What if I’m wrong? (2023)
behavioralscientist.org
behavioralscientist.org
What I notice more and more, is the "you're wrong" is used to buttress opinion masquerading as fact. If you preface "I think that.." to asserts it doesn't stop the "you're wrong" but it at least puts the discussion into the realms of conjecture about things, including facts, rather than simple asserts of facts which are often not as factual as they seem.
I also notice that argument by analogy is being over-used. Because you want to compare your large single CPU to a multi CPU doesn't mean it actually is a Bull compared to a herd of chickens. Or that cat-herding is actually much harder than it looks: you need the right kind of cream. Wait.. that analogy might not work here..
"It's best practice" should invite the question of "according to who, in which publications? What are the circumstances of the practice, are they similar to our circumstances?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
Edit:
Verb tergiversate (third-person singular simple present tergiversates, present participle tergiversating, simple past and past participle tergiversated)
(intransitive) To evade, to equivocate using subterfuge; to obfuscate in a deliberate manner.
(intransitive) To change sides or affiliation; to apostatize.
(intransitive, rare) To flee by turning one's back.
Why does The New York Times use anonymous sources? https://www.nytimes.com/article/why-new-york-times-anonymous...
A Look at Journalists' Use of Anonymous Sources https://www.voanews.com/amp/journalists-use-anonymous-source...
Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee Position Papers: Anonymous Sources https://www.spj.org/ethics-papers-anonymity.asp
Everything-but-the-kitchen-sink: a guide to confidential sources https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2018/12/07/the-everything...
https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Avoid_weasel_words
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_peacock_terms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Word...
If you look at the history of industry trends over the last X decades, most of which were replaced by the next trend due to the pain that was eventually discovered, you will find many people claiming the new trend was "best practice" typically mid-way through the hype cycle and before the actual trade-offs become well known.
I find this sentence kind of funny. If you thought your opinions were bad wouldn’t you change them?
IMO.
Some people don't remember what opinions they had in the past? Remembering all the time I was wrong and learned something new or changed my mind etc is embarrassing, not sure how you could forget all that.
Like, people must remember which candidates they voted for in the past, right? So if they switch side during an election, do they really fool themselves into thinking that they always supported their new side? I don't really believe that. I'd rather believe that they lie about their past because it is embarrassing to have been wrong.
I have noticed that in myself, but I have observed in some people it takes the form of “I didn’t shift, the party did”.
They aren’t completely wrong either, political parties like the people that comprise them are constantly changing. But if you aren’t careful to avoid fooling yourself it’s not too hard to do.
A recount of an action may be wrong. e.g. "He did X" when in actuality he did Y.
This one seems especially pernicious, not because of extremely over-wrought comparisons, but because sometimes the analogy fits really well on the surface. But beyond the structural fit, it does not really help prove anything.
Too often I'll encounter an analogy wielded as if it proves the underlying point, when the reality is that it breaks down quickly if you dive into the details.
Analogies can be great to help establish new mental models, or to try out an idea with terminology that people already understand, but can be quite misleading. Better used for learning than trying to prove things.
While the analogy may have been instrumental in helping change your mind, it likely did so by helping you understand the actual underlying argument.
> While the analogy may have been instrumental in helping change your mind, it likely did so by helping you understand the actual underlying argument.
The world would be a much better place if that was true, but sadly people base their world view largely on feelings and those feelings often doesn't care about the underlying arguments but they can feel the analogies. That goes for you and me as well, feelings are a fundamental part of human thinking, you can't just ignore that just because formal logic says it isn't important.
For example, a person might say that they are against racism but they are pro discriminating against white people. That aligns with their feelings, but it is inconsistent and you would need something more than formal logic to make them see that inconsistency. And once they see it you didn't do it by making them understand a formal argument, you did it by changing how they feel about things, they already agreed with you that discrimination is bad they just didn't apply that consistently due to their feelings clouding their minds.
Can you remind the class about Gödel's second incompleteness theorem and what it says about consistency in formal logic systems?
But if the only thing that convinced you of a thing is an analogy or emotional appeal, and if in being convinced you learned nothing about the underlying argument the analogy is supporting, you are susceptible to being convinced by similarly compelling analogies or emotional appeals that may or may not have any grounding in a solid argument.
I’m not claiming that people can’t be convinced this way. I’m pointing out that this form of persuasion is problematic and insufficient. “Argument from analogy” is considered a fallacy for this reason. It can lead people to take on new beliefs for bad reasons, even if the position they take is the “right” one.
While emotions absolutely influence our beliefs, it’s not accurate to downplay the role of formal logic, which is often implicitly invoked by emotional dialogue. The two are not mutually exclusive, and they work together.
For example: in a discussion about climate change, a purely logical presentation of facts about the temperature of the ocean and receding ice is not compelling without understanding the implications. Painting a picture of potentially cataclysmic outcomes and mass extinction events and migrations evokes an emotional response that is also necessary for humans to take action.
In this example, either one without the other can be problematic. Pure facts logically presented are hard to interpret, especially if you aren’t a climatologist. And if there is no logical foundation whatsoever, the argument is on shaky ground and the person who now believes it will have no reason not to believe the next emotionally compelling thing.
It’s easy to argue against and for “badness” of any reasons. It’s a totally valid, and good argument that somebody just feels it. All of us do this on some level. Just because I feel it that we should consider things “good” when they are generally good for world’s society in general in some specific metrics, and builds my thoughts about more topic solely on that, from how to handle cigarette buds to how to ask something from a waiter, it doesn’t mean that somebody has a less valid point when they didn’t made the effort to follow through every questions regarding that, and cut it at “I feel X way”. No matter what they think regarding any topic.
Of course, when they are expressing this feeling, they should be upfront about it. But they are almost never, and they almost never too far away from the feeling.
And even then, you can have internal conflicts. Just because of your feelings.
Case in point: eating beef. It’s not good to anybody. I still do it. I violate my core principles for it. All the time.
And of course some topics are way foggier. Like travelling. It’s definitely good for my state of mind, and my friendships, but it’s definitely not good for the society that I fly every other week and I travel to other countries by other means every week.
Everybody has these.
Wittgenstein was wrong, but people never want to accept it.
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/72280/first-p...
For example, I convince you that flying causes insanity because my uncle once flew and went insane, and the situation affected me so deeply that I urge you with every ounce of persuasion I have not to suffer the fate of my uncle. Let’s say you stopped flying because of my story, and later found that you had no reason to believe it. This is what I’m referring to. Maybe it’s “good” that you stopped flying for climate reasons, but the reason you stopped was “bad”. And this matters because the moment you realize the reason was a bad one, you may think there’s no longer a reason not to fly (assuming my story was the only reason you were avoiding it).
You’re describing a scenario where you understand the potential “badness” - presumably based on evidence - but choose the “bad” option anyway. This is a very different scenario and not what I was getting at.
> you want to show that the reasons are not what’s stated
In this case, either Y isn’t important at all, or there is also something else besides Y, which is not stated. In other words, X is not because of Y logically.
And a big driver of that seems to be that either the debate isn't about facts so nobody cares, or frequently that the experts don't have a well advertised an opinion on an important subject. It really turns up in economics where finding facts is a challenge. The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are.
I'm sure that there are economists who are devoting their lives to figuring out what happened in China because it is an interesting and important topic. But where the facts are being surfaced is not obvious and it isn't going to make its way through the broader public discourse.
