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Kamalayka
Guest
So, according to you, science has gone down the sh*tter?
- Status
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Touchstone
Guest
Sorry for the delay, had to go dig out a couple books from downstairs for this…
Here’s another paragraph from page 15 of the same book by Guth:
-TS
If our universe began as a vacuum fluctuation (and this is one of the current theories) from an eternal, infinite vacuum, that’s as “nothing” as “nothing” gets, and the universe is a something that spontaneously sprang from that nothing.I can just see Stephen Hawking releasing his new Theory of Nilly Willy.
I’ll agree for the sake of argument that there is no discernible patten or purpose in QM, but that’s a far cry from energy coming into being our of nothing and literally disappearing into nothingness.
I think you aren’t aware of inflationary cosmology – Alan Guth, Andre Linde, Paul Steinhardt. From MIT’s Guth:
Appendix A of that book has an extended treatment on the negative energy of a gravitational field, btw.
Here’s another paragraph from page 15 of the same book by Guth:
More on the rest of your questions anon.
-TS
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Touchstone
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I believe you are forgetting here my point – that the intuition of the (pre)scholastic era wasn’t and couldn’t have been informed by any of this, and only in the past century or so has “nothing” become a “something”. That’s the whole point of Barrow’s book, no? Do you suppose Aquinas, if he could “observe” the Big Bang would say “well it came from something!” Whatever STEM context used for that observation (if there was such a context), it would be perfectly nothing to Aquinas, and to us. Hence, the casual pronouncement that God creates ex nihilo.
On the interim, our intuitions can be informed by the knowledge gained. STEM is “volatile” in a creative sense, giving spontaneous rise to fluctuations an disturbances at random places and times, “from nothing” – where “nothing” is “no thing”.
QM in some ways is understood better than macrophysics. Certainly the precision and performance of the model is astounding. But we aren’t talking about a defeater for the idea that “out of nothing, nothing comes” – that’s not the corrigibility I’ve been referring to, but rather that the the macrophysical intuition that gives rise to that pronouncement is increasingly weakened with the knowledge gained at the QM level (an elsewhere, less forcefully).
That is, QM provides a strong approximation of “something from nothing”, with the only risposte “but a vacuum is not *really *nothing”, which is a valid statement, but (unwittingly) grants the point: our reality appears to approximate “something from nothing” as closely as reality conceivably can, “perfect nothing” being a purely philosophical concept.
This is precisely why people (i.e. the physicists developing the theories) use the language they do, like Guth or Linde in talking about inflationary cosmology. Reality really does behave in a “something from nothing” fashion, given that “nothing” always has a foundation in STEM (so far as we know). It’s not capricious language Guth is using when we describes the inflationary idea of the universe as a vacuum fluctuation that made the big time as “the ultimate free lunch” (that’s the name of the chapter I quoted from above).
-TS
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Touchstone
Guest
Unless one holds the intuition as somehow “divine” or “cosmically authoritative” – itself a problematic stance – all intuition is suspect. That is, it’s not rejected outright, and is indeed crucially valuable for (name removed by moderator)ut and progress, but is subject to override and overthrow by reality, through objective apprehension of the world around us, and reasoning from that.
So it’s all subject to doubt. We have an intution that reality is real, for example. And while we can doubt that intution in principle, it’s transcendentally imperative – it’s a necessary precondition for survival, and thinking about the world around us.
But as above, we are festooned with intuitions, and they bear out well in some cases, and not so well in other cases. If one looks at the “performance graph” of our intutions, good performance is clustered around “local” knowledge and experience – intuitions about body english, and gestures, for example – but human intuition fares much more poorly as the subject moves aware from parochial experiences. The relativity of space/time, for example, overturns our natural intuitions, and is much farther removed from our local experience.
It is this general correlation, that the farther away we get from local, immediate human experience, the more poorly our natural intuitions fare that informs the reasoning mind. We may strongly intuit that for every action there is a cause (a long standing intution if there ever was one), and at “normal” levels of description, it bears out well. But the last century has shown that the universe is not thoroughly like that, and isn’t like that at all at foreign levels of description – the QM level. Virtual particles being “acausal” in light of that intuition, for example.
