Kantian

I have been greatly impressed with the direction this thread has taken, and congratulate the conferring viewpoints on the possibility of creation ex nihilo. Nevertheless, I confess to a desire of indulging in my pastime by interjecting a proper representation of my philosophy, and why it solves the problems of empiricism.

My book Critique of Pure Reason is the first legitimate answer to Hume's skepticism, and accomplished what I style a "Copernican turn" in philosophy- After I read the brilliant book 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Nature' I was roused from my dogmatic slumber and abandoned my rationalistic sympathies.

The force behind Hume's radical empirical arguments drove the field of empiricism to its logical conclusion- to utter skepticism. This journey is best summed with the premise that all knowledge lies in experience, which lead irrevocably to the conclusion that there isn't any knowledge but mere association of ideas through habits, psychological anticipation and impulses. Furthermore, Hume argued that we have nothing but animal faith in assuring that the regularities of experience (i.e., science) will continue. Such destruction of human confidence in knowledge ought to be exposed as a dead end in the history of modern thought and dissolved!

My epistemology
The cure to the disastrous conclusion Hume condemned philosophy with is to refrain from taking the first step of radical empiricism- that knowledge comes from sensory experience alone. In objection to this all-too-naïve premise, I introduced a new concept of knowledge- transcendental idealism, which provides a fresh direction in epistemology that rescues metaphysics from the ashbin Hume has effectively consigned it to. I am willing to agree with Hume that knowledge indeed does have as a source the Humean ingredient of impressions, the sensory constituent in relation to which the mind is passive, merely receiving impressions which it copies as images in thought. However, there is another feature in our knowledge that isn't derived from sensory experience. Rationalists- you may stop applauding, because neither is this ?aspect? derived from an independent reality. It comes from the mind itself! Hume and Locke were incorrect in asserting that the mind is a blank tablet or empty cupboard because the mind comes outfitted with its own pure concepts that organize the flux of sensory impressions into substances, qualities, quantities, and causality. Hume's diagram of the mind is false- it is not empty! The mind comes furnished with twelve pure concepts or categories I shall explain this at another time. The second error of Hume was the assumption that the mind is passive- that it receives information on a screen or a theatre, or a "stream of impressions," or a blank sheet of paper which nature inscribes. It is my philosophical argument that the mind is active, that it actively interprets the world rather than passively receiving and recording in memory what comes to it from the external world via the senses. The categories of our mind organize the sensory fluxes and give it meaning as substances, qualities, quantities, causality, and etcetera.

Hume's epistemology, a reduction of experience and knowledge to sense impression, is false because it fails to account for the fact that we do experience things and causal relations as well as the fact that we do have scientific knowledge of things. Hume, in his relentless push of empiricism, ignored the question how experience of objects was possible. Hume's narrow empiricism failed to acknowledge that experience consists of not only sensory perceptions, but of a priori concepts by which we understand things, the rational element in knowledge. These pure concepts organize sense impressions and render experience of objects, as well as scientific knowledge, possible. Hume tried to destroy the laws of science by denying that we have any sense impressions of a necessary connection between cause and effect- but he overlooked that there will always be a necessary connection between cause and effects because the mind itself imposes the concept of necessary connection between cause and effects. Causality is an a priori, universal, and necessary concept of the human mind.

Thank you for indulging the whims of an old man.

[ January 03, 2002: Message edited by: Immanuel Kant ]</p>

Albert Cipriani

Dear Ender,
Here's the key to crack the secret code: whenever I don't address one of your answers, it stands. I only address what I disagree with enough to argue against.

You say,


Tho I agree that what you are saying here is sociologically true, it is logically false to infer that such theists have arrived at a false conclusion. You are engaged in an argumentum ad logicum fallacy. Just because a conclusion is arrived at through illogical means (cart before the horse) does not mean that the conclusion is false.

For example, just because someone flips a coin heads three times in a row and argues fallaciously that the odds now favor the next coin toss to be tails, does not mean that he is wrong. The next coin toss could indeed be tails. That wouldn't exonerate his illogical argument, rather, it would indict the argumentum ad logicum against his illogic.

You assert:


Historically this is simply not true. For example, the Sudacees (sp?) Jews in Jesus' day did not believe in immortality, yet they performed all the Jewish rituals and worshiped God.

A belief in some kind of a god is not a coping technique for our mortality but a responsive reaction to the world around us. It is an outgrowth of man's sense of awe. It is as reflexive as a sneeze. Only with intellectual effort is it suppressed. That's why atheists tend to be smarter than theists.

The heart of our dispute is stated as follows:


"Experience" is being equivocated to mean sensory input and the more generalized "impression in experience." I say yes, to your sensory input usage and no to your impression usage. That is, yes, God can not be perceived by sensory inputs, but no God can be perceived as a logical necessity, an inference, an impression as valid as any geometric theorem derived as they, too, are without reference to sensory inputs.

