rgb --

...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.

It's true that axioms are foundational to the questions Alex is posing, but as far as I can tell his opinion, such as it is, hasn't changed since he began posting, no matter who posts what or how. He is capable of expressing himself only at an incoherent rhetorical level, but I see no evidence that he is capable of reasoned argumentation.

This is a drag to me because you, I, and everybody else knows this thread ought to culiminate with a discussion of the status of morality if we have a correpondent who actually understood the religious basis on which it might arise. I'm not sure Alex is that person. Perhaps the boredom of waiting is what has lead the rest of us off to more interesting side discussions.

You use these literal readings of the Bible as fodder and to turn peoples eyes from the true message of the scriptures

This always cracks me up. You would think God could have simply wrote the true message of the scriptures in the scriptures. I mean, is God the most retarded asshole in the universe or something? He can't simply have people write down what he actually means? I have a real problem when people dislike the literal meaning of anything.

"Well, you can't read that for the literal meaning. You need to read it for my meaning."

Seriously, you cannot possibly be so obtuse not to see the ridiculousness of your statements.

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

I agree, rgb. Establishing something as true can be characterized both contingently and necessarily. I maintain that to presume reality, one must unwittingly accept it. But these differences have been narrowed to the applicability of language, trivial in terms of this thread. And I don't actually think your axioms are "deeply" flawed; it would be more precise to say that I simply think your approach may be incomplete.

If that's an acceptable summation, I suggest we all start topic-specific threads about knowledge, belief, the observed word, and so on, whenever we see people are interested. We might even try setting up polls to gauge each others' interest in possible topics for the group.

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

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 are, or if w..."

That's what makes sense. It would keep it from coming up over and over again on this thread.

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

How can the Pope talk of 'love' when he is directly the cause of so much suffering e.g. in Africa!

You 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.

If you're going to make a claim about what the "true" message of the scriptures is, you have to demonstrate how one gets from point A (the Bible) to point B (your chosen conclusion) without relying on presupposition or sheer invention. That extracting the good from the Bible and dismissing the bad is the "proper" way to read it is not at all clear. You've yet to give a compelling reason for why someone should read the Bible this way, other than to presuppose that God is good and then read the Bible in a way that supports your presupposition.

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.

Your views and many other Amreicans I have met on here are formed by the actions of fundamentalists.

You 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."

I think people need to be guided in moral matters.

Why can't people collectively guide themselves?

/If this is your position, then go ahead and say so. It would reduce the thread-starting question to, basically, "How can people be good Christians without Christianity?" And the answer, obviously, is, "They can't."/

The main reason I posted the question was because I wanted to know what moral framework different athiests had in mind for society.

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.

Dan

I have already appologised in a previous post about the inadequate way I started this topic. I didnt think it through properly, and I later realised through our discussions that Christian morality is based on and inseperable from belief in the existence of a moral law that was created by God.

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 are, or if we're in agreement or disagreement, or just disagreeing for the sake of it.

Hi Dan --

I agree. But the point rgb and I were trying to make with Brian is that there isn't..."

Please read my last post.

Stephen --

Please read my last post.

rgb – I’ll sum up the problem as I see it after these remarks.

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".

Stop. We disagree about the nature and applicability of axioms. Your definition is mistaken. “There is an external reality ...” presumes what it professes. It cannot do that with reference to reality. However, the axiom of existence can describe its referent instead of defining it, so long as it can point ostensibly to instances or show that attempts to dispute its status as an axiom refute themselves. Particularly in the last instance, that is my precise demonstration that reality is axiomatic, or an axiom, whichever way you wish to put it. We may disagree over axioms, but that would come immediately to a question of whether mathematics is a proper model for philosophy. I explained my position on this thoroughly in my last post, and you quoted a bit of it in yours concerning another point. You may be alluding to it where you say, “Asserting something beyond reality is openly contradictory.” Instead of translating what I’ve said into your axioms, try simply to hold it in mind to see what I mean.


A concept is a mental object. That's part of the problem.

Starting with the axiomatic nature of reality the way I explained it, it is not a problem at all unless ideas are put directly into our minds by a supernatural agency.


please take note that you are stating a set of self-consistent metaphysical axioms (as unprovable assertions)

Precisely metaphysical and not mathematical. You do not “prove” this axiom because an axiom is not subject to proof: it lies at the basis of all subsequent proof of anything whatsoever, including mathematics. I can show it ostensively, and that is adequate. If you ask why I’m starting from the world of observation, it’s because there is no other game in town whatsoever. If you suggest something else, the axiomatic nature of reality will refute it.

You also mention, “To assert that God is definitely unreal “ is mistaken. I agree. The concept of “god” has no referent, so it has no truth value. It is incoherent and, like any other concept standing outside reality, it stands beyond proof or disproof. In contrast, ditto the Higgs particle that hypothetical at least falls within the realm of existence, and speculation about it is ultimately grounded in reality by the reasoning of physicists.


I've never been a big fan of a priori knowledge

I agree. That is why I have insisted that deductive reasoning is an outgrowth of reality, a tool of man’s, and not handed to us out of nowhere; spoken of as an inductive, hence reality based, ground from which it springs.


