Atheists and the validity of reason

[Sarpedon]

There is one positive thing to be said about these conversations: they sharpen the mind. We don’t teach mathematics in school, because it is essential for the everyday Joe Schmoe to know how to calculate the area of a triangle. We teach it because it helps to develop analytical skills, which are very useful. So they don’t have direct value, but they have indirect value.

I certainly agree that these discussions are valuable. They sharpen mental ability, as you said. For the theist, they are a way of serving God. There is also nothing wrong with engaging in recreational fun, as long as it does not interfere with our responsibilities.

You are back to the “accurate” again. Our mind is certainly well developed to contemplate these questions. And that we can certainly do, we are doing it right now.

Certainly. But contemplation does not mean we are capable of reaching the answer.

It is undeniable that we won “some” prize. Maybe not the jackpot, but at least some consolation prize. (And that actually increases the likeliness of atheism. After all the lesser prizes are much more likely than the jackpot.)

The problem with consolation prizes is that we don’t know exactly how they are deficient. If you permit the thought that our minds are in any way partially inaccurate, then all knowledge comes into question. If we think that our minds are maybe partially inaccurate, and don’t know exactly what way they are inaccurate, any human “knowledge” could be a result of that unknown inaccuracy. Thus, we are obliged to maintain that our minds are entirely accurate, unless you want to become a skeptic.

This is ultimately why atheism fails, in my estimation, as a theory. I concede that a partially accurate mind would be likely under atheism, but I can’t concieve why a 100% accurate mind would form. Functionally, we don’t seem to need 100% accuracy, especially in matters that are of no consequence to our fitness.

Note that by 100% accuracy, I mean that all incoming data is presented as it really is to the mind. Obviously, people frequently make intellectual mistakes. However, this is a matter of working with the assumed accurate foundational information, while I am talking about the accuracy of the foundational information itself.

I am not sure what you mean here by the accuracy of the senses. We should differentiate between the information conveyed by the senses (the raw data) and the processed information (what the mind does with the information).

I am talking about the raw data transmission itself, prior to being analyzed by the mind. I am also talking about the ability of the mind to analyze true data.

As an example, consider what happens when a browser doesn’t display a web page accurately. For some reason, the data didn’t go through and/or the computer read the data wrong and made wrong conclusions off of it. I can make conclusions off of the web page, but I assume that the web page is accurate before giving any credence to my conclusions

Given that a computer assembled by a person with the intent of creating an accurate machine is sometimes inaccurate, I find it hard to believe that a nerve cluster assembled by blind forces without intent is always accurate.

To say that our senses are not accurate in giving us the raw data, would be akin to say: “we cannot really see, because we have eyes”, and “we cannot really hear, because we have ears”, etc… To say that the senses are inaccurate means that the senses are an impediment and not an asset in gleaning information about reality. And that assumption really leads nowhere.

I concede that basic survival tools like sight and hearing would likely form in a blind atheistic universe. However, its the more abstract, “useless” functions of the mind that are in question.

Furthermore, they are accurate enough to withstand the test of the pudding. They allow us to survive (mostly), and that is all that counts.

Basic perceptional functions, sure. But highly abstract and irrelevant functions that take our time away?

I would like to address your analysis of the theistic position, but I fear it will deviate from the focus of this thread, which is “atheists and the validity of reason”. Can I start another thread to address it, perhaps “theists and the validity of reason”?

 

[Touchstone]

The problem with consolation prizes is that we don’t know exactly how they are deficient. If you permit the thought that our minds are in any way partially inaccurate, then all knowledge comes into question. If we think that our minds are maybe partially inaccurate, and don’t know exactly what way they are inaccurate, any human “knowledge” could be a result of that unknown inaccuracy. Thus, we are obliged to maintain that our minds are entirely accurate, unless you want to become a skeptic.

Knowledge is inherently questionable. The only way knowledge gets to be knowledge is through the survival of doubt and questioning, and even when it reaches a level of performance vs. questioning, there’s always, necessarily, some tentativity factored into knowledge.

It may be necessary for you to presuppose that your mind is immune to inaccuracy (can you really even entertain that proposition, even as a theist?), but it’s a presupposition with no force or necessity. There’s nothing compelling you to be a theist as a matter of reason, and those no necessity for such a proposition. I may be obligated to believe in my infallible gnosis of Pink Unicorns in or order to be PinkUnicornitarian, but that doesn’t show anything but special pleading, and circularity, that I need to presume my consequent to get there.

As you’ve put it, it supports the atheistic view, and reviews why you need to believe in perfect knowledge and how unsustainable that is as a necessary persupposition. At best, it’s just a preference.

This is ultimately why atheism fails, in my estimation, as a theory. I concede that a partially accurate mind would be likely under atheism, but I can’t concieve why a 100% accurate mind would form. Functionally, we don’t seem to need 100% accuracy, especially in matters that are of no consequence to our fitness.

I can’t think of an atheist (or a theist, for that matter, present company possible excepted) who contends that human minds or reasoning abilities are perfect, or even nearly perfect. Manifestly, the human mind is given to all sorts of foibles, and you don’t have to look far to find atheists who contend that religion itself is an indictment of the human mind. It’s a fabulous faculty, to be sure, but its blunders are often as spectacular as its successes, if not more.

Note that by 100% accuracy, I mean that all incoming data is presented as it really is to the mind.

OK, that totally throws me for a loop. What does “as it really is” mean, here. The perception is NOT the thing perceived, and “presented” carries the semantics of facsimile, isomorphism and analogy, all of which are corruptions – NECESSARILY – of “as it really is”. A picture of a scene, no matter how good the photographer, film and camera, is necessarily a distortion in some degree of the actual scene. “As it really is”, then, is a meaningless predicate here.

Obviously, people frequently make intellectual mistakes. However, this is a matter of working with the assumed accurate foundational information, while I am talking about the accuracy of the foundational information itself.

Now I don’t know what you mean by ‘accurate’ either. I look down by the dock outside me window and I see cattail reeds coming up through the water. Just in terms of geometry, some of the reeds look “bent” – which I understand to be refraction at work – below the water line. But the visual stimulus isn’t “inaccurate” or “accurate” in terms of “as it really is”, beyond being the way light scatters of the objects and sorrounding environment into my eye. It’s “accurate” to say the reeds “look bent”, and it’s also accurate to say I have experience and knowledge that convinces me that “bent” is a naïve interpretation of the stimuli. But the ‘accurate’ stimuli comes to my eye ‘bent’, and gets ‘unbent’ through mental adjustment.

I point that out because ‘accurate’ is totally problematic. We have an objective reality and minds that build mental models of reality, with varying degrees of success and precision. Light scatters and behaves in a uniform way (at macro scales), and is ‘accurate’ in a forensic sense all the time, every time, so far as we can tell. But the reeds really aren’t bent. So what does ‘accurate’ mean, there?

I am talking about the raw data transmission itself, prior to being analyzed by the mind. I am also talking about the ability of the mind to analyze true data.

As an example, consider what happens when a browser doesn’t display a web page accurately. For some reason, the data didn’t go through and/or the computer read the data wrong and made wrong conclusions off of it. I can make conclusions off of the web page, but I assume that the web page is accurate before giving any credence to my conclusions.

As a matter of course, sure, else the platform wouldn’t be useful. But you (or I, at least), allow that page loads and renders sometimes fail, and fail significantly. Per above, we’re dealing here with reasonable expectations, but are always open the prospects that we have false beliefs, even if we hold them reasonably – your bad HTML page is a good example of a reasonable expectation that promotes false belief (in that instance).

Given that a computer assembled by a person with the intent of creating an accurate machine is sometimes inaccurate, I find it hard to believe that a nerve cluster assembled by blind forces without intent is always accurate.

