Atheists and the validity of reason

[Touchstone]

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

What’s to resolve? I didn’t find an argument in Darwin’s quote, but an expression of doubt, incredulity. If you see an argument in there, or have one of your own, lay it out for us, please. As it is, I agree with ateista: you are cycling between solipsism and hyper-skepticism as the basis for your appeal to faith.

Maybe some tractable examples will help. This monkey you are concerned about: when this monkey perceives a jaguar, and head for the high branches, sounding the alarm, what are the implications of such a reaction if we surround the event by a team of human observers equipped with cameras, audo and video equipment? Assuming we have a multi-way consensus on the actuality of the jaguar, would the monkey’s reaction be ‘truth-based’ or ‘reality-based’ to you? Setting aside the anxieties and possible humiliation (not humiliating to me!) of considering that our minds trace back to common ancestors we and the monkeys share, do you suppose that we have reason to doubt the monkeys perceptions and rational processing of those reactions, based on our observing the scene?

Does the monkey have knowledge and perceptions he can trust, no matter what the provenance of that knowledge or capablity is?

I think the answer to those questions will help me understand you better. Because as it is, you appear to be simply fighting against solipsism and universal skepticism. Darwin, I suppose (although he’s not around to ask, unfortunately), was dealing the massive “paradigm realignment” that was implied by his hypothesis. Rather than being an endownment from a sovereign supernatural omniscient deity, the mind was now supposed to come from much more humble origins – slow, step-wise biologcal development over millions and billions of years. That’s quite a paradigm shift, and when I read that quote I hear old Charles reeling just a bit from the switch.

I do not suspect he believed that monkeys were insane, deluded, or irrational, even. I’d wager he’d argue for the finely honed practical cognitive capabilities I’ve mentioned here – he’d immediately affirm the acutely sensitive alarm system monkeys maintain for detecting and evading predators, for example, a system that is only as effective as it is “true” – false positives and missed alarms both being lethal errors, statistically. When you’ve been raised from birth to think of “higher things” as magical somehow, immaterial, supernatural, it’s a hurdle to get over, considering that these “higher things” are just the natural cognitive progression from ‘lower things’ in man’s history. When you think it was a supernatural gift your whole life, the idea that such capabilities just grew their on their own is an amazing, difficult idea to entertain.

This is what I hear from Darwin in this quote.

In any case, that’s just my reaction. I don’t see an argument in there. Please present one, if you’ve got one.

-Touchstone

 

[Sarpedon]

True, Darwin doesn’t present a formal argument in his quote. However, the quote contains the problem that atheism can’t resolve- how we know that we can trust the convictions of a specific monkey’s mind.

If you ask an orangutan how to find food in the jungle, you can probably trust his answer. If you ask the same creature whether God exists, there is no way you could sanely trust its response.

Simply put, orangutans can’t think that way.

Suppose you ask a human whether God exists. How do we know we can trust him any more than an orangutan? Both are monkeys. Why should our species be capable of thinking that way, and how do we know that we can? We have no third-party observation to check the accuracy of our philosophic endeavors.

Clearly, a grade of mental ability exists. Snails lack the ability to use tools. Chimps can use tools. Clearly, the chimp has a greater mental ability than a snail.

If this grade exists, then how do we know our place on it? How do we know that we fall on X point, where knowledge of God’s existence or nonexistence is possible? Maybe we aren’t developed enough, and some future creature will evolve to the point where it is in fact capable of discovering the answer to the God question. Maybe all of our attempts are futile, because we lack the mental ability, in the same way that snails lack the ability to use tools.

 

[Sarpedon]

As it is, I agree with ateista: you are cycling between solipsism and hyper-skepticism as the basis for your appeal to faith.

Is that a bad thing?

I am not either of these, because of faith. Without faith, I would probably be a skeptic. I have explained this numerous times, most recently in post 36.

 

[ateista]

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.

So far, so good. I see you used the word “know”, and not that we “have faith”.

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.

What do you mean by the phrase: “the truth of our reality”? Important point, please clarify.

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.

No, that is not the reason. You “test” your computer, and the result is in conformity with what you associate with a working computer - based on your experience.

When two computers exercise a “handshake” to verify a connection, one sends a message, and the other one sends it back. Then the first one compares the sent and the received strings and if there is no discrepancy, it concludes that the connection is in order. (On the IBM mainframe the assembler instructions are “RUOK” and “IMOK” - which stand for “Are you OK?” and “I am OK”, respectively.)

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?

By the same way you “test” your computer. You build a “model” of reality and verify the expected result against your actual result. If they are the same, you know that your model was reliable, and thus your mind is reliable. To deny this would be another instance of universal skepticism.

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.

Isn’t there a typo in this sentence? I think you might have wanted to write: “because I am NOT a third-party observer”.

