Synaesthesia

Parsimony and conceptual simplicty are not arbitrary critera.

If we lived in a matrix style universe, presumably there would be a point at which the illusion would break down. Find that limit, then I'll consider it. Until then, we have every reason to believe that our understanding of the world is to a very large degree reliable.

That there is a conceptual possibility does not mean that it is equally likely to those theories more strongly supported by explanatory surplus.

Tercel

Christianity contains nothing in it that demands that people be killed, so can’t be the cause of any problems. Isn’t a political philosophy, and doesn’t lust for power.

I’d have to more than seriously wonder about the quality of the Bible study and their level commitment to it. Simply put: Even a cursory reading of the Bible shows clearly Christianity’s strong moral demands. If these people are ignoring those, then all I can say is that they are not really Christians. Jesus said that by their fruits we should know them. If they don’t have the fruits but still call themselves ‘Christians” then they are Christians in name only.

I’m sorry about your sister.

Trust. To have faith in God is to trust that he knows what he is doing.

How about “God is beyond our understanding”?

Except you are depending on the accuracy of your memory to tell you about evolution…

Of course. However I can sufficiently justify my escape from that trap. My sufficient justification also happens to justify belief in god. You no doubt have a problem with this. But can you escape from the trap without justifying belief in god?

You’d have it for the current instant of time.

Some of them are, yes.

Plenty of people claim that appeals to gods have worked. Plenty of people claim to have obtained answers to prayer. Some studies have found results which reached statistical significance. Numerous people claim to have witnessed miracles. Numerous cases of alleged miracles have been investigated by professionals who have failed to find a naturalistic explanation. And so on.

In case you’re not getting my point. There are certainly plenty of claims of such things existing. For you to stage categorically that none of these claims are true is a presupposition – there is <strong>no way</strong> you could have examined all the claims that exist or even a reasonably small proportion thereof. Your argument here is thus not evidential but presuppositional. The most you can do is to stage that none of the cases you (+ any other investigators you know of who have found no reasonable claims) have investigated have warranted non-naturalistic explanations.

Doesn’t evolution sufficiently explain these design stupidities? Not to mention one could argue that god might enjoy variety.

Actually, yes – which is the point. You need to come up with a defensible reason why you make the presuppositions you do. I’ve given my underlying principle I use for my presuppositions. I think I could defend it reasonably against any criticism you can throw at it. Since it justifies me presupposing god, you probably aren’t prepared to accept it yourself and hence you may want to formulate your own principle and attack mine.

My principle again is: “I presuppose X to be true if and only if positively believing X to be true (as opposed to being unsure about it to some degree or positively believing it to be false) is the ‘best bet’.” (or we can rephrase that as: “I’m pragmatic”)

So you intuitively and naturally adopt the belief that the world is real? That sounds fair enough to me.
The vast majority of humans have felt belief in god to be intuitive and natural too. Thoughts?

I’ve always found statistics intuitive.

Of course. However whole point of everything I’ve argued here is that we cannot know for certain the “true state of affairs”. Hence I am arguing that we should adopt the position that yields the highest expected value of returns.

Tercel

Photocrat

One question: what's your definition of me? Can't I exist independently of your definition of me? :] You have something of a point, but I'm not so sure of the way in which you're applying it.

I think that word games are fun & all, but not terribly useful.

Mmmm, that would be interesting... :]

Vorkosigan

Plenty of people claim that appeals to gods have worked. Plenty of people claim to have obtained answers to prayer. Some studies have found results which reached statistical significance. Numerous people claim to have witnessed miracles. Numerous cases of alleged miracles have been investigated by professionals who have failed to find a naturalistic explanation. And so on.

There are no substantian of prayer successes. There are no proven positive results of prayer (by that I mean demonstratable to a third party). There are no proven miracles. Not any. It is in fact a logical impossibility to "prove" a miracle.

I’d have to more than seriously wonder about the quality of the Bible study and their level commitment to it. Simply put: Even a cursory reading of the Bible shows clearly Christianity’s strong moral demands. If these people are ignoring those, then all I can say is that they are not really Christians. Jesus said that by their fruits we should know them. If they don’t have the fruits but still call themselves ‘Christians” then they are Christians in name only.

