidden dimensions either exists or does not exist. Both could exist and leave no unique trace on dynamics that we can observe. Placing God in "unreality" -- as opposed to more or less plausible based on our experience is begging an enormous number of questions. Which is fine, as long as you realize that this is what you are doing.

We observe no basis for supposing that anything lies beyond reality. Therefore, we have no basis for holding open the question of whether reality is all there is. And since no process of cognition can assess the propositions of a metaphysics that includes unreal elements, it doesn’t make sense to try.

I would make the first statement even stronger. "Reality" is the Universe, and it is by definition everything that has being (and not in a temporal sense, as time is just another dimension if we take what we seem to see at face value). Asserting something beyond reality is openly contradictory. It is why the notion of God creating the Universe is self-contradictory -- if God exists, it is by definition a subset of the Universe. To assert that God is definitely unreal (as opposed to unobserved and hence relatively implausible) I think you'd need a logical proof of an impossible kind, given that lack of evidence is not proof of lack, which is why we have a nice placeholder for magnetic monopoles in Maxwell's equations in case one should decide to show up, ditto the Higgs particle.

As for assessing "unreal elements" -- aye laddie, that's the rub, isn't it. How do we tell what is real from what isn't real, in our overheated sense-driven imaginations? The map is not the territory, and the bulk of human history stands as clear evidence that we can and do (as a species and as individuals) create metaphysical system with unreal elements. I'm not sure that we can do anything else, because our metaphysical systems are internal and imperfect (and hence doubly "unreal") mental representations of a presumed objective external reality and have time and again been shown to be not the best we can do. OTOH, if you just mean "we should try to do our best and use common sense and math and reason when setting up a consistent basis for things like scientific inference" then of course I agree!

Deductive logic doesn’t just spring forth ex nihilo: It is an outgrowth of the fact that one first observes a reality to make deductions about. Logic cannot trump reality as the starting point of philosophical inquiry. Reality cannot be deduced: it can only be observed. Hence, induction precedes deduction as a way of reasoning. It cannot be the other way around. This is why priority is essential to the argument. Getting it backwards means that the endless regress implied by treating reality as an baseless assumption – arbitrarily at that – is a signal that, from the get-go, one’s thinking has gone awry somehow.

I rather think I agree, and say pretty much exactly the same thing, with examples, in my book. The point is that this needs to be said, and said again and again.

However, please take note that you are stating a set of self-consistent metaphysical axioms (as unprovable assertions) once again, especially if you wish to assert a methodology for inference. This is exactly the kind of thing that I'm writing my book to say. It is especially important to state the principles of inference carefully, because inference often leads one to error (that further inference and deductive analysis from more data sometimes later corrects). It also has a strictly limited scope compared to "reality".

Either way, I've never been a big fan of a priori knowledge. Deductive reasoning seems like it resides in the mind, and the mind itself seems rather impossible to divorce from its hardware and imperfections. Even things like the "laws of thought" -- arguably self-evident truths, if any such thing really exists -- seem to be mental "objects", or better yet mental semantic rules for manipulating imaginary mental objects in the mind, usually in rather primitive set-theoretic ways.

At some point this becomes a metaphysical discussion about whether or not things like mathematics are "real" outside of the mind, and then we're back to counting cows and ending up with quaternions. I prefer to take the lessons of the last 100 years at face value and consider math and logic to be very valuable tools of the human mind for (as you say) the description and organization of our sensory and mental experiences but not "truth".

Thus, Hume’s assertion that we cannot prove induction from deduction from premises is flat wrong.

I think that you are misstating his position. First of all, of course you can prove it from premises. Here, watch:

Premise: "Induction is true".

Conclusion: Induction is true.

(where you can substitute as much intermediary derivational logic and definition as you like for what induction is). Yes, it is a very, very simple proof, but entirely valid. Yes, it begs the question. Prove it without begging the question. That's what Hume asserted could not be done, and to confound it all you have to do is prove inference from premises that in no way beg the question or involve circularity. Just asserting that Hume is "flat wrong" proves nothing, especially if you misrepresent what he says.

