Atheists and the validity of reason

[ateista]

Maybe his death is only within his perception and experience of reality and not in the true reality.

Are you serious? Would you bet your life on this illusion? Are you willing to try a “sand-diet”?

My point was that it seems foolish to me to reject God for philosophical reasons and at the same time maintain that our minds are not necessarily accurate.

I don’t see why. Mind you, I don’t “reject” God. I simply do not believe that a “supernatural entity” exists. Even the word “exists” is undefined here. Your question is just another version of Pascal’s wager.

No matter how many people play lottery, a winner will be chosen. In the atheistic model, no one is trying or planning to choose a winner. It could just as easily have no winner at all, and when you count the odds of both the people playing and the fact that no one is planning on picking a winner, the odds become extreme.

Not exactly. A winner is not “chosen”. The numbers are chosen and the more people play the more likely it is that someone will get lucky. More about this subject in the next paragraphs.

I would enjoy reading it if you are inclined to write it, but if not, that’s okay.

Very well. It is my perception that you are not a mathematician. I will try to make this simple and if you need clarification, let me know.

The problem as you stated is something like this:

There is a very unlikely event that has actually occurred (the emergence of human minds capable of abstract, philosophical thinking) and you find it unlikely that mere chance is a sufficient explanation for this.

The whole question boils down to the “surprise-factor”. Fortunately the “surprise” can be defined quite easily.

Let’s start with an example. Suppose you have a box with 100 balls in it, and every ball has a number on it. You don’t know what those numbers are. You reach into the box and pull out one ball, and it has the value of “17” on it. How “surprising” is this event?

This question cannot be answered, unless you know what are the actual numbers on all of the balls.

Suppose the balls have the numbers from 1 to 100. The result of “17” is not surprising, it could have been any number from 1 to a 100. Suppose that every ball has a “2” on them, except one, which has “17” on it. The result then would be quite surprising, the most likely event would be “2” - obviously. Suppose all the balls have a “17” on them, with one exception, which has a “2” on it. The result is is not surprising at all.

And this is the point. Just because an event occurred, the “surprise factor” cannot be decided, unless we have information about all the possible outcomes. And that is missing.

I know you find it “intuitively” surprising, but probability theory is not intuitive at all.

Let’s take another example: suppose you heard that someone tossed a coin many times and the result was this:

“TTTHTTTTHTTTTTHHHHHHHHHTTHHHHHHTTTTTHHHTTTTT…”

Would you find this surprising? Probably not. If the result you see is this, however:

“TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT…”

you would find it extremely surprising. The point is that in the first example you see no regularities, in the second one you do (this is called the “odometer syndrome”). But the first one has regularities, too: the number of heads and tails is an encoding of the value of “pi”: (3.14159265358979323846). It is just as surprising.

The problem is that any sequence of “T” and “H” is equally probable. What would be surprising is the ability to predict any outcome. That is the difference between a-priori and a-posteriori probabilities.

The a-posteriori probabilities are meaningless. What happened, happened. And that is the problem with the probability based approach.

That intelligent life appeared somewhere in this immensely large universe is not surprising at all. With the number of galaxies, stars, planetary systems and the possible life-forms (life does not have to carbon based) and the billions of years elapsed, the probability that an unlikely event happened somewhere and sometime is virtually one.

I repeat: Earth is the lucky guy who won on the cosmic lottery. Every lucky player who wins a jackpot is “alone” at the point of winning. Just as it is not surprising that a lottery winner will emerge once every couple of weeks - because of the millions of players, it is equally not surprising that the trillions upon trillions of “experiments” eventually “created” us, the beings who are capable of abstract thinking.

If you need more information, let me know. (As luck would have it, I used to be a math professor, and lectured probability theory for many years.) I know that it is not an easy concept.

 

[Sarpedon]

I will respond to all of your posts, but first I want to see your response to Darwin’s quote above. That contains the argument in a nutshell.