Does this mean that I am a solipist or a skeptic? Of course not.

I am not convinced. Too many times you send dubious messages. I accept that you are not a solipsist, but your stance is perilously close to a universal skeptic.

I have faith that God designed my mind to always interpret reality correctly. I know the Designer.

This time the word “know” really should be “have faith”. And I am not nitpicking. Let’s try not to confuse these two verbs.

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.

That “leap of faith” is verified millions of times every day. Admittedly even millions and billions of verifications cannot ensure that the observed phenomenon will be always true. But it is a very good indication that it is most probably true.

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

No problem, but then we are back to argument from incredulity. And let’s clarify this again: it was not sheer luck that our senses correctly transfer the information from reality. It has a great survival value, and evolution, the “blind watchmaker” will filter out those whose mind builds an incorrect model.

Now, for clarification of your stance:

1. do you have any doubt that you exist?
2. do you have any doubt that the external reality exists?
3. do you have any doubt that the signals reaching your mind are objectively existing?

In other words, do you need any faith to answer these questions in a negative fashion? If you say “no” to these questions then you are not a universal skeptic. If that is the case, then you agree that there are “some” things that can be accurately known, without resorting to faith. And if that is the case, then for you there will be a dividing line, and “before” that line no faith is necessary, and beyond it you will find faith necessary. The question is: “where do you draw the line”? What makes some things “truly” knowable?

One more observation. Atheists do not assert that the mind always works correctly. This is the result of it being an imperfect “computer”, which was not designed, rather it is the result of millions of years of trial and error - by the blind watchmaker. If you think that our mind was designed by a perfect creator, then how do you account for the mind’s imperfect behavior?

 

[ateista]

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

Of course I read them, many times. I know you deny neing a skeptic, but your other words do not support your claim.

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

I cannot because it makes no sense to me. Your analogy is based on universal skepticism, no matter how strongly you deny it. In your analogy (and I am not sure what it is the analogy for!) you say that we don’t know how many balls are there, we don’t know how many red balls are there, and we don’t know if we selected a red one or not. There is nothing “known” in your analogy.

 

[ateista]

True, Darwin doesn’t present a formal argument in his quote. However, the quote contains the problem that atheism can’t resolve- how we know that we can trust the convictions of a specific monkey’s mind.

Why can’t we solve it?

If you ask an orangutan how to find food in the jungle, you can probably trust his answer.

Agreed. We can trust it as far as it actually matters.

If you ask the same creature whether God exists, there is no way you could sanely trust its response.

So what? You can ask the same creature about the details of quantum physics equations, and the response will be something like: “Huh?”.

Simply put, orangutans can’t think that way.

Right on.

Suppose you ask a human whether God exists. How do we know we can trust him any more than an orangutan? Both are monkeys. Why should our species be capable of thinking that way, and how do we know that we can? We have no third-party observation to check the accuracy of our philosophic endeavors.

If you wish to concentrate on the “existence of God”, you must do two things: define “God”, so we know what are you talking about, and define “exists” in connection to this being. Neither of these are defined in a satisfactory manner.

Clearly, a grade of mental ability exists. Snails lack the ability to use tools. Chimps can use tools. Clearly, the chimp has a greater mental ability than a snail.

Agreed.

If this grade exists, then how do we know our place on it? How do we know that we fall on X point, where knowledge of God’s existence or nonexistence is possible?

Without a clear, conscise definition of “God” and “exists” this is a nonsensical question, something like “does Whayu qiaute?”.

Maybe we aren’t developed enough, and some future creature will evolve to the point where it is in fact capable of discovering the answer to the God question. Maybe all of our attempts are futile, because we lack the mental ability, in the same way that snails lack the ability to use tools.

Maybe. However as long as the concepts of “God” and “exists” are not rigorously defined, the question is exactly as meaningless as “does Whayu qiaute?”.

 

[Touchstone]

True, Darwin doesn’t present a formal argument in his quote. However, the quote contains the problem that atheism can’t resolve- how we know that we can trust the convictions of a specific monkey’s mind.

We test by correlation with the evidence, through testing and observation. When the monkey sounds the alarm and takes evasive action, are those actions generally correlated to the presence of a predator or other threat? Do we see monkeys reached by predators without ever perceiving the threat? By any accounts, monkeys are not so proficient to be perfect in this regard. Their cognitive powers are limited, imperfect, and I’m sure monkeys sometimes do waste energy on reacting to false alarms and predators that aren’t there, and they do sometimes get caught unawares or insufficiently aware of the reality of their surroundings, and pay the ultimate price for it.

But the answer for any “how do we know that we know” question always brings us back to empirical validation, for any non-synthetic proposition (we can declare that "all bachelors are unmarried with perfect confidence since this synthetic, tautological knowledge). Knowledge is proved out by performance, so when you want to know if a proposition or model can be trusted, you are simply asking how that model performs in the real world.