TLDR; finding any facts in any public discussion is actually a bit of a challenge. It tends to be opinion all the way down until the trail goes cold.
[1] I find most policy debates I get into with friends have nothing to do with the policy at hand but rather more core political/philosophical questions underlying their thinking (e.g. do the ends justify the means or are they more individualist va collectivist)
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I think it's pretty well understood that the growth of China is thanks to the market reforms in the 70s and 80s.
Is it though? China's economic growth doesn't seem that far off (per capita) from that of South Korea or Taiwan.
There are social contexts where clarity of statement and lucidity of thought *are not* among the tools/objectives of an encounter/interaction.
But in debate or education or in any other case where clear words and ideas are indeed among the tools/objectives, avoiding them or undermining them is being a different kind of jerk.
Ina a similar vein, when people talk about managing creative technical types as ‘herding cats’ I respond that this is a management style issue: You don’t herd cats, you give them something to chase.
Additionally, I think arguing by analogy is a sign that you lack real / structural arguments, real understanding.
I wish I could say the same about Freud, but that ladder is distressingly horizontal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/19/ideas.g2
> In religion, a truth claim is an assertion that the belief system holds to be true; however, from the existence of an assertion that the belief system holds to be true, it does not follow that the assertion is true. For example, a truth claim in Judaism is that only one God exists. Conflicting truth claims between different religions can be a cause of religious conflict. The theory of truth claims has been advanced by John Hick.
A statement which is not even wrong is one that can’t or isn’t expressed properly as a logical assertion or argument but rather asserted without evidence or in such a way that it is made to seem inherently or intuitively obvious. Such a statement isn't argued for or against properly or logically, or isn’t otherwise properly expressed or derived, or a statement or claim which falls short of making a concrete point or argument which can be dismissed or validated on the basis of evidence or logical argument.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
> Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_value
> In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values (true or false).
What I'm saying is that Ptolemy, Aristotle, etc did a great service to humanity by taking a stab at hard problems, even if their solutions were convincing but wrong. Whether they knew it or not they were the primordial programmers writing a throw-away prototype upon which all future progress was based.
Reflecting on his experience in the Second World War, he said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning."
At any rate, along the way over the course of 9 months or so I found a technology stack that supported all my requirements and ran into a bunch of roadblocks. Lots of things related to how internal bits of GCP APIs are handled - the internal libraries had documentation indicating that streaming APIs were supported, and that each chunk of the request would be passed from the API proxy/backend multiplexer to the actual API server as they arrived. This worked for streaming responses, but not for streaming requests, and so I had to add that functionality to the API proxy. That was a huge pain - really hairy c++ code using fibers with multiple layers of request processing wrappers. But I worked thru that and got it landed into the google-wide binary, and never worried about it again.
I got this project to the level I needed it to support the precise requirements for the (regulated medical device) system I was working on. Around this time the GCP Cloud Healthcare group was getting started, and they built a new system using a fair number of bits of my implementation, which they'd eventually replace completely. But my first system saved them most of a year or work, resulting in the CHC feature set rapidly leapfrogging what I'd built.
[fn] not kidnapping, but a logical (procedural) method like induction or deduction
As for psychoanalysis as a whole, it's definitely not my preferred cup of tea but I do believe those people that say that it has genuinely helped them, in which case all the power to them and to psychoanalysis. Maybe treat it through a functionalist prism? (just an idea) Similar to meditation, let's say (similar as in there's no scientific "basis" behind it but I also do believe that meditation helps some people, similar to psychoanalysis).
Of course, that would not solve the issue with "what should we do with the psychoanalysis crooks?", the same issue that probably gets asked when it comes to meditation crooks, meaning grifters trying to live off psychoanalysis/meditation/any similar movement. I don't know what the best answer for that would be, maybe some sort of community-based validation/word of mouth thingie?
And, in fact, Ptolemy was more "right" than heliocentric circles (as opposed to ellipses).
You have to have both elliptical orbits and inverse square law forces to predict better than Ptolemy.
It wasn't until the telescope allowed seeing Venusian phases that geocentricity was actively disproven.
> Distributed understanding is a real phenomenon, but you have to get yourself into a community of communicators that can effectively summon the relevant expertise.
Frankly, I don't think hackernews is all that different in terms of community from Reddit. People are just better at hiding it. Many are regurgitating rhetoric they've heard in other posts without having experience with a subject. Even in the realms of programming, it's not hard to see how little experience people have with the things they demonize or evangelize.
Especially after all the debates on free will with Sapolsky.
Instead it ended up being backhanded self complement, more like, "a lot of other great people agree with me, so maybe I'm wrong, but probably not".
"Descartes’s theory of everything is, even in hindsight, remarkably coherent and persuasive. It is hard to imagine a different equally coherent and equally false theory! He was wrong, and so of course I may well be wrong, but enough other thinkers I respect have come to see things my way that when I ask myself, “What if we are wrong?” I can keep this skeptical murmur safely simmering on a back burner."
I expected him to write back with some eloquent or witty or pithy defense of the link between the title and the contents, but he just thanked me and said, "yes, now that you put it that way, it probably is the wrong title. Oops, too late."
In other words, any attempt to break down the mind into component parts is better than declaring it a lost cause and hypothesizing your favorite alternative instead (god, soul, one-ness, consciousness as an essential property, etc).
It's just from the title, I thought there was going to be some 'inciteful about face', like he had some new 'other way to think about things' that just couldn't wait for the next book. So had hopes up more.
I also can't prove Ra, Zeus, Thor, Unicorns, Ghosts, or Superman don't exist.
It never has lead to a point that proves God exists or not. Unless philosophy has moved way beyond my readings and I missed it.
There are no physical proofs available that Christian it is right. As I say, it is all based on faith and belief.
Several other religions also have long philosophical traditions that are equally plausible - or not - and for which no physical proof exists.
The map is not the territory.
There are also miracles with thousands of witnesses, most notably that at Fatima. The witnesses included not just Catholics, but also Protestants, atheists and those of other religions. https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/Meet_the_Witnesses.pdf
[0] See Edward Feser's Five Proofs
Not sure what you mean, any clear sign from a god would apply here. You seem to believe that such a thing isn't possible making their position irrational, but then I wonder how you can still say you believe in a god? Do you believe that God can't intervene in this world?
But for example, if God manifested giant talking heads all over the world I am pretty sure atheism would disappear very quickly.
What evidence (or counter-evidence) do you suggest I present to show that my disbelief in Thor or Odin is wrong?
Similarly, if one lived all one's life in a rationalist bubble, and never even heard the mention of God or gods or religion or the supernatural, then perhaps one could not have an opinion on whether God exists. But that applies neither to you nor to Dennet.
How would I know that my disbelief in Thor is wrong? At a first cut, I'd need to have someone propose a more concrete proposition to evaluate; then I could try to evaluate it. But whatever that proposition is, it would need to be able to accommodate all that we've learned about the world and about science; it would need to be falsifiable; and it would need to explain the world in a more satisfactory manner than the alternative worldviews.
So for me the first time I really thought about whether god existed was in internet discussions. When I learned about the religions in school it was just a bunch of cool stories and cultural things, there was no need to think whether any of that was real or not. And when I got into internet discussions and first encountered religious people I wondered why they thought a fantasy story was real, but apparently you can't ask them that.
