Does Hume's Fork void cosmological argument?

[thinkandmull]

I would say I only need to point to Helen Keller to show that this is non-sense.

digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html

What is interesting about this example is that Helen is able to conceptually understand colour without ever having experienced it. She relies on the experience of others. And yet, somehow, with only the senses of taste, touch, and smell, she can somehow create a concept of what is experienced in faculties she has never had.

I wonder what she would have said to Hume in response to this:

Her world would indeed be a very limited place were she to agree with Hume.

God bless,
Ut

This sounds like Descartes’s innate ideas. “Ideas” can mean an actual thought that pops into your head from nowhere, or a place in the mind you can go and use your reason to understand things outside of sense

 

[thinkandmull]

Perhaps I wasn’t clear. There are plenty of arguments for disagreeing with strict empiricism. That is, against strict empiricism.

If you agree with those arguments, does this mean you agree there could be an argument from the beginning of the world to prove there is a God?

 

[utunumsint]

This sounds like Descartes’s innate ideas. “Ideas” can mean an actual thought that pops into your head from nowhere, or a place in the mind you can go and use your reason to understand things outside of sense

Maybe. Or maybe Hume just grossly undersells the power of the intellect. Helen was able to conceptualize sounds and colours without having those physical senses. For example, he says: “we always find, that he is as little susceptible of the correspondent ideas. A blind man can form no notion of colours; a deaf man of sounds.” Helen was both deaf and blind.

The way I see it, Hume is undermining human reason, period, by reducing it the way he does.

God bless,
Ut

 

[Rhubarb]

If you agree with those arguments, does this mean you agree there could be an argument from the beginning of the world to prove there is a God?

I agree that there are such arguments. I also agree that there might be a potentially moving one.

 

[thinkandmull]

I realized a contradiction in my thinking tonight. I’ve speculated that God perhaps changes in the sense of having different types of moments of love, one after the other. However, this would be an eternity of motions, and could never reach now. So He must have a single experience, and one that is not simply accidentally one. This is different however, since it is in a mind, than a single infinite physical motion. So the argument still stands. Everyone knows about actuality and potentiality in the world. I get the Thomistic position on this with regard to God though now.

 

[balto]

Can you name an idea from Descartes that Hume used?

Hume’s fork presupposes Descartes’ anti-Aristotelian separation of reality into res extensa and res cognitans. In Hume’s epistemology, “matters of fact” refer to material occurrences just experienced in res extensa and “relations of ideas” refer to the logical relationships between concepts solely located in res cognitans. There is no way to bridge this gap between res extensa and res cognitans because the two are completely distinct.

Previously the bridge was the forms or natures, since forms and natures really were “out there” in the objective world, and our minds, what Descartes labeled “res cognitans”, really did know the objective world by means of the forms and natures. Which is why metaphysics was regarded to be a meaningful method of inquiry back then.

 

[utunumsint]

To recap so far, Hume has presented a severely truncated view of human rationality that he wants to use to attack likely post Cartesian view of the intellect. As Balto said, the res cogitans and any concept of innate ideas. Locke also rejected the concept of innate ideas, proposing that only sense impressions generate intellect. We are a tabula rasa or blank slate.

My response is that this has no impact on Aquinas or Aristotle since they agree with Hume and Locke that the intellect has its origins in sense perceptions but is not reducible to them.

What Hume attacks next is the concept of causality. Specifically the notion that you can deduce anything about a cause based on an effect. He believes there is no necessary link between cause and effect. Only custom leads us to think that because B follows A that there is a link.

I think what is problematic here is the idea of necessary. I think he places the bar way to high when determining what a necessary idea is. He wants necessary to mean some kind of mathematically necessary formula that would be true in all worlds apriori.

Aquinas and Aristotle have the concept of proportionate causality where you can deducing something about the cause from the effect. The cause is in the effect either emminently, virtually, or formally. Edward Feser has a blog post that contains information about these types of proportionality.

Now, Hume seems to be attacking the notion that one can tell what is the cause from the effect alone. But the arguments for the existence of God on not based on whether we can scientifically deduce cause A from effect B, but are based on metaphysical principles presupposed by science. From the post, he says:

…because for A-T we cannot just go around attributing “virtual” or “eminent” features to a thing willy-nilly. In particular, the A-T understanding of causality would in no way license the conclusion that just any old natural process could in theory have immanent causality or life within it “virtually” or “eminently” and thus cause life to exist “formally” in some first organism. The nature of causality as such is a metaphysical question, but what specific causal powers things actually have is an empirical question.

Aristotle and Aquinas derive metaphysical principles based on what we come to know as general metaphysical rules that hold true for all of physical phenomena. Truths such as proportionate causality or the idea that everything that is moved is moved by another, or the law of non-contradiction. They don’t arrive at these metaphysical principles apriori, but a posteriori. Are these principles capable of being disproved? I would say that they are. But if they were, we would have some serious problems on our hands and would likely have to jettison any solid concept of reason.

But to sum up, our experience tells us that B follows A. That when a billiard ball hits another billiard ball, that a chicken doesn’t just pop out of nowhere where the struck billiard ball was. And even if it did, we would not immediately assume that the appearance of the chicken was without a cause. We would go through a long list of possibilities before admitting there was no cause. And even then we would probably never admit that there is no cause, only that we will never know the cause, but we would not doubt that there is one.

Anyway, the cosmological arguments build on these principles derived from experience that we have no good reason to doubt unless one had a prior and arguably unreasonable desire to reject (for example, a desire to get rid of a field of knowledge that seems to give too much credibility to revealed religion.) And if they consistently rejected such principles, they would also undercut the very possibility of science.

God bless,
Ut

 

[thinkandmull]

Descartes believe you can prove there is a God because something must keep you in existence. He says that directly in his Meditations. Aristotle too believe in matter vs mind, just like Descartes. Descartes believed things had natures, but didn’t speak about three principles (prime matter, form, and being) because prime matter and form are nothing without existence, so being can’t be added to them. To Descartes, it sounded like the scholastics were saying “green has green”. Things exist, instead of having existence, because to have something you must first be.

Hume didn’t return from a meditation like Descartes’s and return to sanity. I think Hume was using just his strict logical part of his mind (left hemisphere?) instead of using his whole mind to understand something like nature teaches us

 

[utunumsint]

Descartes believe you can prove there is a God because something must keep you in existence. He says that directly in his Meditations. Aristotle too believe in matter vs mind, just like Descartes.

I really should re-read my Descartes. The last time I had to read his stuff was in University almost 20 some years ago. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff critical of him lately, so maybe I should go back to the source and take a look at the meditations again.

Descartes believed things had natures, but didn’t speak about three principles (prime matter, form, and being) because prime matter and form are nothing without existence, so being can’t be added to them. To Descartes, it sounded like the scholastics were saying “green has green”. Things exist, instead of having existence, because to have something you must first be.

Can you point me to a quote where Descartes talks about the scholastic principles of essence and existence, and form and matter?

Hume didn’t return from a meditation like Descartes’s and return to sanity. I think Hume was using just his strict logical part of his mind (left hemisphere?) instead of using his whole mind to understand something like nature teaches us

If he read Descartes, he certainly did not keep any of the theistic content. He was basically critical of any apriori knowledge. I wonder if Hume ever talks about the cogito?

God bless,
Ut

 

[Jack_Common]

The First Vatican Council formally declared that the existence of God can be known by the powers of human reason.

Hume’s Fork is really an absurdity that results from Hume’s absurd epistemology / philosophy of mind.