If you ask an orangutan how to find food in the jungle, you can probably trust his answer. If you ask the same creature whether God exists, there is no way you could sanely trust its response.

I disagree. Assuming you could get over the language barrier and actually converse with and Orang utan, I think the Orang utan would reply: “God? I have no idea what you are talking about, and know of no such thing”. As it happens, that seems a pretty solid answer, one I might give myself. Feel free to have some fun with me identifying with Orang utans, here.

Simply put, orangutans can’t think that way.

Right. It must not be a meaningful part of their reality, in other words. I’m not convinced humans can “think that way”, either, come to think of it. As least if we demand some nominal coherence in the way the topic is discussed (e.g. what does it mean to “exist” in the supernatural/immaterial sense?). Humans are certainly more willing to try, and will likely use many more words in doing so, but I’m not sure they provide anything more meaningful than your average Orang utan in their discourse.

Suppose you ask a human whether God exists. How do we know we can trust him any more than an orangutan?

We don’t have any means that I know of for accepting human assertions about God any more than a confused shrug from an Orang utan, so far as I can see. Above, I asserted that knowledge was only validated as knowledge through performance, and on this basis, human ideas about God don’t fare very well at all. In absolute terms, I think neither the Orang or the human can demonstrate knowledge of God. The difference is (my unfamiliarity with the inner thought life of the average Orang utan notwithstanding) that many humans don’t require demonstration or justification for things they believe, and so entertain beliefs they suppose they can think about, but when pressed have their concepts fall apart into absurdities, conundra and contradictions, or simple confusions as often as not.

Both are monkeys. Why should our species be capable of thinking that way, and how do we know that we can? We have no third-party observation to check the accuracy of our philosophic endeavors.

A powerful, trenchant observation! I couldn’t have said this better myself. I consider science to be a branch of philosophy, but I understand what you mean, I think; for a wide swath of philosophy, including much or all of theology, we’ve got little to no validation for any of its conclusions or models. It’s pseudo-knowledge.

Clearly, a grade of mental ability exists. Snails lack the ability to use tools. Chimps can use tools. Clearly, the chimp has a greater mental ability than a snail.

In human terms, yes, but that’s an intensely chauvinistic view. A bat has mental abilities that just embarass a human in terms of navigating in the dark, for example, and your average migratory bird has mental skills that direct global navigation in a way that’s just mystifying for a human. Even in cases where the cognitive skills of the organism are rudimentary, those cognitive skills are what is minimally demanded by the environment – each organism is “optimized” in cognitive and other respects for surviving and thriving in its context. It must be – it’s tautologous – else it wouldn’t have survived the sieve of natural selection over millions and millions of years.

That said, there are some remarkable unique aspects of human cognition. So far as we can tell, abstract language, introspection, self-abstraction and other forms of mental acrobatics are unique to humans among all oragnisms. If we stipulate those as “higher functions”, which is reasonable for our purposes here, then humans are at the high end of the curve, with no other species even approaching the abstract cognitive capabilities of humans.

If this grade exists, then how do we know our place on it? How do we know that we fall on X point, where knowledge of God’s existence or nonexistence is possible?

In one sense, we don’t and can’t, just as a matter of reflection. But knowledge is proved by performance, and in that sense, even if we suppose that “God” is something “real”, whatever those terms mean in that context, we don’t have a means of validating it. It may be possible, just as we suppose that proto-humans went from “incapable” of abstract introspection to “capable” at some point. But for now, based on what performance we might squeeze out of claims that God (or gods) exists, we don’t have a basis for saying we’ve reached that point.

Maybe we aren’t developed enough, and some future creature will evolve to the point where it is in fact capable of discovering the answer to the God question. Maybe all of our attempts are futile, because we lack the mental ability, in the same way that snails lack the ability to use tools.

Now you are talking. My conclusion at this point is that there is no God or god to discover. But it could be that God is just as unaccessible to me as, oh, a C++ compiler would be to your average snail. You don’t know what you don’t know, and it’s a possibility to consider – maybe one day either an extant god will interact in some empirically demonstrable way, or we shall develop cognitive abilities that enable us to discover and validate God’s reality.

-Touchstone

 

[Sarpedon]

I disagree. Assuming you could get over the language barrier and actually converse with and Orang utan, I think the Orang utan would reply: “God? I have no idea what you are talking about, and know of no such thing”. As it happens, that seems a pretty solid answer, one I might give myself. Feel free to have some fun with me identifying with Orang utans, here.