None of that serves as a defeater for any particular intuition per se. But the performance of our intuitions as a function of “distance” from our local experience is informative. The “farther out” we get, the more inadequate our intuitions are. Thomistic metaphysics, just by virtue of being metaphysical, are “really far out”, and thus increasingly suspect in light of discovery in past centuries.
‘scholastic man’ had a strong level of trust in the S-PSR, for example. And well he might, given what was available to him, knowledge-wise and experientially. Modern man, however, understands that the idea that every true proposition does NOT necessarily have a sufficient reason why it is true. S-PSR can be true without being shown to be true, of course, but the point here is that scientific discovery works against it – the more we discover, the more we find ‘truths’ that appear to be physically irreducible.
The point was that science in general provides this correlative information, that as the subject gets farther from man’s local experience, the intuitions hold up less and less well. This is not an insight Thomists appear to acknowledge, or be aware of.
The examples above don’t dent a tautology – nothing can do that. But in the tautological sense, “something can’t come from nothing” is just trivially true. In an existential sense, virtual particles, as a feature of STEM, are as “something from nothing” as it gets. Virtual particles are counter-intuitive because our macrophysical experience is consistently NOT like that; something comes from something – a rabbit doesn’t just appear from the magician’s hat. But a virtual particle is a “rabbit from the hat” in terms of causality and provenance. It happens in the context of STEM, yes, but virtual particles militate against our intuitions about “nothing” and “coming from”.
-TS
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punkforchrist
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Touchstone, just letting you know that I’ll be out of town until Tuesday.
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Betterave
Guest
What do you mean? Who is this ‘lone individual’ you speak of? Not you obviously; you are on the science team; you may use the royal ‘we’ and speak of what ‘we’ know now, now that the future has been realized, in these most modern of times, where the juggernaut of human knowledge has begun to race forward, where knowledge is power and as our knowledge grows our power grows, and no knowledge is left that is not power. You may think you avoid dogma; but do you? Maybe I’ve got you wrong, but your scientistic rhetoric is just the kind of thing Kierkegaard talked about. The point is not about attacking aeronautical engineering, please get that idea out of your head. It’s questioning the dogmatic notion that progress is something obvious and monolithic and inexorable (as long as we’re team players - on my team, that is), something that ‘we’ have in our possession just because we live at this point in history. That’s Hegelian dogmatism. Is that you?
Thanks for the links: it was the IIRC I was confused about. I thought you were trying to reference what you were talking about in Ockham’s Ordinatio. Could you help me out with that? I don’t think I’ll have time to read the whole Ordinatio until after Christmas maybe.
Ouch! My bad. My withers are wrung!
I thought ‘whithering’ might have been what you had intended - not a real word, but perhaps it could be given an interesting metaphorical sense…oh whither goeth the intellect - chop!
here comes
the whithering blade
it’s all Bacon now - slice, slice’
(I’m not usually interested in making pedantic spelling corrections for no good reason.)
“…in the expectation that it would validate its beliefs”? Where are you getting this from? “Apologetics issue”? Do you mean this thread? Anyway, of course I believe science ain’t all that. Why would you think that it is? (Or first: what ‘all’, exactly, do you think it is?)
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Betterave
Guest
Here’s a metaphorical dialogue:
A: Miley Cyrus is beautiful
B: no, she’s not; she’s a rational animal
C: are you kidding? she’s a complete airhead!
Now A, B, and C have a long argument about which of them is right, which never gets resolved - I wonder why!
A: Miley Cyrus is beautiful
B: no, she’s not; she’s a rational animal
C: are you kidding? she’s a complete airhead!
Now A, B, and C have a long argument about which of them is right, which never gets resolved - I wonder why!
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Touchstone
Guest
By ‘lone individual’ I mean any person (me included) relying on their subjective experience alone as the source of knowledge. The easiest person I can fool is myself, and so armed with the experience of that understanding, objective methods of knowledge building, error correction and falsification become important. By collaborating with other individuals to “check my math”, as I check theirs, and they check everyone else’s, I deploy an effective means of reducing mistakes, attenuating subjective bias and distortion, and crucial feedback on my personal bearings.
Science is low dogma enterprise. It is quite dogmatic in its fundamental commitment to the reality of reality, and some measure of intelligibility of the universe as an empirical endeavor, but beyond that, everything is tentative, provisional, subject to critique, assault, falsification.
Any theory you want to name is subject to overthrow, and the history of science is a story of one overthrowing after another. There are no truths in science that obtain “because God said so”. Neither is science dogmatic about what must be explained, or what it can explain. It explains what it can explain based on the evidence and the performance of its models.
It’s a fact that, like any other fact, is open to dispute and review, but one which stands up to any scrutiny you’d like to apply: science has accumulated a lot more natural knowledge, performative knowledge than it had centuries ago. If you want to dispute the idea that the massive growth in our natural knowledge is not progress, be my guest, that’d be a subjective assessment, just begging the question of what you (or I) call ‘progress’ in some general sense. But as a matter of achieving its own aims, science has indisputably made significant progress over the last several centuries, and is much further along toward its goal than it was: providing natural explanations for natural phenomena.
Here’s a short encapsulation of the idea:Thanks for the links: it was the IIRC I was confused about. I thought you were trying to reference what you were talking about in Ockham’s Ordinatio. Could you help me out with that? I don’t think I’ll have time to read the whole Ordinatio until after Christmas maybe.
Scotus: An infinite series of efficient causes related *per accidens *is possible, but that would require a finite series of efficient causes related *per se.
***Ockham: **Not, dude! An infinite series of productive causes can be self-sufficient.
That’s an example I was pointing to concerning Ockham’s ontological nominalism. Where Scotus saw such an infinite series as contingent on something else, Ockham saw that contingency as superfluous, unnecessary.
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Benadam
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I want to address this statement before making my point. This statement assumes that nature is a subordinate to personal being. On the contrary,it’s human nature to be self determined. To assume that genes and environment are more powerfull factors than nature in determining the self is to not recognize human nature.
The experience of same sex attraction isn’t homosexuality. Sexual acts between two people of the same sex is homosexuality. If that weren’t true everyone ever tempted to steal is a theif even if they never stole anything.
Homosexuality is a disorder because the end purpose of human sexuality is not met through homosexual acts.
The science that discovers the facts surrounding the source of sexual attraction doesn’t work against the recieved wisdom of the Church. I guess one would have to know what was recieved to know that.
Having said that, I read Sam Harrises book ’ The End of Faith’. Well reasoned critique of religious attitudes and how they enfluence culture. Albeit missing a few of the finer points in a similar fashion as the statement I responded to about the Church’s disposition towards homosexuality and science.
What it presents as new to atheism ( new to me) is Sam’s acceptance of the nenefits religions have offered to humanity. The uncharacteristic acceptance of spirituality as real, necessary and proper to human nature. In fact he not only irritated the sensibilities of religious people, his book upset alot of atheists as well.
The aim it seems to me of the ‘New Atheism’ is an atheism that accepts the spiritual goods that the world religions offer to the human race, redefine them as entirely natural, remove reasoning that supports faith in their supernatural origins, point out the history of evil human behavior as evidence that religion has always lacked as a means to proper human ends,
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Touchstone
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I guess that’s right. How would we recognize human nature apart from a) genetics, b) epigenetic factors, and c) social/cultural environmental influences?
That may be a convenient adjustment for the RCC to make, but that’s not the usage that’s out there. Webster, for example:
The first meaning directly contradicts what you’ve said here. The way people deploy this term does mean “sexual attraction”. If you want to pull out clinical definitions, you will find even beefier definitions that discredit your claim here. There are many homosexuals who have never engaged in homosexual contact. They are homosexuals, and self-identify thus, as being primarily attracted in a sexual or romantic way to individuals of the opposite sex.
Yes but not only the behavior. The behavior is just the acting upon the attraction, the manifestation of the disposition.
“thief” isn’t understood that way, but is defined by a behavior not an inclination or orientation.
Webster again:
Note the absence of inclination, temptation or contemplation, and the conspicuous reliance on commission – the act of stealing. Thieving and homosexuality are fundamentally dissimilar in this regard – homosexuality obtains from desire and internal inclination. Theft does not.
According to who?
