Atheists and the validity of reason

[john_doran]

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.

but you don’t say that “god exists” is meaningless. what ***you ***say, and i quote, is “As I understand it, an ‘agnostic’ is really undecided about God’s existence. I do have a conclusion, and that is that no God exists”.

Touchstone:

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

once more, you say: “As I understand it, an ‘agnostic’ is really undecided about God’s existence. I do have a conclusion, and that is that no God exists…” (emphasis mine)

by any reasonable metric, that is a positive claim.

Touchstone:

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.

define “perform”. does mathematical knowledge perform? what about modal knowledge?

Touchstone:

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.

no: they separate themselves from pseudo-science.

the demarcation problem (to which you have submitted your own solution) demarcates science from non-science, not knowledge from non-knowledge.

Touchstone:

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.

not true: if there is no reality, then there is no death.
Tuchstone:

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.

the discussion isn’t about whether the empirical world is a legitimate source of knowledge, but whether it is the only source of legitimate knowledge.

Touchstone:

Philosophy has a lot of merit, but in an exploratory, conjectural way.

i don’t know what this means. is that to say that philosophy is or is not a legitimate source of knowledge? i certainly think that philosophical knowledge “performs” in its epistemologcal sphere, which, by your lights, qualifies it as knowledge.

Touchstone:

(beyond sheer necessity – my constant reminder that ‘reality is real’ is a beleif we accept of necessity rather than performance)

so why aren’t there other beliefs in the class of “beliefs accepted out of sheer necessity”? like a belief in the past; other minds; the reliability of our senses; etc…

and are those beiefs “knowledge”?

if so, then empirical verification is not the only source of knowledge.

if not, then how can anything else based on those beliefs constitute knowledge?

 

[ateista]

not true: if there is no reality, then there is no death.

Right. You talk the talk, but do you walk the walk - from the precipice of a high cliff into what seems to be a 1000 foot drop?

The proof of the pudding is still that it is edible and no amount of hypothesizing will make a piece of rock nutritional.

Incidentally, I don’t think you should, reality (which you deny) will be very unforgiving. And your remarks would be sorely missed.

 

[john_doran]

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’.

only if you can demonstrate that the only kinds of things that can exist are empirical things.

Touchstone:

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).

if mathematical entities are simply brain states or sets of realy existent things, then math cannot ever get off the ground, since there are not enough things in existence to ground all of the numbers we in fact use: if there are only a finite number of things in the universe, then, for example, transfinite math is incoherent.

and so is the idea of modality: that mathematical truths are necessarily true: there’s nothing empirical that suports that conclusion.

but, in the end, if you do not accept the basic difference between the proposition “there are three apples on the table”, and “three is a prime number”, then we are perhaps incapable of communicating usefuly about this.

Touchstone:

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.

see my other post: this assumes that your body is “real”.

and it’s not questioning these assumptions that leads to solipsism: it’s thinking that you need some kind of (empirical) support for them that leads to solipsism.

which is my point: if empirical knowledge is the only good kind of knowledge, then you don’t have any basis for your belief in the reaity of the world, etc.

Touchstone:

I think the concept of ‘supernatural existence’ is inchoate.

why? i don’t.

Touchstone:

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’.

…and saying that “person” implies something like “has fair skin” provides a logical principle for discriminating between “person” and “non-person”.

seriously, though, what has this got to do with anything? you’re just saying that “exists” has that implication, and unless you can show that this kind of heuristic is actualy based on the way the world is, then you’ve done nothing but state a preference for your use of the word.

you might as well say that “exists” implies something like “visible to the naked eye”, since that would make it even easier to discriminate between “existence” and “non-existence”, and, in addition, help us avoid pesky questions about how we can rely on the “observational” probativity of processes that we don’t actually see ourselves, but which we believe intermediary machinery to be “observing” and accurately reporting.

Touchstone:

That doesn’t tell us anything at all about existence.

this is as close to a meaningless assertion as makes no difference.

look, what do you mean when you say “phlogiston does not exist”?

you don’t just mean “phlogiston is undetectable/unextended” - you mean that there is no such thing; that it is absent from set of all objects in the World; that there is nothing in the World that corresponds to the referring term “phlogiston” (used correctly).

Touchstone:

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.

sets are not extended in spacetime - they are a paradigm case of abstract object.

in principle, there can be no such set as the set of all sets that contain themselves as members, since if there was, then a contradiction would be true.

there. i have just verified the non-existence of an abstract object by using a principled conceptual ground.

Touchstone:

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.

see above.

