Albert Cipriani

Peter Sol says:
Traditionally, Natural Law is a metaphysical concept. The nature of fire to rise above the air, the nature of air to rise above the waters, the nature of earth to sink beneath the waters, the nature of man to be restless until he rests in God.

You’ve used the metaphysical term, “Natural Law,” as a purely formal construct, not a real law. For example, E = MC2 and any other “natural law” of science you want to consider, is better thought of as a description of natural processes than as a law ordering natural processes.

You see, a law may be violated, but a description cannot be. A description may only be expanded upon, as Einstein’s physics expanded upon or described Newtonian physics more completely. Science’s so-called “laws” of nature are not really laws, for they cannot be violated. Whereas, the Catholic Church’s articulations of Natural Laws are really laws, for they can be violated – just witness Gay Pride parades.

Peter says:
Your statement is highly confused. You are mixing “overwhelming probability” with your “feeling confident,” and equivocating them both with “facts.”

You seem to be attempting to say that causality is predictive. Sorry, that pig will not fly.

Our Pavlovian belief in cause and effect relationships is simply normal, not intelligent. Just because the sun always rises after your alarm clock rings does not mean that the alarm clock ring causes the sunrise, indicates that the sun is about to rise, or is proof that the sun will rise.

Cause and effect is no different that trial and error. The cause that results in the effect we desire, we call cause and effect. The cause that results in the effect we do not desire, we call trial and error. Ergo, the difference is in our heads, not in reality. Or better yet, reality is inside our head.

So the reality inside your head based upon a lot of semantic mumble jumbo like “probability” and “fact” is that the sun will rise tomorrow. I’m more intellectually humble than that. I know that what I expect to happen tomorrow (i.e., morning) is independent of my intellectual powers to predict. And whether the sun rises tomorrow or not has nothing to do with it having risen any number of times before.

In short: facts are an illusion, objectivity is a conceit, and subjectivity is all. If the elements began to dissolve tomorrow, science would dutifully revise its theories. Its facts would morph into new and improved facts. Ergo, we can only put our belief in our beliefs. So please, sit down. Stop the grandstanding of your beliefs as facts. Know that all facts are science fiction.. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

diana

Hm. I love to drink beer (I confess), but I hate to be buzzed. I guess you do the same to yourself with mind games. I can't begrudge you that. Each to his own. It just never occurred to me to twist my mind for a cheap high (some would argue that there isn't enough there to twist, anyway ).

I concur. You're one poetic [person]*, Albert.

Cognitive dissonance is the signpost that alerts us to the fact that there is a fork in the road where we thought there was but a single path.

* Original lingo edited out, as I don't know you well enough to affectionately call you a bastard.

You state that as though it isn't already an accomplished fact.

Never! Cognitive dissonance is our best ally.



I do respect this about you, among other things: you know the difference between belief and knowledge (or at least, you acknowledge it with candor here...although the rest of your post makes me wonder how consistent you are with this). I have no beef with believers who acknowledge they don't know.

Why can you "only believe such things," though?

If you're using "know" in the sense of "believe with no proof," then I agree. If you're using it in the usual demonstrative sense, then I don't agree.

Ever checked out Twelve-Mule Team Museum in Boron, CA? Off the subject, I know, but your comment reminded me of it. Fascinating how those men handled those mules....

Truth remains truth no matter who believes it or not. What do you mean your truth? Or are you again blurring the distinction between what you know and what you believe?

d

Albert Cipriani

D says:
Then your atheism is wasted on you. You should become Catholic and get points for not getting drunk. And what am I doing being Catholic since I love to get buzzed but hate alcohol? Like Jack Sprat, let’s switch plates and “lick them clean.”

You ask:
Don’o, why can your heart only pump blood? Why do eyes only see and not also hear? Fact is, our brains can only believe. That’s all they know how to do. And they never stop doing it even when we sleep.

We use a lot of other words for what our brains do, like imagine, create, deduce, induce, dream, reflect, remember, or calculate. But all these mental activities are a species of belief… so many interconnected beliefs that we can fool ourselves into thinking that our thinking isn’t a species of believing, but is, rather, imagining, creating, deducing, etc. etc. But it really isn’t.

You assert that what we KNOW via “proof” is knowledge and anything else we think we KNOW without proof is unworthy of the name.

I assert that “proof” is an infinite regression of proofs that lead us to the Catholic God or the Darwinian god of Chance. All that we know, whether what we know is supported by but one proof or by many proofs, is knowledge that is based upon a house of cards or an entire cathedral of cards. In either case, “there’s no foundation, all the way down the line,” for what we KNOW.

