SanDiegoAtheist

Another line of thought just occurred to me - and since I've never seen this brought up before in response to a presup argument, I'd like to see what the theists response would be...

Under your rules - in other words, to be completely 'justified' in knowledge - how does GOD supposedly account for HIS 'knowing'?

The only answer that I can see is that "God simply knows that He knows" - in other words, under your rules, God is not justified in His knowledge.

From this vantage point, it appears that presuppositionalism is simply passing the buck and begging the question. Not content with a brute fact that knowledge IS, and that WE can 'know' things, the presuppositionalist leaves us with a brute fact that knowledge IS, and that GOD can 'know' things, and thru God, so can we.

Cheers,

The San Diego Atheist

Plump-DJ

A cosmology that does not have an all knowing God. This is a valid expression and within philosophical circles Atheism is a position on the nature of reality. Just take one look at any history of philosophy book. Philosophers tend to have arguments and so on **about reality** and not one's psychological state. Atheists have redefined the term in recent years so they don't have to deal with the philosophical implications of that term but they can still call themselves atheists.

This is how I employ the term. If you're suggesting that Atheism isn't a position on the nature of reality, then why would anyone want to have a series discussion about someone's mental health?

And I pointed out in a post above why I thoight Evo-Epis is just one big begged qestion. Perhaps you can deal with that.

Vorkosigan

A cosmology that does not have an all knowing God.

Well, yes, but this is a purely negative formulation. There's no cosmology here, just the assertion that one should formulate one's cosmologies without reference to the Big Kahuna.

This is a valid expression and within philosophical circles Atheism is a position on the nature of reality. Just take one look at any history of philosophy book. Philosophers tend to have arguments and so on **about reality** and not one's psychological state.

Really? My impression of philosophy was just the opposite. That philosophy almost never grapples with reality if it can help it.

In any case, if philosophers use a different definition than ordinary atheists, one that imposes beliefs where there are none, that's not really my problem, is it? The cosmologies of atheists differ mightily, from my wife's Buddhist views to my metaphysical naturalist ones. If philosophers think these are all the same, they have serious problems.

Atheists have redefined the term in recent years so they don't have to deal with the philosophical implications of that term but they can still call themselves atheists.

Clever, aren't we?

This is how I employ the term.

Thanks. But what is an atheist, then? I mean a common defintion, not Plump-DJ's.

If you're suggesting that Atheism isn't a position on the nature of reality, then why would anyone want to have a series discussion about someone's mental health?

Atheism means lacking a belief in gods. It certainly takes a position on a single facet of reality, but it hardly encompasses all of reality, does it?!

And I pointed out in a post above why I thoight Evo-Epis is just one big begged qestion. Perhaps you can deal with that.

Certainly.

Vorkosigan

[ November 13, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

Synaesthesia

The two formulations are for all purposes equivalent. A person believes in the contents of their ontological repoitoire. If their cosmological system lacks a god, they ipso facto lack belief in God.

Quibbling about demarcation between disbelief and lack-of-ontological-inclusion strikes me as far less important than the reason we accept or do not accept God theory.

Beano Wrote
With the assumption of God's existence we can PROVE nothing that we could not before that assumption. It is, therefore, theoretical deadweight and we are rationally far better off without it.

Quite the contrary, the idea of God has nothing whatsoever to add to the law of non-contradiction. To understand what it means to be a "non-contradictory God" presuppsoes the idea of "non-contradiction". Thus, non-contradiction is a more elementary concept than God.

Secondly, and this hardly needs to be noted, faith really does foster contradictions and philosophical schizophrenia. Not only do transcendental philosophies have nothing to add, the philosophy of dogmatic and unsupported assumption has historically proven it's counterproductivity.

Neither you nor any presuppositionalist has seen it fit to argue this assumption. It stands as a gradiose, and resoundingly empty claim - not a reason to believe in God.

Regards,
Synaesthesia

[ November 13, 2002: Message edited by: Synaesthesia ]</p>

Synaesthesia

Re-evolutionary epistemology,
That we evolved is reason to believe that we are capable of rational and truth-like thought. It is not, unto itself, justification.

Knowledge is itself evolutionary in the sense that extranious and undesireable theories can be pruned while the fitter theories tend to persevere through increasingly tough competition from other theories. Yet it is not mere survival upon which we judge theories, we actually have to develop skeptical evaluative frameworks for our theories.