 

[john_doran]

Since you always misquote it, let me correct you: “empirical verification is the only source of real knowledge about physical reality”.

uhhh…ok. so how do you get from that to “there is no part of reality that is not physical”?

or are you now admitting that there may be non-physical entities, and simply pointing out to us that we shouldn’t try to study them using empirical methods?

ateista:

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.

ok - so there are other epistemological methods/systems that yield legitimate knowledge.

we agree.

ateista:

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.

i do not adhere to universal skepticism; i am only trying to point out that it follows from the atheist epistemology i invariably see defended around here (most lately by you and Touchstone).

this is the argument:

1. you should only believe what you can prove/demonstrate (atheist assumption);
2. beliefs about the reality of the world; other minds; the past; reliability of the senses, cannot be proven/demonstrated (they are necessarily assumed in every attempt);
3. therefore those beliefs should be rejected.

 

[Touchstone]

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.

There is an undeniable basis for believing that humans can reason effectively – our ability to survive and navigate the world at all. If our reasoning from experience is unreliable, we cannot expect to live or manage the project of living. The most trivial actions even require the reliability of our senses and our reasoning from experience. To the extent that our beliefs are not validated – either through empirical verification, or as the production of formal systems and propositional calculi, they really are unreliable, epistemically.

But please don’t confuse the epistemic poverty of “unvalidated philosophy” with the epistemic grounding of ideas validated by empirical review. The best case for the reliability of our senses and our reasoning from experiences is that it is manifestly reliable! You and I rely on our senses, and our reasoning from experience constantly, and to the extent you are able to read this post, you have proven the reliability of your senses and your reasoning from experience. It’s transcendentally reliable – if it weren’t reliable, you wouldn’t be able to make head nor tail of screen, keyboard, words, or anything else. The observation that you can manage to do anything in the world is all the proof you need for the basic reliability of sense-data and your ability to reason from it.

-Touchstone

 

[Touchstone]

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?

The proof is in the proof. I can navigate my environment with some success. I stubbed my toe last night in the dark, but that failure just proves the rule – with sufficient lighting and attention, I’m generally able to navigate the halls and rooms of my home without injury or mishap. I have a “model” of the room I’m walking through, formed based on my senses (and possibly augmented by my memory of past experience in this room), and to the extent I can navigate its obstacles and manipulate it’s objects (turn off the lamp, say), I have demonstrated a level of correspondence between the room as an objective actuality and my mental model of that room. My model is as “true” as my ability to successful navigate, operate and manipulate the features of that room.

I don’t obtain a sense of trust or reliability from my senses merely from their provenance, although my physiological history is provides its own accounting for why my senses are generally reliable (organisms with reliable senses and capability to reason/process them are more likely to survive than organisms that have perceptual and cognitive faculties that do not correspond to the world around them). I trust my senses and my reasoning from them based on the performance of both. Since I was a small child I’ve been continually running trial and error experiments with my senses. I perhaps learned the hard way at one point that I had to take special care in navigating a stairway leading to a lower floor, and that the visual cues that correspond to “floor ends here, with steps down” were not just reliable cues, but important to trust, else I would fall down the staircase and hurt myself.

That completely overwhelms any concerns I may have over how evolution accounts for reliable sense-data and rationality. The pain of falling down the stairs due to cavalier treatment of important visual cues relating features of my environment completely eclipses and obviates any such concerns.

-Touchstone

 

[ateista]

uhhh…ok. so how do you get from that to “there is no part of reality that is not physical”?

or are you now admitting that there may be non-physical entities, and simply pointing out to us that we shouldn’t try to study them using empirical methods?

Indeed so. The formal systems, like mathematics are not physical systems, so the empirical methods are not applicable there. We are familiar with two kinds of “existence”, physical and conceptual. Physical existence is active, physical objects interact with each other. Conceptual existence is passive.

Propositions of the physical reality can and must be verified in order to be declared “true” or “false”.

The conceptual part is either axiomatically based (formal systems) or purely imaginary (literature, music, etc. belong here - and of course I put gods, angels, demons, leprechauns and honest lawyers into this category). In the formal systems something is “true” if it can be reduced to the axioms. In the imaginary world the concept of “truth” or “falsity” is undefined and undefinable.

If you wish to postulate yet another type of existence, which is neither physical nor conceptual, be my guest. Give me a way to conceptualize it, give me an epistemological way to inspect it, and we can go from there.

ok - so there are other epistemological methods/systems that yield legitimate knowledge.

we agree.

Sure. I am still talking about formal, axiomatically defined systems. In the imaginary world there is no “knowledge”. It makes no sense to ask if the “Hamlet” or the “Ninth Symphony” is “true” or “false”.

i do not adhere to universal skepticism; i am only trying to point out that it follows from the atheist epistemology i invariably see defended around here (most lately by you and Touchstone).

this is the argument:

1. you should only believe what you can prove/demonstrate (atheist assumption);
2. beliefs about the reality of the world; other minds; the past; reliability of the senses, cannot be proven/demonstrated (they are necessarily assumed in every attempt);
3. therefore those beliefs should be rejected.