According to you. According to Christian Reconstructionists, we should support stoning of adulterers and slavery. Which is the true Christian? Jesus may have said that we shall know them by their fruits, but he failed to specify which fruits should reveal them.

Trust. To have faith in God is to trust that he knows what he is doing.

Thanks, but I prefer that my faith be underpinned by a pattern of previous success.

Christianity contains nothing in it that demands that people be killed, so can’t be the cause of any problems. Isn’t a political philosophy, and doesn’t lust for power.

Unfortunately, Christianity is an authority-belief, and authority-beliefs -- Christianity, Islam, Communism, Facism etc -- have common fallout: murder of non-participants. The reasons are structural, not doctrinal, although all can find support in their respective doctrine and history when necessary. Christianity mellows to the extent it gives up the authoritarianism inherent in it, and to the extent that it incorporates secular values such as tolerance, love of others, freedom of thought and expression, and diversity.

[from discussion on argument from evil]How about “God is beyond our understanding”?

That's precisely my point, Tercel. Whenever some atheist points to the stupid suffering of the world and says that there is no way an imperfectly good person would allow that, let alone a perfectly good being, then you guys retreat to "We can't understand god" -- in other words, your God is incoherent.

Note that you are simultaneously claiming that on one hand, we can't understand god, and on the other, god created a rational and orderly universe because god is rational and orderly. There seems to be contradiction implied here.

You might be able to escape by claiming that god's rationality is not our rationality, but that was my argument against your original position: the rationality of a god might be different than ours, so how do you know that our universe's rationality is fallout from some deity's? I don't think we can claim that the universe is rational because god is rational -- the rationality of the universe is accessible to us, so it must be a different order of rationality from god's if we can understand it.

A further problem is you still haven't gotten rid of the argument from evil. Pointless suffering is not merely evil, it is by definition irrational as well. It is irrational of god to require that my sister take twenty years to die, while suffering radiates in little ripples out from her to everyone who knows and loves her. If he wants her dead, let him kill her and be done with it. I think that demonstrates that not only is god not good in any way we understand the term, he is also irrational in any way that we understand rationality.


Except you are depending on the accuracy of your memory to tell you about evolution…

It appears you still don't understand my point. First of all, my experience of memory is that it actually works. Every morning I find my shoes where I left them the night before. Whatever brain-in-the-jar speculation you make about the nature of things, it must account for the reliability over time of our sense perceptions. For example, I have been driving for more than twenty years without an accident &lt;sound of wood being tapped&gt;. I have been married to the same woman for eleven years, no changes &lt;more tapping&gt;. To account for that, you have to multiply entities fearsomely. You are forced to argue that the Matrix is moving my shoes and then inserting a new memory over the old one, so that I never notice that my memory is unreliable, or worse, that the world is created anew every second or something similar. Either my memory is reliable and reality is stable, or both reality and my memory are constantly being updated. Since there is no evidence of (2), and by our good buddy Rev. Occam, we must go with (1).

But can you escape from the trap without justifying belief in god?

Sure. Metaphysical naturalism plus evolution explains very well how the world and our cognition work. Take a gander at this primer here.<a href="http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html" target="_blank">Website with Primer on Evolutionary Psychology</a> for a quickie intro.

Doesn’t evolution sufficiently explain these design stupidities? Not to mention one could argue that god might enjoy variety.

Yes, I believe evolution explains them. But you said we were designed to have reasoning powers. I agree with you, but the designer was evolution, not god.

One could argue that god might enjoy variety, but it is precisely because there is no situation that might falsify "goddidit" that god was given up as an explanation. No matter what we find in the world, supernatural powers can always be invoked as an explanation.

Actually, yes – which is the point. You need to come up with a defensible reason why you make the presuppositions you do.

I don't make anything I consider a presupposition. And in order to make a claim "You might be a brain in a jar" you need evidence that requires explanations. So far you haven't adduced any evidence that I am not a brain in a jar. I can't prove I am not Elvis with amnesia either. It's just that there is no reason to suppose I am.