Then there is the world of ideas, of mathematics -- ideas "outside" of external reality

Mathematical concepts are based in reality, in the way I described in my last post. But to say concepts are “mental” as an argument that axioms are self-referring is meaningless. A mind of uncertain derivation is in absolutely no position to form concepts about anything at all, let alone reality. In fact, concepts do help us.


At some point this becomes a metaphysical discussion about whether or not things like mathematics are "real" outside of the mind...

Exactly, provided that by metaphysical we agree we mean “reality-based.” Mathematics is a product of the human mind, and the human mind is a real existent. Abstract reasoning is thus firmly anchored in reality. But as to Hume’s statement, induction is simply not subject to deduction in the first place; but to reduce causal reasoning to the realm of the baseless is unjustified if, for no other reason, it’s efficacy is observable. No question-begging there so far as I can see. As to certainty and </i>truth</i>, they can both be established with reference to the axiomatic nature of reality. This is another discussion, but in effect they can be employed in reference to deductive conclusions or to inductive ones. In other words, truth can be contingent so long as it’s understood to apply that way. It is a (contingent) fact that Canberra is the capital of Australia. If the context is clear, the need for “plausibility” and so on doesn’t seem convincing to me.


God either exists or does not exist

A deistic entity is not a contingent one, unless somebody would like to start another thread, show the evidence and turn this incoherent concept into a coherent one. If this (non)entity isn’t contingent, it is necessary. If it’s not of the real world, it is “pandeism,” (if I understand your panendeism0, it is of the (non)real, whatever in that might be. Under an axiomatic basis of reality, anything outside reality can be safely discarded. Incoherence also answers the question How do we tell what is real from what isn't real...? However, your further remarks about sense perception don’t disprove reality or undermine it. I agree that inference is, under “my” axiom, error prone. But talking about that is premature.

This line of reasoning is so well known that I will not repeat it if anyone acts surprised. This is why any word for the (un)real is impossible to nail down. I’ll just call it the supernatural or the unreal.


To Summarize

Philosophy, a proper venue for the discussion of the effects of different forms of reasoning, helps us here if we understand the uniqueness of reality. All philosophy builds upon the question, “What is reality?”, and the study of this is so important that an entire branch of philosophy, called metaphysics, is the starting point of any further discussions. Sure, you could wipe out the only branch of human knowledge capable of integrating all fields simply by rationalizing away what it deals with, but for what?

What we have, then, is in good part what should be non-controversial equivocations of terms, provided reality is axiomatic. In a contingent sense, yes, things can be said to be true. Or certain, if you wish. Falsity and improbability are likewise interchangeable. Most important, using the word “axiom” in reference to a contingent world might not have the same criteria as what one might use for a deductive groundwork, but it serve the same purpose either way. The fact that we have developed deductive logic means that we have to be clear whether this proposition is true in the contingent sense or true in the deductive sense. And yes, notion of knowledge is certain (in a contingent universe) and uncertain in a context based only on deductive reasoning. Other disputes will fall into place upon reflection, and be seen to be illusory. But this is possible only if the unique status of reality is accepted. Otherwise, epistemological chaos undermines any chance of establishing ourselves a moral agents, and our arguments are no better than Alex’s.

Note: I do not have the time to proofread this. Please excuse the errors.

Note: rgb, I've just seen that you answered that last post of mine with two of your own. I've taken care with this response, but I will not answer the second unless someone else wants to hear something. I'm trying to bring the discussion to conclusion, no matter how shaky or peremptory. If you keep posting seven or eight times what I post, I will take it as dishonesty, the a sewer of verbiage to hose other posters with. Already, you and I both know your interpretation of axioms is deeply flawed.

What in the hell is wrong with you? I have long told you your posts are incomprehensible and should be broken down into discrete subjects, and dicrete posts, and if necessary, other threads. I cannot get you to do that, and neither can anyone else. I'm sure what you have to say is important, but so are other people. I do not want to continue this discussion unless someone else wants to participate or it moves to topic-specific threads.

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

Certainty can’t be established, only ‘most probable’ and for that you need axioms.

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

I agree. But the point rgb and I were trying to make with Brian is that there isn't really an alternative. There's no way to establish any knowledge, certain or provisional, of external reality without some set of assumptions/axioms.

I don't really see what this has to do with "supernatural agency," though, or with "denying any basis for moral reasoning." Unless, say, one of your axioms is the existence of a supernatural agent, which isn't something that came up in the argument with Brian (except for Brian's claim that rgb claimed to be omniscient).

The whole issue got raised in trying to get Alex to notice some of the axioms built into his worldview, which requires first the admission that our worldviews are built on axioms in the first place. Brian took umbrage at this, implying that there exists some way to have certain knowledge of external reality without any foundational assumptions, and away we went.

Alex wrote:
/The difference between the atheist and the Christian in this sense is that the atheist may act ethically for certain reasons (e.g. not wanting to go to jail, it disrupts social order, it makes them look good to others, etc.), but he has no ultimate reason for acting ethically because there is no ultimate moral authority that exists over each sphere of his life. Without this ultimate authority, each atheist defines morality on his own terms, although his morality is influenced by the remnants of morality from the image of God within, along with the strictures and constraints of the culture and society in which the atheist exists./

Firstly, I agree with Dan, this is insulting to atheists.