 

[john_doran]

But the answer for any “how do we know that we know” question always brings us back to empirical validation, for any non-synthetic proposition (we can declare that "all bachelors are unmarried with perfect confidence since this synthetic, tautological knowledge). Knowledge is proved out by performance, so when you want to know if a proposition or model can be trusted, you are simply asking how that model performs in the real world.

sounds a lot like logical positivsm to me…

what’s the “real world”? what if the “real world” contains non-empirical entities? or facts that aren’t susceptible to empirical verification? for example, the pythagorean theorem isn’t proven by measuring the sides of as many right-angled triangles as you can find; and goldbach’s conjecture won’t be proven by seeing if even trillions and trillions of even numbers are in fact the sums of two primes.

not to mention the foundational assumptions we make about the world, like that the actually is a “real world”; that it is roughly the way it apears to us; that there is a past; and so on.

Touchstone:

I disagree. Assuming you could get over the language barrier and actually converse with and Orang utan, I think the Orang utan would reply: “God? I have no idea what you are talking about, and know of no such thing”.

and what if it didn’t say that? what if it instead responded with, “of course there’s a god; how could there not be? i don’t even understand what you’re talking about when you say “god does not exist” - that’s incoherent: saying “god does not exist” is like saying “look - here’s a square circle””

Touchstone:

As least if we demand some nominal coherence in the way the topic is discussed (e.g. what does it mean to “exist” in the supernatural/immaterial sense?).

i have struggled to make sense of this idea of “kinds” of existence that has been bruited about in a number of threads, and i simply cannot.

an immaterial entity exists in exactly the same way that anything exists: if the entity with the properties predicated of it is a part of the actual world; if propositions about that thing are true.

what else could it mean? it’s not like there’s “monkey existence”, so that there’s something that is “monkeyness” that then has “monkey existence” added to it in order for there to be monkeys in the “real world”; or “trees” that, when they “exist”, exist in the “tree-way”.

god exists if there is an entity in the actual world that is picked out by some referring expression or some true proposition that purports to pick out/describe god.

incidentally, what do you think the expression “the spherical volume of empty space with a diameter of 1 meter, that is precisely halfway between the centers of the milky way galaxy and the andromeda galaxy” actually refers to anything at any time? and if so (as it seems it must), what is it? it’s certainly not “material”…

Touchstone:

We don’t have any means that I know of for accepting human assertions about God any more than a confused shrug from an Orang utan, so far as I can see. Above, I asserted that knowledge was only validated as knowledge through performance, and on this basis, human ideas about God don’t fare very well at all.

so much the worse for “knowledge as performance”…

Touchstone:

In absolute terms, I think neither the Orang or the human can demonstrate knowledge of God. The difference is (my unfamiliarity with the inner thought life of the average Orang utan notwithstanding) that many humans don’t require demonstration or justification for things they believe,

…just like you don’t. but how could you? justifications have to stop somewhere or else go on endlessly, which is the same thing as being unjustified.

how do you demonstrate/justify your belief in other minds? or the past? or the real world? or the reliability of your senses?

Touchstone:

Even in cases where the cognitive skills of the organism are rudimentary, those cognitive skills are what is minimally demanded by the environment – each organism is “optimized” in cognitive and other respects for surviving and thriving in its context. It must be – it’s tautologous – else it wouldn’t have survived the sieve of natural selection over millions and millions of years.

so if natural selection is tautologically true (every organism that exists now is the product of natural selection, because if it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be here), how is it falsifiable?

 

[Sarpedon]

Why can’t we solve it?

Because the only way we could solve it is by using our reason, which would be assuming it is true in the first place. You can’t prove the validity of reason through reason. There is also no third-party observation to check against.

This is why atheism undercuts itself. As Touchstone admits, per atheism there is no reason to assume that humans have evolved to the point of being able to philosophize correctly. It is only through philosophy that we could support atheism. However, if atheism is shown to be correct through philosophy, then the natural ramifications of this is that our minds are not necessarily capable of knowing the philosophic truth of atheism.

In other words, to prove atheism right is to also prove that we are probably wrong in our philosophic evaluation.

So what? You can ask the same creature about the details of quantum physics equations, and the response will be something like: “Huh?”.

Would you trust an orangutan monkey in matters of quantum physics? Would you trust a human monkey in matters of philosophy?

If you wish to concentrate on the “existence of God”, you must do two things: define “God”, so we know what are you talking about, and define “exists” in connection to this being. Neither of these are defined in a satisfactory manner.

I don’t understand why you need these defined. The point of my post is that we can’t necessarily philosophize correctly on anything, per atheism. In fact, any philosophic question can be substituted for the God question in my argument. I will allow you to substitute one of your choice, for which you need nothing defined.

Without a clear, conscise definition of “God” and “exists” this is a nonsensical question, something like “does Whayu qiaute?”.

No, because the argument is not tied up to the God question at all.