You assert:


Why isn't "Being" a sensory impression of a supernatural being? My "being" is parasitic, that is, I know that I have being only insofar as other beings touch my "being".

Put me in that perfect sensory deprivation chamber and my parasitic being days are over! All beings are thus contingent beings. Why cannot Being itself be our impression of the Supernatural Being and thus satisfy the empirical test? – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Albert Cipriani

Dear Kant,
You say that


I don't like Hume's conclusion any more than you. But since when are our likes or dislikes reasons? Since when are they, by virtue of our liking them, reasons enough to reject what seems to be true?

No doubt the real Copernican revolution, not the Copernican turn in Philosophy you take credit for, which dethroned earth from the center of the universe to a third rate rock was not a thought much liked. But for the fact that it’s the thought that happens to be true, we’d still be holding to the Ptolomaic status quo and not be exploring the solar system.

Just because all knowledge comes to us through our unreliable senses is no reason to conclude that that knowledge is unreliable. Hume's mistake lay not in his premise but in his skeptic conclusions.

He confused the means to an end with the end itself. The weak impressionable fallible mind is the means. Permanent, demonstrable, infallible Truth is its ends. Hume assumed that since our mental means are untrustworthy so, too, are its ends, the infallible Truth it fallibly grasps.

Well, Alcatraz prisoners dug their escape tunnels through solid stone walls with spoons. Spoons are a poor means of eating mashed potatoes (I much prefer the fork!), let alone excavation. Proof positive that the means need not be commensurate with the ends. All noble ends, certainly infallible Truth, must necessarily be reached by means inferior to it.

So Hume, along with St. Thomas Aquinas, is right: we reach knowledge through our tunnel of sensory inputs. But Hume is wrong to associate the bright blue skies and sunlit uplands of Truth where we may range free of illusion with the dank dark means of our escape from skepticism. Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Ender

In other words, you've abandoned a few positions you've held over the course of this thread for greener pastures.

Nice try, but I haven't claimed that the conclusion is false, but that the belief is a projection of one's psychological make up is exactly where the analysis ought to lie, not in the "wishful thinking" the very person affirms as true. This is due to a denial of absolutism; of universal truth- the position of perspectivism. You have already conceded that belief in God or the afterworld is arrived at illogical means, which negates any rational justification for such inference- i.e. there are no rational grounds for such a belief in God. You could come back here with a moral argument, which is Kant's little backdoor to his philosophy that allows God as the ultimate arbitrator for morality and I personally wouldn't have any beef with that. It does coincide with Feuerbach's classic insights. This brings up to a fantastic and radical Christian- Kierkegaard. Have you had the opportunity of reading Soren Kierkegaard? If so, what are your thoughts of his work? If not, I vehemently suggest you do so.

I've never come across this logical fallacy- could you supply a link or a dictionary definition for this argumentum ad logicum fallacy? I cannot locate this in any of the logical fallacies on the web I've seen, nor in my requisite Anthony Flew's philosophical dictionary, & the Cambridge Encyclopedia of philosophy four volume-set. I'd appreciate the full definition from whatever source you've used. :-)

Note the qualifier: "common reason" - that is an indicator of a generalization, not an absolute universal statement. You must be speaking of the Sadducees. That little red herring is actually an endorsement of customs and habit, nothing more. Yes, I agree that belief in some kind of architect of nature is an all-too-human trait that we infer from the "apparent" order in nature as rational grounds for the existence of some intelligence. However, this inference itself is a very defective one and is a topic worthy of a separate thread. But of course I've rounded up a few skeptical arguments for this very subliminal and "aesthetic proof."

As for atheists and theists, don't sell your fellowmen short- you may have been here far too long breathing noxious fumes of skepticism and naturalism. And I very much am skeptical of the notion of "intellectual effort suppressing man's sense of awe" because reason itself is inert as a motivator, and is always beholden to the passions.

There's a mix up in how you use "impressions" and mathematics- since impressions are nothing more than sensory data while a geometric theorem is an aspect of reason, not experience. This is an old division of knowledge into two: a posteriori knowledge, and a priori knowledge. All sensory data are a posteriori, i.e. known after the fact, in experience. An example will illustrate thus- we could not know a certain body of liquid could be life-threatening before experiencing/observing an attempt to breathe such liquid. The truths of any mathematics or logic are known a priori, before the fact, and are not subject to contingencies of the external world. This is a demonstration of my pubescent epistemology, and may change according to my pending immersion in phenomenology.

In addition, your final sentence is kinda confusing- you agree that god is not sensible, but no God is experienced as a logical necessity or an inference, an impression valid as any geometric theorem? I'll assume that you meant to equate the concept of God with a geometric theorem, which is proven upon the grounds of axiomatic thinking, i.e. Euclid. I have to say that's an unsupportable assertion because God itself isn't an examined idea because the entity is assumed to exist, not proven by reasoning. In mathematics, one assumes a certain standpoint, i.e. the axioms of Euclid, and creates beautiful symmetry from there whereas in religious beliefs, one assumes the existence of a certain anthropological projection and creates authoritative doctrines.