Homosexual acts are not considered sinful by the RCC?
OK, roger that.
I’m sure. When Voltaire observed that if God didn’t exist we’d have to invent him, it wasn’t a matter of simple whimsy he was thinking of, I’d guess. It’s a feature of man’s evolved brain that he has a disposition of intentionality. Man is a story-telling being, “narrative-centric”. Religion and myth can and do fill important “market demands” in the mind of man. And significant benefits can and do obtain.
It’s implausible for an atheist to suppose religions is as widespread and deeply embedded in the culture as it is without some solid, natural reasons for that being the case. It’s too pervasive to just be idle fancy.
Yeah, Douglas Hofstadter, for instance, in I Am A Strange Loop gives a solid treatment to the idea of the “natural soul” and “spirituality” as a material phenomenon, as terms we can deploy usefully in the culture. One of the primitive parts of previous (and alas, much current) materialist thinking about religion and myth was that it wasn’t just false, but frivolously false. As the knowledge base broadens, one of the areas ripe for discovery is models that explain and perform in the area of human mysticism and supernaturalism. We are “wired for fantasy” in many areas, and that’s something we don’t have a lot of real knowledge about at this point, in terms of the underlying mechanics and processes.
-TS
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Benadam
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Betterave
Guest
Okay, so you’re saying there are actually are such people, who “rely on their subjective experience alone as the source of knowledge”? Do you mean people who were raised by wolves? Or other people too, psychologically normal people?
How could a commitment to the reality of reality be dogmatic??? Anyway, of course science per se is not dogmatic, though many scientists of course are. But scientism is not science; it is an understanding of what science is and what role is appropriate to positivistic empirical investigation within the larger domain of human knowing. Scientism is dogmatic and you sound like you espouse it. This is a case where it doesn’t matter how often you recite some mantra about “the easiest person to fool is myself”; it doesn’t actually help you to not fool yourself (it might even incline you to do so in cases like this).
So you espouse the idea that ‘science’ is a subsistent entity of some kind with essential, changeless goals that have indisputably been progressively realized over the last several centuries. In other words, the idea of ‘science’ hasn’t significantly changed since Plato and the standards of scientific progress that are understood by modern common sense are inevitable and unquestionable. And you claim your position is not dogmatic?
Okay, thanks for clarifying. My original point here, though, remains the same: it is not about he said vs. he said. That’s no way to make or demonstrate progress. That’s fluff. The question is: who is right? And to answer that question, even tentatively, in a public way (remember your own rhetoric about the debility of isolated subjective experience), would require a much more detailed discussion.
Right, still a disorder, and from what I know of the issue the APA would refer to it the same way on scientific (evidence-based) grounds - but that’s not their MO. It’s well known that gay political advocacy runs scandalously rampant in the APA. The history of social activism is considered a science by some people too, you know.
Anyway, the obvious point to make here is that there is nothing ‘problematic’ about the onset of a disorder being heavily influenced by genetics and environmental factors beyond the individual’s control. Why do you think there would be?
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Touchstone
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No, not alone, not solely through subjective experience. When they get on an airplane to go to Disneyworld, even if they are intuitively afraid to fly, they are relying on real knowledge systematically assembled by others. When it comes to questions of a philosophical nature, though, many are simply quite enamored of their intuitions, and subjective experience, *over against *the witness of real world knowledge. They “just know” the world was designed by God, for example, and their affinity for their subjective inclinations trumps any objective analysis of the situation. Reality “just feels better” if there’s some unseen yet authoritative deity that provides moral absolutes of a cosmic nature, so that… “feels” true, subjectively, and many go with it.
But in many other areas, these same folk are more than happy to take advantage of the fruits of systematized, collective knowledge.
It’s unassailable, cannot be questioned. That’s dogma!
Man is not at liberty to eschew that belief, or proceed as if he truly doubted it, lest he die, violently and soon, in many cases.
That’s the beauty of science – it seperates the method and the discipline from the personality, the subjective individual participant.
Maybe I misunderstand scientism, but I take scientism to be a belief that science is authoritative over all disciplines of life – arts, music, literature, politics, baseball. Insofar as that understanding is correct, I’m not subscriber to scientism, not hardly.