Your 1) assumption is incorrect (as I pointed out above), therefore your conclusion is incorrect.

If one wishes to avoid the infinite descent, one must start from somewhere. In the formal sciences this point is the axioms (which are either arbitrary or simply self-evident), in the natural sciences, which deal with physical reality they are principles. These principles are not subject to emprirical verification, simply because they form the basis of empirical verification.

They are self-evident, since their denial leads to absurdities like solipsism and universal skepticism.

It is the teists not the atheists who try to carve out a legitimate role for faith (as opposed to reason). Their method is to deny the efficacy of reason, and in this attempt they bring up bogus arguments, like misquoting the basic stance of empiricism and atheism.

 

[Touchstone]

but you don’t say that “god exists” is meaningless. what ***you ***say, and i quote, is “As I understand it, an ‘agnostic’ is really undecided about God’s existence. I do have a conclusion, and that is that no God exists”.

I see those as equivalent. A strong vector in my disbelief in God as an actual identity is the incoherent nature of the concept itself. The incoherence of God as a concept produces two observations. First, it makes validation of God as a positive reality intractable, as we wouldn’t even know what to look for if God was real, and second, the incoherence of the concept, combined with its utility in emotional/psychological terms (“I want to live forever, and that’s how I get to do it”) supports and matches other ideas I identify as inventions, some of which I know to be inventions as I made them up myself.

once more, you say: “As I understand it, an ‘agnostic’ is really undecided about God’s existence. I do have a conclusion, and that is that no God exists…” (emphasis mine)

by any reasonable metric, that is a positive claim.

The negation of a existential claim is NOT a positive claim. Perhaps you are equivocating on ‘positive’ here? “God does not exist” as a universal CANNOT be a positive claim in the sense that it carries the burden of evidence, for there is no psoitive evidence that supports universal non-existence. I refer you to the question of whether all swans are white. It’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that all swans are white, or alternatively that no non-white swans exist, based on all available evidence. But you cannot possible demonstrate this belief as it requires a universal negation – you would have to present the totality of all that does exist, and qualify all of it as a “not a non-white swan”.

Saying “black swans exist” and “black swans do not exist” are not equivalent claims, epistemically. “Black swans exist” is a positive claim in that is subject to verification with the identification of a single black swan – positive evidence. “Black swans do not exist” is not a positive claim by that same measure – the claim is not subject to verification by the identification of any single swan, or all known swans – there may be a black swan in existence that we just aren’t aware of.

So, it’s important to understand that one who claims “X exists” is on much different epistemic footing than one who claims “X does not exist”. Linguistically, they look like “mirror images” of each other. That’s an illusory artifact of our language.

define “perform”. does mathematical knowledge perform? what about modal knowledge?

Empirically, performance means accordance with available evidence, and the ability to generate propositions and predictions that are novel, precise and match our observations. Mathematical knowledge performs insofar as it adheres to its formal constraints. Any kind of formal system will render “performance” a function of conformance to its propositional calculus.

Modal knowledge only performs in a derivative sense from the existential knowledge it draws from. If I have modal knowledge that the table in my living room could be under the window next to the wall, rather than in the center of the living room, I can verify that knowledge by realizing that state – moving the table. That’s the easy method. But even in cases where I want to test my modal knowledge about the possible locations of that table in my living room, to test my understanding that that table could have been placed in many different positions, prior to my now moving it around, the performance of that knowledge obtains only insofar as I can demonstrate knowledge of the degrees of freedom and constraints that apply. In the case of the table, if I can show that the table and room exist in a physical environment where gravity obtainss, and where solid objects do not occupy the same space, and where human agents have both the cognitive and physical capabilities needed to locate, choose and place the table in different positions that are compatible with the physical constraints (solid objects not intersecting, for example). Modal knowledge is hypothetical knowledge, and its performance is accordingly hypothetical.

no: they separate themselves from pseudo-science.

Well, that demands the question: what qualifies as knowledge for you then, if performance and validation only qualify ‘science’?

the demarcation problem (to which you have submitted your own solution) demarcates science from non-science, not knowledge from non-knowledge.

You draw the perimeters as you like. But however you draw the boundaries from your terms, the underlying basis for trust and reliability is performance. This is as true for formal systems as it for real world knowledge; the methods of gauging performance differ, but the importance of performance as a means of validation does not across epistemic domains. You might call “faith” “knowledge” for all I know, or care, but regardless of the label, the question of justification always remains. Gettier problems notwithstanding, the fundamentals of knowledge as a concept reduce to “justified true belief”.

not true: if there is no reality, then there is no death.