 

[john_doran]

We test by correlation with the evidence, through testing and observation.

sarpedon’s point, though, is that you cannot rely on your testing or observations unless you make the assumption that your senses and your reason are generally reliable. but why should you believe that your senses and reason are reliable if they are the product of blind, random forces? aren’t you just left with some kind of basic, insupportable just-so story?

 

[Sarpedon]

I cannot because it makes no sense to me. Your analogy is based on universal skepticism, no matter how strongly you deny it. In your analogy (and I am not sure what it is the analogy for!) you say that we don’t know how many balls are there, we don’t know how many red balls are there, and we don’t know if we selected a red one or not. There is nothing “known” in your analogy.

Yes, it is based on skepticism, but it explains how to escape it, while atheism gets caught in it. Also, we do know how many red balls and the fact that there are huge numbers of white balls.

I propose dropping this part of the thread. If you haven’t understood it by now, I don’t think I can explain it any better. Let’s focus on the Darwin quote, because it deals with the same point.

 

[ateista]

sarpedon’s point, though, is that you cannot rely on your testing or observations unless you make the assumption that your senses and your reason are generally reliable. but why should you believe that your senses and reason are reliable if they are the product of blind, random forces? aren’t you just left with some kind of basic, insupportable just-so story?

They are demonstrated millions of times every day. One can discard the veracity of the senses and the usefulness of reason only at one’s peril. The “blind watchmaker” - through its blind, random forces - will filter out everyone who lives in a dream world, and attempts to disregard his senses.

Your own body will prove you wrong if you attempt to discard the veracity of your sensory (name removed by moderator)uts. No matter how hard you try to disregard the burning feeling if you put your hand into a flame, your instinct will overule your attempt.

No, this is not a formal proof. But formal proofs only exist in formal systems, based on axioms. In the natural world we only have basic principles, which are susceptible to empirical verification, and modification, if necessary.

 

[Touchstone]

Hmm… does the orangutan’s lack of knowledge of the God question impact the question itself? Given that the question is meaningless to you, do you pick a side?

Meaningless is a side. It’s a reasonable conclusion to reach, that we do not have a conceptual foundation for some proposition. If I ask you “do you like the way the color nine smells?” would you ‘take a side’? What is meaningless is justly dismissed, because it is meaningless.

So why try to solve the issue? If you pick a side, why so? Atheism is as much of a positive assertion as theism, so why would you pick either?

No, it is not. The burden of proof for a reasoning mind is completely different. If you tell me that ‘pink unicorns exist’, that does not place an equal burden of evidence on disbelief and belief in that proposition. Failing a positive demonstration of the reality of unicorns, or evidence that reasonably supports that affirmation, disbelief reasonably obtains by default.

Atheism is not a positive claim of the same kind as theism.

How do these ideas fail?

They fail to perform under testing and validation as knowledge.

Through reason?

Reason integrated with objective experience and observation.

You just said that human reason and philosophy may be no more trustworthy than that of an orangutan.

I’m saying it doesn’t depend on being produced by human, Orang utan, or dolphin - knowledge earns trust by reasonable minds by performance itself, and integration with other forms of knowledge that perform.

Why is science extempt from this body of pseudo-knowledge? It is derived from reason, which you admit may be flawed (per atheism).

Science incorporates validation as part of its method for building knowledge. Science isn’t always done right or well, of course, but as a method, science demands performance for its theories. This includes explaining phenomena, accounting for available evidence, making successful, precise, novel predictions, and liability to falsification. Theories that perform against these criteria separate themselves epistemologically from pseudo-knowledge. Just calling it ‘science’ doesn’t earn it any trust or distinction as real knowledge at all; it must perform as a model. Similarly, if you have models that go under other labels (e.g. ‘philosophy’) that perform, that is a basis for considering it knowledge. The “labels” don’t matter, performance matters.

The problem with validation by performance is that it takes individual observations and “connects the dots” so to speak into a coherent picture. However, it is human reason that is doing the connecting, and if that reason is potentially flawed, we can’t be sure that we are connecting the dots correctly.

This is requires nothing more than the core commitment to the reality of reality. You are right, man must embrace the idea that reality is real in order to engage in the enterprise of objective testing and analysis, but man must embrace the reality of reality anyway lest he die. So empirical validation is only as vulnerable as our commitment to the reality of reality. If reality is real, and our perceptions generally reflect the state of the actual world around us, then our collective perceptions form the basis of objectivity – the suppression and discounting of subjective bias and distortion. Saying that all observers are or may be similarly wholly mistaken or deluded is nothing more than dismissing the reality of reality.

Certainly, and I had no intention of slighting animals in regards to their quite impressive capabilities. Bats and birds come out far ahead of humans on the grade of navigational ability. In terms of mental ability, however, humans seem to come out ahead of most species.