That he never stopped to consider why logic doesn’t emerge from itself isn’t my problem, but it did provide grist for later philosophy, which does in fact continue after Hume and up to this day.

Where and how logic emerged wasn't, and isn't, the point. Hume wasn't an idiot, and was hardly ignorant of logic. The point of his argument is the loss of certainty. Philosophers pre-Hume (and post-Hume, sigh) were fond of asserting that their conclusions concerning the world were logically necessary, that they were perfect truth. Look at the ridiculous debate that (as you say) continues to this very day between materialists and idealists, with the idealists down by two runs in the eighth inning. Look at the very real debate about geometry and number theory.

Post Hume you are just as free to axiomatically beg the questions of your choice setting up a metaphysics, including inference. My personal favorite way starts with the Cox axioms plus "math", because they basically ordinally quantify common sense and lead to (a generalization of) Bayesian probability theory that includes Aristotelian/Boolean logic as a limiting case, and hence seems to me to be the best possible basis for reasoning about an uncertain and imperfectly known real world. You can read about this in Cox's book or Jaynes's book.

The two corollaries of Hume's conclusion that should have appeared in philosophy after his Dialogues are:

a) honesty, as in no longer claiming that one's philosophical arguments "must" be true. They must not. Perhaps they are, perhaps not. Quite literally, if one can imagine some way for them to be false without any logical contradiction, they might not be true. I can count two objective external cows, but since I can imagine that the cows exist in my imagination or are a peculiar charge-current distribution that looks like cows but aren't, or that they are really space aliens disguised in cow suits, I cannot be certain that my "logical" conclusion of two cows is truth, only that any alternative is -- subject to certain unprovable assumptions -- absurdly implausible.

b) "Plausibility" as a replacement for "certain truth" in nearly all reasoning about the real world. This did indeed finally happen -- in the twentieth century. This is really all that is necessary to deal with Hume. Hume is right, we aren't certain of the truth about almost anything besides the fact that we are experiencing "something". Which leaves us entirely free to construct an uncertain system and embrace it as plausibly correct or provisionally correct to the extent that it appears to consistently work to describe our experience.

This is very close to what I’m saying, except that you can see how I’m rooting out what I regard as the implicit God’s-eye view of reality, and replacing with a human-centered perspective, resulting in the complementarity of deductive and inductive reasoning. That prevents the employment of the axiom of existence from serving mystical purposes and makes the best observational sense.

In that case, we are probably arguing more about details, or about the particular way we came to arrive at the conclusions than about fundamental substance. My book begins (following Descartes) with an entirely human-centered argument, so I suspect there is even less disagreement than you might think. Clear reasoning requires a statement of one's assumptions, even if they beg questions and one would rather pretend otherwise.

rgb

Reality can't be proven; that's because it itself is an axiom, and the basis of all proof of anything whatsoever. If no definition applies to this axiom, some sort of description or statement must. So if this axiom of existence cannot be defined, which seems fair enough if axioms presuppose existence in the first place, it still must be elucidated, or the status of reality becomes precisely nothing. I don't want to get into a description of nothingness because you confuse it with non-being. But a description of an axiom that has no definition must designate the referent of the axiom ostensively, by specifying examples or by showing that any attack on that axiom refutes itself.

...

An interesting idea, but such a thread would be covering a vast topic. I don't know how many people would even post on it, and if you're a radical skeptic, all you have to do to for you part is to deny what the other person says.

I'm not sure that I understood exactly what you just said -- in particular I don't know the meaning of the sentence "Reality ... is itself an axiom." No, it's not. Not in the English language, anyway. You might want to explain what you mean, since axioms are propositions and reality is not a proposition, it is the presumed objective of a certain class of (as you seem to wish to put it) metaphysical axioms.

