Relativism actually don't contradict morality?

[Gallico]

Agnosticism, sitting in bed without a decision, is unacceptable.

Hello Bubba Switzler, Non Serviam, et al.,

I’d just like to say that I found this remark surprising. I’ve always thought, on the contrary, that agnosticism is arguably the only intelligent position we can adopt – at least, in terms of reason. Because ultimately, in terms of reason alone, what can we know?

I think of myself as a kind of pragmatic empiricist (though I’m not sure this is how a professional philosopher would characterize me). So my certainty that God exists is based only partly on what I think of as a rational response to the world I find myself in. (I mean by “rational response” that to look about me and conclude that all this is mere accident strikes me as absurd; therefore, I posit a God.) The main source of my certainty is the experience I’ve had of something that, if it doesn’t defy, transcends reason. Or is higher than reason. It is not a result of a cognitive process in the brain, nor is it based entirely on a sensual response to the world I inhabit as a physical animal.

I haven’t read much theology or philosophy (yet), so I’m using terminology as (I would think) an “ordinary” person would use it. That is, without any special, field-specific meaning (or jargon).

Atheism, it seems to me, is merely a negation of something. You can’t find evidence for something that doesn’t exist! “Belief” or “conviction”, on the other hand, has to be based on something – well, convincing. Some actual experience of something, rather than mere theory. Some observed state in oneself (or even another) that is irrefutably true. (I know I’m getting into trouble here!) How can I put this? When you’ve been graced with the sense of a numinous reality, however briefly, it’s inarguably true.

It occurs to me that I haven’t used the word “faith” in what I’ve written. I don’t equate belief with faith, exactly: for me, belief is based on conviction. I don’t take what I think and feel “on faith”. I think and feel it because I’ve experienced something I can’t put aside.

Best I can do at the moment. I see I have more thinking to do about what it is, exactly, I think!

By the way, may I ask what a “Zen Catholic” is? I suppose you are a Catholic who utilizes Zen methods to attain…? What? Enlightenment? I’ve met for the first time here the notion of a “Jesus Buddhist”. Now a Zen Catholic. It reminds me of a time in my life when I tried to refer to myself as a “Christian Reincarnationist” (a vegetarian, then, necessarily, in my view); but the first time I used the term to another person she reared back in horror and cried, "What is that?!?!" I gave up trying to call myself anything at all subsequently. When asked my religion on a form to fill out, I put “Eclectic”. I guess that’s more or less where I still am.

Here’s my problem: I can’t really be a Buddhist, because I believe in individual souls, and I can’t really be a Christian because I believe in reincarnation.

Maybe, if I continue to hang out here, I’ll learn better ways to characterize myself.

– Gallico

 

[Khalid]

Read “The Last Superstition” by Edward Feser or “Reasonable Faith” (a Protestant book) by William Lane Craig to get it straight that the “New Atheists” are windbags, not philosophers, and, outside of science - i.e. empirical facts - don’t know what they’re talking about.

Ethics - morality - is in the purview of metaphysics, in the purview of philosophy. Much of the problem is a steady diet and culture, being immersed in and having percolated in to us the false mechanistic philosophy of pretty much everyone since Descartes. If the mechanistic philosophy - Descartes, Hume, etc. - is true, then Christianity is false - the argument has already been won, and the theist is on the losing side.

However, since, under the mechanistic philosophy, the mind can not exist (this is called “eliminative materialism”, and not many espouse it openly, but it is the logical conclusion of materialism, either it or Cartesian dualism), and this is obviously false: mechano-materialism defeats itself. The true philosophy - that with great descriptive power that is completely internally consistent (as mechanism is obviously not, when it deals with the mind) is that of the ancients, called “realism” or “essentialism”, or, “real essentialism”, held by Plato, in a modified and more correct form by Aristotle, and refined by the Angelic Doctor himself, Saint Thomas Aquinas.