 

[Nepenthe]

As ever, ateista, I laud your wisdom and academic power, and most of all, your patience. I haven’t your forbearance, nor I expect your learning (and surely not in the same fields), but I appreciate it very much. My thanks.

 

[Touchstone]

I think the following quote by Darwin expresses in a nutshell what I am trying to say:

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism

Letter to William Graham, Down, July 3, 1881. In The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1887), Volume 1, pp. 315-316.

Below you asked for a response to this. To which I ask “Why”? We’ve already established that solipsism is available theoretical choice, but a luxury no human can afford to indulge and live. In many cases, he can’t physically even choose it, as when the reflexes override his attempts at solipsism by pulling his hand back out from a flame he had just thrust it into, thinking the flame an illusion.

But if we had naught but a monkey’s brain – if we were monkeys in the cognitive sense – we’d be in no different position. What is the alternative for a monkey who doubts that the jaguar stalking him is real, or that his eyes and ears are even crude representations of the world outside his mind? He has no alternative available. If you have no more than a monkey’s capability to reason, you use what you got. If you are a cockroach, you are little more than a finite state machine, responding to external stimuli (“move away from the light to darkness/shelter”).

That points up the unusual position humans are in with respect to reasoning and analysis, but it changes nothing at all with respect to doubts about the reality of reality. I can appreciate Darwin “thinking out loud” on this, and solipsism is an inevitable point on the horizon we approach if we discard the practical constraints of the real world. As the originator of the theory, Darwin was a “trailblazer”, and had not the benefit of now going on two centuries of analysis on both scientific and philosophical levels regarding the unavoidable necessity of embracing rationality as rational and connected to an objective reality.

Even so, the “convictions of man’s mind” are famously uneven and chaotic on many fronts. A man, or a monkey, is remarkably astute in making rational decisions about the reality and intentions of jaguar stalking him. The “consequence factor” for such faculties is very high, and thus finely honed by millions of years of evolution. But the very same faculties often get pointed at ideas and propositions that carry no imminent lethal threat, or hardly any practical consequence at all. The “consequence factor” for believing that a child from the village should be ritually sacrificed in propitiation to the Rain God is nearly zero (provided your not the poor child chosen as appeasement fodder!).

In such cases, man has little practical consequences hanging on such concepts in terms of survival, and his convictions are thus not honed in the way intentionality detection is with the stalking jaguar. You can be a Rain God slave, slaughtering a child every solstice to appease the Rain God, and facilitate rain for the harvest, with little to no penalty for such unfounded convictions. It may even be psychologically beneficial in some sense, this unfounded conviction, in its “explanatory value” – it provides a “narrative” and a rationale for why the rains come or do not come, and gives the village(r) a welcome sense of some control over their agricultural fate.

All that’s far beyond what needs to be addressed in Darwin’s quote, though. What is the alternative? Do we suppose solipsism or brute credulity commend themselves over the faculties of a monkey, or even a cockroach? I don’t see how they would.

Maybe I misunderstand here, and need some expansion, but I fail to see how Darwin’s comments supports, or even attaches to questions of the “validity of reason”. It’s the only game in town, and if you are a monkey, you have (we suppose, through observation) much more humble powers of reasoning than humans do, but nonetheless, it’s spectacularly more powerful and effective than any alternative.

I think Darwin in this quote is processing the astounding insight he’s made, that mind does come from non-mind, and in a gradual, step-wise way. For one immersed in a culture that has miraculous creation and dualism enshrined in its collective worldview, that’s quite a hump to get over. Ask me how I know.

-Touchstone

 

[Touchstone]

I will respond to all of your posts, but first I want to see your response to Darwin’s quote above. That contains the argument in a nutshell.

Sarpedon,

I did respond, see above. But I note that Darwin is expressing doubts and incredulity, not advancing an argument. I understand you to be saying you have similar doubts, and that’s fine, but I can’t find an argument to address in there, even in nutshell form.