That's awfully easy- "Being" is not a single sensory impression but a complex idea of a combination of sensory impressions. Therefore, it has no corresponding single sensory data that corroborates a sufficient proof of its truth or validity. The fundamental principle of empiricism is that since all simple ideas come from simple impressions that are correspondent to them. This was one of the surest methods to eliminate a metaphysical monster of philosophy: substance, the fundamental stuff that subsumes everything in existence. This had been a languishing stumbling block in epistemology, especially scholasticism, until the empiricists came along with their wrecking ball and started to take their fundamental principle seriously, that an idea is nothing but the impressions from which it is derived and to which it corresponds, they demolished and did away with a lot of presumed basic notions in philosophy. If an empiricist, a honest one, if you will started to analyze the idea of substance and ask himself what impressions gave rise to the idea of substance, he would realize very quickly that there is no impression of substance but a collection of qualities in experience, i.e. shape, size, color. Then the idea of substance is the qualities we experience and nothing else. So claiming substances exist is a violation of empiricism. The only valid method to ascertain that something exists is whether there is an impression, or a sensory experience of it. the claim that substances exist has no longer any cash value in philosophy, thanks to empiricism, because there is no impressions of physical substances.

~Speaker 4 the Death of God~

[ January 07, 2002: Message edited by: Ender the Theothanatologist ]</p>

Ted Hoffman

Albert
Wow, this is definitely a pholosophical discussion.
You said
And who are you to say that? Why should your understanding of God be the correct one? Have you been with him? Where did you get this "understanding"? You see, we all can say anything we want, but why should we hold your definitions of God as more correct or superior?
And your perspective is not knowledge based?
What is your perspective based upon? On what basis do you render whatever perspective it is that you use more superior to knowledge-based perspective?
So now you are speaking for God? Have you experienced existential perspective? Is it knowledge based? Gen 1:4 says that God saw that the light he had created was "good". If God experienced the Goodness of the light, did he also experiance the badness of the darkness? If he did, why did he have to hover over the surface of the deep for some time before creating light?
On what basis did God decide it was Good - considering that he was alone at the time? Good for who? What purpose did the light serve considering he was alone?
If God had to experience the light before knowing/ seeing that it was Good then he too was limited by time -ie. he had to create it before deciding/ knowing/ experiencing that it was Good.

what does the be-all of all being mean? Does that mean God is omnipresent or is this one instance of Albert using abstruse sophistry to confuse and confound? If he is everything then he is light. If he is light, then who is light to decide that light is Good? Good for who? Considering he was alone?
Please expound - like you would to a 15 year old.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Ender,
You've made me think hard. That's the highest compliment that I can pay anyone on this board.

Feuerbach and Kierkegaard are two of the villains responsible for the Vatican II Council and hence modern Catholicism which I reject. I've read about what they wrote but have not read what they wrote.

Go here for a description of the argumentum ad logicum: <a href="http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html</a>

Just because it's a sociological fact that many if not most people arrive at theism irrationally is no justification to assert, as you do, that:


I, too, reject the moral argument for God's existence. It is an inversion of one of morality's most basic tenets, the end DOES NOT justify the means. If God is the end that justifies the means of morality and vice versa, then we've had to contradict our morality in order to justify it. Reminds me of the Vietnam general who said "We had to destroy the city to save it."

The latest essence of our disagreement lies in this little statement of yours:


Meaning, is more motivating that life or its pleasures. How many people have left suicide notes stating that life had no more meaning to them? What the hell we even mean by the word meaning is a whole other thread. Suffice it to say, that I could not disagree with you more on this count.

Yes, I equate the rationale for God with the rationale for geometry. They are BOTH based upon axiomatic thinking. Yet you say only God is, and that's why you reject the rational grounds for His existence while, I suspect, acing you geometry tests!

Do I detect your hypocrisy showing? You say:


Ditto for geometry. The basis for that discipline is the axiom of a point, an infinitely small invisible spatial quantum of nothing. No one has ever seen, smelled, touched, or weighed a point. If they did, it would, by definition, disqualify it as a point. Ditto for God.

A point, the basis for geometric segments, shapes, lines, and planes is an "ENTITY ASSUMED TO EXIST." From the assumption that a point exists, as you say, we can derive "beautiful symmetry." From the assumption that of a God exists, I say, we can derive profound meaning.

You've said something very well that troubles me:


My metaphysics, indeed, my idea of God, depends upon the idea of being. You seem to be denying my rights to this idea. I'll let you reject "substance" which is "form" in Scholastic terminology (e.g., sacraments consist of "matter" and "form"). But not my precious being. I must draw the line at being. I'm open to and interested in any of your thoughts on being.

Thank you, once again, for a most stimulating and, for me, difficult dialogue. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic