This is topic What is the proper role of Reason within Christianity? in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.


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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
I asked this question in the Pat Robertson thread, but decided that I'd make it into its own thread. I am here going to tentatively describe Reason as the ability of ratiocination, and Christianity as synonymous with 'your church', or your belief system.

I don't want to get bogged down in a semantics battle. If you don't like my definitions, write your own.(Edit: As in, write your own and use them in your reply. I didn't mean to imply that you had to use mine. )

I'm not going to give my own thoughts yet because I don't want to prejudice the responses.

[ September 07, 2003, 04:46 PM: Message edited by: Storm Saxon ]
 

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Posted by Lalo (Member # 3772) on :
 
I'm not all that sure that there's any role for reasoning in religions.

The original premise of Christianity alone requires that you deny reason and believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing deity that created the universe is invisible and unrecordable except in the mind's eye. Not to mention, following certain dogma of the various forms of Christianity -- such as the baffling assertion that homosexuality is a sin, for example -- is almost impossible to justify except by claiming that it's a part of your belief system.
 

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Posted by Toni (Member # 5620) on :
 
Eddie perpetuates the Twilight Zone-like feeling that every thread on religion is exactly the same.

Stormy - I've come to the theological conclusions I have based on the fact that they seemed reasonable to me. It's like those branching tests.

1) Does it seem reasonable to you that there is a Intelligent Deity/Creator?

Yes No

2) If yes, does it seem reasonable that He would be interested in His creation?

Yes No

3) If yes, does it seem reasonable that He would communicate with His creation?

Yes No

4) If yes, do you think the Bible could possibly be that form of communication?

And so on and so forth. I think everyone has a foundation of belief based on what they believe makes the most sense. Then, they build on top of it. Of course, once you figure out what makes the most sense to you, a healthy amount of self-scrutiny and skepticism are also reasonable.

Nobody creates thier beliefs in a vaccuum of unreasonableness. Even if what they end up thinking makes absolutely no sense to spectators.

[ September 07, 2003, 04:43 PM: Message edited by: Toni ]
 

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Posted by Geoffrey Card (Member # 1062) on :
 
Well, that's a not-at-all-prejudiced perspective, Lalo, thank you

While individuals of all stripes (religions, political parties, support groups, etc) are very often unreasonable about their beliefs, I don't think that you can say Christianity is wholly unreasonable. It does demand some departure from the scientific method, and not all of its moral tenets are universally agreed upon ... but if they were, what would be the point of making a religion out of them? I think that reason plays a huge part in most Christians' lives, particularly in their understanding and interpretation of their beliefs. This might be difficult for your average closed-minded, anti-religious bigot to recognize, but it's there
 

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Posted by Toni (Member # 5620) on :
 
Jeez, Geoff. Do you think we could use more smilies in our posts?

It's like the on-line version of kid gloves.

edit: Yes, I was referring to both of us, not just you.

[ September 07, 2003, 04:57 PM: Message edited by: Toni ]
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 

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If yes, do you think the Bible could possibly be that form of communication?

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What if your reason does not jibe with your understanding of the Bible?
 

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Posted by Toni (Member # 5620) on :
 
Then you take a different branch of the questionaire.

Ultimately, though, if people put sincere thought into their beliefs (no matter what they are), they will be built on reason - even if someone else does not see the same reasonableness in them.

Am I missing the purpose of your thread, Stormy? I may be. I'm sorry.

[ September 07, 2003, 05:01 PM: Message edited by: Toni ]
 

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Posted by Ryuko (Member # 5125) on :
 
I think that if there's something that is completely logical aside from the fact that my religion says its wrong, I amend my religion. Its impossible for me to completely believe someone else's philosophy, which is what an organized religion always seemed like to me.

I'm a christian, and I say I'm a Lutheran, but really I'm something completely different. I'm my own island of spirituality/religion.
 

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Posted by Lalo (Member # 3772) on :
 
Some departure from the scientific method, Geoff? That's rather like saying my belief in pink-spandex-wearing, spear-wielding leprechauns is somewhat unorthodox.

Out of interest, could you put the beliefs of your religion in some kind of logical progression? I.e., Jesus must have been God's offspring because... Despite God's apparent deep relationship with each and every person who believes in one, we can't find where or how that god exists because... I believe the Bible isn't as inaccurate as it seems because... Etcetera.
 

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Posted by Taalcon (Member # 839) on :
 
Those interested in this question would benefit from reading C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Lewis was a dedicated Athiest until he reasoned himself out of that mindset. It's interesting to see his take on the whole thing. I enjoyed reading it TONS, and saw a new perspective on many things. His candid way of speaking (and complete intolerence of those with 'holier-than-thou attitudes) is very refreshing

-Taal
 

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Posted by Tresopax (Member # 1063) on :
 
I think that it is mistake to talk about Reason as fitting INSIDE Christianity in any way. Reason is something larger and more fundamental than Christianity, and it would be much more accurate to say Christianity fits into reason - or even better, Christianity guides reason.

I think it's a bit vague to describe Reason as the ability of ratiocination. I would go ahead and add that it is (more specifically) the ability of ours to draw conclusions and beliefs about the world through mental processes. I believe any religion fits INTO this ability called reason because a religion tells us the proper way to use it. It tells us which assumptions are valid ones to make, what things we should take as given (since reason without fundamentals ends in endless regress), and generally what sorts of reasoning we should use to draw conclusions. To put it more bluntly, Christianity tells us how to reason, what to reason about, and what foundations we should base our reasoning upon. One imperfect analogy might be saying reason is like a computer with its built-in ability to do things, but religion is the operating system that allows it to operate.

And I think to talk ever about religion without reason is a mistake.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Just talkin' bout Shaft, Ralphie.

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Then you take a different branch of the questionaire.

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Ultimately, though, if people put sincere thought into their beliefs (no matter what they are), they will be built on reason

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- even if someone else does not see the same reasonableness in them.

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Reason is something larger and more fundamental than Christianity, and it would be much more accurate to say Christianity fits into reason - or even better, Christianity guides reason.

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One imperfect analogy might be saying reason is like a computer with its built-in ability to do things, but religion is the operating system that allows it to operate.

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So, would it be reasonable ( ) to say that reason has no role inside religion but to justify that religion?
 

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Posted by Toni (Member # 5620) on :
 

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Ralphie, you've misunderstood what was meant by reason. You have laid out a series of steps that seem reasonable to you: that is not related at all to the process of reasoning (also called ratiocination, as noted).

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Right, and that was almost my point. I was looking at ratiocination as methodical and logical steps. What is reasonable to me are the steps I indicated, because my beliefs are built from the answers I determined from those questions. I'm not sure how that could not be considered somewhat methodical, but at the same time I'm learning more and more how vastly undereducated I am.

Stormy - I'm saying all beliefs are reasonable to the person that has them. If not, they get discarded. But then, who makes the ultimate decision on what is reasonable? So, I can't see how the original question could possibly be answered to everyone's satisfaction. Someone is always going to say there is something unprovable, and someone else is always going to say that unprovable doesn't equate "not soundness of mind."

Which means, I guess, I should have realized that before I made my first post and not posted at all, since I can think of nothing satisfying to myself or you. My apologies. I always seem to do that. :/

I'm going to go back to my next Chick parody.
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
I'd say it's much simpler than everyone's making it. Religion is what gives logic it's postulates and then your choices through-out life can be made using reason based on those postulates.

I also think that within a religion you can use logic to determine if it could be true. By which I mean that if you take the premise of a given religion you can determine if anay of the other premises (or other doctrine of that religion) condridict. However, the postulates themselves are either accepted or not, they can not be proved or disproved logically. At least not to more than one person at a time.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
 
In the "classical" understanding of my faith (which is not shared by every member of the churches of Christ, and is in fact becoming increasingly rare, but which I hold to), reason is vitally important to a Christian life. While it is surely possible to act in a reasonable fashion and still believe falsehoods or be a bad person, the opposite is not true.

However, a chain of reasoning is only as good as the evidence it is based on. If you saw a man come back from the dead--or for that matter, if an angel gave you some engraved golden plates--it does no good to argue that such an occurrence is unreasonable. It happened, and further reasoning must be based around the fact that it happened.

It is true that no one alive today witnessed the resurrection (for instance). However, we have no reason to believe that those who claimed to have witnessed it were unreliable, let alone irrational. Their claims have as much value as any other human being's, and unless they can be demonstrated unreliable it is at least not irrational to think they were telling the truth. To dismiss belief in a miraculous event as "irrational" is nearly always the consequence of mistaking data (no one I know has ever seen one) for a process of ratiocination (miracle necessarily involves a contradiction).

{Edit: I am trying to give examples--not to start a debate on the existence of miracles or about the resurrection.}

[ September 07, 2003, 06:03 PM: Message edited by: Maccabeus ]
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
In my tradition (UMC) reason is one side of what we refer to as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral – Scripture, Tradition, Experience, Reason. Decisions are to be based on all four. Ideally, all four will agree, or at least balance, but no decision should be made without taking all four into account.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Ah, I see.

By logical steps it is literally meant, having logic. Merely saying that something seems logical is not at all logical.

The steps you laid out are steps that seem reasonable/logical to you, but that does not make them logical. A set of logical steps as meant strictly would be a series of steps, arguing from a set of premises, that makes conclusions that are absolutely true, provided the premises are true.

Your steps were certainly methodical, but they were not logical, in the strict sense meant.

An example of logic would be the classic polar bear situation: GIVEN that all bears found within 50 miles of the North Pole are polar bears, and GIVEN that all polar bears have white fur, and GIVEN that a bear is found within 50 miles of the North Pole, the bear is THEREFORE a polar bear, and it is THEREFORE white.

If the two premises are accepted, the conclusion (that the bear is white, though that the bear is a polar bear was also a conclusion, albeit intermediary and trivial) is necessarily true.

The general form of the problem just given is: GIVEN if a then b, and GIVEN if b then c, THERFORE if a, b and THEREFORE c.

On a side note, while any (truely) logical conclusion is absolutely true given the premises, it is not necessarily absolute. Logic may make statistical conclusions, for instance.

I hope that clears up somewhat the meanings of reasona nd logic in the strict sense.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Maccabeus: if only we had any accounts from the witnesses of the reincarnation .
 

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Posted by Toni (Member # 5620) on :
 
Thank you, fugu. You're right - but I figured out that's what Stormy wanted after I made the post. I simply misunderstood what he was asking for, most likely because I'm dangerously unqualified for conversations like this.

I'm sticking to fluff. It's where I excel.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
*throws feather pillows at Ralphie*
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 

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Stormy - I'm saying all beliefs are reasonable to the person that has them. If not, they get discarded. But then, who makes the ultimate decision on what is reasonable? So, I can't see how the original question could possibly be answered to everyone's satisfaction. Someone is always going to say there is something unprovable, and someone else is always going to say that unprovable doesn't equate "not soundness of mind."

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Ralphie, I'm not out to get you. Your answers are fine. This isn't about making your answer satisfactory to everyone.

My main reason for this post is because I've been thinking a lot about social change within the context of what OSC wrote regarding a populace weighing an idea and then putting it into law. I had thought this thread might give me some insight.
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
Fugu, who was that post directed at?

Hobbes
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
The unspecified one just above is for Ralphie.

*looks at Hobbes' post*

There's no particular reason premises must come from religion, though it's a reasonable enough way of reconciling premises with religion.
 

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Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
 
Fugu> I could dispute whether we do or not...but the issues we're already discussing are a bit more foundational...

I think you are making a mistake in confining logic to the use of syllogisms, and within those syllogisms, definite absolute statements. There is nothing irrational about probabilistic reasoning (Given that 95% of cats have only four back toes, those tracks probably do not belong to a cat), or induction, especially in statistical form (although induction can be more easily misused).

Moreover, at least some of the Enlightenment philosophers from whom we moderns derive our respect for reasoning were convinced that formal logic was a tool that, like a telescope or microscope, only gave us a sharper view of things we could already sense. I believe it is a mistake to dismiss certain kinds of arguments as necessarily fallacious simply because they do not correspond to strict procedure and do not produce absolute results.

For instance, it is true that one cannot reason, strictly speaking, "If A then B. Not A. Therefore not B." But when an actual human being states "If A then B", the circumstances of the statement nearly always make "If not A then not B" highly probable. "If you wash my car for me, I will pay you." "I will not wash your car." Strictly speaking, one cannot conclude that I will not pay you. But if I were going to pay you anyway, I would not have made the statement in the first place; I would simply have handed you the money. Or to put it in syllogistic form: Given that people do not set conditions on actions they will perform whether or not those conditions are fulfilled, and Given that I have set conditions on an action, Then it is true that I will not perform that action unless they are fulfilled. (This kind of reasoning has been at the heart of, for instance, many arguments about the necessity of baptism.)
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
And, to state my post above without the use of the wonderfully loaded word reason except in the strict context . . .

Premises, being premises, may be whatever one wishes, perhaps even ones that mutually contradict one another (this is a hotly debated item among logicians). This being so, religion may or may not be, arbitrarily, part of one's premises, regardless of whether or not one is religious.

The use of religious beliefs as logical premises is a perfectly acceptable way (in the generates-no-logical-problems kind of way) to reconcile religious beliefs with logic; by assuming them true, one need not provide proof.

And to add to the post: there is one major flaw in taking this avenue. It removes a major persuasive tool from one's arsenal, because when religious conclusions are assumed, there is no logical reason to switch to that religion (at least, for purposes of believing the correct thing; it has long been a tradition to switch religions for reasons of community and power, which may still follow logically).
 

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Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
 
In questioning my faith, I went back to the original premise. Is there, or is there not a God?

I realized that the setting down of this particular premise WAS the act of faith that defies reason, because there could be no reasoning about it. There was no scientific data on the matter. There was only my experience, which I realized was not duplicated with everyone.

But I could not deny my own experience, or my gut feeling that there was a God. So I reasoned that since this was a premise that could not be logically deduced by anyone, at all, I decided that I would embrace my experience and feelings, whether scientifically based or not.

I generally don't like to decide on something that I haven't gathered enough information on. I'm open ended about a lot of things. But this was not a subject I felt like I could hold off my opinion about, since it requires action one way or the other. This required a leap of faith.

Have to go now, to sing about said leap of faith, but I don't mind discussing the further reasoning of my religious belief.
 

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Posted by Toni (Member # 5620) on :
 

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Ralphie, I'm not out to get you.

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No, I know! I didn't suspect that at all.

Okay, let me say it this way without fear I'll be fishing for compliments or otherwise disrupting your thread any more: I'm not SMRT enough to be in this thread, so I'm going to go where I can play with the kids and still seem intelligent enough to remember to wear my medical alert bracelet and get on the short bus.

There.

[ September 07, 2003, 06:48 PM: Message edited by: Toni ]
 

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Posted by popatr (Member # 1334) on :
 
I think that "reason" is a part of religion. Not in the sense that we change our ideas based on the philosophies of men, as opposed to God's. But in the sense that we acknowledge that there are answers based on logic and actual observable truth out there for our really tough religious questions. Some of the answers may come to us before we die, in personal ways.

Other answers may only come after we die. At that point, most religions claim that knowledge and understanding will come to us. Then you can look back and see all of the commandments etc in a "duh" fashion.

But yeah, for now, I accept the idea that God is wiser than me, and that some questions will never be answered by reason during this life.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
we shall let the witnesses question lie, I think.

On the other points: I did not confine myself to the use of syllogisms at all. I did choose syllogisms as my method of example. Luckily, all logical methods are equivalent to syllogisms, so one could confine one's self to syllogisms.

Since you mention induction, I should note that induction has been proven by syllogism (as in fact must be possible), and may therefore be considered an intermediary conclusion which enables later conclusions.

Syllogisms include statements on probability as I allued to in my side note, it's just that mathematical premises then become inducted into the set of premises. Nothing asyllogistic about it.

And no, you're quite wrong about your assertion regarding that particular logical statement. By direct counterexample: if I flip this switch, the light in the room will go on. This is no way means that if one does not flip the switch the light in the room will not go on; perhaps it also has a hanging chain, or there is another switch on the other side of the room that someone else will flip.

By demolishing your example: it is not at all uncommon for a person to employ his children in car washing. Those children often have a general set of chores for which they get paid, and will continue to get paid regardless of whether or not they wash the car. If you wish to modify your example to include "for washing the car", feel free, but that is in fact a disguised iff statement, not a real if statement, and you no longer have an example of the type you were trying to give.

I suggest reading a few good books on logic.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
O.K. Let us say that there is a particular article, or belief, of a religious faith that I want to change. I have reason to believe that ratiocination probably isn't going to work on most of the members because this particular article is in THE BOOK/interpreted to be true. How do I go about changing those members' opinion? Is destruction of that religion the only answer?
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
And Ralphie, we know you're sharp as a tac. You just don't wanna.
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
Well if you feel that two things condridict each other within that relgion, point out the condridiction between the two assumptions.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
I think that falls under ratiocination.
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
I know, but that's about your only hope. If you feel that someones assumptions are condridictory then you should point it out to them. If they refuse to listen that's their choice. I'm not sure destroying religions should be done too often...

Out of curosity, is there something specific here you feel is condridictory or just for future use?

Hobbes
 

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Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
 
Fugu> I suppose it is only marginally worthwhile to acknowledge what you said about my example and agree--I suppose the point I was trying to make, phrased in different terms, was that most such claims are disguised iff statements or they would not be made. I was not aware of any attempts to prove the validity of induction by syllogism, therefore cannot comment.

I will try to locate some good books on logic; I usually devour that sort of thing when I encounter it. I must confess, though, that it sounds like you are making some kind of claim that syllogisms underlie everything we can know about reality; that sort of thing always sounded mystical to me, strangely enough.

In my studies of the history of my brotherhood, it seems that reliance on the validity of deductive logic regarding religion has been the source of a massive amount of dissension, not only as to whether it is proper but in regards to the results. I may be able to find some good books on that subject for you, if you are interested. *takes a moment to taunt some one-cuppers*
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Hobbes, no specific examples because then the discussion becomes about whether or not the reasoning for that particular belief is valid.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
It's not that syllogisms underlie what we can know, it's that syllogistic reasoning is equivalent to other forms of logical reasoning.

While I do rather like logical reasoning (if I'm lucky, I'll have a philosophy paper that deals fairly directly with logic, among other things, published in a few mon^H^H^H^Hyears), syllogisms can in no way explain everything (though they can explain everything that can be explained logically). At the very least, one's premises cannot be explained by syllogism, and I'm at least willing to entertain the notion that other things may be so as well (though it's possible that such things would necessarily be definitionally included under premises).

Yep, induction has been proved by syllogism. Well, mathematical induction and induction considered statistically. General induction has been disproved (as we shall do now by counterexample).

A primer on induction (and the disproof) for our listeners at home:

In induction, we take a "case" and a "result" and infer a rule. For instance, our case might be that bob is human, our result might be that bob is clothed. The inductive conclusion is that humans are clothed. Unfortunately for induction, this is not always the case. Therefore induction is not a proof (QED).

Side note: while I have proved that induction does not work in at least one case, I have not proved that induction always fails (and indeed it does not). I have, however, proved that the statement induction always works is false, which is what is commonly meant by disproving something.

Mathematical induction is rather more complicated, but is 100% sound, and proven so by deduction.

Induction considered statistically is also sound, where one qualifies (quantifiably) the rule based on the sample size of the case/result.

I always love good books on religious philosophy .
 

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Posted by Ryan Hart (Member # 5513) on :
 
I am a very "modern" person. I am rational and logical in almost everything. I came to this conclusion. If you have felt God in your life than you cannot logically deny that to yourself. If you haven't felt him, why waste your time? I have felt God on a personal note, and that is why I believe Him.

What did Christ say...Love the Lord your God with all your mind ! That is actuall the title of an INCREDIBLE book by J.P. Moreland. If you are a Chrisitian I would definantly reccomend it.
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 

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the Number of the Beast,p106: [Charles] Kettering's Law: "Logic is an organised way of going wrong with confidence."

Glory Road,p50: "Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow."

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BOHR'S CODICIL TO LOGIC: The opposite of an ordinary truth is a falsehood, But there also exist great truths -- and the opposite of a great truth is another great truth.

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I generally don't like to decide on something that I haven't gathered enough information on. I'm open ended about a lot of things. But this was not a subject I felt like I could hold off my opinion about, since it requires action one way or the other. This required a leap of faith.

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The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

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- Will Durant. This sums up my opinion of many religious people: they have never truly examined the rationales behind their faith, unlike Amka. Instead, they seem to spring with unexamined philosophies absorbed from their families and community, like the old saying about how you make a fanatic--keep shouting in his ears until it comes out of his mouth.

[ September 08, 2003, 09:58 AM: Message edited by: Morbo ]
 

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Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
 
Who can find out God by searching?
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Sorry for coming late to the thread... a couple of quick thoughts from a Christian perspective... probably redundant, but here goes:

First the easy part: Fugu, if Kant and Spinoza are your idea of the attempts to prove the existence of God by philosophers, I suggest widening your scope significantly. Those seem to me more attempts to *replace* God than prove his existence. Tom Davidson's derision aside, Aquinas's five ways are pretty strong arguments if you take the time to understand them instead of sitting around and feeling superior to medieval wordings like "as fire is the maximum of 'hot'".

Reason was created by God along with the rest of the universe and people should excercise their reason and follow where the argument leads over and above adherence to any Dogma. Whatever God may be, if we may take the existence of God as given for the sake of argument, God must be universal truth and so finding the truth is essential to finding God.

Specifically to Eddie (Lalo), your idea that we must deny reason to be Christians is, itself, irrational on two levels.

IF there is a power that created the natural universe, it is strictly reasonable to say that power is not, itself, a part of the universe it created. Given a supernatural power (one outside of nature) it would be unobservable by our five senses and any actions taken by that power which would be observable would appear as natural events-- unexplained ones, perhaps, but natural nonetheless. This includes miracles, but that's a whole different subject and I'll spare everyone *that* lecture.

Christians, however, believe *precisely* that the Creator of the Universe *DID*, in fact, become a physical, tangible being observed personally and testified to by eyewitnesses, called apostles. The entire premise of Christianity is that God is observable in much wider space than the imagination. To what lengths this can be taken, read Jack Chick's "Death Cookie" tract and realize that the entire Roman Catholic Church and all the churches in communion with it, representing a massive portion of the earth's population, believe that God manifests Himself well outside our mind's eye on a daily, even hourly basis, as Mass is said around the world.
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Was it Diogenes who went in search of an honest man? I don't think he ever found one. But that doesn't mean we should give up on honesty (at least as a goal, if never fully realized.) Similarly, a search for God, whether in the Universe at large or in our own hearts is not fruitless. Even if you never find God, you might find yourself, or other useful knowledge.

I'm sounding a lot more mawkish and sachrinne of late, I blame hatrack.
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
Morbo, the leap of faith was even more agonizingly outline by one Soren Kierkegaard, Danish gadfly of the Danish state church, in the mid- to late-19th century.

Macc, what you are doing in your car washing example is not attacking syllogism, but illuminating the inexactitude of language (which, incidently, has been a very fertile area of philosophy the last hundred years or so). While your car wash example looks like an a -> b statement, it is really an a <-> b statement, though language conflates it out of laziness, or efficiency, your choice.

-Bok
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Morbo,

C.S. Lewis, in Pilgrim's Regress, explains how Atheism can be asserted to spring from wish-fullfilment every bit as easily as any religion can. Speaking strictly from within *reason*, hopes, fears, and desires, are irelevant to the discussion because they are, simply, ad hominem. To say "you say that because you *want* it to be true" is to assert that the reasoning is faulty merely because of the person making the argument.

I wonder... Morbo, you are yet young, aren't you?

It just occurred to me that most people have this same perception that you do, Morbo. I, in fact, had it myself. What I have since found, though, was that the vast majority of people who have a serious, adult practice of their religion, have an excellent, extremely well-thought out understanding of their belief. I wonder if it is the mere fact that when we are younger, people talk religion to us as to children and we get a lot of "that's not important" or "that's really complicated" (both true enough when we are told that) and so we often are not exposed to a steady, adult practice of faith for quite some time.

We develop quite a prejudice, there, because this attitude towards religious people is extremely prevalent and extremely wrong. I mean, think about it. A HUGE portion of this board is religious-- maybe even a majority. Do they really seem like the kind of people that run around leading unexamined lives?

Quick answer to Scott R: anyone and everyone.

[ September 08, 2003, 10:27 AM: Message edited by: T. Analog Kid ]
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
"Tom Davidson's derision aside, Aquinas's five ways are pretty strong arguments if you take the time to understand them...."

Well, no, they're not. But I'm willing to let you try to explain why they ARE, given that they blow chunks.
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
TAK, if that is your perception of Kant, then I think you are just as haughty to so-called secular philosophers as you claim others are of religious philosophers.

I'm no Kantian (I don't believe so, anyway ), but his 1st Critique is supremely important as an attempt to explain what we can and cannot know... Which is not to say that that which we cannot know is non-existant. To presume that would be a misinterpretation of Kant's thinking, I believe.

-Bok
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
Tom, somehow I don’t think he’s going to take that as a given.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
Well, I'm willing to accept the parameters of debate as HE established them -- i.e. my derision set aside -- so I don't see why MY given is so unreasonable.

But I'll advance my argument in this manner, for each of the famous "Five Ways:"

First Way: The Argument From Motion
Aquinas' argument here, based on Aristotle, is that things move only when they are moved. Therefore, since things can be observed in motion, there must have been a First -- or Prime -- Mover, someone to set things in motion in order for motion to exist.

Leaving aside the fact that modern physics has been steadily chipping at Newtonian -- much less Aristotlean -- ideas of motion for some time, the larger question implicit in the Prime Mover argument is this: if an object REQUIRES a mover to move, what made the Prime Mover move? And if the Prime Mover doesn't require a mover, why do we require a Prime Mover at all?

Second Way: Causation Of Existence
This is like the Prime Mover argument, but actually pares it down to its essence. Aquinas argues that it is self-evident that no object creates itself, and therefore there must be a Prime Creator, or First Cause. The problem with this argument -- again, leaving aside any issues of physics -- is explained above. If all objects and creatures can be said to logically require a First Cause, God -- an uncaused First Cause -- cannot logically exist.

Third Way: Contingent and Neccessary Objects
Aquinas sought to define two sorts of beings: contingent beings, objects that cannot exist without a necessary being causing its existence, and necessary beings, a category which basically consists of God. This is actually his explanation for the obvious flaw in Ways #1 and #2; we -- and all the other objects in the universe EXCEPT God -- are contingent beings, requiring a Prime Mover and First Cause. God, as a "necessary being," is the exception. So there.

Note, then, that Aquinas' argument so far consists of the following: "Everything needs a cause, except whatever caused everything."

Fourth Way: Degrees And Perfection
This one is hilariously bad. Aquinas points out that, of any two objects, one can be said to be somehow "better" than the other -- more lovely, more solid, more perfect. Therefore, Aquinas argues, there must be an essential and universal quality of "perfection" by which these objects and their attributes can be measured, and that this perfection is contained in God.

Note that this argument does not actually argue for the existence of God, per se; it assumes as a given that God exists, and does not attempt to argue that the attribute of perfection could exist without God. Rather, it argues that if the attribute of perfection exists, it must be contained within God.

Sadly, both prongs of this argument fail miserably. Firstly, it is disputable whether a universal standard of absolute and Platonian perfection can be said to exist for all attributes of all objects. Secondly, no logical argument is made that suggests that God MUST embody this perfection, except within a narrow definition of the Godhead that is not supported elsewhere in his reasoning.

Fifth Way: Intelligent Design
Similar (understandably) to the reasoning used by modern proponents of Intelligent Design creationist theory, this argument says that it's self-evident that the world works, and that the world is complex. Therefore, Aquinas argues, the world must have been designed by an awesomely powerful being. Of all of Aquinas' arguments, this is the one that most closely approaches science -- but, sadly, still lacks a testable hypothesis, a measurement of the world's inherent "complexity" relative to the probability of alternatives, and evidence for the likely existence of such a designer. Moreover, this argument (which is the essence of the Strong Anthropic Principle and teleological argument) is answered powerfully by the Weak Anthropic Principle -- which says, basically, that while our existence is against the odds, the fact that we exist proves that, in our case, we BEAT the odds.

[ September 08, 2003, 11:04 AM: Message edited by: TomDavidson ]
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 

quote:

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A HUGE portion of this board is religious-- maybe even a majority. Do they really seem like the kind of people that run around leading unexamined lives?

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quote:

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the Wesleyan Quadrilateral – Scripture, Tradition, Experience, Reason. Decisions are to be based on all four. Ideally, all four will agree, or at least balance, but no decision should be made without taking all four into account.

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dkw. I've never heard of this, it sounds like a good compromise between faith and reason. I can respect that. It's folks that hold dogma (in any religion) to be unassailable that give me the willies.
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
Morbo, surely you’re not suggesting that it’s impossible to intelligently and reasonably, after much thought and consideration, agree with one’s parents?

Edit -- In response to your latest – it’s not a compromise between faith and reason. You’ll note that faith is not one of the sides. Faith is based on all four of them.

[ September 08, 2003, 11:00 AM: Message edited by: dkw ]
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
No, of course not. But you cannot deny the power of indoctrination, either. What is it the Jesuits say? Give us a boy for five years and he'll be in the church for life? Something along those lines.
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Thanks for the clarifacation you edited in above. I guess my point is that denying the religion of your family or your community has a cost, sometimes a very heavy cost, even fatal. In an atmosphere like this,to "intelligently and reasonably, after much thought and consideration, agree with one’s parents?" often is difficult if not impossible.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Bok, my understanding of Kant is quite limited, but I am not sure I understand your thrust either. Did I come off as saying Kant was insincere or something like that? I just meant that Kant seems to me to avoid the question rather than attack it head on as others have. When I said "attempt to replace God" I wasn't trying to comment on his motivations.

At any rate, the last thing I wish to do is set myself up on a level with any great mind of the ages, especially with the imprecise wording I tend to use. Apologies.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Morbo, you are right about the cost, but, again, it works both ways.

I *do* quote Lewis a lot, Chesterton more. Are you suggesting that I quote them without thinking about them? (I know you're not... don't worry!)

There's nothing wrong with repeating what you've heard... that's how learning happens, 99% of the time. I believe the Earth orbits the sun, not because I have seen it or deduced it for myself, but because I learned it from a solid authority.

Gonna try to answer Tom, now. Hoo boy, I knew I'd get it from him for that little dig.
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Mentioning the Jesuits reminded me of a joke a read.
Seems the various brotherhood in the Catholic Church were arguing about which did the most good in the world, and which was the most beloved of God. The squabbling got out of hand, and finally the Pope prayed on it. In the morning he found a note on his bedside table:

Please stop bickering amongst yourselves. You are all important in My eyes, Franciscans, the Society of Jesus, Dominicans, Benedictines and all the other orders. All of you should concentrate on your good works, not on which order is the most beloved of God.
signed,
God, S.J.
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
No, Tak, you misunderstood me. I guess that paragraph could come across as a little snotty. I often quote people to support my arguments. A philosophy book I read recently made me more interested in Lewis, and Chesterson. Especially Chesterson's the Man who was Thursday. I think you've mentioned it on the forum before.

How does a negative cost in leaving a religion work both ways?
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
Ooo . . . T.A.K. and Tom are going to reenact the great medieval debates!

::gets popcorn::
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 

quote:

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'Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.'

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-Oscar Wilde ("The Critic as Artist")
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
Of course, Wilde was -- as he often did -- actually talking out his butt on that one. The sentiment is broadly accurate, but wrong about all the technical details.
 

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Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
 
"The last function of reason is to recognize there are an infinite of things which surpass it." -- Blaine Pascal (scientist, not known for speaking out of butt)

Better?

[ September 08, 2003, 11:56 AM: Message edited by: katharina ]
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Yes, but it seemed apropos to counter TaK's Critique of Rote Learning.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Dammit! not cool... I just spent all this time typing a reply to Tom and lost it dealing with the fourth way... arrrgh!

Edit and add: I like both the Wilde and Pascal quotes and Tom's response... good stuff all (inc. the S.J. joke... nice!). I don't think we really disagree, Morbo. I just wasn't sure where you were going. And yes, by all means, read Thursday.

[ September 08, 2003, 12:15 PM: Message edited by: T. Analog Kid ]
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 

quote:

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Who is not satisfied with himself will grow; who is not sure of his own correctness will learn many things. --Chinese Proverb

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.--Francis Bacon

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.--Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary

Man is a credulous animal and must believe something. In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.--Bertrand Russell

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.--John Burroughs

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Sorry for all the quotes. I found some cool quote pages when I was checking on Kettering's Law for my earlier post.

TaK, the example you gave of the Earth orbiting the Sun is universally accepted scientific fact. When you absorb knowledge through your community and family, it often has no such universal application or acceptance. All it means is you function smoothly in the community. Reason for many people never enters into the equation, just acceptance. Dissent is harder.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
In my typically theistic fashion, I'm gonna take my loss as a sign from God that I should be less wordy.

[Tom]
First Way: The Argument From Motion
Aquinas' argument here, based on Aristotle, is that things move only when they are moved. Therefore, since things can be observed in motion, there must have been a First -- or Prime -- Mover, someone to set things in motion in order for motion to exist.

Leaving aside the fact that modern physics has been steadily chipping at Newtonian -- much less Aristotlean -- ideas of motion for some time, the larger question implicit in the Prime Mover argument is this: if an object REQUIRES a mover to move, what made the Prime Mover move? And if the Prime Mover doesn't require a mover, why do we require a Prime Mover at all?
[/Tom]

It's not mere physical motion, but the ideas of energy and entropy, really. Aristotle was wrong when he said that all objects try to reach the center of the earth, but the concept he was describing when he said this was correct: all objects tend towards lowest energy. What Aquinas is stating here, put in terms of modern physics, is that an object can only decrease in entropy or increase in energy by the actions of some other object or energy. Then, he reasons, since the universe once had more energy and less entropy (the big bang) *something* had to make that happen.

[Tom]
Second Way: Causation Of Existence
This is like the Prime Mover argument, but actually pares it down to its essence. Aquinas argues that it is self-evident that no object creates itself, and therefore there must be a Prime Creator, or First Cause. The problem with this argument -- again, leaving aside any issues of physics -- is explained above. If all objects and creatures can be said to logically require a First Cause, God -- an uncaused First Cause -- cannot logically exist.
[/Tom]

Aquinas is saying that nothing he knew of could cause it's own existence, but everything is brought into existence by some other object. This leaves 3 possibilities: nothing exists (dismissed out of hand), there is an infinite regression of things causing each other, or *something* was able to cause its own existence. This thing, He says, is best named "God".

The idea that there must be something self-existent is currently accepted as scientific fact (energy cannot be created or destroyed).

[Tom]
Third Way: Contingent and Neccessary Objects
Aquinas sought to define two sorts of beings: contingent beings, objects that cannot exist without a necessary being causing its existence, and necessary beings, a category which basically consists of God. This is actually his explanation for the obvious flaw in Ways #1 and #2; we -- and all the other objects in the universe EXCEPT God -- are contingent beings, requiring a Prime Mover and First Cause. God, as a "necessary being," is the exception. So there.
[/Tom]

You are right that Aquinas here addresses a possibilty left out of the first two ways: the idea of infinite regression of things causing each other. He reasons that either there are *only* beings which can *not* exist (everything we know) or there is something we don't know which *must* exist (cannot cease to exist). If we go back an infinite amount of time, and there is no necessary (self-existent) being, then, because it is possible for all things to cease to exist, all things would, at some point in an infinite time, cease to exist and so nothing would exist, which conclusion is dismissed. Therefore, there must be a being which must be.

[Tom]
Note, then, that Aquinas' argument so far consists of the following: "Everything needs a cause, except whatever caused everything."
[/Tom]

I disagree. He is saying "everything we know has a cause. These ways, however, show that a universe in which *everything* has a cause, *everything* is contingent, cannot exist. Therefore there *must* be something which we do not understand which causes itself. This is what people mean when they say 'God'."

[Tom]
Fourth Way: Degrees And Perfection
This one is hilariously bad. Aquinas points out that, of any two objects, one can be said to be somehow "better" than the other -- more lovely, more solid, more perfect. Therefore, Aquinas argues, there must be an essential and universal quality of "perfection" by which these objects and their attributes can be measured, and that this perfection is contained in God.

Note that this argument does not actually argue for the existence of God, per se; it assumes as a given that God exists, and does not attempt to argue that the attribute of perfection could exist without God. Rather, it argues that if the attribute of perfection exists, it must be contained within God.

Sadly, both prongs of this argument fail miserably. Firstly, it is disputable whether a universal standard of absolute and Platonian perfection can be said to exist for all attributes of all objects. Secondly, no logical argument is made that suggests that God MUST embody this perfection, except within a narrow definition of the Godhead that is not supported elsewhere in his reasoning.
[/Tom]

I think you miscast this one as well, although I will grant that it's difficult even for someone sympathetic to the idea to state this one well, as I, no doubt, will not.. While he does point out that "good" and "bad" imply "best" and "worst", Aquinas is more concerned with the nature and reality of opposition. "Hot" and "cold", he correctly says, are real differences with real polar opposites (Absolute Zero and "all the energy in the universe"). These gradations are then applied to truth, existence and, as an aside, goodness. That which is most true, most real, most good, must be God. I think this is far and away the weakest of the ways, myself, but I strongly suspect that a lot of that is my failure to understand it.