-TS

 

[ateista]

Well, since you wanted an answer, here it comes:

I think the following quote by Darwin expresses in a nutshell what I am trying to say:

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism

Letter to William Graham, Down, July 3, 1881. In The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1887), Volume 1, pp. 315-316.

I would trust the mind of the monkey over the mind of a philosopher any day - in the jungle. The monkey would know which berries are nutritious and which are harmful. What are the signals of a predator approaching. The philosopher would not last one day in the jungle, where the monkeys thrive.

The truth is that most philosophers are well-fed, cared-for people who can afford the luxury of staying at home and polishing their foreskins. Usually they don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, much less how to gather the ingredients in a rather hostile environment.

It was rationality and reason which allow us to spend only a few minutes a day to get our daily bread. It was skepticism and science which allow us to grow the food for the whole population of the US, and the percentage of farmers who produce all that food is less than 6% of the whole population.

 

[ateista]

As ever, ateista, I laud your wisdom and academic power, and most of all, your patience. I haven’t your forbearance, nor I expect your learning (and surely not in the same fields), but I appreciate it very much. My thanks.

Thank you very much for your kind words.

I have been around for more than 60 years, and had ample time to fill up my brain with useful and useless trivia. Nevertheless, I enjoy some childish fun, and now I will log on to my favorite internet game (Everquest) where I will direct 3 toons (all level 80!) and kill a bunch of evil opponents. Keeps me young at heart and allows me to enhance my eye-hand coordination.

 

[Sarpedon]

The genius of Darwin’s quote is that he begins to realize the ramifications of humans being only animals. After all, monkeys cannot use reason correctly. They simply cannot arrive at the truth of either God’s existence or nonexistence. They cannot draw true conclusions in matters of philosophy, because they lack the faculties necessary for it.

Now, if humans are monkeys (not technically true, but ignore taxonomy), how do we know that this one species of monkey (Homo sapiens), can use reason correctly, but not any other species of monkey our other animal? What makes us special, and how do we know it? We certainly do not have a third-party observation to compare against. Who says that the convictions of our minds are truth, but the convictions of an orangutan are just gibberish? We are both animals.

Darwin called this his “horrid doubt”. I suspect that the reason he chose that word is that he realized his doubt could destroy all certain human knowledge. After all, human knowledge is only the convictions of a monkey’s mind…

 

[Sarpedon]

There is a very unlikely event that has actually occurred (the emergence of human minds capable of abstract, philosophical thinking) and you find it unlikely that mere chance is a sufficient explanation for this.

I repeat: Earth is the lucky guy who won on the cosmic lottery. Every lucky player who wins a jackpot is “alone” at the point of winning. Just as it is not surprising that a lottery winner will emerge once every couple of weeks - because of the millions of players, it is equally not surprising that the trillions upon trillions of “experiments” eventually “created” us, the beings who are capable of abstract thinking.

The bolded part demonstrates where you depart from my argument.

You say that an event has happened, and the prior unlikeliness of it happening a certain way does not mean that it didn’t happen that way.

I say that we don’t know whether an event has happened, and that the only way we can sincerely believe that it did happen is by a certain way.

We can’t know with absolute certainty that we developed philosophically accurate minds, because we have no third-party observation to check against. If we did know with certainty that our minds work that way, your argument could have merit. However, in the absence of that proof, it does not work as well, if at all.

Here’s my analogy:

You have 45 trillion white balls and one red ball. You are blindfolded, and pick one ball. At no point may you remove the blindfold.

In order for ideas and language to have any meaning, the ball must be red. However, you don’t know what color it is. However, you want to be able to use reason and language. Thus, you must make the decidedly unscientific choice that you will believe it is red in the absence of proof.

Now that you have chosen to believe in it, you can try to justify your belief. One way is by believing an intelligence guided your hand to the right one. The other way is by believing that you just so happened to pick the right one by chance out of 45 trillion other balls.