It’s not, and the limitations of the mind in “rendering HMTL” the right way all the time are well known and wide spread. This is incidentally why subjective experience merits heavy skepticism. It’s only through external, objective validation that we have reason to believe that a proposition has been scrubbed for errors in practical ways. If you were to compare the home page of a site that you mention above, and were to compare screen shots with 12 other friends looking at the same site, finding that all 11 others had indentical images rendered for the page, while yours was missing a crucial bit of text and two images, you would have a reasonable basis for concluding that you actually did not get a high-fidelity rendering of that web page. But without comparing it to other cases, you have little to go on or work with.

I concede that basic survival tools like sight and hearing would likely form in a blind atheistic universe. However, its the more abstract, “useless” functions of the mind that are in question.

One thing to consider is that reasoning, like running is much more general in its application than you’re allowing. There’s little reason to think that humans would have some biological imperative to accomplish say, pole vaults at the height that track & field athletes clear, but the combination of capabilities that do serve crucial evolutionary imperatives – running, strength, balance, timing – can account for ‘pole vaulting’ as something explained as a “freebie” that emerges from evolutionary development. Language (written and spoken), for example, provide powerful survival and reproductive advantages. But language developed in a general way, meaning that the capabilities that emerged for evolutionary imperatives brought with it a whole bunch of other available applications, musing about imaginary gods, for example.

Basic perceptional functions, sure. But highly abstract and irrelevant functions that take our time away?

We live in an affluent economy, with ridiculous amounts of free time away from ensuring our survival, by historical measures. If we’ve got language and reasoning, and have secured our survival to a safe degree, there’s a wealth of endeavors we can turn to. Highly abstract philosophy will appeal to some, practicing arpeggios on the guitar may be the big draw for another at that moment.

I would like to address your analysis of the theistic position, but I fear it will deviate from the focus of this thread, which is “atheists and the validity of reason”. Can I start another thread to address it, perhaps “theists and the validity of reason”?

Sounds interesting!

-Touchstone

 

[Sarpedon]

It may be necessary for you to presuppose that your mind is immune to inaccuracy (can you really even entertain that proposition, even as a theist?), but it’s a presupposition with no force or necessity.

By “immune to inaccuracy” I do not mean that I cannot be wrong in my ideas. What I mean is that I know my perception of reality is consistent with the actual reality. For example, let’s say I look at a flower. I see that it is red. Having made the assumption that my senses are accurate, I conclude that the flower is in reality red. If I claim anything beyond the redness of the plant, I may or may not be wrong.

I can’t think of an atheist (or a theist, for that matter, present company possible excepted) who contends that human minds or reasoning abilities are perfect, or even nearly perfect.

I do not contend that reasoning (as an activity of an individual) is perfect. Rather, I contend that reason (in of itself) is infallible.

By this I mean that a conclusion reached through true premises is in fact true. Of course, finding and using correct premises is the practical difficulty in reasoning, and a mistake often leads to incorrect conclusions.

OK, that totally throws me for a loop. What does “as it really is” mean, here. The perception is NOT the thing perceived, and “presented” carries the semantics of facsimile, isomorphism and analogy, all of which are corruptions – NECESSARILY – of “as it really is”. A picture of a scene, no matter how good the photographer, film and camera, is necessarily a distortion in some degree of the actual scene. “As it really is”, then, is a meaningless predicate here.

True, perception is not the same as the thing percieved. However, as a Catholic, I believe that God has given us minds and senses that percieve the truth of reality without distortion (what we conclude from that perception is up to us).

Are you a skeptic? It seems to me that you are arguing that we cannot know reality for what it really is.

I point that out because ‘accurate’ is totally problematic. We have an objective reality and minds that build mental models of reality, with varying degrees of success and precision. Light scatters and behaves in a uniform way (at macro scales), and is ‘accurate’ in a forensic sense all the time, every time, so far as we can tell. But the reeds really aren’t bent. So what does ‘accurate’ mean, there?

“Accurate” in terms of sight, would mean seeing things as they really are. Of course, our eyes might be deficient for seeing the truth of the optical illusion. That’s why God has given us multiple senses (touch would probably be used in your example), so that we can come to a grasp of reality as it really is.

It’s not, and the limitations of the mind in “rendering HMTL” the right way all the time are well known and wide spread. This is incidentally why subjective experience merits heavy skepticism. It’s only through external, objective validation that we have reason to believe that a proposition has been scrubbed for errors in practical ways.

The only way we know if something has undergone objective validation is through a similar “rendition of HTML”. The only way we can subject things to objective validation and know the results is through a “rendition of HTML” as well.

If you were to compare the home page of a site that you mention above, and were to compare screen shots with 12 other friends looking at the same site, finding that all 11 others had indentical images rendered for the page, while yours was missing a crucial bit of text and two images, you would have a reasonable basis for concluding that you actually did not get a high-fidelity rendering of that web page. But without comparing it to other cases, you have little to go on or work with.

How would you do this with your mind? You can’t turn to anything, including your friends (who are percieved through the medium in question) known through your senses.

But language developed in a general way, meaning that the capabilities that emerged for evolutionary imperatives brought with it a whole bunch of other available applications, musing about imaginary gods, for example.

What reason is there to assume that this “coincidental” ability carries with it any weight? If musing about philosophy is just a side result of another thing, why would we think for a second that it has any real merit?

 

[Touchstone]

1. We must first presuppose that always and everywhere and for all time statistical probability theory holds. Any justification for that?

It’s a hypothesis, and an obvious one, based on our experience. From the time we begin the process of visual integration (among other formational processes) as infants, we proceed under the provisional belief in the uniformity of nature around us. At some point, for example, we embrace the concept of ‘persistence of objects’, understanding that a red ball that Mom puts behind her back isn’t gone in an existential sense, but still exists, and and is simply obscured from view. That may or may not be justified in the pure epistemic sense, but as a working hypothesis, it’s quite effective, and is routinely adopted into our core perceptual processing – a basesball in flight toward you isn’t a different baseball in each frame of the visual ‘movie’ sense-data coming from your eyes. Your mind embraces the hypothesis that objects persist and change state/location, and do so in uniform if not always intuitive ways.

That’s the basis for any kind of statistical uniformity why might postulate. It’s not required, but as a provisional hypothesis, it performs very well in concert with other concepts as a model of material reality. Understanding through observation that some processes are random, and that as an ensemble, this aggregated probability gets increasingly structured and predictable as the sample size grows, we conjecture that this may be a general property of nature, occuring with translational symmetry from one side of the universe to the other.

There’s no more “justification” for it, then, on an a priori basis, then just conjecture, provisional consideration. As a hypothesis about natural phenomena, it’s subject to testing and falsification. Empirically, it’s done well, and features in models of physical reality that perform spectacularly well. That’s “post facto justification” – validation, in other words.

1. It looks like we must assume the uniformity of nature for any statistical method to be reliable. You must then face the problem of induction, wherein induction is unable to verify that inductive reasoning is valid.

As above, it’s a provisional commitment of science. Nature may not be uniform, or symmetric in that regard, in which case, we expect our provisional hypothesis to fail as phenomena that are at odds with uniformity roll in to the empirical database.

I think you are looking for abstract epistemology to verify observations, here, when man’s understanding of nature happens in the reverse direction. We iterate over conjectures and observations until we isolate models that perform in a uniquely superior way to others (and even then we keep iterating). Science isn’t the least bit concerned with Hume’s objections over induction, because it’s knowledge doesn’t recognize that sense of ‘valid’. It’s descriptive and performative rather than prescriptive and normative. A scientist says “Induction not valid? Get lost! Look at the way this model performs!” The method is meta-epistemic in that regard.

1. Even presupposing that nature is uniform (on faith), that statistical probability theory holds for all past and future events (on faith), we still have the added problem of any quantitative analysis of your hypothesis that enough random events have occurred to account for our existence and the reliability of our senses.