Ergo, humble yourself. Recognize that what you and I know is what you and I believe based on more or less proofs, but proofs that cannot, ultimately, prove anything.

Boron CA, museum. Spent a whole day there. Great place. Have the photos to “prove” it. – Cheers, Albert the Bastard, A.K.A., the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

diana

I'm starting to understand what you mean when you use the word "believe," Albert. Thank you for your patience.

You take the "brain in a jar" position, essentially. Am I reading you correctly? You've defined "knowledge" so as to be unattainable, and in this sense yes...everything in our brains is based upon belief. By your criteria, there's no way to prove anything, as you've set your standards of "proof" at an unattainable level.

If we play that game, and you require absolute proof of anything, no one can provide it. You will always be able to come up with some alternate explanation, no matter how far-fetched it may seem, that we won't be able to disprove. I've been down that road, and it leads nowhere.

At least, this is how I understand you. Please correct me if I misrepresent you.

I do not subscribe to such a liberal use of the word "believe," though, as it places belief in leprauchans equal to belief that if I hit my thumb with a hammer, it will hurt. All "belief" is not equal. Some things are backed up by the evidence of our senses, and carry immediate and demonstrable consequences if they are ignored. Other beliefs are without demonstrable evidence or consequences. I think it confuses discussions to use the same word to refer to both extremes. For this reason, I call those things that are demonstrable knowledge, and those things that are not, belief.

I'll have a little wine later on tonight. I'll let you know, so you can cop a buzz for me. Deal? Teamwork.

For all you know, I may be God. Prove I'm not.

Touche. I was impressed with it, particularly considering that it's in the middle of nowhere-in-particular like that.

d

Albert Cipriani

Dear D,
Yeah, I accept your “brain in the jar” categorization of what I’ve said. It democratizes thought.

Instead of believing as you say you do in “demonstrable knowledge” as opposed to disbelieving in “belief” you can assign a percentage to your beliefs, like in democratic elections, where 51% of the vote wins. This way we don’t fight needlessly over the semantics of whether or not something really is true or not, but fight over whether or not it is more likely that something is true.

You are absolutely right:
If all beliefs were, why would anyone bother to argue? We argue because we think that our opponent has not weighted the sensory or inferential data as we have. We blind theists think that you blind atheists are fixated on the elephants trunk and need to feel its legs to get a more accurate picture.

The trunk, as I “see” it, is the atheistic fixation on scientific evidence for what you guys believe (i.e., are willing to bestow the title of knowledge upon). Why can’t music, for example, have evidentiary value that’s just as cogent as E=MC2?

(When experimental confirmation of one of Einstein’s predictions came in and his students noticed that he wasn’t that excited about it, he explained, that he considered his theory so beautiful, if experiments proved that it were not true, “It’d be too bad for God.” Not for Einstein. Ergo, he felt God had a stake in proving him correct, not the other way around. In other words, Einstein allowed his own aesthetics to sway his notion of the truth. This is the subjective methodology I myself am pushing here.)

The parts of the elephant that get short shrift, in my “view,” are: aesthetics, justice, and abstractions. Would you allow that our capacity for these things prove anything about the universe, the rump of this elephant? – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

Jobar

In short: facts are an illusion, objectivity is a conceit, and subjectivity is all.

Ah, so you are a post-modernist as well as a fideist. Interesting combination.

And I was not attempting to catch you out in a lie there. I just wanted to see if you realized your position on fideism had changed. You did say, many moons ago, that you were *not* a fideist; but if you have changed your mind that's OK. I can now rag you about the inconsistency between your fideism and your opinion that

The short answer is “yes,” God can be shown. The long answer involves what constitutes “shown.”

You are still trying to have your cake (God cannot be disproved by objective means) and eat it too (God may be proven by objective means.) "Shown" always requires some objective agreement between two people, Albert.

bgponder

Diana say:

Hail, Diana! Huntress queen! I cannot descry thy superiority, nor my bent towards femininity and a buzz. I defer to thy moderative onslaughts in speculative subjection, in sure knowledge that thou wilt allow such as Albert and myself audience to empower searching souls with fodder for the knowledge-feast of thyself and lesser deities! :notworthy

I just had to get that in, D--just fooling. But really, to drink without hope of a buzz is folly! Kind of like decaffienated coffee.