[Tom]
Fifth Way: Intelligent Design
Similar (understandably) to the reasoning used by modern proponents of Intelligent Design creationist theory, this argument says that it's self-evident that the world works, and that the world is complex. Therefore, Aquinas argues, the world must have been designed by an awesomely powerful being. Of all of Aquinas' arguments, this is the one that most closely approaches science -- but, sadly, still lacks a testable hypothesis, a measurement of the world's inherent "complexity" relative to the probability of alternatives, and evidence for the likely existence of such a designer. Moreover, this argument (which is the essence of the Strong Anthropic Principle and teleological argument) is answered powerfully by the Weak Anthropic Principle -- which says, basically, that while our existence is against the odds, the fact that we exist proves that, in our case, we BEAT the odds.
[/Tom]

This one is, to me, less a proof and more of an induction. The idea is essentially, that of the infamous "Paley's Watch". I have heard that Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker is an excellent disection of this idea, but I have not read it. Like Tom says, lack of "control groups" keeps us from really testing this a a proper hypothesis. but the basic gist is that, with all our intellect and creativity, we are not able to design things as complex and efficient as that which has eveolved here... and that seems to imply a purpose or planner superior to ourselves. I agree that it is proper and correct-- that if you find a watch on a beach, the easiest explanation is that there was a watchmaker, and, likewise, humans, infinitely more complex than watches, seem to require a much more detailed designer-- to make this connection, but I do not view it as a proof nearly so much as an instance of Occam's Razor.

Funny that now, two or three years after I last told you I'd go through this with you (you probably don't even remember it) we finally get around to this discussion, eh, Tom?

edited for spelling

[ September 08, 2003, 04:45 PM: Message edited by: T. Analog Kid ]
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Morbo,

forgot to answer one: It cuts both ways because it is just as hard to become a theist in a family or society of Atheists as it is to become an atheist in a family or society of religious people.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
TAK: while your comment on Kant could be accurate from some perspectives, it is shallow at best, and significantly misinterprets Kant's intentions.

Spinoza, however, was incredibly concerned with proving the existence of God. He spent an exceptional amount of time on it. Very roughly, he first tried to prove that the existence of the finite implies the existence of the infinite, then gave reasons there must be an embodiment of all infinities. He gave numerous reasons, and they are all flawed.

I gave those two as specifics because they are some of my favorite philosophers to read. Note the et cetera on the end, accompanied by the rest of my sentence it specifies all the other philosophers who have tried to prove the existence of God.

Aquinas's arguments are quite flawed, and not just for the reasons Tom gives. My break is nearly over, but if you feel you have defeated any of Tom's points I may jump in.

Your comments on the nature of Reason are what is known as circular.

I see that you have come back at Tom; I will return later myself.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
*grin* Yep.

I'll point out that none of your arguments address what is still the serious issue at the core of Aquinas' logic: his claim that there MUST be an uncaused First Cause, and that this uncaused cause is recognizably God.

The issue of first causes is one that is hotly debated among the scientific community; there are even people who have speculated that time itself does not technically exist, since that makes certain equations in quantum physics actually "work." In other words, there IS no reason to believe that a "First Cause" is necessary; at best, when forced to choose between an oscillating, steady-state, or "Big-Bang" universe, it winds up being one of three options.

More importantly, however, there is little in Aquinas' logic to suggest that this First Cause must in fact be a SENTIENT cause, a conscious choice. He attempts to make this argument with his fourth and fifth "Ways," of course; that's their whole POINT -- that God, being the essence of perfection, is perfect (and therefore all-knowing, all-wise, and so on), and that some kind of perfect being had to make the perfect universe.

Both of those "Ways," though, require the acceptance of premises that, even in Aquinas' time, should NOT have been considered givens.

In other words, Aquinas' logic actually proves nothing. He spends AGES rationalizing from his conclusions -- and even though you've tried to put a good spin on more modern interpretations of his recent claims, the weakness of the overall argument is still pretty obvious.

In the final tally, therefore, I think it's important to note that your summation of Aquinas' Ways (which are themselves inconclusive) -- "Therefore there *must* be something which we do not understand which causes itself. This is what people mean when they say 'God.'" -- suggests various possibilities for Godhood that Aquinas would find unrecognizable. What if, for example, the universe was actually "caused" by the compression of a timeless state, as suggested by some physicists? Is that compression REALLY recognizable as "God?"

What it boils down to is this: Aquinas cannot imagine a universe without a Creator, and he finds it comforting to imagine that this Creator embodies positive virtues. But it's not exactly a sound argument.
 

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Posted by asQmh (Member # 4590) on :
 
TaK has a point.

And as one who doesn't ascribe to her parents faith and thinks that we've bastardized the phrase "faith of our fathers," I think that assuming by default that every theistic person is so because he or she was reared in that tradition is somewhat insulting. It's like saying all atheists are immoral - and being pleasantly surprised by those who don't fit my over-arching prejudice.

Nobody said faith was easy. It is for some. Some of us have to work at it - and to us, it may be all the more valuable. Just because it's something to be grappled with doesn't make it irrational, obtuse or irrelevant. If I didn't feel it was something worth fighting for, I'd have given up long ago.

[/rant]
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Great comeback to Tom's post, Tak.
*kicks computer--If you were a Mac instead of a cheap Intel knockoff, maybe you'd be good for something besides regurgitating quotes!*

I think I'll eat lunch and watch the debate on the sidelines. I may post a counter to the "intelligent design" theory later.
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
TAK, ah, it sounded like you were making an offhanded critique, questioning his motives.

Of course, I also disagree with you that he was sincerely trying to "replace God". Rather, in the Critique of Pure Reason anyway, he was trying to delineate the boundaries of what human beings could in fact rationalize with their own faculties. One, I would presume (but could be wrong, as Kant is dense, complex, and not necessarily a thinker I agree with in the details) could agree with the Kantian limitations of the human mind, and still be religious.

Now the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant's attempt to apply his findings from the first Critique to ethical realities, seems to be an attempt to explain ethical decisions without appeal to God. However, this may have been more an attempt to show why disparate cultures (as were beginning to be rediscovered by the West in the 1700s) believed in largely similar ideas (if disagreeing on dozens of details), while not believing in the Christian God.

Of course, the Critique of Practical Reason is largely panned because Kant makes some dubious leaps of logic to rework the ethical within his abstract intellectual construct from the 1st Critique.

--
As just a comment, I find these sorts of discussions interesting, if rarely perspective changing; they, to me, add more evidence for my private hypothesis that humans are rationalizing animals, not rational animals.

-Bok
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
That last sentence is pretty clever, Bok. I'm not sure that I agree, but it's really interesting.
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
asQmh, you've missed my point. People like you who come to their faith without the luxury of family support deserve respect. I didn't assume by default that all religious people are reared in a tradition. However, I think you are in the minority.[edit:debatable,depending on religion, culture, family etc.]

As far as atheists passing their faith down, I suppose that's true. What about a family of agnostics, who question faith but don't deny the existance of God?

Personally, I was raised Baptist, became an agnostic leaning towards atheism and naive materialism in high school. Nowadays I am an agnostic, mystic dualist, that is I believe there is more to the Universe than is sensed...really going out on a limb, huh?

quote:

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I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

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Bertrand Russell.

I envy you your strong faith, asQmh.

[edit:Thank you, Bok. You are often quite eloquent.]

[ September 08, 2003, 01:43 PM: Message edited by: Morbo ]
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
Umm, asQmh, if you note, Morbo said a majority of the religious folk believe like their parents. I'd speculate it's true, but honestly it would take a survey to be sure.

You are setting up a strawman but misconstruing Morbo's comments.

-Bok

EDIT: Doh! Morbo was much more eloquent in defending himself than I.

[ September 08, 2003, 01:33 PM: Message edited by: Bokonon ]
 

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Posted by asQmh (Member # 4590) on :
 
Bok, Morbo - I understand. I probably should have posted to another thread, but it was vaguely relevant and a rant. </rantionalizing>

It was a rant. On one side, there are the detractors who think that if you're Christian (or relgious at all, but usually Christian) you're that way because you grew up that way or you just don't know any better.

And then there's the other side: If you have questions, doubt and struggle, you don't have faith. You get stuck in the middle somewhere and don't really call either camp home. So . . . whining, griping, venting.

*begs for some slack based on the immutable Monday Factor*

[edit: I also wasn't addressing the remarks to anyone in particular - another forum sin. I wasn't railing against Morbo or Bok personally; I can't even point to a specific comment that tripped the trigger.]

Q.

[ September 08, 2003, 01:46 PM: Message edited by: asQmh ]
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
</rantionalizing>Lol
I never looked at it like that, Q. I guess you do catch it from both sides, huh? Whereas in my view you seem to be an honest seeker for the truth, like me.
Stay strong, doubting sister seeker!

*shrugs shoulders in universal symbol of doubters*
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
asQmh, no harm, no foul. Slack given (just be careful not to hang yourself ).

It sounds like Kierkegaard would be a good read for you. He puts up a wonderful (if suspect to later critics) argument about the power of the leap of faith. He was a Christian writer who often criticized the Danish Church for insufficient piety

-Bok
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Was it Kierkegaard or Dick Van Patten who said, "If you label me, you negate me"?

 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
asQmh, did you get the e-mail I sent you yesterday? I got one of those "message delayed" notices.
 

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Posted by asQmh (Member # 4590) on :
 
dkw - Nope, it hasn't made it through. Yahoo's been a little. . . odd lately. If you don't mind resending, you can try this username @midsouth.rr.com That's my "home address."

Q.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Being a Chesterton fan, I should have spent more time and thought on the joke and made my serious replies a little less time consuming and poly-syllabic. True to my own fashion, though, I went for the easy quote.

Trying to keep you all straight in my head, here:

Bok, you clearly know more about Kant than I so I'm just gonna bow to you on that one. I am also right with you in finding these discussions more entertaining than effective in changing minds. The only mind I know I have ever changed by argument like this is my own... ultimately, given a hunger for the truth, that's the most important mind to change, isn't it?

Fugu, as above, I *am* a shallow critic of Kant and, as Morbo points out, have to fall back mostly on what others have said. Also, as with Kant, I didn't mean to impugn Spinoza but merely observe that the upshot of his work was to replace the traditional view of God which he was given with something else more comfortable to his worldview. I don't mean that he was insincere in this, after all, don't we all do the same (atheists and theists alike)? Again, I'm not trying to paint it as deceptive or insincere, but rather pointing out that he comes up with something new rather than proving an old concept.

Oddly enough, though, you have caught me being imprecise again as I am about to agree with Tom on something which directly contradicts my opposition of Aquinas to Spinoza.

Aquinas is not proving the Christian God at all. Tom is exactly right. I am not a Christian because of Aquinas' reasoning. I remain, however, convinced of theism, in part, because of Aquinas' reasoning.

I tend to agree with those who think time is an illusion. I happen to think that time was created by God to allow man to see the nature of Freewill, Causality, and Choice in a universe that is essentially one thing, but that's way deeper than I'm prepared to go with this.

I agree that the 4th and 5th ways move towards in trying to describe what this uncaused cause must be like. Perhaps that is why they come off the weakest in terms of actual proof-- they are less proving and more trying to learn about.

But I disagree that the first three are made irrelevant by the choice between universal beginnings.

If Big Bang is true (and I favor this) then there still must have been something which "wound up the clock", so to speak, even if that something was merely the sum existence of energy (on the Einsteinian view that matter is nothing more than a specialized version of energy)... there is still something that was never created, which then created everything.

An Oscillating Universe tries to get past this difficulty by extending inifinte regression, but you still, on that hypothesis, have the same sum total of energy in the universe as an uncreated prime mover. Remember that each of Aquinas' ways ends with a statement which is best translated: "And this, everyone calls God." What he is saying that these things are out there, must be out there, and that these are the kind of things people refer to when they speak of a "God".

In fact, Aquinas goes on to point to our knowledge of God as being entirely negative: we cannot know omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, perfection, eternal existence or any other of the things that we attribute to God except in knowing that we have no experience of them.