That’s just a total non-issue. We have no basis for such an analysis, barring key elements of knowledge we need to make sense of this problem remaining unavailable. It’s all so important to understand that provisional propositions – hypotheses – are not “faith” in the sense of any actual commitment, and in that sense are not at all like the faith of a theist. If we hypothesize that light is manifest as particles, it’s not ‘faith’ in any sense of commitment beyond that which we need to test it. When we observe distinctly ‘wave-like’ behavior from light in any number of tests, we understand that the hypothesis is in trouble, and is to some extent disconfirmed. If we suppose that light is really a wave, we run into further trouble, and this hypothesis gets sideways quickly with testing and experimentation. But we embraced that with no more ‘faith’ than the ‘particle hypothesis’; it’s just mutations and iteration in the model that are provisional until such time as that hypothesis garners enough empirical support to be considered a plausible theory.

In any case, we don’t have the means to calculate the denominators and numerators that would be required as some way to ‘pre-qualify’ our hypothesis, statistically.

I would like to see the analysis of the age of the universe (prescinding from the obvious question of how the universe ever came into existence) and the chances that enough random events could occur to account for the uniformity we see today that led to an animal that can reliably “know” things from empirical observation.

Anybody care to give it a whirl?

The chances are 1, a posteriori, given our observations. But asking for a priori probabilities for the universe being the way it is a foolhardy request for humans. It’s a demand that the metaphyiscal phase space be quantified, something we are unable to do even in principle. For example, let’s say I just pulled a number out of a hat and said to you the chances are “5 in 8” that a universe with the physical configuration our has would produce sentient life as we have come to be, over billions of years of development. How would you validate that probability, “5 in 8”? You’d rightly call bull on my numbers, and demand for an accounting of ‘why 5’ and why ‘over 8’? To which I would just nod and say “See, now you understand?”.

It’s not that we just don’t know the probabilities you are asking for, we don’t have a way to know them. It’s out of our “light cone”, so to speak.

-Touchstone

 

[ateista]

Certainly. But contemplation does not mean we are capable of reaching the answer.

Sure. We could try to contemplate the smell or the taste of numbers, and it would be futile.

The problem with consolation prizes is that we don’t know exactly how they are deficient. If you permit the thought that our minds are in any way partially inaccurate, then all knowledge comes into question. If we think that our minds are maybe partially inaccurate, and don’t know exactly what way they are inaccurate, any human “knowledge” could be a result of that unknown inaccuracy.

That is not true. From the fact that our minds can make mistakes, it does not follow that we must doubt everything - that would lead to universal skepticism. What does follow is the need to stay alert and allow for the possibility that some of our ideas might be in error.

Thus, we are obliged to maintain that our minds are entirely accurate, unless you want to become a skeptic.

Skepticism and universal skepticism are not the same! I am a skeptic, but not a universal skeptic.

This is ultimately why atheism fails, in my estimation, as a theory.

I fail to see, why?

I concede that a partially accurate mind would be likely under atheism, but I can’t concieve why a 100% accurate mind would form. Functionally, we don’t seem to need 100% accuracy, especially in matters that are of no consequence to our fitness.

I agree with this part.

Note that by 100% accuracy, I mean that all incoming data is presented as it really is to the mind. Obviously, people frequently make intellectual mistakes. However, this is a matter of working with the assumed accurate foundational information, while I am talking about the accuracy of the foundational information itself.

I am talking about the raw data transmission itself, prior to being analyzed by the mind. I am also talking about the ability of the mind to analyze true data.

Now I am seriously confused. Above you said that we are obliged to believe that the “mind” must be 100% accurate - otherwise the whole knowledge comes into doubt. Now you say that people frequently make intellectual mistakes. That does not wash.

And here you question the accuracy of the “raw data”. That I don’t understand at all. We have 5 senses: vision, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. There are some people who are blind, they cannot see at all. Some are colorblind, for them the red and green are indistinguishable. Deaf people cannor hear, etc. All that is true. There are people whose senses are deficient. Do you think that because of that deficiency we ought to question all the sensory (name removed by moderator)ut we receive?

As an example, consider what happens when a browser doesn’t display a web page accurately. For some reason, the data didn’t go through and/or the computer read the data wrong and made wrong conclusions off of it. I can make conclusions off of the web page, but I assume that the web page is accurate before giving any credence to my conclusions

Given that a computer assembled by a person with the intent of creating an accurate machine is sometimes inaccurate, I find it hard to believe that a nerve cluster assembled by blind forces without intent is always accurate.

You are talking about two things here. One is the incoming raw data and the other one is the perceptor. The data is accurate, the perceptor may be faulty.

I concede that basic survival tools like sight and hearing would likely form in a blind atheistic universe. However, its the more abstract, “useless” functions of the mind that are in question.

I am also confused here. Mathematics and logic are as abstract as you can get. Our achievements are quite decent in those fields. Why should we question the basic ability to tackle philosophical questions? Philosophy is not so complicated that it would require decades of study.

I would like to address your analysis of the theistic position, but I fear it will deviate from the focus of this thread, which is “atheists and the validity of reason”. Can I start another thread to address it, perhaps “theists and the validity of reason”?

That is quite all right. It does not really belong here. Maybe I should re-post it under the header “Theist and atheist metaphysics”. That sounds like a good title. What do you think?

 

[ateista]

I started the new thread with the title: “Theist and atheist methaphysics”. See you there!

 

[Sarpedon]

Ateista,

You are talking about one kind of knowledge, and I am talking about another.

These two types of knowledge can be expressed in two different sentences:

1. The plant is green, because I see green
2. The greeness of the plant is a result of certain wavelengths of light being reflected rather than absorbed.

I am talking about type 1, while you are talking about type 2.

Type one is foundational knowledge that is based on sensory experience. We see the color, and conclude that the plant is green. It is more a result of observation than explanation.

Type two is a theory we devise to explain what we observe. It is explanatory, not observational.

When I speak of the “accuracy of the senses” I am mainly referring to the first type of knowledge- sensory observational knowledge.

Now, I do concede that the reliability of simple sensory perception like sight or hearing is likely in an atheistic model. After all, they help in survival. The part where atheism falls apart, in my opinion, is when sensory perception about slightly abstract things is considered, and the mind’s ability to extrapolate from those observations.

The crux of my argument, however, is that an atheistic world can’t explain why we evolved the ability to interpret our sensory experiences in philosophical ways. Therefore, when I refer to “accuracy of the senses” I am not referring so much to things like sight, hearing, or smell, but rather the extrapolations into abstraction that we draw from them, our sensory experiences. I realize now I did not make this point especially clear, and apologize.

In light of this, I will restate my question in slightly clarified terms:

In a universe of composed of blind forces and STEM, is it reasonable to assume that matter arranged itself into a structure capable of understanding and resolving the God question? If so, is it reasonable to assume that we are in possession of that structure?

So far, I have never really referred to the second type of knowledge, which you seem to be thinking of. Obviously, our explanations of reality rise and fall with testing and analyzing. This type of knowledge is derived from the immediate sensory observations that we make (type 1) and thus are contingent upon those observations being accurate and most importantly, the ability of our mind to accurately connect the dots between those observations and draw true conclusions from them.

I believe, as a theist, that God has designed the human mind to percieve type 1 knowledge accurately.

I believe God has given us the ability to try to devise explanations for the observations we make, but these explanations are almost always fallible and subject to revision.

 

[Touchstone]

Ateista,

You are talking about one kind of knowledge, and I am talking about another.

These two types of knowledge can be expressed in two different sentences:

1. The plant is green, because I see green
2. The greeness of the plant is a result of certain wavelengths of light being reflected rather than absorbed.

I don’t see this a distinguished cases.

The plant I see is green to do the wavelength absorption bias of its leaves.

I am talking about type 1, while you are talking about type 2.

I think you are seeing a dichotomy where there is only a unity. Or, maybe we need to get away from analogies, and discuss the difference(s) between the kinds of knowledge in epistemological terms.

Type one is foundational knowledge that is based on sensory experience. We see the color, and conclude that the plant is green. It is more a result of observation than explanation.

Type two is a theory we devise to explain what we observe. It is explanatory, not observational.

