posted
I said I wasn't going to debate the anthropic principle, but...this sums it up:
quote: We should expect that our universe has features compatible with our existence, since, after all, we exist.
from my link at top of page. A fairly self-evident if trivial tautology ( a statement true by virtue of its logical form alone.) I don't understand why you mock it so much, Jacare."Or in this case 'I exist therefore I exist'" is another tautology, but it is not quite equivelent to WAP.
Ahh, in re-reading your posts, I see that it bothers you when atheists use it in proofs of the non-existance of God. Fugu has a good take on WAP, it is often misstated and misused in theological arguments. My view would be that WAP implies that the sole fact of existence, taken by itself, does not imply either God or no God. Also, WAP is not a proof. It is a self-contained logical statement that is true (well, its truth is debatable, I suppose.) The only "assumption" it makes is that we do in fact exist. I assume you would not find this baseless.
quote: 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.
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.) Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
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
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. linkPosts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
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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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.
I think I hurt myself laughing at that one.
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posted
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..).
posted
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
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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quote: 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
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
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.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
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. Posts: 2112 | Registered: Sep 1999
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posted
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.
posted
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.
posted
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
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 .
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote: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.
posted
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).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
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.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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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?
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
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.
posted
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? Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
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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quote: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]
from MIT Open Course 24.00 Problems in Philosophy, Prof. Sally Haslanger.(pdf format, need Adobe Acrobat (free download) to read)
So I guess that makes you a libertarian, Tak, in this limited philosphophical sense anyway. I am a former soft determinist, now not sure.
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If I were to try to refine it, I'd say that my position is that soft determinism is incompatible with my sense of will and hard determinism explains it as an illusion.
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