/The Christian, on the other hand, acts morally out of the knowledge of the moral law given by God in His Word and a love for the Law-giver Himself. In addition, that knowledge is continually increased and personalized by the indwelling Spirit of God, whose task it is to bring the Christian “into all truth”'/

Secondly, if the Christian acts morally in accordance with god’s wishes, how does that Christian know what god’s wishes are in each case? Has he got a direct line to god? “What shall I do here oh mighty one?” If not then that Christian is (just like the atheist) defining morality in his own terms!! On top of that, however, he is only doing it to please god (who is watching), not because it is the right thing to do (as in the atheist’s case)! Who is more moral now!

Then we get /in Christianity human dignity comes from being made in the image of God the Creator./

Talk about self important egotism!

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

I'm just pissed that I am living in a video game which is more complex than the video games I play for entertainment. I mean, can't they update my virtual PS3 so that I can use it to bang virtual hot chicks?

Don't complain about the nature of the game just because you're no good at it.

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?

I'm just pissed that I am living in a video game which is more complex than the video games I play for entertainment. I mean, can't they update my virtual PS3 so that I can use it to bang virtual hot chicks?

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

Second, what do you mean by "acceptance of reality"?

This is the crux of the matter.

At this point, I've explained myself twice to rgb. I will take it up one more time with him.

One cannot characterize self-referentially. That is where the question-begging comes in. 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. But I have explained it in what I though was a clear post last time, and I'm not getting through.

Nobody can establish certainty or knowledge on the basis of an endless regress of self-referring assumptions. They have to end in something or they're meaningless for anything except proceeding to "prove" supernatural agency and deny any basis for moral reasoning. With regard to this thread, it is the moral reasoning which is my ultimate concern. But assuming deductive necessity is no better than the way Alex might reason on the subject. Anyone who ignores this is going to have a bad time. 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.

if BIV is an existential proposition with no truth value, the proposition cannot be assessed and is therfore arbitrary, or incoherent.

This is my point. The brain-in-vat proposition can't be assessed any more than the what-we-perceive-is-really-there proposition. We act as though the what-we-perceive-is-really-there proposition were true, though, because it continues to prove useful.

If you deny any basis to reality other than assumptions, that might get you around Occam's Razor. But since the acceptance of reality is implicit in any utterance whatever due to the axiomatic, or foundational, nature of reality, then OR does apply.

For one thing, Occam's Razor isn't a hard and fast rule. It doesn't prove anything. Second, what do you mean by "acceptance of reality"? The acceptance of the reality made apparent by our sensory data? Or the acceptance of some reality? The fact that we operate under the provisional assumption that reality is as it appears to be doesn't prove anything.

Hi Dan --

...you make assumptions about the world in which they exist. /But the bottom line of brain-in-vat scenarios is that you can't, by definition, say anything about the probability of their being true.

Sure you can decide probability; if BIV is an existential proposition with no truth value, the proposition cannot be assessed and is therfore arbitrary, or incoherent. If you deny any basis to reality other than assumptions, that might get you around Occam's Razor. But since the acceptance of reality is implicit in any utterance whatever due to the axiomatic, or foundational, nature of reality, then OR does apply. If that's not correct, then the circumstances under which OR would ever be useful deserves a complete review.

Anyhow, I'll try once more to reason through the connection between knowledge and certainty with rgb, and it might make more sense at that point. I think I'm beginning to see what Brian's point about certainty is.

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 determined the purpose of this simulation is beyond me. He offered three possibilities:

1. Human civilization dies out before we develop such technology.

2. Humans develop such technology, but choose not to use it.

3. Humans develop and use such technology to simulate sentient beings.

Therefore, there's a 1/3 chance we live in the Matrix.

Of course, he omits a pretty obvious option: humans do develop and use such technology in the future, but we are still living in the real 2009, not the simulated one. Bringing our odds down to 1/4. But wait! What if we are being simulated not by future humans but by some alien race? Now the odds are 2/5? Oh Christ, math is hard.

So, 1/3 for reality is real, 1/3 we really live in the Matrix -- what's the last third?

I can't remember how it went exactly. One of Dan's buddies told him there was a 1/3 chance we were living in The Matrix. I forget his "logic" on this, but I do remember having a good laugh about it.

My response was, "So that means I have a 50% chance of winning the Lotto? Because either I will or I won't? Awesome! I am playing tomorrow. If I buy two tickets, I am almost guaranteed to win!"

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

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 are living in The Matrix. Ha ha.

Alex,

Christian morality is not just about the outside actions its also about ones inner motives

I know this, but I wasn't asking about Christian morality. I was asking about morality, period. The thread began as discussion of morality without Christianity.

The point I (and others) have been trying to make with you is that you keep conflating "Christian morality" and "morality." When you do this, by definition one can't be moral without being a Christian, because you are defining "not being a Christian" as immoral.

If this is your position, then go ahead and say so. It would reduce the thread-starting question to, basically, "How can people be good Christians without Christianity?" And the answer, obviously, is, "They can't."

If this isn't your position, though, then you haven't answered the question at all.

The difference between the atheist and the Christian in this sense is that the atheist may act ethically for certain reasons (e.g. not wanting to go to jail, it disrupts social order, it makes them look good to others, etc.), but he has no ultimate reason for acting ethically because there is no ultimate moral authority that exists over each sphere of his life.