Are you just trying to separate raw sensory (name removed by moderator)ut from interpretation of that (name removed by moderator)ut?

When I speak of the “accuracy of the senses” I am mainly referring to the first type of knowledge- sensory observational knowledge.

Now, I do concede that the reliability of simple sensory perception like sight or hearing is likely in an atheistic model. After all, they help in survival. The part where atheism falls apart, in my opinion, is when sensory perception about slightly abstract things is considered, and the mind’s ability to extrapolate from those observations.

The crux of my argument, however, is that an atheistic world can’t explain why we evolved the ability to interpret our sensory experiences in philosophical ways. Therefore, when I refer to “accuracy of the senses” I am not referring so much to things like sight, hearing, or smell, but rather the extrapolations into abstraction that we draw from them, our sensory experiences. I realize now I did not make this point especially clear, and apologize.

I think you can see that man has evolutionary advantages that accrue from his ability to run. But it would be folly to say that evolutionary pressures exist to enable man to play soccer, a sport which relies heavily on running. Playing soccer has never been a survival imperative, horrendous stories about Saddam Hussein’s actions in running the Iraqi soccer team notwithstanding. So how could an evolutionist account for the skill and expertise of the worlds soccer players?

If you can understand how soccer leverages abilities and faculties that are important for survival – speed on foot, coordination, balance, etc. – and repurposes them in the form of soccer to achieve something that is recreational and entertaining, then I suggest you can understand man’s drawing upon reasoning and critical thinking skills that are important as evolutionary strengths can be repurposed for other mental “sports” that are themselves no more necessary for surviving the scythe of Natural Selection than playing soccer.

In light of this, I will restate my question in slightly clarified terms:

In a universe of composed of blind forces and STEM, is it reasonable to assume that matter arranged itself into a structure capable of understanding and resolving the God question? If so, is it reasonable to assume that we are in possession of that structure?

Yes, but this is resolved on a much more primitive level than you may expect. The resolution to the God question I think is properly “nipped” in simply being rigorous about a) the burden of proof and b) discipline in our terms, with b) being the real clincher – “God” is a concept we can comprehend as an invented invention, but which quickly becomes incoherent as a claim about existential reality. That is, all we really need to resolve the theism question may be the commitment to confessing our incoherence about the term.

So far, I have never really referred to the second type of knowledge, which you seem to be thinking of. Obviously, our explanations of reality rise and fall with testing and analyzing. This type of knowledge is derived from the immediate sensory observations that we make (type 1) and thus are contingent upon those observations being accurate and most importantly, the ability of our mind to accurately connect the dots between those observations and draw true conclusions from them.

I believe, as a theist, that God has designed the human mind to percieve type 1 knowledge accurately.

I understand. The disagreement stems from the question of whether that belief has any reasonable basis or justification. It doesn’t appear to be a necessary commitment, like our unavoidable embrace of the reality of reality.

I believe God has given us the ability to try to devise explanations for the observations we make, but these explanations are almost always fallible and subject to revision.

I understand. It’s the justification for those beliefs which are problematic, I think.

-Touchstone

 

[tdgesq]

Understanding through observation that some processes are random, and that as an ensemble, this aggregated probability gets increasingly structured and predictable as the sample size grows, we conjecture that this may be a general property of nature, occuring with translational symmetry from one side of the universe to the other.

There is no empirical example that you can give of a truly random process resulting in an increasingly structured predictable event, regardless of the sample size.

Even if you could give an example of the above, it would only be one observed during the life span of humanity. And then only of us who were actually trying to observe it. The rest is true. It is a conjecture. A guess as to whether in times past before observation and in times future that we cannot observe it will hold to be the case. An inauspicious beginning for the materialist.

There’s no more “justification” for it, then, on an a priori basis, then just conjecture, provisional consideration. As a hypothesis about natural phenomena, it’s subject to testing and falsification. Empirically, it’s done well, and features in models of physical reality that perform spectacularly well. That’s “post facto justification” – validation, in other words.

I agree, conjecture and provisional consideration. It is subject to testing and even to falsification. It has done well during the time that human beings have been around to monitor it. Not before and certainly not after. It is validation only of the time we’ve been around to monitor it. And yet in a random chance universe, the materialist somehow has the guns to assert that it has been this way for a long long time. No empirical evidence for it of course. Just a bare belief that it has been this way. Without that faith commitment, probabilities don’t explain anything about why and how reality is what it is.

As above, it’s a provisional commitment of science. Nature may not be uniform, or symmetric in that regard, in which case, we expect our provisional hypothesis to fail as phenomena that are at odds with uniformity roll in to the empirical database.

This says nothing about whether your hypothesis has succeeded or failed in the past before human observation or whether it will succeed or fail in the future. And it is absolutely necessary that it hold in the pre-observation past, because if it hasn’t, then it refutes the notion that a chance random universe could ever consist of what we have now based upon probabilities. You want to say that probability theory has always been uniform, but you don’t have an ontology that supports it. All you have is a chance universe.

Science isn’t the least bit concerned with Hume’s objections over induction, because it’s knowledge doesn’t recognize that sense of ‘valid’. It’s descriptive and performative rather than prescriptive and normative. A scientist says “Induction not valid? Get lost! Look at the way this model performs!” The method is meta-epistemic in that regard.

I well know that science is not concerned with the problem of induction. It just assumes that inductive reasoning is valid. Why, because during the time we’ve been monitoring these things, they have performed the way we have predicted (well, sometimes). Therefore, we will guess that they always have and always will. And hey, we can even attach tags like “meta-epistemic” to it so that it will sound like we know we are right. Our ontology? Our metaphysic? Chance random universe.

That’s just a total non-issue. We have no basis for such an analysis, barring key elements of knowledge we need to make sense of this problem remaining unavailable.

You are correct that you don’t have a basis, and it is quite an issue even though you may not want it to be. Statistics and the scientific method do not and cannot explain the materialistic hypothesis: that enough random events occurred to account for a universe that has uniformity. That has rational animals (humans) endowed with faculties that can reliably give them knowledge of reality.

In any case, we don’t have the means to calculate the denominators and numerators that would be required as some way to ‘pre-qualify’ our hypothesis, statistically.

I know. And nobody is asking you to pre-qualify anything. You can posit a hypothesis without it. The fact is you can’t even begin to verify your hyposthesis statistically. But somehow that’s okay for a scientist when it comes to the ontological explanation for the universe.

The chances are 1, a posteriori, given our observations. But asking for a priori probabilities for the universe being the way it is a foolhardy request for humans.

I understand a posteriori probabilities. What you are doing here is just as much an abuse of knowledge as what the Calvinists do with presuppositionalism.

Let us do a thought experiment. The universe has existed for 6000 years. We are all here, thinking, seeing, knowing, driving our cars. Now, your explanation would still be that the red ball was picked. That somehow during this time of a chance universe we all got lucky and it turned out that there is uniformity and a way for human beings to reliably know things through there material bodies.

As it is, you don’t know the actual age of the universe, or what that would mean for the probability that a chance random chain of events could account for reality, or for the ability to know reality. Yet you still believe it. You believe it on faith.

It’s not that we just don’t know the probabilities you are asking for, we don’t have a way to know them. It’s out of our “light cone”, so to speak.

If you don’t have a way to know them, then you don’t know them either. You bow to the altar of luck and chance, without even knowing how much luck and chance you are relying upon. Your metaphysic sucks. It undermines your epistemology at every turn.

 

[ateista]

There is no empirical example that you can give of a truly random process resulting in an increasingly structured predictable event, regardless of the sample size.

Yes, we can. Observe a balloon, with its roughly spherical from. The form is maintained due to the random, chaotic Brownian motion of the molecules.

But apart from such a simple example, consider the central distribution theorems of probability theory. It is a mathematical proof that many, small, independent causes will result in a Gaussian (normal) distibution. The height or weight of individuals vary due to their dietary habits, their genes, etc… However the overall distribution gives a beautiful bell-curve. If you Google “Galton’s board” you will find a few examples.

There seems to be a major miscomprehension that randomess equals chaos. And that is not the case. Random events are not necessarily unpredictable. The actual outcome of each individual event is, but the collection of the events is quite predictable.

Statistics can predict the number of fatal traffic accidents on Labor Day weekend quite accurately. What it cannot predict is: “who will suffer the accidents”.

 

[ateista]

The crux of my argument, however, is that an atheistic world can’t explain why we evolved the ability to interpret our sensory experiences in philosophical ways. Therefore, when I refer to “accuracy of the senses” I am not referring so much to things like sight, hearing, or smell, but rather the extrapolations into abstraction that we draw from them, our sensory experiences. I realize now I did not make this point especially clear, and apologize.

Thanks for the clarification. As Touchstone has already answered most of your post, I will concentrate on the next part.

First, the ability to create abstractions is due to the enormous redundancy of our brain. Redundancy has a clear survival advantage. If a part of the brain is damaged, other parts can “take over” and the sensory (name removed by moderator)ut can be processed again.

In light of this, I will restate my question in slightly clarified terms:

In a universe of composed of blind forces and STEM, is it reasonable to assume that matter arranged itself into a structure capable of understanding and resolving the God question? If so, is it reasonable to assume that we are in possession of that structure?

Well, I already gave you my interpretation of this question, and we started our conversation about it in the new thread.

Nevertheless, let me state the God-question in its barest form: “Is our world fully natural (uncaused, undesigned), or is there a creator ‘outside’ who created this world?”. In other words, do we live in a Matrix, or not?

That is the basic form of this question. My answer is that this question cannot be decided. We cannot move “outside” and cannot examine our Matrix. We are “imprisoned” in this existence. Whether we live in a Matrix or not is irrelevant.

If you believe that we do, that is fine, as long as this belief is your personal conviction. My belief (that the world is unplanned, undesigned and wholly natural) does not impose anything on you. You disagree with it, you perform whatever rituals you deem important vis-a-vis your imagined creator, that is no skin off my nose. We live and let live.

 

[Touchstone]

There is no empirical example that you can give of a truly random process resulting in an increasingly structured predictable event, regardless of the sample size.

The term “random process” is inchoate on its own. “Process” implies structure, direction and constraints, so even (especially!) a “truly random process” incorporates “process” within which randomness operates.

Because that’s the case, “random processes” produce increasingly structured outcomes as the sample size grows. A fair coin flip will predictable level out in approaching 50/50 distributions as the number of flips increases. The graph of decay into daughter nuclides of a radioisotope is predictable and increasingly mathematically pure as random decay events accumulate. Examples like this in the real world abound. The more random event occurs in these processes, the more predictable and structured the outcome of the process is, because randomness is a very effective (maybe the best) driver for stuctured output that scales.

Even if you could give an example of the above, it would only be one observed during the life span of humanity. And then only of us who were actually trying to observe it. The rest is true. It is a conjecture. A guess as to whether in times past before observation and in times future that we cannot observe it will hold to be the case. An inauspicious beginning for the materialist.

Conjecture and hypothesis grounded in our experience is reason in action. There’s nothing wrong with conjecture per se, but arbitrary or conjecture-as-special-pleading that’s problematic, and signals bias and desire rather than reasoning. Uniformity is the most effective and robust model we have for the real world. Nothing else even comes close. We can read Hume and understand that we have no warrant for assuming the sun will come up tomorrow morning, epistemically, on strict grounds. We happily, and reasonably smirk at such observations as the “uniformity model” serves us best – we are well advised to plan for another day tomorrow, Hume’s (technically legitimate) epistemic objections notwithstanding.

The “ausipiciousness” obtains in the results, in the doing, in the performance of the model. You can doubt all you want about the inductive warrant for uniformity, but just like putting putting your hand over an open flame, any casual inspection of your daily actions will put the lie to any doubts you have over the uniformity of nature. It’s a model for making reality intelligible and navigable that has no equal, or any serious competition.

I agree, conjecture and provisional consideration. It is subject to testing and even to falsification. It has done well during the time that human beings have been around to monitor it. Not before and certainly not after.

When we see starlight arriving in our telescopes from many millions of lightyears away and more, the observations we make from that – redshift, etc. – are consistent with our expectations of what we would find in a universe where uniformity was symmetric with respect to space and time. That is, uniformity comes with specific and automatic predictions about what we should expect to observe from the effects of events past, far before any humans existed. And here, too, uniformity has done exceedingly well. Our observations are consistent with uniformitarian expectations for observations and evidence from phenomena that (putatively) predate our existence by millions and billions of years.

It is validation only of the time we’ve been around to monitor it. And yet in a random chance universe, the materialist somehow has the guns to assert that it has been this way for a long long time.

It’s by far the best performing model of reality going, and has no competing models to speak of. The YEC idea of “mature creation”, where God just made the universe to look and act exactly like it is 14Gy old and intelligible under uniformitarian principles as being that old, even though it really is 6,000 years old. Or maybe another competitor is “The Matrix” as a model.

If you are aware of a performative model that abandons or even equivocates on the uniformity and regularity of physical law across time and space, please tell me what it is. If you have such a thing, and I’m not joking at all when I say this, you have merited a slew of Nobel prizes, and world-wide fame and adulation. Barring that, a “regular universe” is far and away the best performing model of reality.

No empirical evidence for it of course.

Oh, sure there is. If you take a look at what cosmologists do and how they do it, for example, you’ll see that the uniformity of physical law is a provisional predicate for there explanations, and that these explanations end up making fantastically novel, accurate predictions. Hubble’s observations cohere under a “uniform” model, where we are stripped of any basis of coherence at all without it.

Which is really the subtext here I think you are omitting or missing; while uniformity of physical law is a provisional conjecture, in many ways it is a transcendental necessity for building natural knowledge – any natural knowledge. Consider how you might formulate a model of reality that does not incorporate uniformity of physical law, and you will see the necessity of uniformity in underwriting explanations. It remains falsifiable – uniformity might have (and in some ways still can) to be quite at odds with observations and evidence – but the ramifications of such a falsification are likely to be catastrophic. If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is – reality isn’t obligated to be intelligible or rational just to please us.

Just a bare belief that it has been this way. Without that faith commitment, probabilities don’t explain anything about why and how reality is what it is.

Probabilities are offered as an explanation of why reality is the way it is, at least in terms of a metaphysic. That’s a theistic habit, invoke the “likelihood” of God existing as opposed to a self-caused universe, for example. Inside nature, we have overwhelming attestation of the probabilistic qualities of nature. Those descriptions and observations are physical, not metaphysical – they tell you what exists and how it operates, but NOT why it operates that way, fundamentally.

This says nothing about whether your hypothesis has succeeded or failed in the past before human observation or whether it will succeed or fail in the future. And it is absolutely necessary that it hold in the pre-observation past, because if it hasn’t, then it refutes the notion that a chance random universe could ever consist of what we have now based upon probabilities.

If the universe does NOT operate with regular symmetry across space and time, then anything can happen, and the universe we have is as likely (or not) as any other possible scenario we might consider. That is, it’s only when the universe is uniform that a materialistic theory of development is demanding in terms of support and validation. If the universe is liable to caprice, then all bets are off, and we have no way to judge what might or might not happen. “Happen” becomes a problematic concept in that case, along with “cause” and “effect”, which are concepts stolen from uniformity.

You want to say that probability theory has always been uniform, but you don’t have an ontology that supports it. All you have is a chance universe.

Without uniformity, “ontology” itself becomes conceptually incoherent. The Law of Identity, the most fundamental principle of human logic, is laid waste by the falsification of uniformity. Uniformity may not obtain, and it may be falsified, but I think you do not grasp the implications of it’s falisification. If it doesn’t hold, then neither does “A=A”. That is an expression of uniformity.

I well know that science is not concerned with the problem of induction. It just assumes that inductive reasoning is valid. Why, because during the time we’ve been monitoring these things, they have performed the way we have predicted (well, sometimes).