Sure, and this is the gamble no one wants to take, the idea that death (and life) isn’t real. Maybe death is the “red pill”, unlocking the real reality for you. It’s an option, just not a live[sic] option if we want to live. If there is no reality, then there is no flame burning the hand you don’t have. Tell me how long you can maintain this position, with your hand in the imaginary flame. I’m interested to know.

the discussion isn’t about whether the empirical world is a legitimate source of knowledge, but whether it is the only source of legitimate knowledge.

It may not be. We are justified in saying it’s a source of knowledge. And we know no other. We don’t know what we don’t know, so we can’t rule out the possibility of other epistemic avenues. But we can say that by “legitimate” we mean to require some objective performance for any putative knowledge source. Formal systems and symbolic abstractions produce their own internal knowledge, for example, and that’s another legitimate form of knowledge, also subject to performance (conformances to the constraints of the formal system).

i don’t know what this means. is that to say that philosophy is or is not a legitimate source of knowledge? i certainly think that philosophical knowledge “performs” in its epistemologcal sphere, which, by your lights, qualifies it as knowledge.

To the extent an claim, model, idea, hypothesis, theory or hunch performs against the criteria I’ve listed, all it needs is “embrace” (the “belief” part) to become “justified true belief”. Callling it “philosophy” or “science” or “poetry” doesn’t confer or remove any epistemic weight to the idea. “Science” typically connotes a method that demands performance for the propositions that get embraced, but just calling it “science” doesn’t make it knowledge.

so why aren’t there other beliefs in the class of “beliefs accepted out of sheer necessity”? like a belief in the past; other minds; the reliability of our senses; etc…

Belief in the past is integral to accepting the reality of reality. Uniformity and predictability are unavoidable commitments we make as to the nature of reality. When we say our senses are generally reliable, that requires persistence and causality. If I stare at a cat for 10 seconds, I’m processing a stream of (name removed by moderator)ut that requires – as a necessity – a commitment to the reality of the past in order to perceive the present (cat). If I’m watching a baseball coming at my head, my only means of determining that it is coming toward me, and at my head is by making temporal comparisons (was there, is now here, appears to be coming at my head soon, based on uniform behavior of reality!). The reliability of our senses underwrites all of this, but the integration of temporal constructs with our senses is so fundamental as to be indistinguishable from our senses. The existence of other minds is a conclusion we arrive at based on our commitment to the reliability of our senses.

and are those beiefs “knowledge”?

No, because while we can account for “justified” due to necessity, ‘true’ is problematic. It may be the case that reality isn’t real, and that there are no other minds, etc. and you are a brain in a vat, imagining all this. It’s totally irrelvant and foolhardy as an actively contemplated belief for humans, but as a matter of epistemology, it’s just axiomatic. Axioms are necessities, “givens” needed for bootstrapping a system, and aren’t to be confused with knowledge.

if so, then empirical verification is not the only source of knowledge.

That would be true if it were the case. An axiom is not knowledge.

if not, then how can anything else based on those beliefs constitute knowledge?

Justification has to stop somewhere. This is true in Euclidean geometry as much as it is for real world knowledge. If there is no baseline, justification devolves into infinite regress. Axiomata are those things that are necessary for knowledge to be constructed. You have it precisely backwards, as the hard problem is how you can build knowledge without basing them, ultimately on necessary givens, axioms.

-Touchstone

 

[Sarpedon]

Touchstone and Ateista,

You both are not understanding what John Doran and I mean by “reliability of the senses”.

The examples you keep giving are feeling pain, surviving, navigating in the dark, etc. You say that these confirm that our mind is operating correctly, because we are surviving and still alive.

This is not what we are talking about. We are talking about how we can trust our reality perception at all- including pain, survival, ideas, everything. All is transmitted through our brains, and thus our entire picture of reality, including the things you mention as proof, are contingent on that transmission being accurate.

We are usually compelled to accept our reality transmission as true, as Touchstone says:

“But the reality of reality and generally reliability of the senses are fundmamental, necessary (and in many cases involuntary) commitments”

Thus, we need to place some sort of trust in our mind that the transmission is accurate, in order to function in life.

I argue that atheism presents no realistic way for this to be true, and most importantly, for us to know that it is true. We have no third-party observation to place us on the grade of philosophic ability. There is simply no way to know if we have evolved this ability. There is nothing within blind matter and force that says a 100% reliable transmission must be established. Therefore, with no guarantee that it would or will actually happen, and no way to know if it did happen, and no way to know if it happened to us, it is simply not verifiable. With no way to verify it, the atheist must use faith as a substitute.