The Big Bang and Oscillating Universe simply confirm there is something which we cannot completely comprehend which drives anything and everything which happens in the known Universe. We just call it "energy" and have different arcane magics (technology) to curry its favor.

The Steady State theory is a little more problematic. It seems to me that you have to have, even more, with this idea, some *source* from which things come to replace that which is passing out of existence. I have to confess to being weak on Steady State because, back when I was actually studying this, it was clean out of fashion and all but dismissed along side Aristotle's Spheres as far as Cosmology goes. I have heard that it has made a recent comeback, (particularly with topologists, maybe?) but I am pretty unaware of the current incarnations of it, so I feel I had best leave it alone.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
*nod* Steady State theory IS making a comeback, especially among multiverse advocates -- mainly because it makes some equations make sense without the necessity of a "fudge" constant. Of course, it's rather disturbing to think that cause and effect don't technically exist at the subatomic level, so I'm not a fan of the idea, myself, for emotional reasons. *grin*

You'll get no argument from me about Aquinas if all you're saying is that he makes a compelling argument for the need for a cause of some sort. The problem I have is the mental leap from this hypothetical "cause" to the conclusion that this cause must, in fact, be recognizable as a God of goodness and perfection -- or a sentient being of any kind, in fact.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Heh, that's a common misperception of Spinoza, due mainly to propaganda spread by his contemporary opponents. Spinoza had a very typical view of God.
 

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Posted by asQmh (Member # 4590) on :
 
Bok - Thanks. I cut my incisors on Kierkegaard when I was in 7th grade - and probably bit off more than I could comfortably chew. Reading in bits and pieces since then. Anything in particular you'd suggest?

Q.

[ September 08, 2003, 04:03 PM: Message edited by: asQmh ]
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Well, I think we have reached a point of agreement, then, and probably much closer to your side of the argument than you thought I'd give in. I think the big thing that Aquinas is demonstrating is that we are dealing, inherently, with a mystery when we push things back that far. Kind of a Heisenberg Uncertainty for metaphysics.

What I take, personally, from Aquinas on the particular question of God's existence (he deals with a lot of the other stuff you mention elsewhere in the Summas, some of it, he doesn't touch at all) is that, when looking at the real origin of things, whether physically or metaphysically, we find the same sort of thing: Something uncreated, that exists from all eternity which makes everything else "tick" (if you'll pardon the allusion back to the watch ).

There are many parallels to be found between the two. A massed being moving at the speed of light would be outside time (time dilation would make all of history one eternal instant) and be omnipotent (have infinite energy) much like God. The Energy that created the universe would similarly do a good job of answering the title of First Cause and Prime Mover.

Like Aquinas, I think there is one truth and if we push it far enough from any direction, we will find the same sort of thing: specifically a mystery which is beyond human understanding. Physicists, in a wonderful act of humility, began labeling quarks "Charm", "Truth", and "Beauty" and talking about properties like "color" and "flavor" to emphasize that they simply have no concept of the things they study. It is by a similar humility that man has come to talk about "God"-- that we which cannot understand, that we can hardly conceive-- but the study of whom provides depth to probe for the lifetime of a star and further.

The unfortunate thing, of course, is that man often forgets the humility and talks of "my God" meaning "the God in my back pocket."
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Fugu,

My take on Spinoza is, I say with some embarassment, precisely how he was taught to me... point for Morbo
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Spinoza is one of the most mistaught philosophers out there, precisely because there is was so much false information out there that had been spread about him.
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 

 

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Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
 
Tom, regarding the Weak Anthropic Principle--it seems to me that there should still be some explanation of how exactly we came to beat the odds, even if this is just a blow-by-blow description of coincidences. That is, even given the W.A., we should still seek some adequate explanation of our existence.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
I would imagine, if you were to lay out the difficulties faced by our evolution, you would HAVE a map of the odds beaten by the Weak Anthropic Principle.

Think about it: the cosmological constants were okay. Planets formed. Some of these planets had water on them, and it turned out that some chemicals that liked water were also photoreceptive.

And so on.

One thing that's interesting about the WAP is that it helps people remember that it's entirely possible that life UNLIKE ours could arise in other situations. (Science fiction has almost as much fun playing with the Weak Anthropic as it does the Strong Anthropic. *grin*)
 

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Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
 

quote:

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One thing that's interesting about the WAP is that it helps people remember that it's entirely possible that life UNLIKE ours could arise in other situations. (Science fiction has almost as much fun playing with the Weak Anthropic as it does the Strong Anthropic. *grin*)

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*nods* While I am not the sort of person who dismisses creationist arguments out of hand because they are creationist arguments, I have long found the creationist unwillingness to imagine life that does not require the same conditions we do (but requires some other set of strict conditions) amusing. After all, don't we Christian theists believe in not one, but two forms of life--intelligent life, no less--that are radically unlike us bags of water and hydrocarbons?

(It is conceivable that my refusal to dis creationism is due mostly to my being surrounded by it continually. So far as I can tell from where I live, certain factions of the churches of Christ are, via Apologetics Press, the intellectual core of creationism. That is, if you will forgive the term "intellectual"...and I myself have noticed a decline in the overall quality of argument since the conservative idea of debate became largely synonymous with "curse-warfare".)
 

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Posted by Jacare Sorridente (Member # 1906) on :
 
I think that the weak anthropic principle is the worst sort of circular reasoning.

It brings to mind a child who is caught with his hand in the cookie jar. When his parents ask how it is that he came to have his hand in the cookie jar he recounts a series of events, each one more improbable than the last. When his parents demand what proof he has that his story is true he replies: "It must be true, for here I am with my hand in the cookie jar."
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
I studied Spinoza in an introduction to philosohy college class, but I don't remember anything from that class. In book I read recently, Gardner's Musing's of a philosophical scrivner, Gardner portrays Spinoza's God as formless and pantheist. Is this what you're talking about , fugu? Is that a misrepresentation of Spinoza's idea of God as well? I trust Gardner as a commentator, I've read his stuff for years and he is very well versed in philosophy.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Re-reading my own post, I thought of a genuine (i.e. not rhetorical) question for Tom...

Why is it that I can apply Aquinas' ideas about "the God of the Philosophers" so easily to modern physics? What I mean is, I have always been fascinated (and heartened) by the idea that physics and metaphysics both give us some startlingly similar ideas, when boiled down. Is it just me being particularly innovative in adding new meaning to old texts, or is there some central point of truth being approached from two different sides? is the opposition of religion and science a simple matter of parallax or must it be a darker matter of war?

I'm curious as to your thoughts (and feelings) on this.

Edit to add that everyone is, of course, welcome to comment and that no, I won't get offended if your answer is just "you're really good at lying to yourself, TAK."

[ September 08, 2003, 04:56 PM: Message edited by: T. Analog Kid ]
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Jacare, that is the worst form of reasoning from analogy. Sorry, I couln't resist.

Calculating the odds against human intelligence evolving, including many factors, is what drove Fred Hoyle, the British cosmologist and co-creator of the Steady State theory to believe in God. The last figure I remember was (could be way off) 1 in 10 ^ 750. A tolerably large number.
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Many scientists and physicists have remarked on the weird simularities between ancient philosophies and modern physics. One book (that I haven't read but have heard good things about) that discusses it is the Dancing Wu Li masters. link

There's also The Tao of Physics, but I haven't heard the buzz on it.

[ September 08, 2003, 05:08 PM: Message edited by: Morbo ]
 

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Posted by Jacare Sorridente (Member # 1906) on :
 
Morbo- easy there slim. I wasn't reasoning from analogy, I was analogizing the absurdity of the WAP premise- a very different thing altogether.

Of course there are problems on the other side of the coin too. How exactly can we determine the probability of a universe occurring with the physical constants our universe has? We can't exactly measure the physical constants of other universes as reference points.

To my mind probability needn't enter the picture at all. God either exists or he does not. Statistics has nothing to say about the issue either way. COming up with mechanisms, on the other hand, is very relevant to the question. To state that evolution can account for everything is one thing, to demonstrate a mechanism for some of the very complex structures is quite another.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
"Why is it that I can apply Aquinas' ideas about 'the God of the Philosophers' so easily to modern physics?"

Well, I thought the entropy thing was actually a bit of a stretch, mind you -- but since both Aquinas and modern metaphysics had as their goals the understanding of the universe (and particularly its beginnings), it's not surprising that some of the broad philosophical arguments underpinning each are similar. The difference between physics and Aquinas is merely one of degree (which I mainly attribute to the growth of human knowledge and refinement of the scientific method in the intervening period; I think if Aquinas had lived today, he would have found much greater joy as an atheistic logician.)

A physicist might speculate on the beginning of the universe and say, "Something must have started all this. I'll call it Particle X. Now, what can equations tell us about Particle X based on the behavior of existing particles?"

Aquinas says, similarly, "Something must have started all this. I'll call it God. And because I'm uncomfortable with the alternatives, we'll resolve that God is good and wonderful -- because it's good and wonderful that we're around."

There's BOUND to be more than a little overlap.

--------

As to the weak anthropic principle being a cop-out: me, I've always thought the invention of an omnipotent being was the biggest cop-out in history. To use the cookie jar example: "Son, why is your hand in the cookie jar?" "Mom, God made the cookie jar appear around my hand. It's not my fault."

Both these extreme examples -- Jacare's and mine -- miss the point: that the simplest explanation (i.e. that the boy stuck his own hand in the jar to extract a cookie) is the most likely.

What Jacare fails to realize is that the invention of a Supreme Being is not, in fact, "simple."
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Jacare, this guy refutes you better than I could hope to:

quote:

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This book argues that even if there is a very high improbability of the universe existing with observers, the properties of the universe that allow us to exist are also what allow us to observe the universe with properties compatible with the existence of observers. If the universe did not have these properties, then we would not exist to observe the incompatible properties.

The idea that we must observe that the universe contains properties compatible with the existence of an observer because if it did not, no one would be here to observe it, is called the anthropic principle or the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP). The WAP is significant in that it makes the improbability of any one universe (i.e. our own) irrelevant. We should expect that our universe has features compatible with our existence, since, after all, we exist.

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quote:

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What Jacare fails to realize is that the invention of a Supreme Being is not, in fact, "simple."

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quote:

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We should expect that our universe has features compatible with our existence, since, after all, we exist.

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It argues for a mechanism from end results. It is rather like saying "We should expect that horses evolved to run fast. They are, after all, chased by predators."

There is no information there, nothing regarding cause or effect or anything at all. It is more a base assumption, rather like cogito ergo sum . Or in this case "I exist therefore I exist"

[ September 08, 2003, 05:23 PM: Message edited by: Jacare Sorridente ]
 

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Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
 
Jacare> One could posit that God was, in fact, in a big hurry--in a manner of speaking. No, I do not mean that God is bound by time and was impatient because of it.

It appears to me that God's primary interest in the universe is the existence of sapient beings like, but unlike, himself. To this end there need to be conditions capable of supporting such beings, whatever those conditions might be, but it is entirely possible that God is not much interested in the other results of those conditions. Perhaps this is normal--any such creations would be trivial matters, but the same may not be true of other free-willed intelligences. Why not cut to the chase, then?
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
Jacare, the reason the Weak Anthropic Principle "works" is that, clearly, we do exist. Therefore, even if the odds of our existence are remarkably low, we beat those odds. Period.

Now, you can argue that the odds of our existence are SO low that they're actually lower than the odds of the existence of a Supreme Being, and therefore it's likelier that we were created or "Intelligently Designed," even if your theory is complicated by the creation of a hypothetical God. But since we don't actually know the numbers on that one, either way, it breaks down once you start to talk probability.
 

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Posted by Jacare Sorridente (Member # 1906) on :
 
Macc- Why cut to the chase? If God is eternal he must be a very patient fellow. If time is not measured unto God then why hurry things along at all?

Your hypothetical situation seems to require that God worries about time.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Why does Creationism deny the use of a mechanism?

Don't confuse all creationists with the ones who label themselves as such.

Interesting side point, if the timelines I have seen for the creation of the universe were correct, the matter of the universe in the seconds following the big bang significantly exceeeded the speed of light and completely disobeyed the rules of relativity. The scientists then proceeded to announce that this was because the laws of the universe were different for the first few seconds of existence. What creationists stand accused of is literaly true of modern cosmologists.

However, I'm with the cosmologists on this one, the fundamentalist interpretation of six literal days seems to me like insisting that you've found the location of Camelot based on a description in Morte d'Arthur
 

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Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
 
Alright, let me put it another way, Jacare....