However, if I do understand this particular sentence correctly as stating that we cannot be certain of our beliefs concerning reality at the level of deductive certainty, I not only agree but consider this to be the proper basis of a worldview that seeks to establish knowledge as less than deductive certainty. You will need to be very careful on this thread if you advance this viewpoint, lest Brian pounce and talk to you about nifty schemes and pink reality-axioms.

As for being a radical skeptic, let me see if I can clearly and succinctly state my thesis and see if you agree or disagree, as I think we are likely in more agreement than disagreement, once one gets past possibly divergent usage of words and terms. If you're using axioms as self-evident truth, for example (a meaning that I claim was not that of Euclid in the first place but that was "religiously" added by his successors who were so impressed that they elevated his assumptions to a state of theistic "belief" in the platonic ideals they asserted, a state of affairs that ended in the latter half of the nineteenth century during the proper axiomatization of mathematics and had the period added to it by Cantor, Russell, and Godel in the early twentieth) and I'm using it as a particular kind of assumption upon which a theory is built, then obviously our reason cannot lead us to common ground as I say potAYto, you say poTAHto.

a) Descartes wished to establish his worldview, his basis of knowledge of the world, as soundly as he believed his knowledge of geometry was based. Geometry in his time (and for more than two hundred years subsequently) was believed with a Pythagorean religious intensity as "certain truth", a truth in an "ideal" world where all truths were self-evident or logical consequences of self-evident. Yet Bacon, in particular, was asserting that knowledge of the real world needed to be derived from experience via induction, not platonic ideals, and Descartes did not consider inference from sensory experience logically sound. He invented methodological doubt to try to adduce the axioms (self-evident truth form) of reality.

b) Descartes was led astray almost immediately, possibly because the case of Galileo (occurring rather famously while Descartes was a young man) taught him the very real danger of opposing the Church, possibly because he was genuinely religious in his own account. He introduced a circular ontological argument "proving" God from things (such as his own existence) that he observed with his senses, then used God to prove existence and the reliability of his senses.

c) Hume (a hundred years later) called him on this. Hume acknowledged that he had ideas, but denied any provable necessary connection between his ideas and a presumed external world. In particular, he argued that induction cannot be proven deductively from self-evident axioms without begging the question, cannot be proven inductively without begging the question, and hence cannot be proven. IMO this was a truly brilliant use of reason, one that anticipated the conclusions of Godel two centuries later, as reason examined reason self-referentially and discovered that it could not prove itself.

The mathematical implications of his demonstration were slow to surface, though -- everybody still thought of axioms as self-evident truths, not question-begging assumptions. Berkeley was a more or less contemporary philosopher that was in the process of asserting that reality was a great big platonic Ideal in the Mind of God, remembrer -- I don't think it is easy for us to appreciate how solid was the conviction that the mental realm, the ideal realm, the realm of the "soul", was the true reality. Hume was was pointing out the illogical core at the heart of all logical systems, and the reaction of the philosophical world was to either pretend that this never happened or -- in a few rare cases -- to try to beg different questions in an even more twisted way and hide the defect.

(As a parenthetical aside, you might enjoy reading Neal Stephenson's new book Anathem. Check out his "Hylaean Theoric World, which is pretty much a proposed "true realm of ideas". In fact, there is a lot of very good philosophy in Stephenson's books, this one in particular.)

d) One can then go down a list of philosophers (not mathematicians that tried to rescue pure reason in philosophy (not mathematics per se). Even as they were writing, Gauss, Lobachevsky, Bolyai were pounding a stake through the heart of Euclidean Platonic Ideal Truth, and a few years later Riemann cut off its head so that it turned to dust.

e) Hilbert's "grand project" of axiomatizing mathematics and establishing it as a perfect, consistent theory fails with the startling discovery that it cannot be done. Any mathematical theory capable of expressing arithmetic can be either complete or consistent but not both. Furthermore, if such a theory can prove its own consistency it is inconsistent. The only theories that might be consistent are the ones that contain theorems that are true but cannot be proven (are incomplete) and which cannot be proven internally consistent.