Anyway, unlike fantasy stories, religious people are led into belief due to things like people insisting that a religion is true, arguments that suggest that God exist, and spiritual experiences. Maybe this isn't convincing to you, but it's markedly different from a fairy tale.
I just never met such people irl so I have no idea what that is like. Like, having a bunch of people trying to gaslight you into believing in these stories feels like a nightmare to me, I can see why you would say you believe just to make the nightmare end.
The only very religious person I talked to about these things irl said that belief is a very personal thing and he didn't care about what others thinks or doesn't think. I think that is much healthier, and with such an approach you get almost no believers since there is no longer any pressure to believe things we wouldn't naturally believe in.
Anyway, they're not really "gaslight[ing] you into believing in these stories" any more than a climate change activist is doing that. They believe their stories are true and that it would have a positive effect on you and the world if you too were to believe in it.
Assuming that you believe in the miracles of the old and new testaments, how would such things be proven false? For them to be positive evidence for the existence of God, we should at least be able to imagine how we'd go about refuting them.
No, right now you probably have no opinion on the subject. And depending on context are perfectly willing to entertain either or neither. The world will be a much better place when people stop having opinions on things just because someone asked them to pick a team.
There are no attempts at proof (that I'm aware of) for the existence of these mythical deities. There are several for the existence of the God of monotheism, which I believe to be sound, but will struggle to fit into a combox.
Further, the thing we imagine them to be is different in kind from the God of monotheism. There are sound explanations of why this is so, but (again) they won't fit into a combox.
See Edward Feser's Five Proofs for the Existence of God, and some of his other works, if you care to explore this further. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and the like ignore, or grossly straw-man, these arguments.
Like if the gases of a nebula got rearranged to spell out “God is real”, then sure yeah I guess they are real.
But then I changed my mind: now I believe that agnosticism is just a "shy" way of being atheist, somehow trying to say "I don't believe in a particular deity, but I can't commit to saying that I believe there is no deity". But that's the whole point of a belief: I could be wrong, and it would be okay to change my mind. A belief is not a proven fact.
So I am an atheist: I don't believe in any particular deity, and in fact I do believe that there is no such thing. But obviously if you proved my belief wrong, then I would change my belief :-).
This is inside out. What evidence was presented to you that made you believe Christianity was right?
I became an Atheist in large part because I took Latin my first year in high school and realized that the Roman's actually believed in their gods the same way that I believed in the Christian god. And I gradually realized that they had the same reason to believe that I did ... they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up.
> I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong.
I can't speak for Dennet, but for me it would just be ANY evidence: a verifiable miracle, proof of life after death, or meeting an angel/demon.
I don't think this is really the right way to think about Christianity for many believers. C.S. Lewis says, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." It's not so much that Christianity is just another fact lying out there that we just happened to stumble upon, and now we use scientific tools to investigate whether it's true or false. No - it's a belief that shapes the very way we understand the world. It's a worldview. That's not to say that it's necessarily correct, but just that it's not a belief that we necessarily acquire in the same way we might acquire a belief about what 1+1 is or how many planets orbit the sun. It's much like how someone born and raised atheist doesn't hold their belief in atheism because of some evidence for that view. We can still argue about Christianity, atheism, or other religions, of course, that's fine - but it's not obvious that there's some inherent irrationality in asking "what could show Christianity to be false" instead of "what convinced me Christianity is true".
>they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up. This is true, but if the implication is that belief in Roman paganism is on just as firm intellectual ground as belief in Christianity, that seems unfair given the rich intellectual history spanning millennia of the latter to which the former isn't really comparable at all.
Just like if someone chalks up inconsistencies in the Bible to "God testing us" or the fact that the Bible has been edited repeatedly, picking whatever parts supported their authority at the time, that I'm probably being scammed.
Now Christianity is so fragmented and personal in it's belief system that to say "what evidence do you have that it's not real" does feel backwards. I have equal evidence in any religion as I do in Christianity.
My point was not you, as an atheist, shouldn't ask "what evidence do you have that Christianity is true". Rather, my point was that a Christian, in thinking rationally, is not forced to ask "what evidence do I have for this belief?". You as a nonbeliever might see just as good evidence in other religions as Christianity, great, that's fine.
For Christians. You kind of do have to grapple with the fact that billions of people do not have that worldview, and therefore you do have to compare the Christian worldview to the non-Christian worldview.
> >they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up.
> This is true, but if the implication is that belief in Roman paganism is on just as firm intellectual ground as belief in Christianity, that seems unfair given the rich intellectual history spanning millennia of the latter to which the former isn't really comparable at all.
Maybe that's the case with Roman mythology (though I don't have the dates), but what about Hinduism? Buddhism? Islam? Judaism?
All of these have comparable histories.
For the Christian, this is presumably part of asking "what would lead me to believe Christianity is false?". That is, asking whether other religions should lead one to conclude Christianity is not true.
>Maybe that's the case with Roman mythology (though I don't have the dates)
Well, more than just the dates, it's about the intellectual rigor of people thinking about the theology. There is no serious equivalent in Roman mythology to, for example, Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, which includes grappling with questions such as "Whether the existence of God is self-evident?", "Whether God is the supreme good?", and "Whether sacred doctrine is a matter of argument?".
>but what about Hinduism? Buddhism? Islam? Judaism?
These are all fine traditions! Far and above Roman mythology. You could replace "Christianity" with any of these in my original comment, and it would still apply. There's a world of difference between "a silly belief that people held when they were a child and continue to hold just because of inertia" and "a serious belief with a rich intellectual history, though one among several other such beliefs".
I'm genuinely curious - do you actually know this? Or are you just assuming this based on the age of the Roman empire, the fact that they were older generations, etc? Cause I personally don't know that much about it, but we know ancient civilizations grappled with these kinds of questions all the time.
> These are all fine traditions! Far and above Roman mythology. You could replace "Christianity" with any of these in my original comment, and it would still apply. There's a world of difference between "a silly belief that people held when they were a child and continue to hold just because of inertia" and "a serious belief with a rich intellectual history, though one among several other such beliefs".
Yes, but I think you misunderstood my meaning. I was saying, if you substitute "Roman Mythology" with e.g. "Islam" in the parent comment, you can't just as easily brush it aside by saying "there is not rich intellectual tradition there".
As a Christian believer, I think you do have to grapple with billions of people, some of them as smart and sophisticate as any Christian, who follow a different belief system. That's why you have to argue "from the inside" as it were about why Christianity is right - some reason it is more correct than any other belief, or that other beliefs are wrong.
An Atheist makes a simpler argument - all of these beliefs are wrong. That is applied equally and consistently to all the different beliefs. A Christian by definition agrees with the Atheist on 99% of religious beliefs - namely all non-Christian beliefs - and probably for the same reason (lack of evidence that they are correct).
I say this because there are no seriously-taken arguments for the Roman mythological gods (or anything like them) like there are for foundational beliefs of the other religions you mention (none that I have heard of in my studies, at least... I'd be very interested to hear them if they exist). And because the ancient philosophers - e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus - generally drifted away from popular mythology to something more akin to monotheism.
>Yes, but I think you misunderstood my meaning. I was saying, if you substitute "Roman Mythology" with e.g. "Islam" in the parent comment, you can't just as easily brush it aside by saying "there is not rich intellectual tradition there".
I see - I made that point about intellectual history there because the implication originally seemed to be that both Roman mythology and Christianity are just silly beliefs that people held as children and continued to hold because they hadn't thought about it. That isn't to say that that alone shows Christianity is true, just that it's a set of beliefs we need to take more seriously.