A vast amount of material exists on the internet, all of which ultimately derives from the creative actions of a relatively small group of people. However, those people presumably would not find all that material to be of equal interest. Assuming that they are alive to do so, one would expect them to be found clustered around websites that deal with subjects they are interested in.

Time, as such, is not important. God will be most present "where the action is", dealing with those matters that interest him most. I once posited a universe in which God "backfills" a real history (not an illusory one) for the objects he creates; in such a universe creation and evolution would be well-nigh indistinguishable. Unfortunately, such a universe is neither very scientifically interesting (at least unless and until humans were to begin engineering space-time directly) nor very useful to creationists, except as a last redoubt.

I think it's worth bringing up that at this point I don't know if it's appropriate to describe me as a creationist per se. I have become something of an agnostic on the matter. I would certainly not claim that creationism is scientific, nor would I consider that necessary for creation to be a physically real event. Likewise, I can easily imagine that evolution may well be the best current or even the best possible scientific explanation without actually being true. At present I am standing somewhere in the muddled middle.
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
asQmh, honestly, I've tried a couple translations, but I haven't found a comfortable one. I do find the beginning of Fear and Trembling a great, radical, but somehow resonant take on the story of Abraham and Isaac.

-Bok
 

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Posted by Ryan Hart (Member # 5513) on :
 
TAK- Are you a theistic evolutionist? Because I am out of the closet now. My friends all thought I had gone atheist till I explained.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
As I often do, I'll defer to Chesterton:

quote:

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If "evolution" means a positive thing called an ape turned slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox, for an all-powerful God might as well choose to do things slowly as quickly.

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quote:

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Why does Creationism deny the use of a mechanism?
Don't confuse all creationists with the ones who label themselves as such

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quote:

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Jacare, the reason the Weak Anthropic Principle "works" is that, clearly, we do exist. Therefore, even if the odds of our existence are remarkably low, we beat those odds. Period.

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quote:

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Time, as such, is not important. God will be most present "where the action is", dealing with those matters that interest him most.

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quote:

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I once posited a universe in which God "backfills" a real history (not an illusory one) for the objects he creates; in such a universe creation and evolution would be well-nigh indistinguishable.

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quote:

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Because it admits two possibilities that Creationists often ignore:

1) Life UNLIKE ours can theoretically exist, or COULD theoretically exist if the situation were different.

2) It is not necessary for a God to exist in order for life to exist. The likelihood of God's existence must be measured against the likelihood of spontaneous evolution.

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It does no such thing. Both of your conclusions are based on unfounded assumptions. As to your first point- We have no idea if life unlike ours can exist. How could we possibly speak to such a thing? To the best of our scientific knowledge life may only exist within very narrow bounds. How can the WAP contradict this?

Secondly, the WAP is often used as a pseudo-scientific justification that we don't need God. But it doesn't work. It begs the question. "If we assume that only the materialistic exists and that life was created by materialistic processes then no matter how unlikely it is that those processes ocurred randomly we can see that they must have occurred because we exist" that is what your interpretation of the WAP must mean if you take it to negate the need for a prime mover.

[ September 09, 2003, 11:02 AM: Message edited by: Jacare Sorridente ]
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
It is incorrectly used to try to disprove God in any way.

And it is not useless.

Firstly, as I stated, it does not allow us to "say what probability there is of human life existing". It says nothing at all about specific probabilities.

And the statement I gave you is not utterly useless. It completely defeats the counterargument that "things happening by random chance is an incredibly low probability, therefore it did not happen" argument. This counterargument presupposes that things which are improbable are not likely to have happened, which the weak anthropic principle clearly shows us is not so (given that other theories of creation have a similarly low probability).

Now, beyond such specialized cases it is not particularly useful, and it does not prove anything (it pretty much is useful for disproofs). This is because it is a trivial statement. It is useful only for attacking presumptions about probabilities of existence, which is most common in counterarguments. This is why it is called the weak anthropic principle.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
"It begs the question. 'If we assume that only the materialistic exists and that life was created by materialistic processes then no matter how unlikely it is that those processes ocurred randomly we can see that they must have occurred because we exist.'"

It does, indeed, beg that question. However, you only have to ask it if you want; it's not exclusively useful for that purpose.

Some people believe that the existence of an omnipotent, invisible Supreme Being is more likely than a number of other random processes; the WAP doesn't particularly speak to this belief at all, except insofar that it agrees that, yes, it's POSSIBLE that such a Supreme Being may exist if indeed the existence of a Supreme Being would be necessary.

However, for those of us who do NOT consider belief in a Supreme Being to conform to Occam's Razor, the WAP makes it possible for us to say that there are other alternatives, no matter how unlikely, that explain our existence.

I'm afraid you'll have to cope with that.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Proving a negative (we could NOT have gotten here randomly) is always difficult.

For me, it's not a matter of probability or Occam's Razor so much as my own version of Pascal's Wager which finalizes my selection of sides:

If there is nothing above and beyond nature, then there can be no freewill because every action is the result of natural processes and obeys natural laws. It's true that there is ample room in science to have those natural reactions *look* like people making choices and excercising wills, but they are still not, in the sense we talk about the word, acts of "will". In short, if the world is purely materialistic, it must also be purely deterministic. In this case, all my actions, choices, emotions and thoughts are entirely pre-determined, including whether or not I am a theist. It literally makes no sense for me to try to find the truth because there is no "me" to try anything. I will do what I do and that is the end of the matter.

But, when I examine myself, I find a hunger for truth, a will that can shape the world around me rather than merely react to it, and desires, emotions, and a mind that I can consciously influence. When I examine others, I see that they appear to be the same way. It is entirely possible that this is all an illusion. It is entirely possible that this is a mere appearence given to the world around us because evolution has favored existentialism.

But the most striking thing I see when I look at others is that even those who propose that the will is all an illusion do not, themselves, treat it like one. Everyone behaves as though they have a soul, even when they deny its existence. They argue. They convince. They attempt to sway each other's decisions. They attempt to influence my actions. Perhaps they cannot help it. Perhaps being aware of the illusion is not enough to break them free of it.

I, not surprisingly, am with Chesterton on this:

quote:

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I find, for some odd psychological reason, that I can deal better with a man's exercise of freewill if I believe that he has got it.

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quote:

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And the statement I gave you is not utterly useless. It completely defeats the counterargument that "things happening by random chance is an incredibly low probability, therefore it did not happen" argument. This counterargument presupposes that things which are improbable are not likely to have happened, which the weak anthropic principle clearly shows us is not so (given that other theories of creation have a similarly low probability).

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quote:

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However, for those of us who do NOT consider belief in a Supreme Being to conform to Occam's Razor, the WAP makes it possible for us to say that there are other alternatives, no matter how unlikely, that explain our existence.

I'm afraid you'll have to cope with that.

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Just so long as you recognize that its only value is as a proof based on a baseless assumption then I suppose we are in agreement. It will be tough, but I think that I can cope with it
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
TAK, I think you see the words but miss the concepts. The Weak Anthropic Principle is a very easy principle to grasp because it is weak and trivial. It does not say much. Free Will seems like such a simpler concept, yet it is an incredibly complex concept.

For instance, you seem to assert Free Will "feed[s] events into the universe". Okay, so if we consider this outside region beyond the universe as part of our system (just the sum total of all events we are considering), suddenly everything is determined again? Doesn't that imply we have no actual "free" will as everything is still determined?

There has never been an adequate definition of Free Will, unlike the Weak Anthropic Principle, which has been quite adequately (if trivially) defined.

Then you misunderstand quantum physics. everything is quantum physics. Everything is made up of these small, truly random particles. It's just that there are so many that the probabilities tend to balance out in aggregate. That does not mean things are determined, it means that the distribution of randomness is very narrow. It's like flipping two trillion coins: the ratio of heads to tails will be almost exactly one, simply because in the long run it approaches one. That does not mean it will never be that every coin is tails, just that the likelihood is miniscule.

And if you think quantum effects never matter on the macro leve, you need to take another look at quantum computing, or heck, even current microprocessor technology. Quantum tunneling (due precisely to that pure randomness) happens all the time.

I think it was Feynman who once wrote a paper on why quantum effects were so important to everyday life, though I cannot find a reference. If you can, you should go read it.

Jacare: we are basically agreeing. The reason the Weak Anthropic Principle exists is twofold: one, science can't just say an argument is silly, it has to give a reason, and two, the Weak Anthropic Principle is in a very general form, so it works against a lot of similar arguments without having to reformulate it.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
"Just so long as you recognize that its only value is as a proof based on a baseless assumption..."

Which assumption is the baseless one?
 

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Posted by Jacare Sorridente (Member # 1906) on :
 

quote:

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Which assumption is the baseless one?

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quote:

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That's not an assumption of the Weak Anthropic Principle, though I'm not sure you're saying that. Could you clarify what you're saying it's an assumption of?

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quote:

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Because it (the WAP) admits two possibilities that Creationists often ignore:

1) Life UNLIKE ours can theoretically exist, or COULD theoretically exist if the situation were different.

2) It is not necessary for a God to exist in order for life to exist. The likelihood of God's existence must be measured against the likelihood of spontaneous evolution.

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quote:

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Secondly, the WAP is often used as a pseudo-scientific justification that we don't need God. But it doesn't work. It begs the question. "If we assume that only the materialistic exists and that life was created by materialistic processes then no matter how unlikely it is that those processes ocurred randomly we can see that they must have occurred because we exist" that is what your interpretation of the WAP must mean if you take it to negate the need for a prime mover.

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What I am arguing with is the standard tactic of many atheists I have read trotting out the WAP as if it proved somehow that God is unnecessary to the creation of the universe. It does no such thing since all the WAP can say is that we exist therefore it doesn't matter how probable our existence is. In order to be twisted into relating to God you must add the baseless assummption that the universe is solely randomly mechanistic- in other words that life evolved from inanimate materials.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
"In order to be twisted into relating to God you must add the baseless assummption that the universe is solely randomly mechanistic- in other words that life evolved from inanimate materials."

Except, of course, that the existence of God is itself a baseless assumption, and the DEFAULT assumption, consequently, is that life arose without the assistance of invisible beings. By default, any logic that involves the interaction of known mechanisms is "simpler" than one that requires the invention of new mechanisms, particularly if those new mechanisms cannot be tested in any way (or fail tests when tested.)
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
That's correct, it doesn't prove in any way that God is unnecessary. It does prove that there is no probabilistic reason for God to be necessary, which is a much more limited statement.

The WAP is much maligned for things it doesn't say .
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
I think I'll just stand pat. Thanks for the go 'round, Fugu.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
What I am I here for, if not as one of those inflatable punching bags that rolls backwards then comes back up and smacks you ?

I always enjoy a good debate.

[ September 09, 2003, 02:40 PM: Message edited by: fugu13 ]
 

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Posted by Jacare Sorridente (Member # 1906) on :
 

quote:

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Except, of course, that the existence of God is itself a baseless assumption, and the DEFAULT assumption, consequently, is that life arose without the assistance of invisible beings. By default, any logic that involves the interaction of known mechanisms is "simpler" than one that requires the invention of new mechanisms, particularly if those new mechanisms cannot be tested in any way (or fail tests when tested.)

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See Tom, this is where your unfounded assumption comes in. Why should the default be your particular point of view? See, there is no scientifically known way for life to originate from non-life. It can't happen by any process we know therefore it is clearly NOT the default. It fails the very criteria which you set eg the "invention of any new mechanisms" one. There is no default, for to the best of my knowledge life has also never been shown to originate from non-life even with human intervention.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
"See, there is no scientifically known way for life to originate from non-life. It can't happen by any process we know therefore it is clearly NOT the default."

Except that we actually have testable hypotheses for this process, and are testing them. Where's your testable hypothesis for God, exactly?

Let's use Occam's Razor, here:

Given that God does not exist, and that life cannot arise from non-life, what's the simplest solution? Clearly, that life has always existed in its present form.

Unfortunately, this is demonstrably false, based on our current understanding of the universe. So that brings us to conclude that EITHER a bunch of known processes combined in a way we don't understand to produce life, or a completely unknown process created life in a way we don't understand.

Even as a second-string option, God doesn't make the cut.

[ September 09, 2003, 03:17 PM: Message edited by: TomDavidson ]
 

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Posted by Erik Slaine (Member # 5583) on :
 
Thank you, Tom. I see that I'm not needed here.
 

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Posted by Jacare Sorridente (Member # 1906) on :
 
Tom-

quote:

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Except that we actually have testable hypotheses for this process, and are testing them. Where's your testable hypothesis for God, exactly?