I find this statement a little insulting and a little ignorant. First, it's insulting because it presupposes that atheists can't be moral, but can only imitate morality for selfish aims. You exclude the possibility that an atheist could, you know, value and care about others, and therefore act morally towards them. It's ignorant because you miss the point that acting morally because of an "ultimate moral authority" is the exact same thing as acting morally because of the police, but on a much larger timescale.

You need to answer this question: Are morality and God-worship synonymous in your mind? Is it inherently immoral to not worship God? If yes, then the entire discussion has no purpose. You begin from an assumption that atheists do not share, and you're not trying to say anything other than that your assumption is true, using nothing but your assumption as evidence.

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 that it's generally useless to give any brain-in-vat scenario equal priority, or even any priority, to the observed world. But when you describe any of these scenarios as overly "complex," you make assumptions about the world in which they exist. A Matrix-like scenario is complex by the standard of our observed reality, which is to say that such a scenario is complex given that it's not true. But the bottom line of brain-in-vat scenarios is that you can't, by definition, say anything about the probability of their being true. (Which is reason enough to dismiss them out of hand for any practical purposes.) What's the probability that you are right now dreaming? You can't say. In every dream, reality seems self-consistent. Recently I dreamed that my niece was three inches tall, and I thought nothing of it. The suggestion that this wasn't reality would've seemed preposterous.

Maybe I'm getting long in the jumble of these posts, so I'm not sure I get the purpose of this statement of yours, but it seems like you're trying to use the apparent absurdity of Matrix scenarios to dismiss the idea that all understanding of external reality is built on axioms.

Dan
/I'll ask again: Take two people. Their behavior is identical. Neither commits infidelity, murder, etc. Neither steals, neither covets. They both even adhere to some of the more ridiculous "moral" laws /

Christian morality is not just about the outside actions its also about ones inner motives and how one forms ones decisions. If there was a person who followed the moral law, without worshipping God in the Christian manner, then for the sake of your question of which one is more moral, you would have to know the other mans emotions and inner thoughts.

'C.S. Lewis put it this way: if a man sees another in danger, the first instinct is to rush to help (altruism). But a second voice intervenes and says, “No, don’t endanger yourself,” which is in keeping with self-preservation. But then a third voice comes into play and says, “No, you ought to help.” Where does that third voice come from, asks Lewis? This is what is referred to as the “ought-ness” of life. Morality is what people do, but ethics describe what people ought to do. And yes, people know what they ought to do, but that doesn’t mean that they always act according to that knowledge.

The difference between the atheist and the Christian in this sense is that the atheist may act ethically for certain reasons (e.g. not wanting to go to jail, it disrupts social order, it makes them look good to others, etc.), but he has no ultimate reason for acting ethically because there is no ultimate moral authority that exists over each sphere of his life. Without this ultimate authority, each atheist defines morality on his own terms, although his morality is influenced by the remnants of morality from the image of God within, along with the strictures and constraints of the culture and society in which the atheist exists.

The Christian, on the other hand, acts morally out of the knowledge of the moral law given by God in His Word and a love for the Law-giver Himself. In addition, that knowledge is continually increased and personalized by the indwelling Spirit of God, whose task it is to bring the Christian “into all truth”'

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.

Bacon put it quite well in his essay on Atheism, 'They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature. It destroys likewise magnanimity, and the raising of human nature; for take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on when he finds himself maintained by a man; who to him is instead of a God, or melior natura [better nature:]; which courage is manifestly such as that creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine protection and favor, gathered a force and faith which human nature in itself could not obtain. Therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty. As it is in particular persons, so it is in nations.'

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

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? Such neutrality indicates that, despite an attempt to get out of it, one’s reasoning has somehow returned to Plato’s Ideas. Meanwhile, Occam’s Razor has gone out the window. That last fact deserves further exploration. The questions of priority, premises, and skepticism remain differences, and contingency versus necessity is a new opposition to add to the mix.


I don't know the meaning of the sentence "Reality ... is itself an axiom." No, it's not.

To ask for proof or disproof of reality cannot be done because reality is axiomatic to everything whatsoever, including the concepts of proof and disproof. In fact, the moment someone opens his mouth to utter the statement “reality is an assumption ... “ they’ve accepted reality in order to doubt it. This self-refuting quality doesn’t prove reality; rather, it demonstrates that the nature of reality is axiomatic.

Reality is the broadest of concepts. For that reason, it is the starting point of philosophical investigation. 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. 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.

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.

Descartes wrongly applied deductive logic as the basis of his philosophy. But Descartes can be understood in context: His philosophy was intended to set religion on a rational foundation, and his choice of axioms is best understood in that light. He addresses his Meditations to the Catholic Church in Paris, and his philosophy is intended to prove what they assume in the first place. Sounds like theology to me. Yet Descartes’s dualism has taken a life of its own elsewhere, even in the absence of a Church before which to scrape and bow. The connection between deductive premises and the contingent universe has be severed.

I suppose that the thing that hasn’t been mentioned is how reality, an observation without which nothing else can be said, can also be thought of as axiomatic. How can a deductive concept be smuggled into an observed experience? The answer is that deduction is complementary, not oppositional, to induction, and subsequent aspects of the axiomatic observation of reality amount to deductive reasoning concerning observed existence. That means some conclusions can be derived both inductively and deductively without problems.