This is the very best, and in practical terms, the only basis for believing something about reality – performance.

Therefore, we will guess that they always have and always will. And hey, we can even attach tags like “meta-epistemic” to it so that it will sound like we know we are right. Our ontology? Our metaphysic? Chance random universe.

But putting “universe” after “random” is like putting “process” after “random”. A “random universe”, a universe which incorporates randomness and unpredictability at fundamental levels that are subject to the constraints and dynamics of physical law is a recipe for exquisite complexity and emergent structures, given a milieu - the “stuff” of space/time/energy/matter.

“Chance” and “random” are the engines of structure and complexity. Random (name removed by moderator)uts into a structured formula produce all sorts of amazing things. Consider the output of generating random variables for z in the Mandelbrot set. Random (name removed by moderator)uts with constrained processing produces structures, and often fantastically complex stuctures, with scale (although fractals aren’t particularly complex in the information-theoretic sense).

You are correct that you don’t have a basis, and it is quite an issue even though you may not want it to be.

You’ll have to explain to me on what level it is an issue, then. I will certainly grant that it’s not a replacement for being omniscient, but by the same token, this model of reality is demonstrably superior, and possibly alone, depending on how rigorous you want to be among its peers in performing.

-Touchstone

 

[Touchstone]

continued from above…

tdgesq:

Statistics and the scientific method do not and cannot explain the materialistic hypothesis: that enough random events occurred to account for a universe that has uniformity. That has rational animals (humans) endowed with faculties that can reliably give them knowledge of reality.

We don’t have a way to know – even in principle – what the denominators and numerators are in that case. So we cannot speak reasonably at all about what the probabilities were/are. What we can do is hypothesize, and suppose. If life were to be an emergent property of an impersonal universe, what would that logically and practically entail? What would we expect to see, and what constraints can we identify? What predictions would a model like that make, and how do those predictions bear out, empirically?

Because we do not have a priori probabilities available to us – we are not privy the metaphysical phase space – we approach the problem empirically. We formulate competing hypotheses and models, and then we test them for internal coherence, explanatory power and predictive performance. We gain knowledge by “testing”, by trial and error, rather than imaginations of gnosis, knowledge of cosmic probabilities or metaphysical phase spaces.

I know. And nobody is asking you to pre-qualify anything. You can posit a hypothesis without it. The fact is you can’t even begin to verify your hyposthesis statistically. But somehow that’s okay for a scientist when it comes to the ontological explanation for the universe.

It’s verified in its performance, in its utility. The model we’ve arrived at currently is perfect by no means – we’ve still not managed to unify gravity across the the Planck barrier, for example. But the model we do have rests heavily on the provisional assumption of uniformity of physical law, and it performs with stunning precision on many, many levels. This does not simply involve “current” observations from our life times. Starlight is available evidence from many eons ago, for example, and even things we can dig up from the earth match the predictions made from uniform models – the deeper we dig in the geologic strata, for example, the more advanced the decay is of radiosotopes, we find. Just what the uniform model predicts.

I understand a posteriori probabilities. What you are doing here is just as much an abuse of knowledge as what the Calvinists do with presuppositionalism.

No, and it couldn’t be more different. Uniformity is eminently falsifiable. Calvinist presuppositions are not, even in principle – they are considered transcendentals by those who embrace them (believe it or not). As a materialist, I do not hold that reality MUST be uniform to be reality. Reality could be utterly capricious, or just a little bit, so far as I know – my ability to make it intelligible in my mind is not an obligation of reality.

Most importantly, the “proof is in the pudding”, for materialsits, as ateista might say. Instead of saying “This is knowledge because of deduction or induction”, we understand this model to be performative and robust in ways that no other model is. It’s descriptively effective rather than prescriptively exhaustive.

Let us do a thought experiment. The universe has existed for 6000 years. We are all here, thinking, seeing, knowing, driving our cars. Now, your explanation would still be that the red ball was picked. That somehow during this time of a chance universe we all got lucky and it turned out that there is uniformity and a way for human beings to reliably know things through there material bodies.

Again, I don’t recognize any basis for the probability analysis you are returning to, here. It’s a non-starter as a means of investigation, and is only useful as a euphemism for a ‘hunch’, a proxy for credulity, so far as I can see. The way we verify that we reliable know things is that we are able to reliably deploy and verify those things as being consistent and predictive of the world around us.

As it is, you don’t know the actual age of the universe, or what that would mean for the probability that a chance random chain of events could account for reality, or for the ability to know reality. Yet you still believe it. You believe it on faith.

Only if you equivocate on ‘faith’. Here, the faith is nothing more than recognizing an implication of the model we deploy for understanding reality. The model that performs best has no need for a metaphysical personal designer, so one is not posited as part of the model. Here is another aspect you might call ‘faith’ – the preference for logical economy, parsimony in reasoning toward explanations. We don’t know the probabilities involved at the metaphysical scope, but we understand that it’s not necessary for embracing the descriptive and performative prowess of the model.

If you don’t have a way to know them, then you don’t know them either. You bow to the altar of luck and chance, without even knowing how much luck and chance you are relying upon. Your metaphysic sucks. It undermines your epistemology at every turn.

I think you are simply projecting with that language. As above, the model of reality that performs best against the challenges of evidence, prediction and falsifiability is one that is predicated on uniformity of physical law that provides structural and algorithmic constraints for random fundamentals. The metaphysic is descriptive rather than prescriptive, which certainly does “suck” for someone who demands metaphysical knowledge, but that’s a problem that obtains in the asking, rather than the answer. The answer “sucks” because you demand what you’ve got no reason to expect – visibility and robust knowledge at the metaphysical layer.

-Touchstone

 

[tdgesq]

Touchstone,

Thank you for the reply, it may be a few days before I can get back to you due to my schedule. Will try to respond then. Thanks.

 

[Sarpedon]

I will be gone on a trip until Friday, and will not be able to return until then.

 

[Sarpedon]

I apologize for the late response.

The plant I see is green to do the wavelength absorption bias of its leaves.

Our knowledge of it being green is purely a result of sensory experience, while our knowledge of why it is green is a result of the scientific method.

If you can understand how soccer leverages abilities and faculties that are important for survival – speed on foot, coordination, balance, etc. – and repurposes them in the form of soccer to achieve something that is recreational and entertaining, then I suggest you can understand man’s drawing upon reasoning and critical thinking skills that are important as evolutionary strengths can be repurposed for other mental “sports” that are themselves no more necessary for surviving the scythe of Natural Selection than playing soccer.

This is a very good objection, and I think we are now on the same page.

Soccer is purely running. It is simply an advantageous skill used for something redundant in terms of survival. It is no more than running, and no less. It is the same as the adaptive ability.

Let’s examine reasoning through the same lens. In order for this example to mesh with the soccer example, our reasoning must be no more or less than the advantageous ability selected for. In other words, reasoning must have survival benefits itself, before it can be adapted to games.

So, all of our reasoning ability and its extent, must be something evolution selects for. This presumably includes the God question.

We cannot assume that because evolution selects for some reasoning itself, we can extend that to all processes of reason. For example, if some creature evolves the ability to reason that because most plants with a leaf shape are poisonous, maybe the rest are, we cannot assume that this one faculty of reason translates into an ability to perform all reason. If this one type of analytic reasoning is all the creature can do, it cannot philosophize correctly about God, despite having evolved “reason”. Evolving the foundational ability to “reason” does not mean that all processes of reasoning become possible for that individual.

Therefore, if our ability to correctly philosophize about the God question as a game is the side result of our selected reasoning ability, then evolution must have selected our reason to the point of being able to resolve the God question. I see no reason for this, any way to know at what point our reason departs from its evolutionarily set limits and wanders into nonsense. It seems to me that the farther we go from basic survival deductions, the likelihood our our reason being developed to that point decreases. (unless, of course, it got nudged a bit by God )

Yes, but this is resolved on a much more primitive level than you may expect. The resolution to the God question I think is properly “nipped” in simply being rigorous about a) the burden of proof and b) discipline in our terms, with b) being the real clincher – “God” is a concept we can comprehend as an invented invention, but which quickly becomes incoherent as a claim about existential reality.