My principle again is: “I presuppose X to be true if and only if positively believing X to be true (as opposed to being unsure about it to some degree or positively believing it to be false) is the ‘best bet’.” (or we can rephrase that as: “I’m pragmatic”)

You outlined not a principle, but a moral value. My values are different. There are no presuppositions in my view; I do not consider the stability of reality to be a presupposition in the sense you mean. "I take X to be provisionally true only if evidence and argument can be found in support of it."

So you intuitively and naturally adopt the belief that the world is real? That sounds fair enough to me. The vast majority of humans have felt belief in god to be intuitive and natural too. Thoughts?

Your second statement is incorrect. It might better read "The vast majority of humans have had some kind of belief in the supernatural." Lots of supernatural belief systems are atheistic.

Currently neuroscience and ev psych are laying out the basis for both the intuitive belief that the world is real, and the intuitive belief in the supernatural. The second belief is fallout from a more fundamental belief, required for social interaction, that things in the world have intentions. See Ingold's article in
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052148541X/internetinfidelsA/" target="_blank">Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution</a>. It seems intuitively obvious that the world has a purpose because humans are constructed by evolution to impute purpose to things in the world. To give another example, as another article in the book points out, human folk physics appears to be 3 dimensional, newtonian and euclidean, but the universe is not any of those things. It's just that at the level of human interaction with the
world, that is the world we experience.

I’ve always found statistics intuitive.

Lucky bastard. For most people, statistical thinking is very difficult.

Of course. However whole point of everything I’ve argued here is that we cannot know for certain the “true state of affairs”. Hence I am arguing that we should adopt the position that yields the highest expected value of returns.

I agree. But for you, the highest expected value of returns is eternal life. But for me, the highest expected value of returns is useful and reliable knowledge about the world. In my view anything else is not only wrong, but unethical, since sound knowledge can be used to alleviate human suffering. Your position does not offer reliable and useful knowledge, so I reject it as evil and unethical.

Vorkosigan

[ May 23, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

Metacrock

No you can't, becasue you can't demarkate any basis for evil other than the rejection of the good. the only one would be the will to power. But with a notion of good, will to power isn't evil, it's just power. the postive concept is the good, evil is the idea of rejection of the good. that's what the idea is.

Metacrock

Your reasoning here is actually more in line with that reasoning that Tercel is arguing against. HIs argument would be more like saying this fork is made out of atoms, therefore, the fork is a collection of atoms. The fork as a whole is not an atom, but it is a thing made out of atoms.

An ariplane is made mostly of steele parts, that makes it a steele air plane.

The analogy as applied to cosmolgoical argument; the unvierse is a collection of contingencies, therefore, the universe is contingent. Why wouldn't it be? If it's just a collections of contingentcies why is it not contingent?

Metacrock

Meta =&gt;No one, not Derrida or even Sassure thinks that thinks that the actuality of the signified is determined by the signifier. A signifier is just a collections of signs, it points to something, usually an actuality, and it cannot determine the actuality of the thing it points to.

Vorkosigan

Still making this claim? This might go over on the old ILJ boards, among the simpering 17 year olds at CARM, or on Andrew_theist's playpen, but here you have to make actual arguments with evidence.

Metacrock, "contingency" is an empirical claim. Just put forth the empirical evidence that the universe is contigent on some other entity or process, and we'll be glad to discuss.

Vorkosigan

Automaton

My fork analogy was wrong, and Tercel straightened me out on that. But argument from composition is still fallacious. Better example: everyone in the human race had a parent, therefore the human race itself had a parent.

HRG

First, not all signifiers by far point to an actuality.
But my main point was that there is no unique concept that the signifier "God" points to. IOW, the properties of the concept pointed to by "God" are not pre-given, but depend on who is doing the pointing: you, a conservative Christian theologian, a Muslim etc.

In this aspect, the signifier "God" is essentially different from the signifier "Bill Clinton". Everyone agrees about what "Clinton" points to; not so with "God", where we can't even say that it points to an actually existing thing, and not just to a concept.

We might say that with "Clinton" the signifier follows the signified, while with "God" the signified follows the signifier. "God" points to that entity, if it exists, which fulfills the definition that the speaker has in mind. I.e. the signified is not unique.

Regards,
HRG.