If the real essentialist philosophy is true (it is, but don’t take my word for it: read “The Last Superstition” for a crash course, and Routledge’s “Real Essentialism” if you can work at a graduate level in philosophy), theism is necessarily true, as is absolute morality: this is the traditional Catholic position called the “natural law theory”, as, in essentialist philosophy, the four causes - formal, material, efficient, and final - the purpose-directedness of a thing - inherently has a moral connotation. That is, what is moral is that which is in accord with the final cause of a given system or being (an “instantiated form”), or the activities of that being; thus, as a human being’s sex act is meant to procreate (to grossly oversimplify), contraception is immoral - as it interferes with the final cause, or teleology, or goal-directedness of the act, as we were created by God. Homosexuality is immoral as man and women were made complementary, and there is no natural purpose - final cause - that can possibly exist in the homosexual act. “Moral” means to follow the natural goal-directedness present in your being (which can, in some way, be identified also as God’s will); “immoral” means to try to thwart it.

In Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, the world actually does exist and has objective purpose and value separate from what we assign to it; through our senses, thought, and experience, we can come to a true - in the absolute sense of objectivity - understanding of things.

One of the proofs for God under this system - not to mention the argument from objective morality itself - has to do with the four causes and what are called “essentially ordered series”, which is a type of simultaneous causation (hand moves stick moves rock; if any link in this series breaks, the motion beyond that point stops, compared to a “loosely ordered series”, such as breaking a window by throwing a brick: the first cause in the essentially ordered series of the universe is God: this is the “first cause” of Thomas Aquinas - not the “Unmoved Mover”, which has to do with act [actuality] and potency [potentiality], and the actualization of potencies - thus God is the self-actualized actualizer, the pure Act [actus purus]; it’s better described in today’s terms as “Unchanging changer”, as our use of the term “motion” is much more limited today than it was in older times).

David Hume, one of the first nominalists/conceptualists (positions opposed to essentialism), held that there were no objective relation between the processes of the mind and the outside world (Kant held a similar position, but held that the outside world was essentially a projection of certain necessary laws of the mind, thus not denying the possibility of knowledge as Hume did), and, in concert with the times, this philosophy took hold and spawned modernity. It’s first proponents were theists, when they did not recognize the logical implications of their theories.

Now I’m ranting about philosophy, but to paraphrase Etienne Gilson: “In order for our philosophy and understanding and world to have any hope, we must abandon Hume and return to Aristotle” - this is why modern philosophers and metaphysicians are asking, and attempting to answer, some of the same questions that even the pre-Socratic philosophers asked and answered; the mechanistic philosophy has traded understanding of nature for control of nature (wisdom for technology, philosophy for artifice); we must strike a balance. Undoubtedly, scientists for a long while were rightfully frightened of final causes as antithesis to empirical science, as they were often wielded with a heavy hand in such a way (i.e. “The fish has fins because it’s final cause is to swim”: a true statement, but one that unnecessarily obstructs empirical and deconstructive research in to the subject): but they are not incompatible with it. Indeed, they are the only self-consistent framework in which being and somethingness can be explained, including the pursuit of empirical knowledge, and the methods used, not just philosophical knowledge.

 

[Abu]

Great, Khalid. Much nonsense has been spouted.

 

[NonServiam]

I’ve always thought, on the contrary, that agnosticism is arguably the only intelligent position we can adopt – at least, in terms of reason. Because ultimately, in terms of reason alone, what can we know?

Depends on what you mean by “know.”

If you mean, “Know to a degree of 100% absolute certainty,” then I guess we can’t “know” anything – including this very statement – because it would seem impossible to achieve such a high level of certainty in almost all cases.

Luckily, when we say “know” in our day to day lives, we’re not talking about about absolute certainty. We’re talking about being reasonable sure that a claim is very likely to be true. In this sense, we know all sorts of things: your post demonstrates that you know, at a minimum, how to operate a computer, how to read English, how to compose English sentences and paragraphs, etc.

So my certainty that God exists is based only partly on what I think of as a rational response to the world I find myself in. (I mean by “rational response” that to look about me and conclude that all this is mere accident strikes me as absurd; therefore, I posit a God.)

I think you’re going to want to spend a little more time on this “argument” of yours.