First off, I personally find that the Catholic explanation for God and His motives provide the most coherent and incompassing explanation of reality, among atheism and other world religions. This is just my opinion, as is your assertation that it is incoherent.

Am I understanding you correctly? If not, please correct me.

 

[Sarpedon]

First, the ability to create abstractions is due to the enormous redundancy of our brain. Redundancy has a clear survival advantage. If a part of the brain is damaged, other parts can “take over” and the sensory (name removed by moderator)ut can be processed again.

I don’t see how the ability of other parts of the brain to take over functions of other parts of the brain create reliable abstraction. Presumably, the part that takes over for the damaged part has the same abilities as the original part, so I don’t see how any net change would be affected

That is the basic form of this question. My answer is that this question cannot be decided. We cannot move “outside” and cannot examine our Matrix. We are “imprisoned” in this existence. Whether we live in a Matrix or not is irrelevant.

Many think that we can deduce the existence of things outside of our matrix from things that are known entirely within the matrix.

Anyway, many of us have experienced the creator of the matrix reaching down and revealing His existence to us. I presume that this has not happened to you. Have you requested such an experience?

If you believe that we do, that is fine, as long as this belief is your personal conviction. My belief (that the world is unplanned, undesigned and wholly natural) does not impose anything on you. You disagree with it, you perform whatever rituals you deem important vis-a-vis your imagined creator, that is no skin off my nose. We live and let live.

Certainly. I am responsible for my choices, and you are responsible for yours. As a theist, I hope you allow God to touch your life, but the choice is only yours, as is my choice.

 

[Touchstone]

I apologize for the late response.

No worries, mate. There’s no time clocks on these discussions, or even any obligation to continue.

Our knowledge of it being green is purely a result of sensory experience, while our knowledge of why it is green is a result of the scientific method.

The latter is just an extension of the former. Science is just the systematic analysis of our collective sensory experience. Pure perception isn’t knowledge by the way, but perception. It’s what knowledge is built from but is not knowledge itself. Perceiving ‘green’ and knowing something is green are different propositions, even if we have no idea why that thing appears to be green.

This is a very good objection, and I think we are now on the same page.

Soccer is purely running. It is simply an advantageous skill used for something redundant in terms of survival. It is no more than running, and no less. It is the same as the adaptive ability.

OK, I’ll go along with this as it seems you speaking broadly here. But soccer integrates a lot more than just running, which you surely know – coordination, jumping, thinking ahead, tactically and strategically, etc. I take it you are simply going to focus on the running aspect of soccer here.

Let’s examine reasoning through the same lens. In order for this example to mesh with the soccer example, our reasoning must be no more or less than the advantageous ability selected for. In other words, reasoning must have survival benefits itself, before it can be adapted to games.

Well, no. Features that are detrimental to survical get selected out, but that’s not the same as saying that every feature has to “pull its own weight” to stay in the game. Neutral features can and do proliferate and get fixed in the population – neutrality being a local distinction… an environmental change can bring dramatic changes in survival dynamics of traits that were previously inert, survival-wise.

But in this case, I don’t think there’s a need to nitpick. Running has plenty of survival value, enough for us to consider at a feature that “pulls its own weight” in the face of the selective environment.

So, all of our reasoning ability and its extent, must be something evolution selects for. This presumably includes the God question.

Ahh, now I see why you focused on just running! No, that’s quite missing the point of the soccer player. Soccer is not just running, and “soccer abilities” are a composite of other factors, each of which has its own accounting to be done as to its provenance via evolution. Soccer, then, is a kind of “emergent property” of humans, with some being naturally more adept at it than others. But the “soccer ability” is not something the natural environment selects for. Similarly, and this was the point of my example, “reasoning abilities” can be emergent faculties with respect to say, abstract theology, or quantum electrodynamics. Nature doesn’t select against an individual’s grasp of spooky action at a distance, or the ability to provide expository discourse on the merits of supralapsarianism vs. infralapsarianism. These are composite abilities that man benefits from as composites, just like soccer abiities. The “building blocks” which nature does work on vigorously, provide for modes of recombination and redeployment in such ways as to produce innovative faculties that are completely out of the reach and view of natural selection (excepting, of course, the idea that a good grasp of quantum electrodynamics may represent high income potential, and thus “mate-ability” for prospective mates, and thus enhanced reproductive opportunities…).

We cannot assume that because evolution selects for some reasoning itself, we can extend that to all processes of reason.

The faculty is a general one. That’s why I used the running analogy with soccer. Nature doesn’t select for running for the ability to chase down an aggressive lead pass, but that ability is just a specific application of a GENERAL CAPABILITY. If running and speed of movement are rewarded, that capability does have evolutionary advantages, but if Joe Human wasn’t to repurpose that capabilty for some soccer, or some other recreation, he’s got the legs and he knows how to deploy them to good effect.

Reason is a general capability too. It’s not infallible, and its got strong biases – the human mind is bent toward seeing everything in anthropic terms, which you theists vividly demonstrate – but the ability to analyse (break down in parts), contrast, compare, weigh, sort, etc. provides for a wealth of applications beyond those that enouraged and demanded its emergence as a means of survival to the present. We can run for good evolutionary reasons, but can commandeer that ability for all sorts of non-evolutionarily-essential activities. We can reason for good evolutionary reasons, but can commandeer that ability for all sorts of non-evolutionarily-essential activities.

For example, if some creature evolves the ability to reason that because most plants with a leaf shape are poisonous, maybe the rest are, we cannot assume that this one faculty of reason translates into an ability to perform all reason.

Agreed, but that’s a good example of a capability that has general applications. The ability to recognize, identify, classify and correlate patterns from this endeavor will prove quite useful in lots of other areas, many of which have nothing to do with vetting a food source.

If this one type of analytic reasoning is all the creature can do, it cannot philosophize correctly about God, despite having evolved “reason”. Evolving the foundational ability to “reason” does not mean that all processes of reasoning become possible for that individual.

I’m confused what you mean by “all processes”, there. Reasoning is a method, a tool for building knowledge, and while the object of the reasoning changes around all the time, as the reasoner considers different subjects, the reasoning process is the reasoning process, applying logic and analysis to the available evidence.

We have ample evidence around that reasoning skills are not all the same – anyone with small a child in the house can attest to the process of the human mind gradually becoming more adept at using the tool, the method.

And that’s the important point. We don’t justify our ability to reason on some subject by “genetics” or some vague hunch that we should be able to make headway on this topic or that (or not). Knowledge, the product of reasoning, is proved by its validation, by its performance against the real world. That means to me that you are approaching this exactly backwards, then. Rather than saying “what is the evolutionary basis for man’s ability to reason about this subject or that?”, the verification of reasoning on any subject is provide by the performance of the reasoning!

Can we reason about quarks and leptons? Very hard to find an evolutionary imperative for that! Nevertheless, we can show that knowledge has been accumulated on that subject, and knowledge that performs against the real world with spectular precision and predictability. We can show reasoning in action, being effective on that topic.

Can man reason about God and the supernatural? That’s a much tougher question. I’m not aware of a means of validating any knowledge about God, and worse, am convinced that the terms that attend the subject – ‘God’, ‘supernatural’, etc. – are even coherent enough to evaluate for or against. For the most part, the language is conceptually impoverished on this topic, what I used to call “mysterious” or “mystical”.

In any case, the topic of God and the supernatural conspicuously lacks the means to verify knowledge, knowledge that would be the proof of our ability to reason about the subject.

Therefore, if our ability to correctly philosophize about the God question as a game is the side result of our selected reasoning ability, then evolution must have selected our reason to the point of being able to resolve the God question.