>As a Christian believer, I think you do have to grapple with billions of people, some of them as smart and sophisticate as any Christian, who follow a different belief system. That's why you have to argue "from the inside" as it were about why Christianity is right - some reason it is more correct than any other belief, or that other beliefs are wrong.
If Christianity was a conclusion reached after a set of rational arguments, you would be right. But belief in Christianity is sort of logically prior to rational argumentation. Of course, we have Christian apologetics, which make arguments for certain aspects of Christianity, but this isn't really the reason to believe so much as it is just motivation for people who think in more intellectual terms to take it seriously. Faith is beyond the domain of human reason - the Christian's belief is founded in a kind of immediate, self-evident spiritual experience that comes logically prior to arguments. We might still discover internal inconsistencies that might motivate us to rethink this worldview, of course.
This might sound kind of silly. But there is a point at which your justifications of your beliefs have to bottom out. Can you start with only naturalist/scientific premises and reach Christianity? No, even if you agree to Christian apologetic arguments, they will not get you to Christianity proper. In this sense, atheism, Christianity, and other religions are each in a kind of bubble that arguments alone can't let you escape from. It still makes sense to talk about internal consistency (inconsistencies should probably lead us to drop the system), but I don't think we can really make any progress by trying to argue about the foundational premises themselves, if that makes sense.
As for your final comment - Christianity does share a lot in common with other religions. It shares a lot with Islam and Judaism, the other Abrahamic religions. It's maybe not apt to characterize Islam and Judaism as "simply false" from the Christian perspective - there are significant elements of truth even though the overall system is false. This is true, I think, even for the eastern religions.
Yes! I think this is the crux of the matter. I also think this is why discussions involving religion are often unsatisfactory to me. This very thread started with a discussion on _evidence_. And the rest of the discussion is from a _rational_ perspective. But then evidence or rationality only work with scrutiny, including and especially of the axioms. So if discussions on Christianity start with the _premise_ that Christianity is true, then can there really be any further discussion? For instance, elsewhere in a comment you wrote:
> a Christian, in thinking rationally, is not forced to ask "what evidence do I have for this belief?"
In everyday life, this is fine. But when discussing Christianity rationally, questioning the premise is an important part of the process, no?
I present some of my own thinking below. I am taking Christianity only as an example in the context of this thread, but it applies to any revealed religion.
"I" exist. Presumably the universe I experience also exists. Why? There's a First Cause that brought them into existence. We can call it God. This is the closest religion and science can get, because this definition of God is without any pre-defined qualities. For instance, God can be non-dualistic (God _is_ the universe, or in other words, the universe is its own cause), and even mathematical (Physics' Theory of Everything, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis). We only have a set of possibilities here.
But Christianity then takes certain leaps.
* God is omnipotent and omniscient. Why? Even a God that is only finite in power and knowledge could have created this universe. Think "super-scientists" in a base reality. So do we really have to take God to be limitless in His capacity?
* God is all-loving and personally cares about His creation. Why? God could have just created the universe and stepped aside, not caring at all about human prayers or actions. So do really have to worry about Heaven and Hell, especially as defined in Christianity?
* God is Good. Why? A fallible God (or even the _evil_ Devil) could have created this universe. It would explains the problem of suffering, or why God seemingly revealed Himself multiple times with conflicting mutually exclusive instructions, perhaps due to incompetence or deliberate manipulation. So say God did actually reveal Himself as the life and tribulations of Christ. Is Christ a reliable arbiter of what is true and good? What if it was the Devil who came down multiple times as Christ/Allah/Buddha, just to mess with humanity? This is an important question I think, and would love to hear if there is a better justification than a priori faith.
Faith plays an important role for many of my family members and friends and by no means would I want to take it away. But I do get interested whenever religion wants to be an exclusive arbiter of reality and what's right or wrong. And every time, I have found it to fall short of all its claims.
>> If Christianity was a conclusion reached after a set of rational arguments, you would be right. But belief in Christianity is sort of logically prior to rational argumentation. Of course, we have Christian apologetics, which make arguments for certain aspects of Christianity, but this isn't really the reason to believe so much as it is just motivation for people who think in more intellectual terms to take it seriously. Faith is beyond the domain of human reason - the Christian's belief is founded in a kind of immediate, self-evident spiritual experience that comes logically prior to arguments. We might still discover internal inconsistencies that might motivate us to rethink this worldview, of course.
I respectfully disagree with every sentence (except the last).
Firstly, I think God's existence can be proved rationally, using arguments that take very basic empirical observations as premises (for example: "things change", "things behave predictably", "there are multiple instances of the same thing"). I don't think these are arguments that fit into a combox, which is frustrating but that's the reality -- although I think most of the common arguments against God's existence can be dealt without many words.
Secondly, once God's existence is established, I think the empirical basis of Christianity specifically (evidence for the resurrection) is sound. I think the common objections fail. Many of the objections are variants on Hume's, which amounts to "the resurrection is so unlikely given my philosophical assumptions that literally any explanation for the observed facts is more likely". Once Hume's assumptions are undermined (in stage 1), the facts take on a very different light.
Thirdly, I think Catholicism is internally consistent and has further evidence in its favour -- including miracles, continuity of institutions and continuity of teaching -- whereas I think Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy lack these qualities. While intra-Christian disputes may seen beyond the scope of this discussion, I think they have some bearing. For example:
>> Faith is beyond the domain of human reason - the Christian's belief is founded in a kind of immediate, self-evident spiritual experience that comes logically prior to arguments.
This is a specifically Protestant view (although many Catholics mistakenly hold to it since it chimes so easily with the post-Enlightenment concept of religion). I would say faith is a rational assent to revelation. But more importantly for the present discussion, I would say God's existence that can be established by pure reason, independently of faith.
> "I" exist. Presumably the universe I experience also exists. Why? There's a First Cause that brought them into existence. We can call it God. This is the closest religion and science can get, because this definition of God is without any pre-defined qualities. For instance, God can be non-dualistic (God _is_ the universe, or in other words, the universe is its own cause), and even mathematical (Physics' Theory of Everything, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis). We only have a set of possibilities here.
There are solid arguments against all these and in favour of monotheism. Again, no way of summarising in a combox, but I can give a few thoughts, which should not be taken as even an adequate description, let alone a complete defence that is intended to convince you :-).
Pantheism is false because it can't explain change. A thing can only be changed by something else; therefore the first principle (First Cause) of reality can't change, because otherwise it would not be first. But the universe is changing; hence the universe can't be the first principle of reality. Each of these points is obviously controversial, but I think defensible.
Alternatively one could argue that change is an illusion, like many eastern religions do. But speaking very generally, one object is distinguished from another by how it changes (that is, how it acts or is acted upon). We distinguish the presence of hydrogen from that of helium by how they act, or how other things act on them. We also distinguish a human being from a dog by how they act -- not least, how they act on our sight, sound, etc. And so on. If change (that is, action and being acted on) is an illusion, it means that individual objects (like stones, trees, dogs, human beings) are not actually individual at all; their individuality is only an illusion. But if this is so, predication is impossible, because we are predicating only of our illusions. Since this is not so (because if it were, why are we even bothering with this discussion?), pantheism must be false. Such is the vague outline of another argument that a monotheist would make.