Thus, Hume’s assertion that we cannot prove induction from deduction from premises is flat wrong. Hume’s “illogical core at the heart of all logical systems” is an acknowledgment of the existential (observational) basis of logical systems – the unproblematic emergence of deductive reasoning within a pre-existing world. 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.

The fact remains that an internally logical system is mysticism if it’s not also externally anchored. In mathematics, that anchor is provided by the fact that the internal consistency is supplied by a human agent, not by a metaphysical non-entity; that fact establishes the validity of the mathematical enterprises while invalidating supernatural nonsense. I’m afraid reasoners don’t often see just which idea they’re actually upholding: the premise of existence, or the assertion of a supernatural agency. The mathematical organization of the world, as you put it, implies a world to organize, not a deductive chain of logic that creates a world of uncertain extraction. The descriptive basis to the mathematical structure of physics, which you also mention, only means that both endeavors are anchored in reality. So here:

it is pretty obvious that induction cannot be falsified, cannot be proven, ... // Hume has demonstrated quite convincingly ... 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.

Reality is axiomatic; it subsumes the very idea of proof. As an axiomatic concept, it is subject to a process of validation: pointing to instances or showing that attacks on it are self-contradictory. Attempting to uses deduction to prove the very reality from which the deduction emerged is a fatal reversal of philosophical priority. Understandably, though, when I have a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. Hume is popular with those who haven’t considered this reversal of priority as well as those who revel in ontological and epistemological hijinks for the sake of – no, I won’t say it – of the speculative esoterica it leads to.


...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.

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.

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

rgb --

...our previous discussion, right?

That one, yes. It's now finished as an issue for my part. The Lord closes a window ...


Hume ended philosophy as anything but question-begging...

... and opens a damn door. This is another gratuitous assumption, which you've made to save mathematics from the philosopical oversight I said took priorty over any sub-field of human endeavor. It's also an example of the radical skepticism I've said was laced with malice. It's true that people of unusual intellect can and even must think imaginatively to do their jobs, but to employ fantasy to disprove anything you wish is, as I said, an idle parlor game of academics, with no serious raison d'etre except to blow a little fairy dust in the faces of the unaware.


This leaves my panendeism. That I would be perfectly happy to discuss -- in a separate thread, I think. Or not. Do I need to pass an "atheist" test to participate in the discussion, or is being a Hume-grade skeptic enough?

What's important is to designate your starting point -- panendeism, pantheism, radical skepticism or whatever, to people who might assume you're arguing from some other standpoint. Specifying your approach from the start may avoid problems down the line. But of course, I'm not your dad ...


... in any axiomatic system, there must be undefined terms

And again, you cannot address a philosophical question with mathematical notions any more than you can describe biology using rules suited to chemistry. It's not that axiomatic systems never come into play, seeing that logic is a subfield shared by the two endeavors, but that metaphysical questions -- meaning the study of reality -- don't require the level of logic you're talking about.

Reality, in fact, requires some axiom or foundational observation to establish itself, and your restriction of the discussion to mathematics prevents that. But scientism is not philosophy any more than obscurantism. If there are systems of axioms, and it's true that at least one must be undefined, then for consistency's sake none can be, and you're (wrongly) defining axioms that refer to existence, identity, and consciousness.

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.


But as I said, I'd be happy to discuss this in a thread all of its own ...

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.

How can Alex be a skeptic if he believes in things without evidence?

That's a good question; I take him as meaning he's interested at least in testing his ideas to see how they stand up. His actual posts will show how significant his opening statement was.

Also rgb has not offended me.

Of course. As I was saying, not everyone is going to react rgb's extravagant statements the same way.

Telling people that they can’t be atheists has offended at least four other posters on this group, drawing reactions like, “your posts have gotten more and more insulting. They have been patronizing ... “ So it’s not just me. If reactions to your assertion vary, some will turn hostile in response. Although it’s not out of the question to take your remark in a charitable spirit, nothing requires anyone to do so. I cannot believe you can't see how brazen you sound.

If I recall correctly (this is our previous discussion, right?) I was arguing that it wasn't possible to be certain that there is no God any more than it is possible to be certain that there is, and was claiming that not to be sure was properly called being agnostic.

This was a mistake on my part. You were right. Sorry. It was partly a language issue (trying to explain my reason for arguing at that time) -- to me atheist meant something different from what I've subsequently learned that it meant. Yes, Tyler, I can learn... slowly, but I get there;-)

And yeah, I do debate too strongly sometimes. As I said, I apologize. I certainly didn't mean to hurt your feelings or "insult" you, then or now. I've been trying to emulate Dan (who has tolerated even more shit, in some ways, than I have from Brian, especially given that Dan generally replies calmly and refuses to react in spite of a fair amount of name calling). I'm not completely successful...:-)

You’ve said you were a Zen deist. I thought Zen was a variation of Buddhism. In any case, it’s a distinction without a difference. Your assertion that I was victoriously “finger-pointing” is a reading of that interpretation into what I said. But your supernaturalism is indeed fact. I suspect that the definition of "belief" is a factor in many of your exchanges, because people seem to be using it different ways.