Indeed, and man has a spectacular advantage over all other animals on many fronts.

Of course the question is whether the curve goes far enough for the God question to be included.

That is an important question!

Assuming we can’t validate it, we also can’t discount it either. Agnosticism would seem the obvious choice here, but only if we operate on the assumption of atheistic evolution. This whole argument has been built on the assumption that atheism is true, and has led to agnosticism (correct me if I’m wrong). This would seem to undercut the assumption of atheism in the first place.

Agnosticism speaks to knowledge, and atheism concerns belief. In terms of knowledge, we do not have a performative claim that God does not, cannot exist. Due to the black swan problem, even a strong atheist must maintain some tentativity in his belief that God doesn’t exist. But that’s operating under the heavy demands of knowledge, and knowledge about universal negatives is problematic.

Atheism as a belief is a reasonable conclusion based on the (lack of) available evidence. In one sense, all atheists are agnostics, but “atheism” in both its strong and weak forms identies the bearer as having reached the conclusion that while God cannot be positively disproved, even in principle, there is either no basis for such a belief in God (weak atheism), or a reasonable inference to be made that there is no God (stron atheism).

Agosticism as a belief is a lack of conviction either way about God’s existence.

Are you an atheist or an agnostic?

In terms of knowledge, I’m an agnostic. I do not have knowledge of God’s existence, and knowledge of God’s nonexistence is impossible for me to attain. In terms of belief, I’m an atheist, finding the most performative idea about God, given the evidence, to be that there is no God or gods or any supernatural deities.

The main difference between myself and you is that I have faith that God has given me the powers of correct human reason. Thus philosophy (which we are engaging in on this thread) has merit, and any conclusion reached through reason, having correct premises, is true.

I accept that as a key difference between us. Philosophy has a lot of merit, but in an exploratory, conjectural way. When it comes to knowledge, ideas and beliefs that we can justify, performance is what justifies our beliefs (beyond sheer necessity – my constant reminder that ‘reality is real’ is a beleif we accept of necessity rather than performance).

-Touchstone

 

[Sarpedon]

Your own body will prove you wrong if you attempt to discard the veracity of your sensory (name removed by moderator)uts. No matter how hard you try to disregard the burning feeling if you put your hand into a flame, your instinct will overule your attempt.

What you are doing here is appealing to one sensory experience to justify another sensory experience, when the reliability of the senses as a whole are in question. John Doran pointed out that atheism can’t account for the reliability of our senses. This covers all sensory experiences, including pain. You can’t prove the reliability of one sensory experience (reason) by appealing to another sensory experience (pain). John Doran points out that since our senses are the product of blind forces, there is no reason we should trust any of them. This includes both reason and pain.

I would guess that it is due to this difference in understanding that you have not understood my analogy.

Touchstone, reply to come in a bit.

 

[ateista]

What you are doing here is appealing to one sensory experience to justify another sensory experience, when the reliability of the senses as a whole are in question. John Doran pointed out that atheism can’t account for the reliability of our senses. This covers all sensory experiences, including pain. You can’t prove the reliability of one sensory experience (reason) by appealing to another sensory experience (pain). John Doran points out that since our senses are the product of blind forces, there is no reason we should trust any of them. This includes both reason and pain.

Reason is NOT a sensory experience. Pain is. Both you and john doran are arguing the position of universal skepticism, which has been refuted.

Reason is a method. It does not justify itself. It cannot justify itself. It does not have to justify itself. To confuse reason with pain is a gross distortion.

The reliability of our senses cannot be “proven”, since it is not part of an axiomatic, formal system. The reliability of the senses can only be verified, and it is being verified millions of times every day.

Atheism has nothing to do with the reliability of the senses. If you rely on your senses, you will survive. If you attempt to deny it, you will die. That is all there is to it.

 

[john_doran]

They are demonstrated millions of times every day. One can discard the veracity of the senses and the usefulness of reason only at one’s peril. The “blind watchmaker” - through its blind, random forces - will filter out everyone who lives in a dream world, and attempts to disregard his senses.

Your own body will prove you wrong if you attempt to discard the veracity of your sensory (name removed by moderator)uts. No matter how hard you try to disregard the burning feeling if you put your hand into a flame, your instinct will overule your attempt.

No, this is not a formal proof. But formal proofs only exist in formal systems, based on axioms. In the natural world we only have basic principles, which are susceptible to empirical verification, and modification, if necessary.

it’s not only not a “formal” proof: it’s not a coherent proof.

you’re saying “you can know that what you feel/sense/perceive is reliable because it feels reliable”.

you have no idea if the reliability of one’s senses is demonstrated “millions of times a day” unless you assume that your sensations of those millions of confirmatory demonstrations are reliable.

the principle “empirical verification is the only source of real knowledge” is itself incapable of empirical verification. period.

 

[Touchstone]

what’s the “real world”? what if the “real world” contains non-empirical entities? or facts that aren’t susceptible to empirical verification? for example, the pythagorean theorem isn’t proven by measuring the sides of as many right-angled triangles as you can find; and goldbach’s conjecture won’t be proven by seeing if even trillions and trillions of even numbers are in fact the sums of two primes.

This is just equivocation on the terms ‘true’, ‘fact’ and ‘proven’. A “proof” produced from Euclidean axiomata and theorems is “true” as a matter of propositional calculus. The validation methods are different for mathematical propositions, for example. Without getting into analytic/synthetic/a priori/a posteriori distinctions per Kant, Quine, et al, when the conceptual predicates themselves are non-phenomenonological, their “proofs” or validations are not going to phenomenal, either.

All of which means that if “God” is proven as a mathematical concept, I find no basis for complaint - “God” as a mathematical symbol can represent what ever we want. But “God” as a reified entity, as something actual in the existential sense, that concept places empirical burdens on the implications of “God” as ‘real’, ‘true’, or ‘proven’.

Pythagoras’ Theorem, for example, physically exists as a real entity, but as a concept, a “brain state” in the minds of those holding that idea. The concept (the brain-state) is perfectly real in that sense – it is extended in space/time – and it even works nicely as applied to the real world. Within practical tolerances, you can measure the sides of a physical right triangle and affirm that Pythagoras’ Theorem corresponds to our phenomenonology – the ‘real world’ is “Euclid-compatible” in that respect (this doesn’t ‘prove’ Pythagoras’ Theorem, but rather establishes correspondence between it and our local physics).

not to mention the foundational assumptions we make about the world, like that the actually is a “real world”; that it is roughly the way it apears to us; that there is a past; and so on.
Right, we’ve been talking about that. Reality is real, by necessity, for humans who want to live. See my comments upthread to Sarpedon about holding your hand in an open flame to see how long one can deny the reality of reality, even roughly construed. To question those assumptions is to fall into solipsism, solipsism that is practical refuted by the smell of burning skin from your fingers in the flame.

and what if it didn’t say that? what if it instead responded with, “of course there’s a god; how could there not be? i don’t even understand what you’re talking about when you say “god does not exist” - that’s incoherent: saying “god does not exist” is like saying “look - here’s a square circle””

That would simply invoke a set of questions about what you mean by ‘exist’. Any “of course” begs for a basis for such a claim, and it should be trivial to provide if it’s an “of course”. It may be that we need to back all the way up and look at the concept of ‘coherent’, as claims that “not exist” is somehow conceptual incoherent suggest that that the objector himself does not have a conceptual foundation for the terms.

In any case, this would just require a detour into the conceptual foundations of the terms you are using.

i have struggled to make sense of this idea of “kinds” of existence that has been bruited about in a number of threads, and i simply cannot.

I think the concept of ‘supernatural existence’ is inchoate. The concept of ‘material existence’, however, integrates with our observations and reasoning demands nicely. Saying that ‘exist’ implies something like “extended in space/time” provides a conceptual basis, a logical principle, for discriminating between the ‘existent’ and the ‘non-existent’.

an immaterial entity exists in exactly the same way that anything exists: if the entity with the properties predicated of it is a part of the actual world; if propositions about that thing are true.

That doesn’t tell us anything at all about existence. By using ‘extended in space/time’, I can go apply that criterion, at least in principle, and often in practice, to affirm or falsify existence. That means that I have made a conceptual correspondence between the ‘reality of reality’ and my concept of ‘exist’. ‘Exist’ is now grounded, conceptually.

But your formulation here simply begs the question: what does “actual world” mean? Given the proposition “X is part of the actual world”, how do we test that proposition. If we understand “part of the actual world” to be contingent on “extended in space/time”, then we have a principled and objective basis for arriving at an answer. But without such a definition, what does “actual” mean? Similarly, what is necessary for a proposition about a thing to be ‘true’? We can say ‘Pythagoras’ Theorem is ‘true’ in the sense that is a formal production of the propositional calculus of Euclidean geometry. That’s a good, applicable set of semantics for ‘true’ with respect to a geometric proof.

But what does ‘true’ demand to be compatible with ‘actual’ or ‘real world’?

what else could it mean? it’s not like there’s “monkey existence”, so that there’s something that is “monkeyness” that then has “monkey existence” added to it in order for there to be monkeys in the “real world”; or “trees” that, when they “exist”, exist in the “tree-way”.

Indeed, it’s problematic once you try to get away from materialist definitions. ‘Extended in space/time’ isn’t dependent on ‘monkeyness’ or ‘humanness’ or any other ‘-ness’ as a matter of cognition. Extension conceptually unifies existence without concern for any kind of ‘thing-ness’.

god exists if there is an entity in the actual world that is picked out by some referring expression or some true proposition that purports to pick out/describe god.