It is assailable, and open to criticism and review. It stands on its record of performance, on the evidence of what it has produced. It needs to assert no authority, or silence any challenges. A review of what science has produced in terms of knowledge will make the case for its efficacy and utility for man. No dogma needed, just look at the results.
Possibly, and I’m happy to pursue that. I am fascinated for the power of Ockham’s ideas in terms of how they undermine religion and support rational thinking. I’m sure he really didn’t have a clue what the downstream effects of his own ideas would be, upon his own ideas. This is part of my larger judgment that science in general is a “golem” of sorts, a “child of religion” which has ended up haunting and laying siege to religion. No way to treat your mother, that!
Well, I take a dim view of that as sicence, if so. The unmistakably trend in the science that deals with data, genetics, and measured, isolated effects is directly away from any kind of “disorder”, though. Even in terms of evolution, it makes sense – mothers of gay males are statistically more fertile/fecund than the other mothers. There seems to be an evolutionary advantage in reproductive/gestational phenotypes that are more efficient in propagating genes even after paying the “tax” of homosexual males who do not produce offspring as much as heterosexual males.
Anyway, that’s a subject of interest – the physiological science, not any kind of fluffy sociology. I think the physiological science is problematic for the doctrines of the RCC.
Well, to the extent sexual orientation is genetically/epigenetically determined, it undermines what Paul says in Romans, for example. And I don’t think there’s a case to be made that rules out social/psychological environmental factors, given what we know right now, in case that isn’t clear. To the extent being homosexual is a predetermined identity, though, it’s not like alcoholism at all. We are sexual beings in a fundamental level where “alcoholic dispositions” do not even apply.
Someone upthread tried the “homosexuality is the act, not the inclination” trick, and I think that gives away the game here with respect to the church. If homosexuality is an expression of man’s (God given) nature, not the behavior but the basic, core affinity, Catholic theology looks quite at odds with the reality of man as man.
-TS
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punkforchrist
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That presupposes that something really can come from nothing, so it doesn’t help to beg that question.
I’m familiar with it. The key to understanding Guth’s statement is that negative numbers represent certain energy levels. He’s not saying there’s energy that’s less than nothing.
As far as the “free lunch” is concerned, Guth is at this point doing metaphysics, and not science.
Barrow’s book presents a contrast between classical and modern physics, but his point remains that the modern notion of a vacuum is something. Just because there’s no discernible pattern does not at all imply that something can come from nothing.
Thomas would, and actually did say, that if the universe had a beginning, then it had a First Cause. Of course, his own cosmological arguments are not dependent on this. Keep in mind that God is something.
I don’t have any disagreement that matter may be spontaneous, or random, but you have to show the connection between this and “something coming from nothing” in order for your objection to stand.
I realize this is what you believe, but I maintain there is no weakening at all. There’s just no connection, however implicit, between spontaneity and something coming from nothing. Moreover, I’ve pointed out that QM actually confirms the ex nihilo principle. To restate that it’s still weakened is circular.
I don’t agree with you about the necessity of corrigibility. “I am appeared to redly” is incorrigible if, in fact, I see something that appears red to me. There are a number of a priori principles that are both true/meaningful, as well as unfalsifiable, such as those found in logic and mathematics. I would also add the ex nihilo principle to that list. In sum, not all intuition is subject, especially if you’re using “intuition” as a blanket term for all non-empirically derived principles.
I wouldn’t limit that to survival. Some things are transcendental in both an ontological and epistemological sense – there could be no intelligibility or knowledge without them.
I’ll continue to wait for a single example that validates this statement.
Lucky for these Scholastics, their arguments didn’t necessitate the S-PSR.
That’s a bit of a hasty generalization to make about Thomists. In any case, if we are going to take this “counter-intuition” proposal seriously, then we cannot even trust our own cognitive faculties in coming to the conclusion that our intuitions may be wrong. This, of course, undercuts your own argument.
A tautology would be something like, “nothing is nothing,” or, “something is something.” “Something cannot come from nothing” is not tautological. Nevertheless, even tautologies are meaningful, so they shouldn’t be dismissed as contributing nothing to knowledge.