Two points. First of all, Buddhism is properly speaking atheistic. The Buddha directly rejected the prevailing theism of his day, saying that arguing about God or Gods was silly and a waste of time. It had nothing to do with his moral philosophy, which he argued applied as much to the Gods (if they existed outside of metaphor) as it did to humans. Buddhism does (as I pointed out) have certain supernatural cosmic karmic balance plus reincarnation aspects in it -- that I consider quite implausible -- but alone of "religions" (it is more properly a philosophy or proposed ethical basis for society) it:

a) invokes no deity or theistic pronouncement as the basis for believing (or not) in its precepts.

b) clearly states those precepts.

c) argues that the reason for accepting those precepts is properly empirical and personal experiential -- look at them, think about them, try them out, and accept them (or not) if they seem right to you -- and not to please any imaginary being.

One can view it quite reasonably as the earliest version of secular humanism. It isn't "quite" secular, because of the local traditions of the time it was founded and because people will try to deify anything that doesn't stand still (and the prevailing Hindu culture had a strong interest in deifying Gotama as an incarnation of Vishnu even though Buddha would have laughed at any such thing). If you strip off the add-ons, though, the four noble truths and eightfold way are a practical guide to psychological well-being and ethical goodness.

You can check at least one fairly decent presentation of Buddhism here:

http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/fourt...

Note well the following (from "Karma and Rebirth", arguably the most questionable parts of the philosophy, although as I said given the prevailing theism Buddha operated in, he did a damn sight better than say, Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, and a cast of thousands who contributed to the Enlightenment:

The Buddhist concept is subtly different from the classical Indian understanding, because it denies the existence of a self or a soul. In Buddhism, the idea of self is merely an illusion. Man wrongly identifies perception, consciousness, mind and body with what he calls self. In reality, there is no abiding entity that could be identified with a self, because the states of perception, consciousness, and mind and body constantly change.

The body is mortal and when it dies, all mental activities cease. That is why there is no soul. The idea of soul is simply an extension of the self; in fact it is an immortal version of the self that supposedly survives physical death. Buddhism denies the existence of such an entity. Instead, what we call self is just a stream of consciousness that draws identity from concepts and memories, all of which are impermanent.

Anybody care to argue with that? It's sufficiently impersonal that even if one is "reincarnated" it hardly matters. Each birth is a different person, because of the lack of continuity of memory. However, according to Buddha, the "you" of right now is not really properly the "you" of five minutes ago, a remarkably advanced idea for his time.

Second, while Zen developed in the context of Buddhism and Taoism (in China, if it matters, not India, where both are more philosophies than they are theisms) it is even more atheistic. It is basically centered on the idea that meditation (one of the parts of the eightfold way) is central to Enlightenment, the realization of the true nature of being and achievement of a strongly self-actualized state. There are Zen Christians, Zen Atheists, Zen Deists, Zen Buddhists out there -- anyone can medidate as meditation has nothing to do with one's religious beliefs and either does or doesn't do anything for you empirically.

This leaves my panendeism. That I would be perfectly happy to discuss -- in a separate thread, I think. Or not. Do I need to pass an "atheist" test to participate in the discussion, or is being a Hume-grade skeptic enough?

To define an axiom as an assumption is incomplete. To define an axiom as a self-evident observation that lies at the base of knowledge is better. While axioms are essential to philosophy, they aren’t the basis of philosophy. Metaphysics is.

Except that the history of mathematics over the last 2300 years has been the slow, painful discovery that their "self-evident truths" weren't. As I said, if you are really interested in this issue, you really, really should read the Kline book I linked up above. He walks, slowly, through the joint history of philosophy, mathematics, and physics (and the other sciences to a lesser extent) and details the progression of axiomatic reasoning from the Greeks (who pretty much invented it) through the intervening 1900 years (where it went through various schools, was nearly lost in the theistic wars and purges of non-Christian literature, and various other exciting things) was re-introduced into the west around 500-600 years ago, and took root here primarily in the form of Euclid, which was considered "perfect truth" by philosophers. In fact, it set the standard for perfect truth -- a set of deductive conclusions obtained from self-evident truths about the real world.

Then Gauss, Lobachevsky, and Bolyai more or less independently developed non-Euclidean geometry by altering the parallel axiom. Worse, it was gradually shown that there many geometries and that many of them would work to describe the real world. At the same time, algebra was being developed without axioms at all -- people just made it up as they went along. It took up to the latter half of the 1800s for mathematicians to generally accept the notion of negative numbers, irrational numbers, and complex numbers, and long before they finished axiomatizing the real number line and ordinary arithmetic, Hamilton had discovered and defined quaternions. Again, there are many algebras and forms of arithmetic, differentiated by axioms. No "perfect truth", only contingent reasoning.

Another important thing to remember in axiomatic reasoning (or reasoning of any sort) is that in any axiomatic system, there must be undefined terms. Hilbert himself pointed out that mathematics is incapable of establishing consistent correspondences between the abstract "objects" in a theory and objects in reality.

And then there was Godel, who pretty much put an end to the notion of a nontrivial self-contained provably-consistent mathematical theory. Collectively, this is pretty much the end of the notion of self-evident derived truths. So no, axioms are not self-evident truths, not in modern mathematics, not really in logic, not for roughly seventy years now. They are assumptions, part of the premises and definitions upon which a theory is based, without the cachet of "necessary self-evident truth". Our human capacity for determining self-evident truths is highly suspect.