I suppose it boils down to what you mean by “accident” – the formation of stars and planets, the origin of life, the development of the diversity of species: all of these appear to be the products of natural laws – that is, the blind, unintelligent, purposeless function of the universe – that work in regular ways. There doesn’t appear to be anything absurd in saying that we have no grounds for supposing that any intelligence was driving any of these things. Perhaps you can clarify your position because I don’t understand it.

The main source of my certainty is the experience I’ve had of something that, if it doesn’t defy, transcends reason. Or is higher than reason.

Arguably, all experience transcends reason. I can’t rationally put into words the experience of sitting outside on a nice summer day. I can try to approximate what it feels like with words, but my paltry attempts will always fall short o the experience, which transcends my ability to put into words.

I don’t question that you’ve had an experience of some kind, but I do question your rational interpretation of that experience: you claim, for example, that the experience “is not a result of a cognitive process in the brain” – this is a rational claim about your experience, and while you might not be able to rationally report your experience, we can rationally examine this claim. On what grounds do you support the claim that your experience “is not a result of a cognitive process in the brain”?

Atheism, it seems to me, is merely a negation of something. You can’t find evidence for something that doesn’t exist!

Atheism, in its broadest sense, is the lack of a belief in god, the absence of that belief (a-theism).

When we investigate claims about the existence of entities, the default position is non-belief until the claim can be demonstrated, until we are convinced of the claim. Not believing in god, I would argue, is the default position until one is presented with sufficient evidence. Then – and only then – does one move from the position of non-belief, to a position of belief, to a state of being convinced that the claim is true.

 

[NonServiam]

windbags

Funny you should say that.

If the mechanistic philosophy - Descartes, Hume, etc. - is true, then Christianity is false - the argument has already been won, and the theist is on the losing side.

So far, you’re so good.

However, since, under the mechanistic philosophy, the mind can not exist

False. What we call mind appears to be an emergent property of matter. And when I say “appears to be,” I mean based on actual experiments, not just sitting around in an armchair thinking about it.

For example, we know that making physical changes to brains alters consciousness and thought: if you prod a brain in the right spots with an electrical current, you can trigger memories, tastes, smells, etc. Further, traumantic brain injuries have been known to modify and in some cases completely transform personalities. Further, “split brain” experiments have yielded results in which it appears that two different personalities can inhere in the same brain.

In short, everything we’ve actually discovered about brains – you know, “discovered” by means of actually looking at brains, rather than sitting around twiddling our thumbs and thinking about it in our bedrooms – supports the notion that consciousness and mind emerge from physical brains and not a single piece of evidence suggests that minds are something that exist outside of brains. We don’t even have one example…not even one…of a mind that exists without a brain.

If the real essentialist philosophy is true

Bwahahahahaha, that’s a good one.

what is moral is that which is in accord with the final cause of a given system or being

Where “final cause” is dreamt up by human beings. Pretty cool.

the first cause in the essentially ordered series of the universe is God

Nothing like reasoning back to a first cause and then randomly declaring that the cause must be a God.

Now I’m ranting about philosophy

You are, and it’s pretty tiresome. If the past few hundred years have taught us anything, it’s that learning things about the world happens by looking at the world, not by sitting in our armchairs and thinking about the world.

 

[Bubba_Switzler]

I’d just like to say that I found this remark surprising. I’ve always thought, on the contrary, that agnosticism is arguably the only intelligent position we can adopt – at least, in terms of reason. Because ultimately, in terms of reason alone, what can we know?

I think of myself as a kind of pragmatic empiricist (though I’m not sure this is how a professional philosopher would characterize me). So my certainty that God exists is based only partly on what I think of as a rational response to the world I find myself in. (I mean by “rational response” that to look about me and conclude that all this is mere accident strikes me as absurd; therefore, I posit a God.) The main source of my certainty is the experience I’ve had of something that, if it doesn’t defy, transcends reason. Or is higher than reason. It is not a result of a cognitive process in the brain, nor is it based entirely on a sensual response to the world I inhabit as a physical animal.

I think you are making the mistake of equating agnosticism with uncertainty. Note well the example I chose. I did not say that it was unacceptable to proceed through life with less than certainty about the choices you make. I said that laying in bed trying to escape uncertain choices was unacceptable. More precisely, though, it is impossible. Because if you choose to lay in bed you have made a choice and you must then wonder, is it the right one? Or as the great Rush said, “if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.”