Are we arguing soft universal skepticism (obviously not the hard variety, which refutes itself)? Yes- but only with the assumption of atheism.

Starting with the assumption of theism, our faith in the accuracy of the transmission becomes less blind. Obviously, a hypothetical “God” programming His creature’s minds to have an accurate transmission makes sense, at least hypothetically. This would explain why our minds are that way, and how we know that they are that way.

Given the fact that both theists and atheists have to make the same assumption about the transmission, the theistic explanation seems to me to make a lot more sense than, say, “Blind forces interacted with blind matter in such a way as to create brains capable of correctly using reason. Guess what, there’s more… we are in fact in possession of these brains. Don’t ask me how I know, that’s just the way it is…”

 

[Touchstone]

only if you can demonstrate that the only kinds of things that can exist are empirical things.

No, the scope isn’t claimed to be exhaustive. Rather, by ‘exist’ and ‘actual’ is meant ‘extended in space/time’. Saying something ‘exists’ apart from or without being ‘extended in space/time’ is a semantic error. It’s possible there are modes of existence that are ‘actual’ and unconnected to ‘extened in space/time’, we just don’t know of any. As an experiment, try to define what it means to ‘exist supernaturally’ as opposed to ‘not-exist supernaturally’. ‘Exist’ doesn’t point to anything meaningful in that context.

if mathematical entities are simply brain states or sets of realy existent things, then math cannot ever get off the ground, since there are not enough things in existence to ground all of the numbers we in fact use: if there are only a finite number of things in the universe, then, for example, transfinite math is incoherent.

That’s no problem at all. The concept is actual, embodied in your mind, but the referents don’t have to be real to be manipulated as symbols behaving according to the rules of formal systems. We can make productive use of imaginary numbers conceptually, which are in one sense “double imaginary”, being abstract as a number, and doubly abstract as a number that is imaginary with respect to other numbers. It’s perfectly real in the logical sense – ‘zero’ was thought to ‘not-exist’ for along time as a mathematical construct, too. Transfinite math is not challenged as coherent at all by being housed as concepts in a physical brain, or encoded symbolically in such a way that another brain can absorb and reify those concepts as their own brain-states.

and so is the idea of modality: that mathematical truths are necessarily true: there’s nothing empirical that suports that conclusion.

Yes, but that’s just equivocation on the word ‘true’. Being ‘true by definition’ is not the same as being ‘true as an actuality’. You’re using the same letters for the word: ‘true’, but you mean very different things when you speak of mathematical truth over against empirical truth.

but, in the end, if you do not accept the basic difference between the proposition “there are three apples on the table”, and “three is a prime number”, then we are perhaps incapable of communicating usefuly about this.

I do, see above. I think I’ve been the one trying to emphasize these distinctions, and suppress the conflation of ‘mathematical truth’ with ‘actual truth’.

see my other post: this assumes that your body is “real”.

It’s a necessary, unavoidable assumption. Try putting part of your body over open flame if you think this is at all optional.

and it’s not questioning these assumptions that leads to solipsism: it’s thinking that you need some kind of (empirical) support for them that leads to solipsism.

Doesn’t matter how you get to solispsism, just arriving there is all the problem one can handle. I’m perfectly able to conceptual understand that reality may not be real. It’s a logical possibility. But it’s academic, totally untenable for humans in practice of living.

which is my point: if empirical knowledge is the only good kind of knowledge, then you don’t have any basis for your belief in the reaity of the world, etc.

As I said previously. Axioms aren’t knowledge. They are axioms. Believing that reality is real is incumbent on humans that choose to live (and to some extent, even upon those who don’t). I don’t need any basis for what I must accept of necessity, other than that necessity. Anything more is superfluous.

why? i don’t.

Well , great. I have about 50 questions for you when you have the time, questions that I can’t get meaningful answers to. What does it mean to ‘exist supernaturally’ vs. ‘not-exist supernaturally’, for starters? That one really stumps me, and everyone else I’ve asked (and it’s been a lot of smart people now). I’d be obliged if you were the one to provide some meaningful answers to that question!

…and saying that “person” implies something like “has fair skin” provides a logical principle for discriminating between “person” and “non-person”.

Yes it would. We might ask, ‘why just ‘fair skin’?’, as that seems arbitrary given our observations, but even if arbitrary, it would provide a criterion by which distinctions can be made (assuming ‘fair’ is something we can distinguish).

seriously, though, what has this got to do with anything? you’re just saying that “exists” has that implication, and unless you can show that this kind of heuristic is actualy based on the way the world is, then you’ve done nothing but state a preference for your use of the word.
No, it’s much more profound than that. Rather, I’m saying that as limiting as that definition may seem (and that’s a “nutshell version” that saves me/us from having to paste in pages of qualifications and expansions), it does provide a “divider” that affords the possibility of giving meaning to the terms “existent” and “non-existent”. With that definition in place, we can supply meaning for statements like “X exist”, or “no Xs exist” or “X does not exist”.