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quote:

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Let's use Occam's Razor, here:

Given that God does not exist, and that life cannot arise from non-life, what's the simplest solution? Clearly, that life has always existed in its present form.

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quote:

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EITHER a bunch of known processes combined in a way we don't understand to produce life, or a completely unknown process created life in a way we don't understand.

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See here's the problem yet again. There is no room in scientific explanations for events which are not solely the result of physical laws. Let us suppose for an instant that life on earth originated with a comet from another solar system. How can science test that hypothesis? The conclusion is completely untestable, though at least some hold that the mechanism has been proven.

The very paradigm which makes science so useful also makes the results completely wrong if the basic assumptions of a test are false.
 

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Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
 
Ok, you've beaten the WAP to death, now on to Occam's Razor:

Occam does not say that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, (as is usually paraphrased). He says not to multiply complexity unnecessarily.

Translated, this means that given two possibilities to investigate, you should investigate the one with the fewest variables first. (or just: the easier one to investigate) If you can disprove it, you won't have wasted much time. If it appears true, you can continue to investigate it because, well, it appears true.

What Tom is arguing is that the introduction of God into the investigation of the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, makes things more complicated, because in order to answer it, you have to explain god as well.

Note: if God arises from the investigation then it would be more complicated to try to formulate alternate theories, just because you are trying to exclude God. But since God does not arise from any scientific study, it's better left to theology, not science.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 


Sorry, this discussion about Occam's razor amuses me, considering Occam's conclusion on the subject, which may be summed up in one word:

Goddidit.
 

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Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
 
Likewise you can use Pascal's wager to argue that belief in god is a waste of time.

We got into argument by authority over on the other side, too, regarding Einstein. I've got great respect for Pascal, William, Galilei, Newton and Darwin. All were theists. This doesn't diminish their work.

BTW, I've been thinking I should post this. It's on topic, but not so serious as the rest of the thread:

http://facts4god.faithweb.com/thelist.html
 

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Posted by usually i lurk (Member # 1727) on :
 
on number 22 they spelled thor wrong
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
you have to admit this one:

quote:

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16. ARGUMENT FROM INTIMIDATION

(1) See this bonfire?
(2) Therefore, God exists.

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quote:

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29. ARGUMENT FROM BLINDNESS (II)

1) God is love.
(2) Love is blind.
(3) Ray Charles is blind.
(4) Therefore, Ray Charles is God.
(5) Therefore, God exists.

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quote:

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32. ARGUMENT FROM META-SMUGNESS

(1) **** you.
(2) Therefore, God exists.

---

 

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Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
 
Haven't absorbed this WAP thing, but I'd like to address the original question. I think the role of reason in my own life is to try to bring my beliefs around to revealed knowledge. A nod to Kierkegaard and the sacrifice of Isaac: Why would God demand something so unreasonable?

My answer has been that if our reason is adequate to govern us, God is unneccessary. If God exists, then, he will demand the unreasonable. I have not yet found a way to make it reasonable, but I am working on it. I am working on it with my reason. This is the role of reason in my own cosmology.

FWIW.
 

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Posted by Ryan Hart (Member # 5513) on :
 
Pascal thought that you should choose to believe in God because it would enrich your life, and you would lose nothing. Basically if I'm right and there is a God, you go to hell. However if I'm wrong then I still have lived an enriched life.

Doesn't sound like a waste of time to me.
 

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Posted by Ryuko (Member # 5125) on :
 

quote:

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219. ARGUMENT FROM ALL YOUR BASE

1) Someone set up us the bomb.
2) We get signal.
3) Main screen turn on.
4) How are you, gentlemen.
5) All your base are belong to us.
6) What you say!
7) You have no chance to survive make your time.
8) Ha ha ha ha....
9) Move *zig.*
10) You know what you're doing.
11) For great justice, take off every *zig.*
12) Therefore, God exist.

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quote:

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222. ARGUMENT FROM WARREN ROBINETT

1) There's a secret message in the video game "Adventure."
2) It reveals that the game was Created by Warren Robinett.
3) It's the same way with the world. Look for the secret messages, and you will find the World's Creator.
4) Therefore, God exists.

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I thought about being offended for a moment, but then I realized that that's the exact way that atheists get treated by some christians. (shakes head sadly)
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
I think this whole thread is a good illustration of the fact that reason is of no use whatsoever as a foundation of a person's beliefs. Reason cannot and does not make anyone believe or disbelieve in God. You believe in God because you do; you don't believe in God because you don't. What reason can do is distill, refine, and support the structure of your belief system. But it's never the actual cause of your belief. Because the existence of God is not something that anyone has ever concretely proven or disproven by means of logic. Because it can't be done.

Jacare:

quote:

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The only reason to even suggest any of these ideas is because a somewhat ambiguous Hebrew word for day is taken literally in the midst of actions which are clearly symbolic.

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quote:

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We should expect that our universe has features compatible with our existence, since, after all, we exist.

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quote:

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In short, if the world is purely materialistic, it must also be purely deterministic.

If there is nothing above and beyond nature, then there can be no freewill because every action is the result of natural processes and obeys natural laws.

if the timelines I have seen for the creation of the universe were correct, the matter of the universe in the seconds following the big bang significantly exceeeded the speed of light and completely disobeyed the rules of relativity. The scientists then proceeded to announce that this was because the laws of the universe were different for the first few seconds of existence. What creationists stand accused of is literaly true of modern cosmologists.

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TaK. The first statement is unproven. Any randomness in a materialistic system would make it non-deterministic. There are a variety of possible mechanisms for randomness, quantum mechanics being the most fashionable to cite. And fugu is right, quantum effects (and other microscopic but non-quantum effects) can "cascade" up and cause real effects in the macroscopic world.

The second statement is thornier, as it gets into free will. One simple comeback is that since all natural laws are not at present known, it is at best premature to dismiss freewill as impossible in a materialistic universe. There are deterministic models with freewill that were covered in an online MIT Open class, but I only skimmed them because debating freewill ususlly gives me a headache. I'll post a link to class notes later.

Finally, the last statement about Guth inflation in the early moments of a Big Bang theory. Someone mentioned this on the forum a few weeks ago. I think the current take in this is that space/time can expand faster than lightspeed without violating relativity, because relativity disallows matter/energy moving faster than light, not space/time. I'll have to read up on that.(I said that last time it came up! I procrastinate,so sue me.) And, physical laws were different in barely understood ways in the beginning of any Big Bang theory, because of the enormous mass/energy densities.

Also, what's wrong with a scientist revising theory to fit data? That's the essence of science, and is why it is such a powerful intellectual process. Too bad more religious people can't revise beliefs to fit the facts of modern day life, instead of clinging to beliefs out-dated hundreds of years ago (this is an all-purpose dig at any close-minded religious folks, not any one religion.)
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
Another explanation that's been floated about the expansion of the universe in the early period is that relativity is local in some sense, so that sufficiently distinct areas may be relativistically unlinked, so to speak.

Basically, if it's outside a space-time point's light cone it's less clear as to what in relativity applies (some of the assumptions behind the calculations for relativity do not necessarily hold).
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 
Still researching TaK's criticism of Big Bang/inflation theory violating relativity. This link has many criticisms of Big Bang, though it is 6 years out of date (a long time in cosmology) and some flaws no longer apply. link
 

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Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
 
I just want to confess I got a c- in deductive logic so when it comes to big bad for real proofs, I don't even want to go there. Though I did get an A in informal logic. I remember my professor being particularly delighted with his own explanation of the literal meaning of "Everybody loves somebody". Something about a Universal Lovee.
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 

quote:

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433. ARGUMENT FROM KEVIN BACON

1) Kevin Bacon is haunting my dorm.
2) He keeps rattling and scratching at my door at night.
3) I prayed to Jebus, and Kevin Bacon hasn't broken down my door yet.
4) Therefore, God exists.

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I think I hurt myself laughing at that one.
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
Saxon, that isn't completely true. The 4 Gospel writers, for instance, each had a fairly definable agenda in their version of the gospel, and spun it accordingly, depending on the target audience (Jew, Gentile, etc..).

-Bok
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
I don't claim to be any sort of Biblical expert, but weren't the Gospels created rather a long time after Genesis?
 

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Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
 
Right, but you seemed to be talking about the Bible in general, which includes the Gospels.

-Bok
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Just for clarity, I think it's absolutely appropriate to revise theories to fit new discoveries and I am not critiquing the Big Bang theory (which I think the most likely of the ideas currently proposed about the origins of the Universe). Someone just said something about people rewriting old ideas to fit new discoveries as a flaw in metaphysics and I was pointing out that the same could be said WRT physics.

I'm also going to re-make a distinction that I seem to have left nebulous by poor wording.

I agree that "deterministic" was a bad word choice. My point was that quantum or chaos theory (as examples) do NOT provide an explanaton for our human sense of choice. Substituting randomness for determinism does not explain the idea of willful choice.

We constantly talk about personal preference. We constantly talk about decision making. We constantly try to convince each other of things (though our repeated failures might be a strong argument for determinism ). If these are *merely* mechanical processes, even if they are quantum processes, then our actions are mere reactions, however random, to the universe around us. Like a billiard ball, we are struck, and we rebound. There is no VOLITION involved. Yet, as humans, we all sense and act as if there is volition.

I like Rush. I like Dave Matthews Band. I like Ben and Jerry's Pistachio Pistachio Ice Cream. I like women with wider hips and thicker thighs and calves than most men do. I will say again that I am not here concerned to deny that these personal tastes could be the product of a mere combination of quantum randomness acting on varied inputs. I deny that anyone *acts* as if this is the case. Among the more particular items that this idea destroys is the concept of responsibility: how on earth can we hold someone responsible if all their actions are the product of randomness acting on their nature and nurture? But even those who say that the question is, indeed, nature or nurture and entirely forget the will still appeal to people's sense of justice or mercy or whatever is most appropriate to win their cause. More importantly, they still get angry, accusatory... they still BLAME even as they say that we shouldn't.

Does that make things more clear? Apparently (from the "therefore, God exists" list) my position is similar to that of Plantinga, whom I have never read, but perhaps he elucidates these ideas better than I have.

[ September 10, 2003, 10:32 AM: Message edited by: T. Analog Kid ]
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
Bok,

I see. No, I was actually just talking about Genesis.
 

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Posted by Jacare Sorridente (Member # 1906) on :
 

quote:

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I was having a conversation with a friend and his wife about some stuff I didn't understand about Genesis, stuff that didn't make sense to me. And my friend's wife immediately responded with the idea that Genesis is symbolic, and should not be taken literally. My friend, who is nonetheless firm in his belief, responded to her by saying that at some point, everyone took it literally. So I am having a little trouble with your use of the word "clearly." That is, it seems to me that whoever wrote the Bible, or, in the case that it comes from an oral tradition predating the written book, whoever started telling the story of Genesis (whether divinely inspired or not), probably believed the literal meaning of his/her (well, probably his) words. I'm not trying to debunk the Bible here, but I do think that you shouldn't be so cavalier with words like "clearly."

---

Saxon- you are absolutely right. My use of "clearly" was rather cavalier. In general there is a great deal of disagreement between which passages of scripture are to be taken literally and which are to be taken figuratively.

Still, I wonder about the statement that its intended audience all took it literally. I think that the intended audience had the necessary cultural background to allow them to understand much better than anyone today what the intended message of the Genesis story is.
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
Well, I won't pretend that I know how the ancient Jews and Christians interpreted the Genesis story. I don't think that my friend, if asked to reconsider his words, would make any such claim either. But it does seem likely to me that those people who were around thousands of years ago when the Genesis story was first being written/told were inclined to take the explanation literally. We have no reason to suspect that the ancient Norsemen didn't believe that the world is literally the body of the giant Ymir who happened to climb out of Ginungagap one day, or that the ancient Greeks didn't believe that humans were literally created out of clay by Prometheus.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
TAK: while I agree that humans have free will, the actions of humans cannot really be used to prove this. If humans actions are purely the result of random and determinalistic properties (with no "Free Will", whatever that wonderful undefined is), then observing those actions provides no data to disprove the theory. Given the randomness, even if we knew all the environmental variables (an inpossibility), we still wouldn't be able to predict an action and see if it matched up against a human's action, due to the randomness inherent in some things.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
I agree that it's not a proof. That's why I said it was a bastardized version of Pascal's Wager:

The sense of personal choice I'm talking about might be an illusion. It might be real. If I assume it's real and it isn't, no harm done. If I assume it's unreal and it is, maximum harm done. Therefore, I assume it's real. Everyone acts as if it is real, so I take it that, at least subconciously, they agree with me.
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
Saxon, I think there’s good reason to believe that by the time the stories were compiled as a single book (Genesis, not the whole Bible) the compilers weren’t taking them literally. Just the fact that they included two accounts of creation which conflict in details would indicate that. And there’s general consensus among scholars who do form-criticism that Genesis 1 was written as a worship liturgy and never intended as a “scientific” account at all.