As for metaphysics, I don't know what that means, if not meta-axiomatic reasoning about even more unprovable assumptions, ones that are even less certain, in clearly definable ways, than mathematics.

What the problem of axioms comes to is the difference between contingency and necessity. Your line of reasoning assumes necessity. But necessity requires taking a God’s-eye view of reality. This is fine in mathematics, because the thinker himself can adopt such a stance to work through an equation, for instance. The reasoning is valid to the extent that a consciousness can have perfect knowledge of its content.

However, to extend a God’s-eye view of a single consciousness to a metaphysical assumption makes any conclusions stemming from it supernatural by definition. Under this reasoning, furthermore, any supernatural standpoint in philosophy is perfectly acceptable.

I beg to differ. The problem of philosophy is Hume. Hume ended philosophy as anything but question-begging of one sort or another. The only question is which questions one is going to be, and whether or not we can come up with a reasonable way to do the best possible job of begging questions, a way that leads us to agreement about what are the not absolute, but most plausible truths associated with our sensory experience.

But as I said, I'd be happy to discuss this in a thread all of its own. In the meantime, think about precisely which questions you must beg in order to establish a correspondence between your experience and your knowledge (certain or not) of (presumably, question one) external reality. Beg in the sense of formal reason.

rgb

Tyler,

How can Alex be a skeptic if he believes in things without evidence? That seems to be a rather stupid thing to do.

Also rgb has not offended me.

----------------

Alex,

Clever of you to be able to identify those bits of the bible that are eyewitness accounts of historical events that should be taken as observed facts and those bits that are just a morality play.

/Would it have served Gods purpose thirty-four hundred years ago to lecture to His people about radioactive decay, geological strata, and DNA?' Francis S Collins, head of the Human Genome Project./

Are you saying god wrote the bible? Surely you know it was cobbled together hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.

Damasio is good, all be it a bit wordy. Although he uses quotes from old philosophers he is a scientist who is really finding out about where emotion originates and how it is used in the brain.

And yes, Christianity is a god of the gaps theory. And the gaps are getting smaller all the time.

rgb –

Alex, in his introductory post, described himself as “skeptic,” commendably so in my opinion. You, too, say ...There are fundamental epistemological questions that go with being a skeptic. This is the goddamn atheists and skeptics list. Because skepticism relates to the point of the thread I’ll return to it. I’ll also take up the equally relevant point of axioms. Allow me first to point out a serious mistake on your part.

You make a fundamental, and in my opinion, gratuitous error by attempting to make philosophy a servant to mathematics. Mathematics and even empirical sciences are discrete fields of endeavor over which philosophy governs. That’s because philosophy is the most general area of human understanding; so while it can borrow from mathematical concepts, it is never, never subservient to them. Proceeding from sensory input to knowledge using mathematical axioms is like interpreting biology using rules suited to chemistry.

So first --

I'm not quite seeing the "contempt for atheists" in there / Do I care if you, or Dan, or Nathan, or Stephen, are atheists? (Answer, no.)

Telling people that they can’t be atheists has offended at least four other posters on this group, drawing reactions like, “your posts have gotten more and more insulting. They have been patronizing ... “ So it’s not just me. If reactions to your assertion vary, some will turn hostile in response. Although it’s not out of the question to take your remark in a charitable spirit, nothing requires anyone to do so. I cannot believe you can't see how brazen you sound.

Since you’ve made a sophisticated effort show other posters they cannot be atheists no matter how much they think they are, the only way for you consistently not to care about Dan, Nathan or Stephen is if, in fact, they’ve never claimed to be atheists in the first place.


But goodness, Tyler. Now I'm ... "a Buddhist"[?:]. I'm actually neither.

You’ve said you were a Zen deist. I thought Zen was a variation of Buddhism. In any case, it’s a distinction without a difference. Your assertion that I was victoriously “finger-pointing” is a reading of that interpretation into what I said. But your supernaturalism is indeed fact. I suspect that the definition of "belief" is a factor in many of your exchanges, because people seem to be using it different ways.

To proceed:


Axioms

To define an axiom as an assumption is incomplete. To define an axiom as a self-evident observation that lies at the base of knowledge is better. While axioms are essential to philosophy, they aren’t the basis of philosophy. Metaphysics is.

Using your definition of axioms is good enough in mathematics, but extending it to philosophy results in absurdity. If you do that, you have to account of the ontological status of the term assumption. The result is that all reality can only be an assumption, considering that the real world must now have something axiomatic to itself.

All you posts point that way. But if the basis of reality is an assumption, and an axiom is an assumption, then your definition of an axiom is self-referring and leads to an endless regress. That makes your definition of an axiom meaningless. This is why you cannot use the tools of mathematics to assess an ontological problem in philosophy.

If you persist in this error, you will succeed in undermining the world of ordinary experience. That you have done. You will also undermine any possibility of assigning a truth value to epistemological statements because truth itself can no longer be inferred from contingent fact, but only from a priori necessity. That you've done.

The only way out of this paradox is to alter the definition of an axiom. If you do that, you put a stop to all the conceptual chaos your definition leads to, you establish the basis for reality and truth, and you thereby provide a way by which knowledge becomes factual.