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punkforchrist
Guest
But, where are you getting this connection from? How do we get from mere spontaneity to a free lunch? Further, we do observe spontaneity at the macro-level, especially if there is such a thing as free will.
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Betterave
Guest
But you’re trying to create a false contrast here: between fear which is intuitive and ‘reliance on real knowledge’ which is not. You can’t really believe that’s a real distinction?
Of course you may be right about this, whatever it is exactly that you mean; but again, your simply claiming that this is the case, using all sorts of vague and ambiguous terms with non-identified referents, is pure ad hominem self-congratulatory fluff (rationally speaking). If science is rigorous and objective, this wouldn’t be science; what point is there in praising science if you don’t try to emulate what is good about what you’re praising? You can insist on rigorous epistemological standards, but such insistence becomes pretty silly when its picture of rigor is purely dogmatic and itself not at all rigorous.
…and presumably you’re saying they shouldn’t be? You know this how? Intuitively? Or is this a ‘scientific’ claim, in your view?
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Betterave
Guest
Not quite! There’s a difference between ‘cannot conceivably be questioned’ and ‘is understood to be beyond doubt’. Dogmas are not beyond questioning. My point, anyway, was about dogmatism, not dogmas. There is no pejorative connotation implied by ‘dogma’, whereas ‘dogmatism’ implies stubbornness, disregard for evidence, closed-mindedness.Before I roll over and accept this claim, can you tell me what ‘eschewing the belief that reality is reality’ even means? (And obviously I’m looking for something informative and non-question-begging.)
Does it really though? Is this something you’ve had an intuition about? Or is there a ‘discipline’ that has established this fact independently of ‘personality’?
imho, you do misunderstand scientism (not that there is a single neat definition for the term, but I can’t even imagine what it would mean to say, for example, that “science is authoritative over the ‘discipline of life’ that is baseball”). Scientism insists on the cognitive superiority of the natural sciences and dismisses the cognitive claims of other Wissenschaften, or claims that these are destined to be subsumed under the Naturwissenschaften and their particular kind of objectivity and exactness. It is obviously based, I think, on an intuition (one that is shallow and stupid). But maybe this bears more discussion. For now I’ll just say that I think that perhaps you have a habit of making hasty claims, the consequences of which you do not understand and would not agree with if you did understand them.
You’re missing the point entirely, I believe. You make non-scientific claims about science and claim that ‘science’ does the same - it doesn’t and can’t: science can only make scientific claims. You don’t understand the structure of scientific knowledge at all if you think that it results speak for themselves about their own ‘efficacy’, at least in a sense which is relevant to this debate - that is just your intuition speaking, not science.
I think this is indeed a fascinating topic. My one comment for now will be that your hypostatization of ideas and their power is partially correct, but naive; ideas are part of the life of spirit and human person’s necessarily underlie ideas as well as their material history/progress.
Your ‘dim views’ are perhaps all too dim - certainly a more substantive comment would be in order than what you have offered here. Anyway, yes, the physiological science is interesting; but why do you think it is problematic for RC doctrines??? Don’t just tell me it is!
I’m sorry, which part of Catholic theology? Not all of it, I hope! Please clarify. I don’t mean to be unkind but this is more fluff.
(You seem to have made clear at the beginning of this post that you believe (it’s one of your intuitions, I’m guessing) that things like theology are unsystematic collections of intuitions. I’m guessing this is why you might think that this kind of ‘criticism’ is actually pertinent or salient with regards to that which it purports to criticize; it seems to me, however, that it clearly is not. Remember, who is the easiest person to fool…?)
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BobCatholic
Guest
As the Guess Who say:
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
The New Atheism is just the same as the old Atheism.
Human reasoning? Sounds great, until people start reasoning away morality and ethics - so they can do what they want. Then we get Dr. Mengele again.
Sure, science and human reasoning are great to an extent. But without morality and ethics, what’s the point? We’ve seen what happens when people don’t follow morality and ethics, time and time again.
And thus, we’re back to the New Atheism - its code of ethics says that all is allowed - except to believe in God (or gods) - so it is just like the old atheism which says the same thing, so nothing’s changed.
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
The New Atheism is just the same as the old Atheism.