If there is a preference here, it’s a preference for meaning and semantic freight over incoherence and nonsense. For example, if ‘exist’ is defined as ‘what I believe exists’, that produces all kinds of absurdities and contradictions. Saying “X exists” tell us nothing about exstence or ontology, but has just been co-opted as a synonym for ‘belief’.

As far as a heuristic for establishing how the world actually is, transcendentally, that cannot be established. But as a practical matter, empiricism does show correspondence and correlation between observations/experience, and propositions and ideas that explain or make claims about it.

you might as well say that “exists” implies something like “visible to the naked eye”, since that would make it even easier to discriminate between “existence” and “non-existence”, and, in addition, help us avoid pesky questions about how we can rely on the “observational” probativity of processes that we don’t actually see ourselves, but which we believe intermediary machinery to be “observing” and accurately reporting.

Easy isn’t the goal, here. We’d like to have the widest, most robust conception of what ‘exist’ or ‘actual’ means that we can while maintaining coherent meanings and conceptual integrity. ‘Extended in space/time’ is a handy four-word mnemonic for a model of reality that integrates all manner of phenomena that are impervious to direct human observation (can’t see quarks with your naked eye, for example).

this is as close to a meaningless assertion as makes no difference.

look, what do you mean when you say “phlogiston does not exist”?

There is no evidence that anything that matches the descriptions provided for ‘phlogiston’ is an actuality, is extended in space/time. The lack of evidence or inferential basis for the extension in space/time of ‘phlogiston’ justifies the belief that ‘phlogiston’ does not exist.

If you were to apply this to “baseballs”, you can see how well the principle works. If you say “baseballs” do not exist, all I need to do is make sure you are pointing conceptually at ‘baseballs’ – roughly spherical objects approximately three inches in diameter, customarily featuring a distinctive stitching pattern, etc. Once I’ve confirmed what you mean by ‘baseball’, I could produce one, or several, and provide third party witnesses that attest to the actuality of these things that match our working description. The baseballs exist, and while hefting one in your hand should suffice, we can ultimate build a strong case that these are extended in space/time… they exist. They are actual.

you don’t just mean “phlogiston is undetectable/unextended” - you mean that there is no such thing; that it is absent from set of all objects in the World; that there is nothing in the World that corresponds to the referring term “phlogiston” (used correctly).

I’m not concerned with practical limitations. I may not be able to directly travel to the far reaches of the universe to verify that distant planets are actual, extended in space/time. Their being undetected is just a practical limitation, not an ontological one. I do mean, though, that that belief expresses ‘no such thing’, anywhere. It cannot be detected even in principle because it is not actually extended anywhere.

sets are not extended in spacetime - they are a paradigm case of abstract object.

That’s fine, the referents of concepts are under no obligation to be actual to be useful of meaningful. The concepts themselves are real and actual as brain-states, but the things they refer to need not be.

in principle, there can be no such set as the set of all sets that contain themselves as members, since if there was, then a contradiction would be true.

Fine, none of this quarrels with the Law of Non-Contradiction, so far as I can see.

there. i have just verified the non-existence of an abstract object by using a principled conceptual ground.

That’s why we call it an ‘abstract’ – that’s what abstract connotes there. It’s not ‘actual’. In this case, ‘non-existence’ is once again equivocal with respect to ontology. As a function of set theory, it’s a violation of the constraints of your formal system, and its ‘non-existence’ obtains with respect to your formal system, rather than physical existence.

-Touchstone

 

[ateista]

With no way to verify it, the atheist must use faith as a substitute.

I will answer the rest of your post later. However, I would like to ask you to answer this simple question, which I already asked a couple of times:

Do you need some kind of a faith about your own existence?

Or do you take it as a necessary axiom or principle, without having a third party to affirm it?

It is a very important question, so I would appreciate it, if you would give me an answer. By the way, the same question goes to john doran, as well.

 

[Sarpedon]

Do you need some kind of a faith about your own existence?

On this point, I’m not 100% sure, but I’ll tentatively say no. This does not affect my argument, however.

You will immediately argue that since I accept this one principle without faith, there is no reason to think we can’t accept other axioms without faith, such as the reliability of the mind.