Edit: Something here is reminding me of something my OT professor once said. If I wrote “I left my heart in San Francisco” you’d understand exactly what I meant. Three thousand years from now, some researcher might find those words and, being unfamiliar with the cultural reference but knowing that the technology of the twenty-first century did allow for heart transplants and artificial organs, assume that I meant it literally.

[ September 10, 2003, 01:51 PM: Message edited by: dkw ]
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
See there you go. I don't really know much about the history of Christianity/Judaism or the Bible, so I bow to your superior knowledge.

One thing I will point out about your example, though, dkw, is that the reason we say things like "I left my heart in San Francisco" is because at one point people believed that the heart, the actual physical organ, was where emotion was generated and stored, whereas today we know that the heart is more or less just a pump but still use the term symbolically.

[ September 10, 2003, 01:56 PM: Message edited by: saxon75 ]
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
Yep. But we don't know for sure what earlier writers believed and what they used symbolically because of what still earlier people believed.
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
Good point.
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Never underestimate the ability of the ancients to use and understand metaphor.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
TAK -- pretty much my perspective on Free Will, though I am an itinerant and amateur philosopher, so I strive for better definitions all the time .
 

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Posted by T. Analog Kid (Member # 381) on :
 
Wow, cool!

How often do people on opposite sides ever reach points of agreement on this stuff? ...and now we've done it twice on one thread!

<feeling very good about hatrack>

... Therefore, God exists! (kidding! kidding!)
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 

quote:

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But it does seem likely to me that those people who were around thousands of years ago when the Genesis story was first being written/told were inclined to take the explanation literally. We have no reason to suspect that the ancient Norsemen didn't believe that the world is literally the body of the giant Ymir who happened to climb out of Ginungagap one day, or that the ancient Greeks didn't believe that humans were literally created out of clay by Prometheus.

---

Just thought I'd throw my two cents in here too. It's my understanding that there is a great deal of evidence from both anthropology and comparative mythology that people in at least some ancient cultures didn't just view their cultural myths as literaly true.

Studies of comtemporary or near-contemporary aboriginal tribes shoes that there are mnay different styles of treating myths in non-"poluted" cultures. One of the more interesting descriptions comes from Schopenhouer (busy, don't want to look up spelling) who describes a attitude towards myths and rituals as "open behind". This sort of involves treating the myth as literaly true and, at the same time, a made-up story. In relation to rituals, there's a stereotypical image of African aboriginies wearing a god-mask and acting as that god. This happens and the way of viewing it is that the person is at the same time the god and a person wearing the god mask.

It's important to realize how "weird" in relation to the rest of the world the western worldview is. The way of seeing things that we as Americans take for granted is the "natural" way is at odds with nearly every other non-western society and took a long time to develop. We are at the very extreme of a lot of very fundamental, in terms of worldview, scales. As such, it is important to try as best as possible to not apply our invisible biases (e.g. seeing the world as made up of individuals) when we examine things in other cultural contexts.

[ September 10, 2003, 03:54 PM: Message edited by: MrSquicky ]
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
That's a very strong argument for God there, I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to counter it .

I'd even like to propose a corollary: hatrack and God exist, therefore so does Rita (though she's been a little quiet lately).
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
I'm coming in a little late on this, but, man I don't want to go back to work (Stupid JTables!). If I can, I'm going to widen the question to what is the role of reason in religion in general.

I think the simple answer is that reason applies to religion in just about the same way that it applies to anything else. I'm not saying what I think a lot of people think they just heard there: that religion shouldn't be followed because it is unreasonable. Rather than decrying religion because it isn't reasonable, I think we should be looking at whether being unreasonable is always a bad thing.

People have brought up Occam's razor. For me this is maybe most important concept when talking about reason and religion. Again, I'm not saying what many people are probably hearing. William of Occam was a 13th century Catholic theologian and philosopher and a member of the "Schoolmen", which is a label given to a group of philosophers active around this time who were trying to bring reason into the Church as much as possible. William's conclusion, when using his razor ("One should not multiply entities needlessly", was not as someone above had claimed that the simplest expanation for anything was that "God did it", but rather that due to this constraint on reasoning, the existence of God was beyond the domain of reason.

One of the central traditions of western logic is the contradictory dichotomoy. Good/bad, left/right, rational/irrational - these are all examples of this. There is often an unstated assumption that a thing either conforms to reason or goes against reason. William posited a third state, which, borrowing from Buddhism, I like to refer to as mu-reasonable. This is the state where, as I said above, reason has nothing to say about the question at hand. It just doesn't apply; it's like asking if something feels blue or pink.

Back to dichotomies. We've very quicky set up the dichotomoy of reasonable/unreasonable. I agree that this is a very useful distinction. However, there is a very important point missing. I feel like there is an underlying assumption that reasonable=good and unreasonable=bad. I think that it's important to state that the situation acts more like a matrix, with there being good reasonable and bad reasonable as well as good unreasonal and bad unreasonable.

This begs the very important question, is there are good unreasonable? For me, from a spiritual, philosophical, and scientific or reasonable standpoint, the answer is a yes.

Spiritual/philosophically, let me propose a three level model of man's existence. There is the subconscious, the conscious, and the superconscious. I doubt the first two are new to anyone, but maybe the third needs a little explaining. This is the level that is generally equivilent to what many would call the soul. It's my belief that the first two levels are bound up in causality. That is, they can only deal with a world where something happens and then causes something else. The only inputs are genetics and environment. To put it another way, they are completely deterministic. Were these the only levels of existence, man would be a robot, without free-will.

This is introduced by the third level, the superconscious. This allows man to not be driven by events, but rather choose among possible perceptions. In The Tao of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator likens this to the awareness that goes before the analytical knife of consciousness, directing the knife as to what form to cut experience into. I like that metaphor, although I'm not sure it comes across without a fuller explanation than I just gave. It is this super-conscious that provides the opportunity for such things - sometimes classified as transcendental experiences - as love, creativity, and self-actualization.

To keep it short, I'll just touch briefly on creativity when talking about the reasonable side. The scientific literature on creativity strongly supports the idea that creativity is itself an mu-reasonable act and that a strong concern with conforming to reason hinders rather than helps creativity. I'm going to leave that right there, because it's such a big topic, I don't know where to start on a summary. Look into it a bit; I'm confident you'll see what I'm talking.

From an empirical standpoint, I find that reading from two of the most creative people of the 20th century also suggests that there is a good case for embracing unreason to enhance creativity. When studying creativity, I think most people come across the writings of Henri Poincare, a highly accomplished mathematician from the early 20th century. Somewhat lesser known, but, in the field of creativity at least, as accomplished is Viola Spolin, the informal founder of the American improvinisational acting tradition. I think that the first few chapters of her Improvisation for the Theater should be consider the place where anyone interested in studying the subject should start.

All this is not a blanket endorsement of unreason, however. It's just the opposite. As I said, there is good unreason and bad unreason. A quick look at human society easily shows that the bad unreason is very much ascendent.

It's a trivial exercise to show that, even (or maybe espeically) in America, a country whose citizens take a great deal of pride in its rationality, people behave incredibly irrationally. Not only that, but they often find it extremely difficult to tell the difference between their rational and irrational motivations.

If this is so, it stands to reason (and psychological or historical analysis) that people are in general also very bad at distingiushing between the unreasonable promptings of their subconscious and their mu-reasonable promptings of their superconscious. It then becomes extremely important to learn how to tell the difference. As we've just counted out sub- and super-consciousness, the only thing left to do this with is the conscious.

This brings up right back to religion in tow different contexts. First, in reference to the individual, if they are concerned with achieving religious enlightenment, they should be extremely concerned with gaining enough self-knowledge to support this sort of thing.

In the larger social context this implies something that we really had to wait for the Enlightenment to be codified and I have no idea how long before it actually becomes the rule of the land. Unreason may be from the superconscious but reasonable analysis shows that it is more likely from the subconscious and we have no way of telling the difference. Furthermore, especially from a religious standpoint, unreason has been such a negative influence on the human race, that it took a group that was directly anti-religious and anti-unreason to establish the rule for such a place as America. As such, the Enlightenment suggested the idea that the only responsible way to organize society was off of reasonable structures.

For religions have long exceeded the mu-reasonable area. They constantly put themselves into places or hold stances where they can be subject to rational analysis. When dealing with the transcendental experiences of the individual, they are pretty much untouchable by reason, but anytime they suggest principles or organize people or advocate causes, they put themselves in a place where they can be judged as reasonable or not. Every time they attempt to describe the world, a la the Earth being the center of the universe, they can tested. Every time they describe a view of human beings, a la man is at his base evil and cannot be good without belonging to my religion, they stand exposed to analyis. Every time they make a prediction that doesn't deal exclusively with mu-reasonable areas, that prediction can be confirmed or denied by reason. Every time they form a group, that group can be examined to see how it stacks up against other groups.

One of the hallmarks of subconcious beliefs is a prtotective attitude towards them. A person or organization holding such beliefs are rarely going to welcome rational examination of these beliefs. Religion ruled all for a long time and still does in many parts of the world. In such cases, those who persist in questioning these beliefs are reacted to most strongly even to the point or the Arabic empire pulling itself to pieces over their once revered tradition of rational inquiry. Where the irrational person doesn't want to look at their beliefs and is constrained from agressiving towards those who are, they seek to set up excuses for not examining them. Thus, as in America today, it's semi-accepted to hold some amazing irrational beliefs (e.g. The Bible contains the literal stories of creation even though the two stories of creation logically contradict each other) if you claim that they are religious.

In the final analysis, I don't think that religion deserves the special treatment that it seems to get. By that I mean, the bad unreason of religious people isn't any different from the bad unreason of secular issues. Rather than singling out religion, it is better to focus on the overarching human reality of this bad unreason. Especially since just as it hard for people defending a religion to tell if they're defending good unreason or bad, it is likewise difficult for it detractors.
 

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Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
 
I bow to your superior knowledge of William of Ockham.
 

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Posted by Glenn Arnold (Member # 3192) on :
 
Mr Squicky:

"To keep it short"?

Also, although I suspect there are a lot of titles that are similar, do you mean Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Or is there another book called the Tao of Motorcycle maintenance? I've read ZATAOMM, and it sounds like something that was in there (talking about a priori knowledge) but I don't remember it (the knife) specifically.

Maybe this should be another thread, but I wonder what value atheists here can find in religion/belief?
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
Glenn,
Ooops, yeah, you're right. I was sort of blazing through that post and let little things like actually getting book titles right slide. It's weird though, I've talked to few people who've read that book and haven't remembered the knife thing, which seemed to me to be one of the central points.

As for short, for me that was pretty short. Well, not really, but it's nowhere near the longest post I've ever written.

[ September 10, 2003, 11:54 PM: Message edited by: MrSquicky ]
 

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Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
 
Squicky, I find it very interesting that you use the terms subconscious and superconscious. Are you a neo-freudian or are you just using terms that us poor, dumb non-psychology majors will understand?
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
Storm,
It's neither. I'm pretty sure I got the idea to use those terms from Viktor Frankl's The Unconcious God, but I can't be sure because I can't seem to find my copy. Anyway, subconscious has long been an accepted term to use outside of the Freudian tradition. I didn't mean to suggest Freud's superego bu saying superconscious, but rather to highlight it's unconscious nature and surface similarity to the subconscious.

I have a lot of respect for Freud and his successors and I find that they have a lot of realy valid things to say. However, if I had to label myself, I'd probably say that I'm an existential humanist, which is pretty opposite of Freudian theory.
 

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Posted by Morbo (Member # 5309) on :
 

quote:

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SUMMARY AND PREVIEW:
Hard determinism is the view that determinism is true and that because of this freedom is an illusion. Soft determinism agrees with hard determinism that determinism is true, but maintains that this doesnít rule out free will. That is, determinism and free will are compatible. For this reason soft determinists are called compatibilists. Hard determinists are incompatibilists. That leaves the libertarian, who agrees with incompatibilism, but holds that determinism is false--­free acts occur and are undetermined. So, if DET is determinism, FREE is free will, and INC is incompatibilism, the positions are these:[for table click on link]

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