I am always a day late and a dollar short in these things, but I would like to bring up something from page one, as it seems to me critical:

Albert had said in response to Selsaral:

I wonder if my great friend and lengthy antagonist Albert the Trad has subscribed to my recent hypothesis that All Is Advantage, or has he simply equated his treasured Being with Existence here, for it seems that if what he says above is so, then the fact that lions kill cubs they did not sire is as to the fact that largemouth bass often gorge themselves to death on threadfin shad in their season. My point, for Albert and those not so knowledgeable of the "natural" world, is that, if we may observe that "God" has created around us thus, then how are we to know whether and at what point it is "good" for us to worship Him?

Peace and Cornbread, BarryG

diana

It isn't that I "disbelieve in belief," really. It's that I draw a line and say that I can demonstrate and reason for A, but I can't for B. If I can demonstrate and reason for it, I call it "knowledge"; if I cannot, I call it "belief."

I don't know about assigning a percentage of probability to divide what I know from what I believe. Hmm. That's an interesting way of looking at it. Are you suggesting we line up our "evidences" for the thing we "believe," then assign a percentage of probability to its being demonstrably true?

Doesn't this all come down to what we agree is reasonable to accept as fact, pragmatically, versus those things that experience and reason tells us are so unlikely so as to not be worthy of arguing for? I really don't need numbers for that. If you were to tell me you can walk into the street in front of a semi and the atoms of that truck will pass through the atoms that comprise you without harming you, I'd place what's left of you posthumously into the latter category. No numbers necessary.

Those would be the legs of faith, would they? I'm afraid the only true legs of faith would be unfeelable. You'd just have to believe they're there.

Is music a theorem? Apples? Oranges?

In that case, Einstein was a sap. The aesthetics of a theory have nothing to do with its truth.

Our capacity for aesthetics, justice and abstractions prove only that we have these capacities.

How do you make the leap from "we have these abilities" to "this implies X about the universe"?

d

Albert Cipriani

Oh Dear, D,
You’re slipping. Have you been hitting the booze? Now finding that buzz a welcome relief from our dialogues? It seems that way from my end.

You say nothing when you say,
That’s like saying the nickel in my pocket proves I’ve got a nickel in my pocket. It’s nothing more than a repetition in the guise of an inferential argument. You can do better than this. What we have a capacity for is what we are designed for. What we are designed for is what makes us happy. Hugging the legs of the elephant makes us happy.

That’s why those legs are always around for us to get our arms around. Aesthetics, abstractions, and justice… can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. They are what we are about, they are the life we live while we are busy making other plans, to paraphrase John Lennon.

You say,
If you think that, it’s cuz you live in an ostensibly Christian -- not Catholic -- country. Christians brag of their faith’s blindness. Catholics don’t. Like the Aesop Fable of the fox who lost his tail in a trap and then tried passing his tailessness off to his fellow foxes as a new fashion trend. Christians must stand on their blindness of faith because they are trapped in the historical vacuum of their non-intellectual tradition. Catholicism is not like that. We are not fideists, (Ignore that Jobar behind the curtain!) but rationalists. Read a few pages of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica if you doubt me.

You believe beauty and justice and abstractions are there, don’t you? Ill-definable as they are, they are there. God is like that. The faith I need to believe in beauty is precisely as open-eyed and un-blind as the faith I need to believe in God. Do you really mean to imply that aesthetics, abstractions, and justice are the stuff of blind faith, that they are “un-feelable” as you say?

You say,
This is the most foolish sentiment I’ve heard you express. Years ago physicists began looking for a certain elusive subatomic particle some of them were sure must exist because if it did, well, what they knew about quarks would be much more beautiful then. Their scientific quest was predicated upon an aesthetic judgment. Surprise, surprise, they found it. It’s called the charmed quark because finding it was so charming.

You ask,
I’m suggesting that you give up your dichotomous view of things. Your either-or, binary perspective of reality does not conform to the universe quantum mechanics is showing us. I’m suggesting you stop thinking that anything is “demonstrably true.” Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal should disabuse you of it if I can’t. You may disparage my view as the old “brain-in-the-jar” solipsism all you want, just so long as you come to accept it. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

Jobar

(Ignore that Jobar behind the curtain!)

You wish.

See, I knew that fideism is considered a heresy- there is a Papal bull or encyclical or something about it, I understand. I wasn't going to call you on it, but since you point it out, you give me another club to beat you with. So, you are now saying you are *not* a fideist? Make up your mind, Albert!