Alternatively one could argue that a thing need not be changed by something else -- that it can change itself. The trouble with this is it fails to explain why things act in one way rather than another. If things could change themselves, they would act completely randomly, because there would be no cause of their change, and therefore no reason. This is not so.
Pythagoras was the first to propose that mathematics was the basis of everything. But there are things that are not numeric or can be reduced to number. For example, non-mathematical logic, which is a fundamental aspect of reality, and can't be reduced to number. Again, a counter-argument would proceed on these lines.
I'm not going to attempt any other answers in a combox because these are profound questions that require, and have received, book-length expositions. I am only attempting to give you the vaguest idea of the thought processes I go through in arriving at my beliefs. But I have not yet found an argument that makes me doubt my Catholicism, and I think it's profoundly false to say that Christianity is independent of logic or observation.
>Firstly, I think God's existence can be proved rationally
I have never really bought that natural theology successfully gets you all the way. You're correct in identifying my lack of complete endorsement of Catholicism, I've always been sympathetic to Kierkegaard (Protestant) in thinking that Christianity is not merely an intellectual exercise in philosophy.
>This is a specifically Protestant view (although many Catholics mistakenly hold to it since it chimes so easily with the post-Enlightenment concept of religion). I would say faith is a rational assent to revelation.
Thank you for saying this, I think I spoke too clumsily here---I meant that the knowledge revealed through faith is beyond that of human reason. I'm here thinking of Aquinas when he says that reason is a preamble to faith, meaning the distinctly Christian beliefs only start beyond what reason can get us, though in going beyond reason we're not slipping into irrationality.
>I think it's profoundly false to say that Christianity is independent of logic or observation.
I dunno, I am kind of skeptical that a spiritual connection to Christ, which seems foundational to Christianity to me, is dependent on logic or observation.
And again, there is a sense in which union with God is dependent on logic, inasmuch as logic (logos/Word) is just another way of saying reality :-). That which is illogical is not, and cannot be; it is non-being.
We have to be careful here by what "God" means. God as in a First Cause is trivially true, but is not what most people mean when they say God. The existence of the God of religions, i.e., a personal all-loving human-caring God who listens to human prayer can only be shown true or false empirically. In my comment, I posited alternative universes, for example, the Devil acting as God. Which universe we actually live in among a large number of possibilities is not something that can be proved rationally.
> empirical basis of Christianity specifically (evidence for the resurrection) is sound
Yeah, I remain unconvinced and give higher explanatory power to human affinity for divine miracles (see followers of modern age "gurus"), ability of hearsay to go "viral" (especially in an era without books and modern scientific knowledge), and a new religious movement asserting stories for a "greater good".
In addition, as I already mentioned, even if the resurrection is true, the only thing we can be sure of is that certain "magic" can go beyond the usual laws of physics. That's it. There could be a number of reasons behind the resurrection. The Devil playing games. The Matrix scientists testing a "what-if" scenario. A fallible God trying to do some good. And of course, a genuine all loving God.
Christianity would have been so much convincing if Jesus had mentioned at least a few futuristic but concrete facts that only God could know, and that future generations could verify happened exactly as written in the Bible.
> A thing can only be changed by something else
I can only say, why? :) By a universe, I mean a set of physical laws and a bunch of stuff those laws act upon. Nothing prevents say a cyclic universe where both laws and stuff exist without a beginning, just evolving from big bang to big crunch to big bang, repeated ad infinitum.
What research have you done up to this point to answer your questions?
I've been promised such many many times, and every single time the arguments have fallen hilariously short of the promise. For instance, the "Five Proofs" are basically a variation of the statement: I insist X has to exist, and X=God. The simple refutation is: Nope :). X can be reasoned about in other ways. Maybe I'll take a look at the other resources at some point, but my credence is low those will have any solid arguments either.
I often wonder why such arguments are taken so seriously. I've honestly tried to see if they have enough substance to make me change my mind. But each time I become more convinced religious arguments are simply wish fulfillment. Moreover, the word is God is so flexible that it's hard to pin down the exact thing people have in mind when discussing religion. And so it'll continue. As long as we live and let live without imposing viewpoints by force, that's okay!
Funny, I feel exactly the opposite, but of course everybody, whether religious or not, sees what he wants to see :-)
"For instance, the "Five Proofs" are basically a variation of the statement: I insist X has to exist, and X=God."
This is false. Or please tell me what work you've read that gives you that impression. It perhaps works as a parody of the ontological argument (which is not one of the 'five proofs'), but no more than that.
The book Five Proofs is not the same set of five that Aquinas very briefly summarises (though there is some overlap). The ontological argument, which I think fails, is not one of either sets.
Anyway, I've pointed you in what I hope is a profitable direction. I recommended the Five Proofs book in particular because one chapter (IMO) successfully rebuts every atheist argument that I've encountered online or in print. These books' arguments are not what you will find in typical pro-religion discourse, much of which I agree is risible. I wish you well!
Most definitely. Though I do think (hope?) we humans can rise above our limitations to grasp the actual Truth quite a bit.
> The book Five Proofs is not the same set of five that Aquinas very briefly summarises
Alright I got the actual book now. To correct the mistake, I'll give the book a honest read and post my impressions here in a day or two. I hope you can be around to respond if I got something wrong. If not, nice talking to you!
Sure. I don't mean to imply I'm a subjectivist or that the situation is hopeless. But seeing things as they are, rather than as one is inclined to see them, takes serious effort and self-training. That's not an argument in favour or against anything; it's true in every aspect of life, from the most mundane to the biggest questions.
Feel free to respond to this comment or some more recent one, and I'll try to remember to check. Regardless of whether you're convinced, you'll at least be responding to much better arguments than what you've likely encountered so far. Enjoy!
So the thesis of the book "Five Proofs" is as it says in the intro---the real debate is not between atheism and theism---by trying to show that God, as accepted by theists, definitely exists.
By God, the book means an entity with certain qualities, which I'll divide into two sets:
* impersonal: simplicity, immutability, immateriality, incorporeality, eternity, necessity
* personal: will, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, love
My main criticism of the five proofs is that, even if accepted, they can only used to demonstrate the impersonal qualities above. The book bolts on the personal qualities with thin arguments that don't follow from the proofs. And this has been my observation in many such discussions, that the meaning of the word "God" switches mid-conversation to fit the conclusion.
An impersonal "God" is actually compatible with naturalism, because here "God" is just a word being used to describe the ultimate nature of reality. So whatever the ultimate nature of reality is, if one wants to call it God, that's totally fine. To differentiate my perspective, I'll call that ultimate reality the Theory of Everything (ToE) instead. ToE has all the impersonal qualities, ToE is what sustains the universe, ToE is eternal and immutable, etc.
* ToE is what sustains the hierarchical series at each moment.
* ToE is base part out of all other composite parts of made of.
* I don't see why "there must be a necessarily existing intellect which grasps all of the logical relationships between all propositions". Truth and logic just are. They don't need to be grasped by anything to exist. However, if one wants to call this collection God/ToE, that's fine. But it doesn't follow that such a God is omniscient (as there isn't any will that "understands" in such a collection).
* I don't really see how the Thomistic Proof is different from the Aristotelian Proof, but in any case, I think ToE can be the essence of this universe's existence.
* "There must be at least one necessary being, to explain why any contingent things exist at all". Yes, the First Cause, but ToE and not a personal God.