This is simply not true, because the situations surrounding both instances are not the same. Knowledge of self-existence deals with something that can be known purely from within. No transmission of anything. Therefore, this knowledge is not contingent on anything being accurate or true. The reliability of the mind, on the other hand, does deal with something outside of the self. Transmission is involved, and thus true knowledge of the subject requires true transmission to the knower.

Note- in terms of this argument, the knower is distinct from the body it inhabits, and parts of the body act as the transmission. Not strictly true in Catholic theology, but that’s a matter of revealed truth, and we are dealing with an assumed atheistic system. This argument works with the Catholic system, and I can explain how if you want (although it deals with thing’s you won’t accept, like revealed truth).

I never said that no axioms can be known without faith. All I concerned myself with was one “axiom” that I argue requires faith. To shift the focus onto a different axiom will not affect my argument.

 

[Sarpedon]

BTW, I have not responded to every point made in this thread, primarily because they became swamped in previous pages and I didn’t want the thread to lose clarity. If there is any point you want me to address, please bring it to my attention.

 

[ateista]

On this point, I’m not 100% sure, but I’ll tentatively say no.

First, I want to thank you for your answer.

Second, I agree. We can know that the “I” exists without resorting to any kind of faith. Now comes the rub. This is only true for an atheist, for whom the “I” is the body and the mind. For a Christian, the “I” is the “soul”, distinct from the body, and distinct from the “mind”. For the Christian, the mind and the body are just “conduits”, which connect to the “soul” in some unspecified manner (and as such it is subject to “faith”).

Therefore your answer is that of an atheist. (May I welcome you into our camp now? After all you repudiated one of the basic Christian concepts: “the soul”.) Christians would have to invoke “faith” to accept even their own existence, which is clearly unneccesary - for you.

This does not affect my argument, however. You will immediately argue that since I accept this one principle without faith, there is no reason to think we can’t accept other axioms without faith, such as the reliability of the mind.

Naturally, this follows. If you are your body and your mind, then your mind is reliable in that respect. You don’t have to resort to faith to accept that you ate too much, and therefore you have an upset stomach. Why would you doubt its reliability in other respects? For the atheist this is obvious. For the Christian, it is not.

This is simply not true, because the situations surrounding both instances are not the same. Knowledge of self-existence deals with something that can be known purely from within. No transmission of anything.

Only for the atheist, but not for the Christian - with his alleged immortal soul.

Now comes the second question:

Do you need any faith to accept that you have parents?

In other words, can you reasonably entertain the thought that you have been created ex-nihilo by God (one second ago!), without any ancestors, and you are the whole universe, by yourself? All the other humans with whom you seem to interact are just figments of your imagination? All the world which seems to surround you, all the memories you seem to remember are just illusions imposed by God, just to confuse you? Would you consider this a reasonable option?

Please answer this question, too.

 

[Sarpedon]

First, I want to thank you for your answer.

Second, I agree. We can know that the “I” exists without resorting to any kind of faith. Now comes the rub. This is only true for an atheist, for whom the “I” is the body and the mind. For a Christian, the “I” is the “soul”, distinct from the body, and distinct from the “mind”. For the Christian, the mind and the body are just “conduits”, which connect to the “soul” in some unspecified manner (and as such it is subject to “faith”).

Wherever did you get this idea!
Catholics are not platonists. We believe that we are a body-soul composite. This is one of the main differences between us and angels, for we are both body and spirit, while angels are just spirit. We are not complete without our body, and at the last judgement, we will recieve our bodies again for all eternity. They will be glorified, free from all imperfection, so that we can be as perfect as God originally intended us to be.

I am fairly sure that most protestants also believe in a body-soul composite, although their doctrine is rarely as defined as Catholic doctrine (i.e. CCC).

As an aside, many Catholic teachings about the body and its proper use come from this belief in the body-soul composite. For example, sexual activity is not viewed as merely physical insemination, but rather as two whole persons, body and soul, giving of themselves in a profoundly spiritual and physical way.

Pope John Paul II enumerates on this a lot in his Theology of the Body.

I will respond to your other points tomorrow.

 

[tdgesq]

Second, I agree. We can know that the “I” exists without resorting to any kind of faith. Now comes the rub. This is only true for an atheist, for whom the “I” is the body and the mind.

1. How is it that under a materialistic worldview there is a mind separate and distinct from a body? You could say we have a body that contains a physical brain that allows us to think. Maybe that’s what you meant, or maybe you aren’t a materialist.
2. You are back to faith again when you assert that “I” is a body that contains a brain that allows one to think. The only way you can verify that is through the senses - through empirical observation. That presupposes the senses are reliable. How can you verify that the senses are reliable? Not through the senses, unless you want to beg the question.
3. That atheists accept the reliability of the senses based upon faith does not bother the theist, so long as it is admitted. We are required to do the same thing. It is the ontology of materialism that is of concern. That by random unguided chance a universe materialized that operates according to certain uniform principles where material “stuff” comes together eventually in the form of a human body and brain such that it can give me reliable information about reality. So reliable that I can say other minds exist. That’s the problem - for me at least.