f) Philosophers, in the meantime, fall into two schools. One is the school of "natural philosophy" which split off from philosophy in general, which at one time included all of metaphysics, physics, mathematics, geometry, etc and became "science". Science and math had made tremendous progress working together by tabling issues such as "truth" or "axiomatic provability". Simple arithmetic wasn't put on a reasonably sound axiomatic basis until the late nineteenth century, even though it had been used with great success for some four or five thousand years! As I pointed out, people literally didn't "believe in" negative numbers or complex numbers because there was no theory of numbers -- how could Farmer Joe take five cows from his field containing only four cows, leaving minus one cows? Is this the true meaning of Revelations? Take one Christ, subtract two, and behold, the Antichrist! This is why I find it so amusing when Brian goes on about the "truth" of numbers, arithmetic and reality -- he'd have fit right into the debate on this very issue, a mere 150 or so years ago.

In science, of course, natural philosophy began by rejecting the notion of platonic ideals, the notion that there was "truth" out there that the world had to conform to. The earliest and best of the natural philosophers who invented science insisted on observation leading the way, not following the mind, because the mind has a distressing habit of producing platonic bullshit, not platonic truths, bullshit that eventually is confounded by experience anyway. Science stopped being axiomatic and became descriptive, but at the same time it became empirically clear that the world we were parsing with our senses was mathematically organized.

We take this so much for granted today that it has lost all of its impact, but if you think about it deeply, you realize that there is no reason for this to be true, it's just self-consistent ex post facto the way it appears to be. It is an unwritten axiom of science that the world is mathematically organized -- an unprovable metaphysical principle, if you like, but one that is self-consistently true, so far.

So here's the state of affairs. Hume has demonstrated quite convincingly (in my opinion) that reality cannot be proven, that pure reason cannot carry us beyond the knowledge of our immediate sensory experience without assumptions that cannot themselves be proven. The logicians and mathematicians of the world have made tremendous progress since the days of Euclid and Aristotle. Axiomatic reasoning itself has finally been put on something like a sound foundation, but the price that has been paid is the notion that -- outside of a very small core of things such as the laws of thought themselves (which are still being subjected to analysis, with demonstrations that it is possible to build an apparently consistent logic without the law of excluded middle, for example) -- theories are built upon self-evident truth. The meaning of the terms is changed, and many mathematicians adopt the neutral term "premises" instead of "axioms" to avoid the leftover Pythagorean/Platonic connotation and make it clear that e.g. Euclid's fifth axiom is really his fifth postulate, and that if one postulates it differently one can end up with a consistent but different theory so that neither one is "truth". Physics (in particular, but the other sciences as well by inheritance if nothing else) has been shown to be overwhelmingly mathematically structured on a descriptive basis. Practically speaking, then, our worldview is built upon reason, but it is a shaky tower of reason, with foundations that appear to be hanging over nothing at all.

This is the "Pit of Existential Despair", in a manner of speaking. For any question, if one examines the reasons given for any answer, and then look at the reasons for the reasons, and the reasons for those reasons, eventually you end up with a reason that is the moral equivalent of your mother saying "Because I said so." or just "Because!" Why do we believe the real world is out there in correspondance to our senses and not just a dream or a Matrix like illusion crafted by an evil genius? I don't know, just because. Why is that world (apparently) mathematically structured? I don't know, because it is, and analysis based on the assumption of consistency yields a consistent result.

Philosophers -- and here I mean modern philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, as I don't think one can properly differentiate -- are rarely content to let an answer like "because" alone. If nothing else, it seems desirable to determine a minimal set of "because" level answers, axioms as metaphysical assumptions, required to establish what we believe anyway to be the system of the world, to put both the empirical process itself and its results on the soundest self-consistent foundation possible.

This is not a basis of truth as certain knowledge. This is truth the way we actually use the term -- to the best of our knowledge (literally). A core metaphysical precept might be something like "we should believe the most what we can doubt the least" together with axioms required to define e.g. most and least.

rgb