Agnosticism is an attempt to avoid making certain choices or commitments. But life does not allow us this luxury. It forces us to make choices. We may pretend that we are agnostic about God and morality but sooner or later we are forced to make a choice that reveals our commitment one way or the other.

I am entirely sympathetic to uncertainty. In fact, often the term “faith” is used to mean a willful bridge between uncertain evidence and a definite choice. The evidence that God exists is uncertain so we employ faith to make up for the difference.

 

[NonServiam]

what is moral is that which is in accord with the final cause of a given system or being

I figured I would more adequately address this point, just to show you why it’s so incredibly flippin’ wrong.

Let’s take your example that “a fish has fins because its final cause is to swim.” A fish most certainly does not have swimming as its purpose, and neither did fins arise for the purpose of allowing it to swim,

The very idea of “purpose” implies a conscious being who creates that purpose. When you say that the “purpose” of a creature or a body part is X, you are saying “God created this being or body part for this purpose.” When you do that, you are already assuming that a god exists from the beginning: your assumption cannot then be used to demonstrate that a god exists…it’s a circular argument. [And no, switching “purpose” for “final cause” doesn’t change this problem…you’re just playing a word game]

In point of fact, we know that fish didn’t arise for the purpose of swimming, and we know that fins didn’t arise for the purpose of allowing fish to swim. Both fish and fins are the result of a long process of incremental changes (mutations), each one persisting because it – unlike other mutations – happened to provide a survival advantage in that environment. There was no “end” in sight, no goal, no teleology, no “final cause,” no purpose. Just a series of changes over time.

 

[Khalid]

If I didn’t use the word “scientism” in my above post, I apologize: please feel free - indeed, feel compelled - to enter it at least once every two sentences.

Being short on time, until I return, I refer you to the work of a much greater philosopher than I - Etienne Gilson - and his work “From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again”. If you can comprehend that, you might want to try “Real Essentialism - Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy”. I believe you completely misunderstood my specific example of final cause: it was spoken in sympathy to your position, because mistaking final cause for a scientific explanation has caused no limit to the limit of empirical development in the past.

Natural selection is itself teleological in nature. The very word “selection” implies it: even if the only traits being selected for are those conducive to reproductive fitness, there is a final cause. As long as there is selection - full stop - there is teleology.

And, please, I beg of thee, read an introductory text on the philosophy of mind and familiarize yourself with the theory of qualia. “Mind” is irreducible (even you must agree thought most certainly is teleological in nature), and calling something “emergent” is not explaining it, but merely sweeping it under the rug of materialism: much like an inverse God of the Gaps, a “science of the gaps” - “Well, we don’t know exactly how yet, but I’ll stake my life that empirical science will eventually figure it out”.

Philosophers and scientists of much greater intelligence and acumen than you or I have tried to explain persistent personal identity and mind, and all fall to one side or the other, or, again, invoke the “empiricism of the gaps”, and say, “we have problems with it now, but it’ll be fixed”: even Karl Popper himself. The nature of mind - or, should I say, consciousness, since you don’t seem to grasp the standard materialist definition of “mind” as “everything that can’t be explained empirically” - is such that it is an a priori impossibility to explain it in purely physical or reductionist terms, and still have a mind left over.

Why is there an atheist on conservative Catholic forums anyhow? You must like arguing nearly as much as I.

 

[NonServiam]

Being short on time, until I return, I refer you to the work of …]

Look, I’m here to have a discussion, not a book club. If you want to bring in arguments that other people have made, then give a short, coherent summary of the arguments, but let’s keep our discussion focused on our ideas.

Natural selection is itself teleological in nature. The very word “selection” implies it: even if the only traits being selected for are those conducive to reproductive fitness, there is a final cause. As long as there is selection - full stop - there is teleology.

I think you’re confusing yourself with language here. We call it “natural selection,” sure. But it’s not a selection in the same way that my choice of coke over pepsi is a selection.