Again, that just begs the question of what is meant by ‘true proposition’. What makes ‘true’ true in actuality? My answer would be that ‘true’ means that the proposition corresponds with the actual state of the real world, where ‘actual’ and ‘real world’ are meaningful under the definition ‘extended in space/time’. To be actual, a thing must be extended in space/time, and the ‘real world’ is the sum of all that is extended in space/time.

incidentally, what do you think the expression “the spherical volume of empty space with a diameter of 1 meter, that is precisely halfway between the centers of the milky way galaxy and the andromeda galaxy” actually refers to anything at any time? and if so (as it seems it must), what is it? it’s certainly not “material”…

The concept you describe certainly is material. It’s a “brain-state” in your head, realized as chemicals, electrons, etc. that has now made its way through transmission to some (hopefully) logically similar form in my brain, and the brains of others reading this.

But never mind that distinction; your one meter sphere of empty space is perfectly actual, and demonstrably so, by your own description of it. That one meter sphere is measurably extended – you’ve just told me where it is spatially, and how big it is… how it is extended in space/time. If I had the transportation means to visit that location, I could measure the space (or whatever happens to be there besides just pure dimension).

I think you are supposing that ‘empty space’ somehow doesn’t exist, because it has no or very little mass contained within it. But space/time itself is actual – that’s how gravity works, and affects ‘empty space’. The “fabric” of space/time is distorted by mass, which is why the earth orbits the sun, for example. The “empty space” the earth is hurtling through is an actuality, an extension of space/time. Being perfectly devoid of mass doesn’t make extended space any less actual or real.

so much the worse for “knowledge as performance”…

That’s dogma, talking there.

…just like you don’t. but how could you? justifications have to stop somewhere or else go on endlessly, which is the same thing as being unjustified.

They run to ground in our commitment to the reality of reality. We do not have logical justification for embracing reality as real; it’s simply a necessity that we do so if we want to live. By choosing to live, we break the regression, and necessarily embrace beliefs that provide a ‘baseline’ for our empistemic justifications.

how do you demonstrate/justify your belief in other minds? or the past? or the real world? or the reliability of your senses?

As above, the baseline is ‘reality is real, and our perceptions generally reflect the actual state of the real world’. This is a commitment we cannot avoid making. From that, conclusions like the belief in other minds rationally proceed. But the reality of reality and generally reliability of the senses are fundmamental, necessary (and in many cases involuntary) commitments.

-Touchstone

 

[Touchstone]

john doran:

so if natural selection is tautologically true (every organism that exists now is the product of natural selection, because if it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be here), how is it falsifiable?

Natural Selection is useful as a tautology – a definition. But it’s more than just a tautology. It provides an explanation for why the defition is true as a tautology. Organisms don’t survive by ‘circular definition’, but rather they survive as the result of interplay between their genetic traits and their environment. Evolution attempts to explain how organisms change, and by consequence, how they got to be what and where they are. Beneath the superficial tautological aspects of Natural Selection (the ables survive because those that survive are termed “most able”), Natural Selection explains that the environment tends to favor genetic variations that are compatible or beneficial with the environment. Without that explanation, genetic variations themselves cannot account for allelic changes in populations, or account for why one kind of variation should succeed over another.

Natural Selection, then, is eminently falsifiable. If environmental conditions do not exert observable influence on the success or failure of genetic variations to be preserved and spread in a population, then Natural Selection is falsified. If we observe that population genetics are invariant with respect to the environment those populations inhabit, Darwin’s concept of Natural Selection was wrong, and should be abandoned.

-Touchstone

 

[ateista]

you’re saying “you can know that what you feel/sense/perceive is reliable because it feels reliable”.

No, because I survive. It says nothing about my “feelings”. It works in an objective fashion, the alternative being injury and death.

you have no idea if the reliability of one’s senses is demonstrated “millions of times a day” unless you assume that your sensations of those millions of confirmatory demonstrations are reliable.

And those people and animals also survive. Those who make an inaccurate prediction will get crushed in an accident, or get injured, or get poisoned, etc…

the principle “empirical verification is the only source of real knowledge” is itself incapable of empirical verification. period.

Since you always misquote it, let me correct you: “empirical verification is the only source of real knowledge about physical reality”. This principle does not pertain to the formal systems. And it most certainly does not pertain to itself, because it says nothing about physical reality, it speaks about the method to obtain knowledge about physical reality. And methods are not ontological entities.

On the other hand, you seem to subscribe to universal skepticism, which says: “we cannot know anything for certain, our knowledge is always tentative”. Now, if we apply this principle to itself, it will show just how nonsensical it is.