Both are possible. Personally, I don’t think I could bring myself to believe in the second possibility, especially when compared to the first.

Some people could read this and think that because we can’t know with certainty that the ball is red, we shouldn’t decide either way. These people are broadly known as universal skeptics (usually the soft variety, because the hard variety refutes itself).

I think that this is foolish and a result of requiring certainty for everything, which is not necessary nor possible. By using faith, we can escape the logical traps of a entirely proof-based system and actually lead healthy and productive lives. Also, experience is a vital factor in making these descisions, in addition to philosophy. I try not to fall into the trap of believing in something that is against common sense due to some carefully constructed words. At the same time, I try to not allow “common sense” to override something that may well be true.

 

[ateista]

The genius of Darwin’s quote is that he begins to realize the ramifications of humans being only animals. After all, monkeys cannot use reason correctly.

They certainly can “reason” well enough that their survival of their species is “assured”.

They simply cannot arrive at the truth of either God’s existence or nonexistence. They cannot draw true conclusions in matters of philosophy, because they lack the faculties necessary for it.

True, and they are not “worse off” for lacking that ability. What this really means is that the ability to contemplate God’s existence is not relevant. The monkeys are “weak atheists”, and that does not hurt them in any way.

Now, if humans are monkeys (not technically true, but ignore taxonomy), how do we know that this one species of monkey (Homo sapiens), can use reason correctly, but not any other species of monkey our other animal?

We can reason well enough to survive.

What makes us special, and how do we know it?

Special? Our brain structure is definitely much more complicated and allows the development of a more sophisticated mind. It allows us to create wonderful medications, but it also allows us to make horribly destructive weapons. Maybe our complicated mind is more of a “curse” than a “blessing”?

We certainly do not have a third-party observation to compare against.

Not right now. But we may run into some space aliens, compared to whom we are not more than the Neanderthals were to us. We may even be able to build artificial intelligence, which will be much more complicated and “smart” than we are.

Who says that the convictions of our minds are truth, but the convictions of an orangutan are just gibberish? We are both animals.

It seems to me that you think about an “absolute, all-encompassing knowledge” which we certainly lack. It reminds me of Paul Erdos, a great Hungarian mathematician, who did not believe in God, but who believed in the “Book”, which contains the most beautiful proofs of all the mathematical problems of all kinds. When he saw an especially insightful proof, he said: “this is straight from the Book”.

Darwin called this his “horrid doubt”. I suspect that the reason he chose that word is that he realized his doubt could destroy all certain human knowledge. After all, human knowledge is only the convictions of a monkey’s mind…

But it does not “invalidate” or “destroy” our current level of knowledge. It simply reminds us not be over-confident, and always stay open to the possibility that we may be mistaken in our current assessment of reality, and be ready to review it, if and when the necessity arises. And that is the real and true meaning of the quote you mentioned.

 

[Touchstone]

The genius of Darwin’s quote is that he begins to realize the ramifications of humans being only animals. After all, monkeys cannot use reason correctly. They simply cannot arrive at the truth of either God’s existence or nonexistence.

I think perhaps they may. I think if you could examine the beliefs of a monkey, such as they are, you would find no trace of a belief in God, or any concept of God at all. So far as your monkey subject is concerned, God is a non-entity, wouldn’t you say?

As for the truth of God’s existence or non-existence, humans cannot agree on that point.

They cannot draw true conclusions in matters of philosophy, because they lack the faculties necessary for it.

If they see a jaguar stalking the jungle floor, they are reacting rationally to scamper up a tree, and to sound the alarm to their fellow troop members to do the same. That reaction is contingent on a functional perception system, a processing model for threats and intentionality and decision-making faculties. To the extent the monkey is not able to reason about the sensory perceptions it processes, it is at risk of quick and violent death. To the extent it is unable to develop heuristics for locating food on a continuing basis, it is at risk as well.