ToE/God, with the impersonal qualities, can be the final conclusion from all the 5 proofs. But theists need "God" to be something extra. They need God to have the above personal qualities as well. And that cannot be shown with the proofs. Because the reality we observe is consistent with an impersonal ToE creating and sustaining it. ToE doesn't need to have a will, or to be perfectly good, or to love its creation. These qualities don't follow from the proofs at all. So personal qualities can only be accepted if one accepts some revelation to be true. But that is outside the scope of this discussion. All I want to show is that the thesis of the book is incorrect and atheism is back on the table.
To reiterate, something cannot come out of nothing. Cogito, ergo sum. Something (I) exists. Hence there is some brute-force First Cause for this something. Theists call this First Cause God. Atheists can call this ToE (say). I claim that God = ToE at this point. Theists go one step further to give personal qualities to God, who willed this universe into existence (but could have chosen not to) and cares about its constituents, including humans, whose prayers and actions He listens to and judges, and has revealed himself at least once (if not more). Atheists reject this second part. I instead adopt a naturalist viewpoint modulated by Bayesian Reasoning. If I find some strong evidence for a personal God, I'll of course have to change my mind and become a theist.
For instance, if the 5 proofs had actually logically and definitively proved that a personal God exists, then yes, that knowledge would become part of science.
Conversely, is it not true that the actual bedrock of religions are the books/revelations. Imagine a world where were no such revelations. Would people have as much faith in a personal caring God just on the basis of proofs?
And if the revelations were actually shown to be true, that would become part of scientific knowledge. Say God appears on Earth today and agrees to undergo scientific observations of His nature (say by turning water to wine or parting the ocean under experimental scrutiny), then naturally His existence will have to be accepted as part of reality.
The scientific method is used by everyone, whether consciously or unconsciously and to the best of their ability, to survive and understand the reality we observe. There is no other way to judge right from wrong. Scientists obviously use it to study physical reality. And theists use it for instance to judge which among the various religions (and which denomination within a religion) is actually true. Yes, that is also an application of the scientific method, looking at the arguments for the different religions and judging which one (or none) seems to be true. The disagreements come in when we don't have enough data to make a definitive judgement between the alternatives. And that's where all the wonderful imaginative ideas continue to exist.
But quite a few atheists say that claims about anything that is outside science-in-the-second-sense's domain is irrational. Example: Alex Rosenberg states that any knowledge outside of physics' domain is irrational (in line with his reductionist philosophy, he holds chemistry, biology, etc to be physics on a bigger scale). Hume also seemed to be pushing such views with his fork. This claim is trivially easy to refute, I assume you know the arguments already so I won't waste your time with them.
I'll even go further and claim that distinction itself is meaningless and only matters when say organizing university departments.
What needs to be kept in mind is emergence. Chemistry emerges from physics, then biology from chemistry, ecology from biology, etc. Experimentally verified God will become the base level out of which physics emerges from in the other direction. In that sense, physics' domain perhaps includes everything. But it all depends on how we define the terms.
> the purpose of the intellect is the attainment of truth
This I wholeheartedly agree. Maybe you'll enjoy reading this blog post [0] that proposes Truthism as life's goal.
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious...
I'm at work so need to be brief, but I assume you read the discussion of the five qualities you list as personal, on pp.205-229. What did you think were the weaknesses in the argument? If you want to focus on just one or two of the five qualities to keep the discussion within boundaries, that's obviously fine.
Would you agree that the proofs, if successful, prove the existence of something that is other than the universe, even if the arguments for the personal qualities of this entity fail?
I'm not sure. I think the proofs show some base entity that is needed to sustain the universe. But is it something apart from the universe? Whatever exists, say God and His creation, all together constitutes the universe. Of course by universe I mean the totality of reality that the proofs refer to.
Perhaps you mean that the something "other" always exists even though the universe might not have. As I say in the other comment, God might not have a choice in creating the universe, so this is an open question that cannot be discussed within the context of the proofs.
First, I don't think "Theory of Everything" is a good phrase for what you're trying to get at. Any theory is necessarily incomplete, since a theory attempts to describe reality using formal symbols, and formal symbols cannot be equal to the reality they attempt to describe. They cannot capture the entirety of the reality. But this is kind of nitpicking.
The very very short summary is as follows:
Omnipotence: if we accept that (at least one of) the Five Proofs succeed, it follows that God causes any given thing to exist at any moment in time. If he causes its existence, he also causes its power to act. Without God, nothing can act.
Omniscience: again, accepting at least one proof succeeds, it follows that God causes everything to be doing what it is doing at that time. Hence any 'state of affairs', like 'the cat sits on the mat', will be caused by God. Therefore he knows about them (yes I know this doesn't logically follow, the book obviously goes into far more detail).
Perfect goodness: this is a bit more complicated, since we hit disagreement about what good and evil actually are. As a premise, let us say that in classical philosophy, any evil (or bad-ness) is a defect, or alternatively, a failure of a thing to instantiate its essence. Hence a tree might be bad to the extent that it's diseased and therefore failing to grow; a dog might be bad to the extent that it has only three legs. With human beings, some defects are moral defects, which are defects of intellect and will: the person fails to perceive his true good, and therefore fails to pursue it. But moral defects are not fundamentally different from the amoral defects of trees, dogs and even artifacts like chairs and computers. This is one area where classical philosophy differs radically from modern philosophy, which posits a fact-value distinction that allegedly cannot be overcome.
To summarise, a defect in classical philosophy is where a particular, concrete example of a thing fails to instantiate its essence: that is to say, it lacks what is proper to it.
Since God's existence is the same as his essence (if you accept the Thomistic proof), it follows that God cannot have any defects, and therefore must be completely good.
Love: God does not have emotions. But to love a thing (and 'person' is included under 'thing') is to will its good: that is, its true end. Since God does this, he loves everything.
Again, all this is the ultra-ultra-cliffnotes version.
More generally, God cannot possibly lack anything, including the 'personal' qualities you describe. Again, you realise this is so when you grasp that God causes everything to exist, and therefore causes all their qualities as well. It would be impossible to cause something that you don't in some sense have yourself (either formally or eminently -- hence the objection "but God doesn't have ears!" fails). Also, remember that evil is a defect, a failure to have something, so therefore God cannot 'have' evil qualities. In a strict sense, nothing 'has' evil qualities, it only lacks corresponding good ones.
> pp.205-229
I am on the ebook, but I assume you mean Chapter 6, which I did read but as you can imagine, the arguments are not convincing to me. I think the meaning of the terms omnipotent, omniscience, goodness, etc is quite fluid in the book, so let's try to pin those down.
I posit that an impersonal God, let's call it iGod since you nitpicked ToE, serves as a final answer coming out of the proofs. Let's grant it all the qualities that the proofs need. iGod is what causes and sustains the universe. However, since iGod is impersonal, He did not choose to create the universe. Ultimately, He does not have any will. He just is. Maybe you at least agree that atheism/science is compatible with iGod in this sense.
And that is the key difference from theism, which needs a personal God (pGod) with a sense of will. As the book says (emphasis mine):
* "Since God exists in the fullest possible way, he must have the capacity to act in the fullest possible way."
* "God apprehends all the things that could exist, and causes some of those things actually to exist while refraining from causing others of them to exist."