When we say that a mutation is “selected for,” what we mean is that the mutation in question makes it slightly more likely that the organism will live longer to pass on the mutation. “Fitness” isn’t a goal of some kind that nature aims to produce…“fitness” is our word for those organisms that do survive and pass on their mutations.

Now, we can describe this completely natural, blind, and unintelligent process as a “selection” – because we do like to anthropomorphize things, don’t we? – but it is in no way anything like the selection that happens when I pick a coke over a pepsi.

Furthermore, my point was that evolution itself – not just natural selection, which is the mechanism of evolution – has “no teleology.” Evolution isn’t “aiming” to produce any particular kind of creatures…it’s not even aiming to produce “fit” creatures. “Fit” is our word for those creatures that result from the process.

Even the idea of “species” is something of a fabrication that we’ve imposed on the process for the purpose of thinking about it: every living thing, after all, is utterly unique. When we talk about a “species,” we’re grouping together, for the purposes of classification, a very diverse group. If we went back through the evolutionary history of a species and its ancestors, we wouldn’t be able to draw a line and say, “Here’s where a mother, of species A, gave birth to a child of species B.”

It’s sort of like with languages. We all know that Italian is descended from Latin. But could we p(name removed by moderator)oint a Latin-speaking mother who gave birth to an Italian-speaking child? Of course not: languages, like species, develop very, very slowly through a series of small incremental changes. The very idea of a “language” – like a “species” – is a construct we use to discuss a subsection of evolutionary history that is still in progress.

There are no species that evolution is aiming to produce. There are no body parts that evolution is aiming to produce. There are no aims or goals: there’s nothing but change over time. The environment influences that change over time, but that’s it.

You cannot argue that there are “final causes” unless you first assume that there is some transcendental consciousness willing those causes, which means that you are starting by assuming that your conclusion is true, which means that your argument is circular.

I beg of thee

Beg all you want.

calling something “emergent” is not explaining it, but merely sweeping it under the rug of materialism

Calling it “emergent” isn’t an explanation – as I freely admitted, we don’t know exactly how it works, at least not yet – but while it isn’t an explanation, it is an identification.

Consider, for example, ancient tribesmen trying to figure out what rain is. One of them says, “It is the tears of the Great Sky God.” Another says, “I disagree – based on evidence, it sure looks like the rain is somehow the product of clouds.” Now, that second tribesman hasn’t advanced an explanation, but he has identified the phenomenon as coming from clouds, and he doesn’t need to have a perfect explanation to be on solid ground saying that rain sure seems to be a product of clouds.

We’re in a similar position with this consciousness stuff, except we’ve got a ton of better evidence that lets us identify consciousness as emergent from brains. Again, we don’t know exactly how. Maybe we’ll discover it, and maybe we’ll never discover it. But even if we never do, it still looks like consciousness emerges from brains, and that will remain the most sensible position until there is some better evidence.

much like an inverse God of the Gaps, a “science of the gaps” - “Well, we don’t know exactly how yet, but I’ll stake my life that empirical science will eventually figure it out”.

No. When we don’t know something, we say, “We don’t know, and we’ll keep trying to figure it out. Maybe we’ll discover it, and maybe we won’t.”

At any rate, it should be obvious that not knowing something – ignorance – cannot form the basis of a rational argument for a claim (otherwise known as an “argument from ignorance”). The fact that we don’t know something means that we don’t know…it doesn’t mean that “therefore, God.”

 

[NonServiam]

Why is there an atheist on conservative Catholic forums anyhow?

Because I feel like it.

 

[TruthSeeker60]

If the past few hundred years have taught us anything, it’s that learning things about the world happens by looking at the world, not by sitting in our armchairs and thinking about the world.

Exactly!

A lot of recent discoveries are counterintuitive, proving that merely thinking about things based on assumptions that are intuitive, without taking in data from the world, is a terrible way of coming to conclusions about the world. After all, heliocentrism was counterintuitive. What makes anyone think that they can use what I dub “armchair epistemology” to accurately come up with conclusions about the origins of this universe, when such an approach has been a proven failure on many occasions?

I know this isn’t directly related to the topic, but I had to respond when I saw this because I am appalled by how many people think that they can make accurate conclusions about the world by just thinking without gathering data.