If you can demonstrate that we “correctly philosophize about the God question”, then that would establish our ability to reason about that topic, definitionally. It still may be a “collateral ability” that emerges as a side effect of other evolutionary imperatives, but in any case, if you can show knowledge as knowledge, reasoning is proved. I’m not aware of any basis for embracing the idea that we “correctly philosophize about God”, apart from concluding that it’s conceptually impoverished.

I see no reason for this, any way to know at what point our reason departs from its evolutionarily set limits and wanders into nonsense. It seems to me that the farther we go from basic survival deductions, the likelihood our our reason being developed to that point decreases. (unless, of course, it got nudged a bit by God )

That may be the case, and I understand the “drift” idea you are advancing. It seems sensible. But it’s still bassackwards in its approach. Reason capabilities are demonstrated by the performance of the knowledge it produces. So I would say that I share your skepticism about man’s ability to reason about God and the supernatural, but arrive there from the opposite direction – we do not have knowledge that proves reasoning abilities in understanding or identifying a “God” or the supernatural. Without that, and NOT for lack of trying, I suggest, we understand that man has no demonstrated ability to reason to the existence of God, or anything supernatural at all.

-Touchstone

 

[Touchstone]

Sarpedon:

First off, I personally find that the Catholic explanation for God and His motives provide the most coherent and incompassing explanation of reality, among atheism and other world religions. This is just my opinion, as is your assertation that it is incoherent.

I don’t think the explanation is incoherent at all. It’s a very approachable narrative, that’s why it’s so effective in garnering subscribers. What’s incoherent is the justification for embracing that explanation as true, as a real explanation. The best explanations are always the invented ones. It’s only when an explanation has to justify itself that “best” is shown to be “best” in terms of appeal and robustness, and “worst” in terms of support by empirical evidence.

Just as a quick expansion of this, imagine the “common design” argument Intelligent Design proponents regularly advance. It’s that way because God wanted it that way! It’s the perfect answer, the theoretical maximum in explanatory depth (while actually having no depth at all). It’s very satisfying and appealing, and is “best” on those grounds. But it’s got naught for evidential support as they actual explanation. Materialist explanations have their hands tied, and have to work hard to provide any explanation at all – no magic gods allowed to provide the “best” answer. But, as humble and frustrating as materialistic explanations are, they are grounded in the actual.

Am I understanding you correctly? If not, please correct me.

I don’t think we are necessarily converging on accord or agreement, but I think we are understanding each other more than we did previously. That’s a good thing.

-Touchstone

 

[Sarpedon]

The latter is just an extension of the former. Science is just the systematic analysis of our collective sensory experience. Pure perception isn’t knowledge by the way, but perception.

When I refer to “knowledge” I am using it in the broadest sense possible, including perception. I understand you view the term differently, but this is only a matter of linguistics.

OK, I’ll go along with this as it seems you speaking broadly here. But soccer integrates a lot more than just running, which you surely know – coordination, jumping, thinking ahead, tactically and strategically, etc. I take it you are simply going to focus on the running aspect of soccer here.

Yes, I was generalizing it a bit. My point is that all the necessary skills used in soccer are directly selected for by evolution. Soccer is simply another application of abilties conferred by natural selection.

For a parellel comparision to exist for our reasoning ability, we have to assume that the ability to reason to a specific level was directly selected for by evolution. We can’t say that because evolution has selected for some simple reasoning abilities in regards to survival, we can by extention use this reason for more complex reasoning that is not selected for. To say otherwise would be like saying that because evolution has selected for running ability, we can by extention run 500 MPH.

If evolution has selected for an extraodinarily high level of reasoning ability, then sure we could use it for idle games which have no survival advantage. I see no reason why evolution would have selected for such an ability. The other question is how we know what level evolution has selected for without a third-party observation. After all, there is not necessarily a penalty for going beyond our philosophic ability, especially for abstract ideas like the God question. We know the level of our running ability because our body will physically stop us from exceeding it. I see no parallel thing to stop our minds from venturing into harmless nonsense.

The faculty is a general one. That’s why I used the running analogy with soccer. Nature doesn’t select for running for the ability to chase down an aggressive lead pass, but that ability is just a specific application of a GENERAL CAPABILITY. If running and speed of movement are rewarded, that capability does have evolutionary advantages, but if Joe Human wasn’t to repurpose that capabilty for some soccer, or some other recreation, he’s got the legs and he knows how to deploy them to good effect.

Exactly. I do not see any way to determine the limits of the general capability of the mind, as I do with running (my body will stop accelerating)

We can reason for good evolutionary reasons, but can commandeer that ability for all sorts of non-evolutionarily-essential activities.

Of course, but the question remains: what are and how do we know the abilities of the mind in the first place? It seems to me that the level of ability selected for by evolution would be relatively low, and that much our our thinking, mostly in regards to abstract ideas, is nonsense (per atheism).

I’m confused what you mean by “all processes”, there. Reasoning is a method, a tool for building knowledge, and while the object of the reasoning changes around all the time, as the reasoner considers different subjects, the reasoning process is the reasoning process, applying logic and analysis to the available evidence.

What I mean is that reason is not a single, undividable ability. If one organism evolves the ability to use reason to some degree, it does not follow that that organism can use reason for anything beyond that degree. For example, if one organism evolves the ability to “run”, it does not follow that that single capability of “running” means that any speed and distance of running become possible to that organism. It can only run in regards to the degree that evolution has selected for.

Likewise, the ability to reason about simple things does not translate into an ability to reason about complex things. If an organism can reason about complex things, then evolution must have selected for that high degree of reason. And if evolution has selected for that high degree, then that brings us back to the main question: “why has evolution selected the ability to know the answer to the God question?”

And that’s the important point. We don’t justify our ability to reason on some subject by “genetics” or some vague hunch that we should be able to make headway on this topic or that (or not). Knowledge, the product of reasoning, is proved by its validation, by its performance against the real world.

The only way we can validate it is by analyzing its reaction with reality, which entails analytic mental capability. This brings us back to square one: why would evolution have selected for this analytic ability, and how do we know the extent of our ability? (the last point being the most important)

That means to me that you are approaching this exactly backwards, then. Rather than saying “what is the evolutionary basis for man’s ability to reason about this subject or that?”, the verification of reasoning on any subject is provide by the performance of the reasoning!

The only way we know the performance is through the operation of the faculties in question. Therefore, it cannot justify the faculties, for otherwise you would have to assume the truth of the premise you are trying to establish.

Can man reason about God and the supernatural? That’s a much tougher question. I’m not aware of a means of validating any knowledge about God, and worse, am convinced that the terms that attend the subject – ‘God’, ‘supernatural’, etc. – are even coherent enough to evaluate for or against. For the most part, the language is conceptually impoverished on this topic, what I used to call “mysterious” or “mystical”.

Classical theology is not very mystical at all. Concepts like immutability and perfection (in the philosophical sense) are not very esoteric. You may disagree over whether they are true, but the ideas themselves are very clear and defined.

In any case, the topic of God and the supernatural conspicuously lacks the means to verify knowledge, knowledge that would be the proof of our ability to reason about the subject.
If you can demonstrate that we “correctly philosophize about the God question”, then that would establish our ability to reason about that topic, definitionally. It still may be a “collateral ability” that emerges as a side effect of other evolutionary imperatives, but in any case, if you can show knowledge as knowledge, reasoning is proved. I’m not aware of any basis for embracing the idea that we “correctly philosophize about God”, apart from concluding that it’s conceptually impoverished.

My basis for accepting the ability to reason about God (and the rest of reality) is because I have faith that God designed my mind that way.

Since I cannot test my ability to reason against the world without assuming my ability to reason in the first place, without faith in my mind’s ability all knowledge would come into question and I would become a soft universal sceptic.

That may be the case, and I understand the “drift” idea you are advancing. It seems sensible. But it’s still bassackwards in its approach. Reason capabilities are demonstrated by the performance of the knowledge it produces.

Again, the only way we can know the results of its performance is through the very faculties in question.