I have yet to have anyone successfully argue how Dr. Mengele was out of line, by using the scientific method. As soon as someone says that he was out of line, they appeal to something not in the jurisdiction of science - morality and ethics - which is the domain of philosophy or theology. Thus, that’s one thing that makes science ugly, and why I don’t trust Science alone as the final truth.
Human reasoning? Sounds great, until people start reasoning away morality and ethics - so they can do what they want. Then we get Dr. Mengele again.
Sure, science and human reasoning are great to an extent. But without morality and ethics, what’s the point? We’ve seen what happens when people don’t follow morality and ethics, time and time again.
And thus, we’re back to the New Atheism - its code of ethics says that all is allowed - except to believe in God (or gods) - so it is just like the old atheism which says the same thing, so nothing’s changed.
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AntiTheist
Guest
Sorry, I haven’t been following this thread, but I read your post, and I can’t let a false statement like that go unchallenged.
Atheism isn’t a set of teachings – it’s just a position on the question of whether gods exist or not. Atheists don’t have to agree on anything more than that: and indeed, you will find atheists with a wide variety of opinions on all sorts of subjects, morality and behavior among them. There isn’t one “code of ethics” that all atheists subscribe to – different atheists have different opinions and approaches to morality.
Plenty of atheists subscribe to various systems of morality – and no atheist, as far as I know, thinks that science should tell us how to act. Science is a method of finding out objective facts about the world; it doesn’t tell us how to behave. We have other ways of going about doing that.
Personally, I don’t subscribe to any particular morality, nor do I think that “morality,” as it’s commonly spoken of, exists outside of people’s heads and value judgments. Essentially, people find that they like other people behaving in certain ways and don’t like them behaving in other ways. These judgments are manifestations of people’s values, and those values have their root in a wide variety of factors, including biology, reason, tradition, society’s influence, and training.
No one needs to “successfully argue” that Dr. Mengele was a monster – you simply have to evaluate his actions from the perspective of your values. And if your values lead you to any conclusion other than “he was a monster,” then my values will lead me to the conclusion that I should stay far away from you.
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Touchstone
Guest
I think ‘dogmatism’ is the support for ‘dogma’, no? A look at Webster suggests that’s the case.
I’m not sure if it’s in this thread or not, but the example I use regularly is finding your hand in an open flame? Ouch! What happens? Even if you want to pretend you believe that reality isn’t real, that the flame isn’t actual and neither is your hand, your brain stem will override your malfunctioning cerebral cortex and force your hand to take evasive action from the flame.
If you drive to work, you prove everytime that you arrive that you are solidly committed to the reality of reality, as you could not avoid a fateful crash without respecting the reality of the objects around you, and the basic integrity of your perceptions. When you are going down the highway, and you see brake lights ahead of you, if you don’t proceed as if that car were a real object in a real extramental world, you are putting yourself at mortal risk.
As infants, before we even learn language, our brains consolidate their wiring to integrate perceptual processing on this basis. An infant who touches a hot stove will per her hand away, instinctively; she is wired for belief in the reality of reality. It’s how her species survived to the present day.
It’s observed, over and over. Objective review and analysis catches mistakes and identifies bias at the individual level that can be filtered out or adjusted when identified. In a recent analysis of network traffic problems for an Internet service I’m working on, I got “spanked” for some math errors that I rejected even after being corrected the first time. It took a replication elsewhere and some checking against a couple other sources to see that I was in fact mistaken. It was not malicious on my part, but that is the kind of experience that objective knowledge building puts into my/our experience base all the time.
Knowledge is a team sport.
Could be. Perhaps I subscribe to sceintism under your definition. I’m well aware of the apocalyptic predictions that typically accompany criticism of atheism, and in fact, I understand that to be a/the major impetus in resisting it, rather than fact-based, reasoning on the evidence. A major sustaining influence of Christianity I believe is the simple fear of the ramifications if this is a godless universe. However scary or dystopian that is, though, such assessments don’t make a godless world godful, or vice versa. It is what it is. In any case, I do understand that whatever the reasoned conclusions are about the actual state of reality, we aren’t bound to choose despair, or nihilism or hate.
- Status