All of which means that the truth model for a monkey is more closely tied to real-world application, tools deployed in the service of surviving and thriving. But these are demanding tasks, and the failure to dependably reason to approximate truths about the state of the world around them is a deadly circumstance.

Now, if humans are monkeys (not technically true, but ignore taxonomy), how do we know that this one species of monkey (Homo sapiens), can use reason correctly, but not any other species of monkey our other animal?

I believe you are laboring under a misconception. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, having reasoning capabilities, just less developed capabilities in some/many areas compared to humans. Cognition isn’t a ‘flatline’ that spikes with the introduction of homo sapiens. Homo is quite a ways out front of even the chimpanzee (in terms of skills humans value), who has more reasoning power than monkeys on the basis of skills humans value (proto-language, for example, tool usage, social calculus). Different animals have different cognitive faculties, and some are more sophisticated than others. So far as we know, humans are the only animal that can manipulate the abstract elements of language, for example. But the chimp deploys clever, team-oriented hunting tactics that take both anticipation and social coordination – evidence that chimps have reasoning capabilities that are required to facilitate such actions.

What makes us special, and how do we know it? We certainly do not have a third-party observation to compare against. Who says that the convictions of our minds are truth, but the convictions of an orangutan are just gibberish? We are both animals.

I don’t know where you got the idea that the convictions of an Orang utan are nonsensical. All conscious beings build a truth model that facilities negotiating their surroundings. Poor truth models are very hard to carry forward in terms of survival, and are punished hard over the long term by natural selection; if you imagine predators that aren’t there, and waste precious energy avoiding phantoms that aren’t there, you’re at a survival disadvantage to others who do not have “false positives” firing so frequently. Similarly, if you are not able to build a sensory array that detects predators, you are much more likely to become prey, and quickly, then others who are able to detect threats in time to take evasive or defensive action.

Nature itself is a “truth builder”, and while the process isn’t perfect – its mindless after all – it’s very powerful, especially when it works over long periods of time. The Orang utan only gets to be a species we are aware of because it has a millions-of-years legacy of ancestors who were able to develop truth models about their surroundings that were sufficient accurate and robust to survive and reproduce. The Orang utan mostly likely hasn’t a clue about God or Barbra Streisand, but he’s a finely honed truth machine when it comes to real world environments and factors that matter to him.

Darwin called this his “horrid doubt”. I suspect that the reason he chose that word is that he realized his doubt could destroy all certain human knowledge. After all, human knowledge is only the convictions of a monkey’s mind…

Humans aren’t monkeys, of course, and human knowledge is not monkey knowledge, as powerful as monkey knowledge is to the life and times of a monkey. Over 10 million years, the human brain grew way out of proportion to its body mass and surface area, with much, much bigger ratios than a monkey. And the difference is much more profound than just sheer size. Somewhere along the way, man developed faculties that that were intellectual inflection points – the development of language, for example, verbal, then written… then Internet.

Even so, if we understand all this to be a fairly recent (~10Mya) outgrowth of “monkey knowledge”, I don’t see why that would be a problem.

And there is no certain human knowledge (most likely, heh). See Wittgenstein on doubting even Cartesian certainty of conscious existence, for example. In any case, consider what quantum electro-dynamics can do right now, for example. It can make predictions with mind-boggling precision, time after time after time. The only way to assail that as knowledge is to declare that reality isn’t real. Reality may not be real, but if it is, the performance of QED is simply unexplainable apart from being a precise model of the way reality works at quantum scales.

-Touchstone

 

[Sarpedon]

They certainly can “reason” well enough that their survival of their species is “assured”.

Certainly. That does not cover philosophy.

And why should this ability be relevant to our species?

We can reason well enough to survive.

And this doesn’t cover philosophy

Special? Our brain structure is definitely much more complicated and allows the development of a more sophisticated mind.

But is it developed enough? Do we really know that our brain development is at the stage where we can know the truth of God’s existence or nonexistence? Maybe some vastly more developed animal in the future will discover that God actually does exist. How do we know the current status of our mental development as a species?

