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It is good, then, to remember four options in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). There is rational foundationalism, as attempted by Descartes. There is natural foundationalism, as attempted in Hume. There is coherentism. And brooding over all of them, there is scepticism, or the view that there is no knowledge. Each of these has had distinguished defenders. Whichever the reader prefers, he or she will find good philosophical company.
It is more likely that the world was created yesterday than 4 billion years ago
Hence, scepticism permanently beckons, or threatens, us. We may be tracking the world reliably, but we may not.
Any confidence in a harmony between the way we take things to be, and the way they are, will seem to be a pure act of faith.
These events in the subject’s consciousness cannot be seen in public. They are private. The whole classroom may see some neurones firing, but only the one person feels the pain.
‘substance dualist’.
property dualists.
‘rationalist’.
Interesting facts about color
Thoughts are strange things. They have ‘representational’ powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there. It doesn’t, on the face of it, point towards anything beyond itself, such as a fact or putative fact.
A thermostat controls the temperature by being part of the way in which the past controls the present and future. And according to compatibilism, that is how we control things. We are involved in the causal order.
(But then, contemporary juries are not very good on causation either. In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual.)
For perhaps religion is not a matter of beliefs, and these states of mind are not beliefs. Accepting a religion may be more like enjoying a poem, or following the football. It might be a matter of immersion in a set of practices. Perhaps the practices have only an emotional point, or a social point. Perhaps religious rituals only serve necessary psychological and social ends.
This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: It is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: It is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him ... And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in
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Suppose you found yourself at school or university in a dormitory. Things are not too good. The roof leaks, there are rats about, the food is almost inedible, some students in fact starve to death. There is a closed door, behind which is the management, but the management never comes out. You get to speculate what the management must be like. Can you infer from the dormitory as you find it that the management, first, knows exactly what conditions are like, second, cares intensely for your welfare, and third, possesses unlimited resources for fixing things? The inference is crazy.
In particular, if ‘God’s goodness’ is not to be understood in the same terms as what we think of as good (so that, for instance, it might be ‘good’ of God in this different sense to unleash bubonic plague on defenceless infants) then it has no implications for how I am to live my life.
In other traditions, he is by no means omnipotent, but subject to forces not of his own making. Each of these at least affords some kind of theodicy.
A little miracle or two snuffing out the Hitlers and Stalins would seem far more useful than one that changes water to wine at one particular wedding feast. It is no doubt very good of God to let St Giuseppe levitate in front of pictures of him, but other things being equal, one would have preferred, say, the miraculous quarantine or destruction of the Aids virus.
Hume was born less than twenty years after the last legal religious executions in Britain, and himself suffered from the enthusiastic hostility of believers. If in our time and place all we see are church picnics and charities, we will not be so worried. But enough people come down the mountain carrying their own practical certainties to suggest that we ought to be.
But ‘logical’ is not a synonym for ‘sensible’. Logic is interested in whether arguments are valid, not in whether it is sensible to put them forward.
Logic has only one concern. It is concerned whether there is no way that the premises could be true without the conclusion being true.
Disease calculation
For a creature to flourish, it must get information from the environment that tallies with its actual needs. All that is necessary for this is that the information stimulates it to action in the right way. For instance, if a predator is coming, it needs some information that stimulates flight. However, for this function, it does not matter what experience it gets.
So as well as opening up dualism of mind and body Descartes and his contemporaries open up a dualism between the world as it is for us (sometimes called the ‘manifest image’)—the coloured, warm, smelly, noisy, comfortable, familiar world—and the world as it is objectively or absolutely (the ‘scientific image’)—the world that contains nothing but physical particles and forces spread out across the boundless spaces of the cosmos.
His world retreats entirely into the mind—the doctrine known as subjective idealism.
In fact, the sensitive reader may have noticed that the upshot of the arguments is often a kind of pessimism. The harmony between our thoughts and the world, the bridge we build between past and future, the sense of what the physical world contains and how our minds fit into it, are all topics on which the finest thinkers have hurled themselves, only to be frustrated.