 

[Sarpedon]

Excellent post, tdgesq.

Here is the relevant quote from the Catechism (364-365) about the body-soul composite:

The human body shares in the dignity of “the image of God”: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit.

(Following paragraph quote-S)
Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.

The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.

 

[ateista]

1. How is it that under a materialistic worldview there is a mind separate and distinct from a body? You could say we have a body that contains a physical brain that allows us to think. Maybe that’s what you meant, or maybe you aren’t a materialist.

The mind is the electro-chemical activity of the brain. Just like “walking” is the activity of the legs. There is no ontological object of “walking”, it cannot be separated from the physical foundation of the legs". Yet, walking and the legs are not the same, just like the mind and the brain is not the same.

1. You are back to faith again when you assert that “I” is a body that contains a brain that allows one to think. The only way you can verify that is through the senses - through empirical observation. That presupposes the senses are reliable. How can you verify that the senses are reliable? Not through the senses, unless you want to beg the question.

What “senses” are you talking about? My question was: “do we need faith to know that we exist?”. Sharpedon said that he is not 100% sure, but he thinks “no”. He said because there is no “transmission” involved, there are no senses involved. Now you think otherwise. So what is your answer to the posted question?

1. That atheists accept the reliability of the senses based upon faith does not bother the theist, so long as it is admitted. We are required to do the same thing.

It is the word “faith” which is not applicable here. The basic axioms and principles are not accepted of “faith”, they are accepted because their denial is impossible.

Do you need “faith” to accept the law of contradiction? Or do you accept it as a simple, self-evident necessity, since its denial would be its confirmation?

It is the ontology of materialism that is of concern. That by random unguided chance a universe materialized that operates according to certain uniform principles where material “stuff” comes together eventually in the form of a human body and brain such that it can give me reliable information about reality. So reliable that I can say other minds exist. That’s the problem - for me at least.

It should not be. As I already explained to Sharpedon, this “surprise” of yours is based upon the ignorance of what probability theory means. You can go back a few pages and read it.

 

[ateista]

Wherever did you get this idea!
Catholics are not platonists. We believe that we are a body-soul composite.

Don’t you believe that the “soul” is infused into the body at conception at it will “leave” at the time of death? Isn’t the soul something immaterial? To speak of “composite” is just a theological word-game.

In other threads I pointed out that the physical damage of the brain results in the damage of the personality (mind) of the involved. The answer was that “maybe” the damage we see is like the damage to the power cord of a TV set, clearly indicating a “transmission” channel between the body and the soul.

But that is not really important here. The soul is not the body, it is not even the activity of the body - unlike the mind which is the activity of brain. Therefore some (mysterious) transmission channel is involved, and yet you accept that you need no faith to be certain of your existence.

You can’t have it both ways. On one hand maintain that the true personality, the soul is immaterial, and yet there is no transmission channel between the physical brain and the immaterial soul. (Of course for the atheist this alleged dichotomy of body - soul is just another example of theological double-talk.)

 

[Sarpedon]

Don’t you believe that the “soul” is infused into the body at conception at it will “leave” at the time of death? Isn’t the soul something immaterial? To speak of “composite” is just a theological word-game.

Yes, the soul does leave the body at death, but only temporarily. We recieve our bodies back at the last judgement, and are complete.

You can call it a word game if you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is what Christianity teaches. Thus, I am not in the atheist camp as you asserted.

But that is not really important here. The soul is not the body, it is not even the activity of the body - unlike the mind which is the activity of brain. Therefore some (mysterious) transmission channel is involved, and yet you accept that you need no faith to be certain of your existence.

The catechism states that the union of the body and soul form a single nature. Even if there is some form of transmission between the body and soul that makes them into a human person, this doesn’t change anything.

All I said is that I can be certain of my own existence without faith. I don’t see how you extrapolate from this to the matter of reliability of the senses. It would be perfectly possible for me to exist, but to do so in a context completely different than what my inaccurate senses are telling me. Knowledge of existence does not imply knowledge of anything besides that existence.

You can’t have it both ways. On one hand maintain that the true personality, the soul is immaterial, and yet there is no transmission channel between the physical brain and the immaterial soul.

As explained above, even if there is a transmission channel, nothing comes of it.

I don’t know how you define “soul”, but I want to make it clear that a human person is both body and spirit. The union of these two things form a single nature, the nature of man.