Not right now. But we may run into some space aliens, compared to whom we are not more than the Neanderthals were to us. We may even be able to build artificial intelligence, which will be much more complicated and “smart” than we are.

If this happens, we’ll take the discussion from there.

It seems to me that you think about an “absolute, all-encompassing knowledge” which we certainly lack.

If we lack the capacity to discover all this knowledge, then how do you know the God question falls into the knowable category?

But it does not “invalidate” or “destroy” our current level of knowledge.

Yes, it does, because all previous discovered knowledge was learned by the same potentially flawed animal mind.

It simply reminds us not be over-confident, and always stay open to the possibility that we may be mistaken in our current assessment of reality, and be ready to review it, if and when the necessity arises. And that is the real and true meaning of the quote you mentioned

.

Unfortunately, the actions you mention are only possible if we do in fact have a mind capable of accurately gauging the truth of certain ideas. As Darwin realized, a species of monkey is doing the gauging, for better or worse.

[/QUOTE]

 

[ateista]

The bolded part demonstrates where you depart from my argument.

You say that an event has happened, and the prior unlikeliness of it happening a certain way does not mean that it didn’t happen that way.

My friend, I don’t even understand you any more. Prior to this you asserted that the human mind could have come into existence as the result of a divine intervention, or the result of the random evolutionary process. Now you seem to deny that the human mind exists at all.

If there is no human mind, then what are we talking about?

I say that we don’t know whether an event has happened, and that the only way we can sincerely believe that it did happen is by a certain way.

This brings us back to a few questions I posted, and you have not answered yet.

Do you rely on “faith” when you contemplate your own existence? Or do you know with absolute certainty that you exist? Do you doubt that the external reality exists? Do you doubt that your senses give you accurate information about the reality?

If you would try to deny your own existence, you would be a lunatic. If you would try to deny the existence of the external reality, you would subscibe to solipsism. If you would try to deny the accuracy of the information your senses convey to you, you would subscribe to universal skepticism. There are no other choices.

Obviously you are not a lunatic. Obviously you accept the reality of my and Touchstone’s existence, since you reply to our posts. Obviously you accept the accuracy of your senses, since you reply to what you read. Where is the need for “faith” in this process?

Please take time to read and respond these questions.

We can’t know with absolute certainty that we developed philosophically accurate minds, because we have no third-party observation to check against.

In your sixth post you said the opposite (“Having established that we all accept the axiom that our minds accurately percieve truth, we can move on from there. There are two main ways to explain why this axiom is true.”), and both Touchstone and I immediately disagreed. We don’t have “absolutely accurate” minds, our mind is not “perfect”. The models we build are under constant revision, and always subject to be reworked, if necessary.

Let’s be precise: there are instances when doubt is in order. But such doubt must be established with reasons, it cannot be simply stated that “since we are not perfect, there is always reason to doubt”. (That would be universal skepticism again.)

Here’s my analogy:

You have 45 trillion white balls and one red ball. You are blindfolded, and pick one ball. At no point may you remove the blindfold.

In order for ideas and language to have any meaning, the ball must be red. However, you don’t know what color it is. However, you want to be able to use reason and language. Thus, you must make the decidedly unscientific choice that you will believe it is red in the absence of proof.

That is not a good analogy. You don’t know how many balls are in the stack. You don’t know how many red balls are in the stack. But you do know that a red ball was selected. To make a calculation of the a-posteriori probability of having selected a red ball you need the missing information, otherwise you would be just guessing and it would be a totally unfounded, wild guess.

This is why the “surprise” factor is meaningless.

You have two options: either believe a divine intervention or believe the semi-random process of evolution. The trouble with the divine intervention is two-fold.

The first problem is that it violates the principle of parsimony. This is less of a problem, after all a simple explanation can be wrong and a more complicated one can be right.