I don't see how this sense of a will follows from the proofs. iGod, the unmoved mover/unactualized actualizer, may not have any control over actualizing. The universe can just burst forth naturally from iGod without any sort of active decision to bring it forth. The book's defense of this sense of free will, where God is free to choose not to cause the universe, is simply that "the freedom of the divine will is mysterious to us", which I think you'll agree is not any sort of proof. If you can show me how a sense of will arises from these or other proofs, I'll reconsider my position, since this is the keystone to the rest of the qualities I'm calling personal. Without will, the meaning of the rest of the personal qualities become the same as iGod's.
Some quick comments on the rest of the qualities:
Omnipotence: I am not sure if we can extend the quality of iGod causing "any given thing to exist" just from observation of this one universe. More concretely, I am still thinking about whether the purely actual actualizer being unique holds. But in any case, if iGod's omnipotence means that it causes and sustains "any given thing to exist", that is fine. But this is a passive power. If pGod's omnipotence means that He has the power to cause anything but can withhold a subset of them based on a willful decision, then that is not an outcome of the proofs. As I said, the will part matters.
Omniscience: To give a sense of where I am coming from, I'll give two example. Base axioms in mathematics cause all the rest of the theorems to be true or false, in an eternal sort of way (as also discussed in the 3rd proof). But it's absurd to attribute omniscience (about mathematics) to mathematics. And electrons cause emergent phenomenon such as electricity and working computers, yet they don't "know" anything about these emergent levels built of top. Similarly, iGod, in an impersonal way, causes the universe, following a chain of causation. But in what sense can we attribute a sense of knowing in iGod? Again, it just is. Without proving a mind/will, using the word omniscience is I think a mistake and just leads to miscommunication.
Goodness and love: I think these only exist in an emergent level of reality, i.e., in human minds. You'll agree that atoms that constitute our physical bodies don't have these attributes, right? I posit that in the same way, iGod, the impersonal base reality which constitutes everything else, also does not have these attributes. The book (and your comment) is redefining the terms (goodness = lack of imperfection, love = "that God creates things entails that he loves them") to mean something different from how we use it in our everyday conversation and which is why I think using these terms is again a mistake. We're free to use whatever terms we like of course, but it just leads to a miscommunication that makes these discussions more murky than they need to be. In any case, goodness/love in pGod again needs a sense of will to make them useful, because otherwise by the same definitions iGod is also good and all-loving.
> God cannot possibly lack anything ... It would be impossible to cause something that you don't in some sense have yourself
I understand the sense of what you're saying here, but I want to make a distinction between base qualities and emergent qualities. For example, atoms "lack" the quality of being a table, even though a table is constituted entirely by atoms. Tableness is an emergent quality. In the same way, iGod only has the properties needed to actualize the next potential that in the causal chain gives rise to entirety of reality, including our universe. But that does not mean iGod itself can be attributed the quality of being an atom or a galaxy or a human body. Causing some quality to exist down the causal chain does not mean it is meaningful to port those qualities back up the chain. In the context of the proofs, all we can be sure of is that some First Cause base reality iGod exists. But the minimal qualities we need to attribute to iGod do not use terms like goodness, love, evil, etc without entirely redefining those terms. But theists cannot then turn around and use the same words back with their original meaning in the same context.
I read some more of Feser's writings. And the more I read, I more I see that the quibble is less about what is and more about what we should call it.
The major thrust of the book is that the proofs show the God exists, hence everyone should be a theist. But you see, the terms God and theist are not defined that well. God, in the context of the book, is an entity that has some qualities that are defined to be something "analogous" to the usual meanings of the word. And that creates a lot of ambiguity in the message. More so because theism is not defined at all.
"The real debate is between theists of different stripes—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, purely philosophical theists, and so forth—and begins where natural theology leaves off.", the book says. Well here's a thought. Let's take Christians. They necessarily believe that the God revealed in the Bible is True. Moreover, they believe the God of all the other religions are necessarily false [0]. Now of course, as the book itself says, whether Christianity is true or not is outside the scope of the proofs. So for the sake of this discussion, let's say that yes the God the proofs is true (necessarily), but no human religion, including Christianity, is true. That is, God hasn't revealed himself to humans directly. Where does that leave us? Should we still be a theist? A "purely philosophical theist", as the above quote says? What would that mean? What should the beliefs of a theist without any of the current religions be?
In other words, what difference does the presence or absence of this proof of God make in our lives to be able to define us as a theist or an atheist? God may be perfectly good and all knowing and all the rest of the qualities. Alright, so what? Does it have any implication for our lives? At this point I expect the theist to jump in and say (among other things), yes of course it matters. God is the perfect role model, and we imperfect humans should try to elevate our lives to try and match his perfectness. This I think is fine. However, I think this is compatible with being an atheist! Attempting to reach our maximal potential is a valid goal regardless of whether that perfectness is already "actual" or not.
And that is my overall point. That's why I tried to point out the "personal" qualities earlier. When I resist the term theist, for me personally, I am resisting the idea that God is somehow actively participating in the daily affairs of the universe. That He sets the rules for what is good or bad, not as the perfect being, but as defined in the Bible (or other books). That there is a judgement of the our actions and we go to heaven or hell (or cycle of rebirth based on karma, etc). And this later part is I think where most of the disagreement between theism and atheism is. And these later ideas don't (and cannot) come from the proofs. Moreover, there is a subtle flip in the meaning of the terms even when discussing the proofs. For instance, take the first proof. Everything has a (hierarchical) First Cause. Let's call it God. God is the cause of everything. Hence, God causes everything to exist. But you see, there is a flip from the passive "is a cause of" to an active "causes". Which then naturally is taken to mean a God with a will who has the power to cause the universe but also has the capacity to choose to create or not create the universe. And that is I think an unjustified misreading of the words "cause". To make an analogy, electrons "cause" tables to exist, without having any active godly qualities. God can similarly cause and sustain the universe, without having any active role in it.
So yeah, in short, natural theology as described here can actually be compatible with philosophy of science/metaphysics in my reading, and the quibble is more about terms and boundaries. The main challenge for theism is to show the next step, that God revealed Himself to us. Because only that can show that God is personal/active rather than impersonal/passive. And that can only be shown empirically I think, not through philosophical ponderings.
I probably didn't manage to express my thoughts fully, and I hope you'll try to read into the spirit of the message when pondering it.
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-do-believers-of-a-god-defend-this-...
I note the equation of atheism and science but make no further comment :-)
>The book's defense of this sense of free will, where God is free to choose not to cause the universe, is simply that "the freedom of the divine will is mysterious to us", which I think you'll agree is not any sort of proof.
Feser is not offering this as proof of the existence of God's free will. He's answering a particular objection: how is it that an unchanging Being can will, given that we, as changing beings, necessarily change from willing to not-willing and back again? He says that using this as a ground against God's having will is to commit the fallacy of accident. And then he's saying we can't understand the full details of how God can will without changing, but that we can nonetheless safely say what is not the case: that God lacks will. (My summary of his argument is below.) Therefore I think your characterization of his argument is inaccurate.
If either A xor B is true, and we can show that A is false, we know that B is true. Perhaps there are implications of B that are impossible to grasp even in theory, but this doesn't undermine the truth of B. Agree?
One way we know that God wills freely is by comparing a lion, a unicorn and a dinosaur (I'm paraphrasing the argument on Will in Chapter 6 here). There is nothing about the concept of a lion that causes it to exist, there's nothing about the concept of a unicorn that causes it not to exist, and there's nothing about the concept of a dinosaur that caused it to exist at one time but then caused it to stop existing. On the contrary: I could describe the concepts of a lion, a unicorn and a dinosaur in infinite detail, and you wouldn't know from what I had told you which is real, which is historical and which is imaginary.