As it happens, the best epistemological frameworks we have involve ideas like "reality" and "theory-laden sense-data". Pragmatism ultimately supports scientific realism and not contemporary relativism or positivism.

excreationist

Hi BEANO
Sorry you are getting overwhelmed here, but I think I've got some important things to add.

The basis is Occam's Razor. And by the way, most atheists would just lack a belief that gods exist - most aren't 100% absolutely certain that no gods or spirits or devils, etc, exist. I mean it is conceiveable that those spiritual beings could be hiding under a rock somewhere.
Occam's Razor involves the simplest, most consistent explanation. Though random ad-hoc explanations can sometimes turn out to be right, throughout the history of science, Occam's Razor has been what has helped it progress... e.g. in early history, philosopher scientists usually believed that everything orbited the earth... this sounds simple at first, but then they discovered that that would involve the planets going in spiraling orbits around the earth... a simpler explanation is that the planets orbit the sun according to some simple formulas. (Newton's gravity formula, or better yet, the relativistic Einstein one - or even better - a quantum gravity formula)

They aren't necessarily absolutely correct, but they seem to be more or less correct...


We can infer things using animal-type reasoning in order to survive... inference just involves predicting something based on past patterns we've learnt. This is what artificial neural networks do... and that is also what animals like birds and mammals do. Written and spoken symbols can be used to store those patterns (animals just use neurons for memory and computation). That's what formal logic is. Our part of the universe is pretty stable - it allows complex structures like people to exist and allows things to work in fairly consistent ways - so complex systems like brains can function well. In other parts of the universe, like inside the sun, people and brains wouldn't exist so there wouldn't be anyone there to worry about formal logic. Formal logic just reflects the basic reality we see... it doesn't apply to the quantum level of things very well though... but there are patterns there too of course... if the quantum level wasn't consistent in some way it wouldn't make sense for higher-level structures to act in consistent ways either.
So reason is possible because the particles in our part of the universe are pretty stable. If they weren't, we wouldn't be able to think about it since intelligent creatures wouldn't exist.
As I said earlier, I think formal logic is based on animal-type (neural net type) reasoning. This would have evolved under survival pressures.
e.g. if animals didn't have a properly functioning reasoning system, they wouldn't be able to infer things based on past experience - and that would make them more likely to get killed due to predators, and environmental hazards, etc...

We need to have self-motivated intelligence - i.e. we need to desire to analyse our thoughts. If we have no desire then we won't analyse our thoughts on a second-level - and just end up thinking like an animal - or a baby - without language. This self-motivated intelligence would have come from survival pressures... those who aren't interested in learning (extremely autistic kids, etc?) would have tended to die earlier in the wild, and they would be less likely to spread their genes.

Well I think we always choose our greatest desire and/or avoid what we fear most (depending on what outweighs what).
About what "rational" means - it would involve us choosing conclusions (motivated by what we fear or desire most of course) and these conclusions would be based on patterns that people would find reasonable or normal - i.e. they are common in the experience of others... when people are irrational, their neurons are still following a system but it is corrupted or skewed... usually when people make an important decision they'd compare many different options. In the case of an irrational person, they might choose one option then not carefully consider other options (probably because of fear).

Plump-DJ

In any case, if philosophers use a different definition than ordinary atheists, one that imposes beliefs where there are none, that's not really my problem, is it? The cosmologies of atheists differ mightily, from my wife's Buddhist views to my metaphysical naturalist ones. If philosophers think these are all the same, they have serious problems.

Atheism has been a position on the nature of reality for the last 2000 years, a cursory look through some history of philosophy books will support this.

*But* in the end it doesn't really matter how we define atheism since the elements of our cosmology needed to justify knowledge will come from the argument *anyway* so it matters not how you or I wish to define the terms. We can see the elements which do emerge and compare them to the various positions across the board. We then don't have to get into this discussion about what atheism is.

Clever, aren't we?

Well I thought it was quite cowardly actually. Reminds me of the following argument...

Argument from Atheism
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-
1. Atheism is not a position
2. Therefore it cannot be attacked
3. I'm an Atheist
4. Therefore you cannot attack me
5. HaHa.
6. Therefore God does not exist.



Thanks. But what is an atheist, then? I mean a common defintion, not Plump-DJ's.