Skepticism

What the problem of axioms comes to is the difference between contingency and necessity. Your line of reasoning assumes necessity. But necessity requires taking a God’s-eye view of reality. This is fine in mathematics, because the thinker himself can adopt such a stance to work through an equation, for instance. The reasoning is valid to the extent that a consciousness can have perfect knowledge of its content.

However, to extend a God’s-eye view of a single consciousness to a metaphysical assumption makes any conclusions stemming from it supernatural by definition. Under this reasoning, furthermore, any supernatural standpoint in philosophy is perfectly acceptable.

In its proper form, skepticism is a tool for inquiry. This is the way, I think, that Alex intended the term in his first post – and that’s good. But you profess skepticism as a permanent state of mind, understandable given you definition of axioms. The problem is that nobody can possibly live that credo. If you can’t live what you profess to believe, you’re no different from any other partisan of the supernatural.

But of course, it doesn’t matter to you how unsound your reasoning is. You’re a believer, and your religion is skepticism. At the heart of hundreds of thousands of words you’ve thrown this way lies the malicious glee I spoke of that jams the ability of your more credulous correspondents to trust philosophy. But in the process, you have totally misconstrued philosophical purpose of the true skeptic, co-opting it for your own purposes.

Hi Alex --

Alex wrote: "Tyler
Hey sorry what was your last point? I will try and answer if I can."

Actually, it was several points back at msg. 436. We were talking about the role of humanism in moral thinking; specifically, whether it was part and parcel of Church doctrine from the outset.

Intelligent design is a God of the gaps theory, belief in the existence of the soul isnt.

I disagree. The soul is an invention to explain the things about ourselves that we don't understand. But many, if not all, of those things are now understood. Explain to me, what does a soul do? Imagine two people (again :)), identical in all respects except that one has a soul and one doesn't. How are they at all different? What function does a soul perform that isn't understood as a function of the brain?

Dan \This presupposes that it is good to worship God. Basically, you're saying that it is good to worship God because by worshiping God, you worship God.

I'll ask again: Take two people.\

I thought of an answer a day ago while sick in bed with some gahstly stomach problem. But I have forgotten already. It will come to me later.

Tyler
Hey sorry what was your last point? I will try and answer if I can.

Steven
\How can spirituality prove the existence of the soul\
I have said no such thing, however spirituality is healthy and a natural desire.

\e.g. creating the world in 7 days. Or are you one of those that pick and choose what bits of the bible to believe?\
Intelligent design is a God of the gaps theory, belief in the existence of the soul isnt. You seem to be a man who treasures logic and yet you wont use it on your own questions. Ultraliteral interpretations of Genesis are unnecessary. There are clearly some parts of the Bible that are eyewitness accounts of historical events that should be taken as observed facts, and there are other parts such as the first few chapeters of genesis, the book of Job, the song of solomon, and the Psalms that have a lyrical and allegorical flavour, and do not carry the mark of pure historical narative. I have spoken before that the first chapters of Genesis were more of a morality play than a news report.
Tell me, in Isaiah 41:10) did the right arm of God literally lift up the nation of Israel?
'The intention of the Bible was (and is) to reveal the nature of God to humankind. Would it have served Gods purpose thirty-four hundred years ago to lecture to His people about radioactive decay, geological strata, and DNA?' Francis S Collins, head of the Human Genome Project.

/The heart is a pump, is that what you think with? /
I dont know if you are trying to be funny or if it is just your character. I shouldnt even bother replying to such statements but any way.
'(Heart Anthropology) Above all in the course of the enlightenment Descartes sets the rationalistic antipole by professing the experiences of emotions in the heart section as an "illusionistic projection". [6:] However Antonio R. Damasio, from a neurobiological perspective, argues: "The feeling of an emotion has much more to do with the body," and states: "rational thinking is not possible without the influence of the emotion." Damasio refers to a quotation of Blaise Pascal: "The heart has its reasons that reason knows not." [7:]'wiki

Hi Dan --

I don't want to spoil my post-World Series high.

I'm too far away to know which team sux, but I did think Matsui was amazing.


... and whose mother is the bigger whore.

Okay, I don't usually burst out laughing while reading, but I did when I got this point.


The nature of knowledge was a topic back then -- rgb was saying atheists don't exist, that they only think they're atheists. But morality was only indirectly touched on. I think what rgb's setting the table for is some revised version of nihilism, but I'll have to peruse his last post to figure it out.


...even though it sounds like you would've been across the fence from me, I'm sure you would have brought civility and coherence to that side of the argument

I don't take off the gloves unless I detect something irredeemably dishonest about the other person's approach. If I can't reconcile a difference, I at least like to narrow it down. That was what I was hoping to do with Alex -- perhaps to draw him out. But he didn't answer my last point about the origin about humanism, so there's not much I can do for now. In any case, I'm sorry I wasn't following the thread that closely because at some point it got ugly. Part of the problem was that the posts were flying so fast and furious.

But it's like they say: Trying to get atheists to agree on anything is like trying to herd cats.

In a sad, probably doomed, effort to bring the thread back onto track, has anybody read:

Good Without God What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

? Amazon kicked it up into my field of view on my last visit, and it looked interesting (but perhaps a bit expensive at $18). Certainly apropos to this thread.

rgb