The second and serious problem: it carries no explanatory value. To say that an unknowable, supernatural being used an unknowable method to make something happen is the denial of explanation. It says that we shall never know how such an event happened. And that is the reason why the divine intervention cannot be seriously contemplated.

 

[ateista]

But it does not “invalidate” or “destroy” our current level of knowledge.

This is universal skepticism again, in its most blatant form, which you repudiated before.

You state that we know nothing, because the humble origin of our brain. It is true that all of our knowledge of the natural world is subject to review, if and only if there is a good, empirical reason to do so. That does not invalidate or destroy our current knowledge, it merely makes it possible that some parts of it might come up for review.

I ask you to rethink your position and re-state your dilemma. Right now your position oscillates between solipsism and universal skepticism, both of which are untenable positions.

 

[Touchstone]

This is universal skepticism again, in its most blatant form, which you repudiated before.

You state that we know nothing, because the humble origin of our brain. It is true that all of our knowledge of the natural world is subject to review, if and only if there is a good, empirical reason to do so. That does not invalidate or destroy our current knowledge, it merely makes it possible that some parts of it might come up for review.

I ask you to rethink your position and re-state your dilemma. Right now your position oscillates between solipsism and universal skepticism, both of which are untenable positions.

This is a good synopsis of the problem, Sarpedon.

-TS

 

[Sarpedon]

You both are totally misunderstanding what I am saying. I will start again. Rather than respond to each individual point in your previous posts, I’ll just start again to maintain clarity. If there is a specific point you want me to explain I am more than happy to do so.

Also, lets keep the discussion focused on the Darwin quote. This quote contains the argument in a concrete way. What I will explain below is extremely abstract.

The term “reality” can be substituted for “philosophy”, if you want to reduce the abstraction factor of this argument.

First, off, we know that we experience a “reality”. Trees are green, my hand hurts when put in a fire, etc. We experience this “reality” through our nerves, neurons, and sense organs. These things are all matter, and they are the medium through which we experience “reality”, in the same way that my computer is the medium through which I experience this discussion.

Obviously, the truth of our “reality” is contingent upon the relevant material things being organized and working in that way. In the same way, the truth of your responses (to me) is contingent upon my computer presenting them to me correctly. Now, I know that my computer was designed by a fellow human to do this task, and I am fairly sure that it is working correctly.

So, I know that my computer is reliable, because I know who designed it and that it works correctly. I know these things because I am a third-party observer.

How do I know that my mind is reliable? How do I know that my synapses present a reality that is entirely true? How do I know that my mind doesn’t alter some aspects, perhaps for evolutionary finesse? I don’t know the programmer (atheists say there is none), and I can’t know whether it operates correctly, because I am a third-party observer.

Does this mean that I am a solipist or a skeptic? Of course not. I have faith that God designed my mind to always interpret reality correctly. I know the Designer.

Atheists must also make the leap of faith that their mind interprets reality correctly. To say otherwise would mean that they would not be able to trust anything out of their mind, because of the potential for error. The difference between atheists and theists is that atheism has no programmer.

Personally, I find “God made it happen, despite the odds” a far better explanation that “by chance, luckily, fortunately, it just happened”.

 

[Sarpedon]

That is not a good analogy. You don’t know how many balls are in the stack. You don’t know how many red balls are in the stack. But you do know that a red ball was selected.

No, the whole point is that we don’t know whether a red ball was selected. We can have faith, but not proof or perhaps even evidence.

 

[ateista]

No, the whole point is that we don’t know whether a red ball was selected. We can have faith, but not proof or perhaps even evidence.

Back to universal skepticism again?

 

[Sarpedon]

Back to universal skepticism again?

No! Did you even read post 36 and 29? How many times do you want me to explain it?

Anyway, you just saying that doesn’t change the fact that so far you have not addressed my real analogy about the balls.

 

[Sarpedon]

By the way, I do not consider the Darwin quote resolved. I hope you both return to it.