What is a 'common' definition? The one that has right-thinking-urban-humanists across the world going 'yeah i like the sound of that' or the one accepted within philosophical circles. The metaphysicaly meaningless (and it is) definition you mention would be expunged from any serious discourse on the nature of things because people tend to discuss the way reality is rather then our mental health. I would however conceede that maybe i've just got this all wrong and deserve a good spanking.

Atheism means lacking a belief in gods. It certainly takes a position on a single facet of reality, but it hardly encompasses all of reality, does it?

Does this common definition of Atheism you find so appealing correlate to reality or not? Does it have metaphysical content? No? So why would anyone want to discuss a person's mental health?

Certainly.

You did? Well done ol' chap. Perhaps you can point me in the direction of your rebuttal.

[ November 14, 2002: Message edited by: Plump-DJ ]</p>

jpbrooks

Hello again, all.

I just have time for a few brief
comments.
This thread is turning out to be an interesting one, but The San Diego Atheist's question above (if I am interpreting it correctly) is particularly thought provoking.
If SDA is essentially asking how does God (or the Theist, for that matter) know that what He (God) believes to be genuine knowledge on His part is, in fact, genuine knowledge, the Theist could perhaps respond by pointing out that, within Theism, God is the creator (as well as the sustainer) of the natural order. So, since any knowledge of the natural order that God has is constitutive, it would be pointless to question its genuineness.
Of course, a question that then could be asked in response to the Theist's answer is "why does God have any knowledge at all at the outset?", to which a Theist might reply that assuming that God possesses no knowledge at all would blur the distinction between order and randomness in the creation (since, again, God's knowledge is constitutive). However, since the distinction between order and randomness [is] generally a meaningful one for us, God must have knowledge.

(As a Theist, I don't subscribe to a "strict" or "pure" [Theistic] presuppositionalism because it must be abandoned [at least temporarily] in order to adjudicate among competing versions of Theism that all claim that their presuppositions are true.)

I have to run.

[ November 14, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Synaesthesia

[quote]Originally posted by Plump-DJ:
Evolution in the biological sense is an explanation for why we have knowledge at all. It is not unto itself justification, although, like all good theories, it expands our ability to test inferences and expand our knowledge.

A secondary use of the term evolution is heavily influenced by the philosopher Karl Popper. It describes the process of competition between theories.

It is worth noting that whatever sense of evolution we use, you severely misrepresent. We don't justify the veracity of sense data soley by evolution which is established only by sense data. The limitations and capabilities of our sensation is judged much the same way that any other theory is judged: relative veriscimilitude.

Knowledge is not justified with a simplistic 'cause is like effect'. If that were the case you would indeed have a point. But there is more to our judgement than that.

After all, not only can we judge that our senses are occasionally inaccurate we have a great body of knowledge about the particular circumstances under which it tends to break down. So in point of fact, the veracity of our senses is not presupposed. Our environmental interpretation can be evaluated with reference to our best theories about the world.

Our senses, our beliefs must necessarily be judged within a sophisticated framework of other theories. We cannot escape the necessity of processing internal mental models. Does this mean we are operating by faith? Emphatically not. It can be very well established that the theories we have are vastly better than any other theory that has yet been imagined by the human mind.

Within such an evaluative framework, we can eliminate God as a serious possibility. This is not, as some are trying to frame it, a competition between nearly equal presuppositions. It is the comparison of a tribal deity, an infinitely complex theoretical entity with no predictive power, and the highly parsimonious and unrivaled explanatory power of scientific realism.

SanDiegoAtheist

When it comes right down to it though, presuppositionalism always has seemed to me to be simply yet another "God of the Gaps" argument.

The argument simply claims that religion is able to answer one question that cannot be answered without it - the question of "how do we know". As we know however, the God of the Gaps is a pretty poor argument. Religion has ALWAYS claimed to have all the answers - the problem is, throughout history, many of THEIR answers have been proven wrong.

I have no problem admitting "I don't know" or even "we may never know" to a question - this simply seems to be something that is anathema to theists - but their CLAIM to have the right answer relies on them ACTUALLY having the right answer.

The fact that the argument demonstrates that the Christian worldview CAN be supported isn't a very interesting proposition UNLESS it can be also be shown that (a) the Christian God exists, or (b) that NO other possible worldview can be logically extant...and (b) would be near impossible (if not completely impossible) to prove.

It's relatively easy to create a logically consistent model or worldview - but being logically consistent only means that such a thing is POSSIBLE, that it is not self-contradictory - not that it actually exists.

Cheers,

The San Diego Atheist