What I said about those three animals is true about everything. You could describe the concept of anything in infinite detail without knowing whether that thing exists or existed. There is nothing about a lion as such that makes it real, and nothing about a unicorn as such that makes it imaginary. There is nothing about a lion that makes its existence necessary, and nothing about a unicorn that makes its non-existence necessary. The existence or non-existence is a completely separate question from what it is (its qualities, etc).
Now consider the principal of proportionate causality (described in the book in detail). This basically says that if a thing doesn't have a particular quality in itself, that quality must be caused by something else. Example: I can't lift myself 10000 feet into the air, but an aeroplane can cause me to 'have' this quality. A particular pool of water may be red; it is not the water itself that's red, so something else must be giving it this quality. Etc.
The result of this is that any object that exists must be caused by something else to exist, and that this 'something else' must exist in and of itself. (This is obviously contained in some of the proofs.) Obviously the proofs say that God is such a 'something else'. Therefore, God is causing lions to exist, caused dinosaurs to exist at one point but no longer does, and has never caused unicorns to exist.
But we know that there is nothing in lions that makes them exist, nothing in unicorns that makes them not-exist, and nothing in dinosaurs that makes them stopped-existing. So, assuming the claim that God causes their existence from moment to moment succeeds, if follows that their existence or non-existence is a matter of choice. The fact that He is causing one to exist and not the other two indicates that He is choosing to do this. Given that there is nothing in any of the three that causes it to necessarily exist, it follows that the real things we see are not some sort of 'natural bursting forth' from an impersonal being, but rather exist by the choice of this Being. If the universe 'burst forth' from God, then anything that could potentially exist, would exist.
>> God cannot possibly lack anything ... It would be impossible to cause something that you don't in some sense have yourself
> base qualities and emergent qualities...But that does not mean iGod itself can be attributed the quality of being an atom or a galaxy or a human body. Causing some quality to exist down the causal chain does not mean it is meaningful to port those qualities back up the chain.
I disagree with the reductionist account of a table that is I think implicit here -- I think tables (or at least the wood that constitutes the tables) are metaphysically prior to the atoms that compose them, and the same for all natural objects. By this, I mean that the parts can only be understood in terms of the whole, and must be understood as subordinate to the whole, not vice-versa. But if I understand your objection correctly, I think I can work through it even allowing for the reductionist ontology. The principle of proportionate causality illustrates things well. Could you read the book's account of this principle? It's early in Chapter 6, I think pretty much the first section. I think you're using the 'heirloom principle' to object, which assumes that the Principle says that an effect must exist formally in its cause, and ignores that it can also exist eminently or virtually. The book defines these terms, and attempts to explain why the objection is not valid. Do you think the attempt succeeds?
If you think the attempt succeeds, I will go on to discuss why, given some things in reality (human beings) have a will, it follows that that which causes human beings' existence must also have will, either in the same sense as human beings or in some greater sense.
I'll try to respond to your other post when I get a chance. Some of the points are fairly different from what we're discussing here. I'm happy to talk about whether God revealed Himself, and in what sense he governs our conduct (or has a right to do so), but it's a pretty different conversation.
Ah sorry I didn't mean to imply an association, only that both atheists and scientists, from their perspectives, would have no qualms with (and in fact should necessarily accept) an impersonal First Cause.
> we can't understand the full details of how God can will
I'm quite wary of arguments that invoke the "beyond the capability of our minds to understand" clause. But I get it, let's see if A: "we can nonetheless safely say what is not the case: that God lacks will" holds up. I don't think the book makes a good case for A and only offers B, hence my comment.
In general, I think the quibble again is in the definition of the term existence.
* Logical existence: Everything, that is not logically inconsistent, logically necessarily "exists". God has no say here. This is the logical metaphysical landscape, with mathematics and all possible universes with all possible constituents such as tables and unicorns.
* Ontological existence: A small small subset of the metaphysical landscape that we experience with our senses. Here, some things "exist" and others don't. This is what we want to talk about right? What we think about when we ask the questions: where did this come from, who caused this, etc. At least I exist. Thus something exists. Ex nihilo nihil. And thus, a First Cause sustains this something's existence. And the question then is, of the things that do exist, how much control does First Cause have for their existence?
I think your argument above switches between these two definitions, hence the disagreement.
> You could describe the concept of anything in infinite detail without knowing whether that thing exists or existed.
Yeah I read this, but not sure if I agree. That infinite detail would contain its history and details of its components, no? And that would lead to a description of an entire universe, where we can judge whether it makes sense for that things to exist. But anyway, doesn't matter for our present purposes. We can take unicorns to be metaphysically true as an axiom, for instance.
> There is nothing about a lion that makes its existence necessary, and nothing about a unicorn that makes its non-existence necessary.
This is perhaps true for metaphysical existence, but the ontological existence of a lion and the non-existence of an unicorn can absolutely be determined by the physical laws and the initial conditions of our universe. As far as we have probed our senses, the physical world seems to be, with absolute consistency, following a set of laws. All the First Cause has "control" over (right now) is selecting/sustaining what the laws and initial conditions were. The rest of the entire history of the universe is then already logically implied, either deterministically (single line) or probabilistically (a tree), including +lions and -unicorns. First Cause has no say whatsoever.
> Therefore, God is causing lions to exist, caused dinosaurs to exist at one point but no longer does, and has never caused unicorns to exist.
> I disagree with the reductionist account of a table that is I think implicit here
> the parts can only be understood in terms of the whole
This is the core of the disagreement then. "Existence", by which I mean to take this physical universe that we experience with our senses, is empirically reductionist. No God is needed to explain why the Sun rises or why tables retain their form. Each emergent level [0] has a necessary and sufficient cause from the level below it. Tables -> atoms -> quarks -> QFT -> ? -> First Cause. In this sense, First Cause is causing and sustaining the universe. But again, passively, not actively.
Theists obviously disagree with this. But my point is, just from the proofs as the book claims, why can we claim that God chooses unicorn not to exist? All we can say is God chose/is the First Cause physical laws, no? The non-existence of unicorns is implicit in the laws (and initial conditions). No choice needed. And since I have shown an alternative explanation that is consistent with the proofs, a personal God is not a logical necessity, is it? Theist will have to rely on the Bible (etc) for that, not logical proofs.
And also:
> has never caused unicorns to exist.
> If the universe 'burst forth' from God, then anything that could potentially exist, would exist.
Well we don't know! We cannot make any claims about what "exists" beyond our universe. It is absolutely possible that unicorns exist in some other universe. It is possible that the entire metaphysical landscape has ontological existence. We just don't know. And thus these statement cannot be considered true (or false) with any certainty.
[0] Except the origin of our universe and consciousness. The former will ultimately have a brute force First Cause. And the later is an open question right now (a gap).
Even the proofs imply a reductionist account no? The first proof says: the table holds up the glass, the floor holds up the table and the earth holds up the table. And then asks, what holds up it all? Answer: necessarily God. But then God is at the edge (first) of this causal chain and the table is still holding up the glass (directly), no? And God is holding up the universe (directly) and everything in it (indirectly). Thus, saying that God is holding up the glass would be misusing the usual meaning of the term "holding up".
I'm thinking God -> object1 -> object2 -> object3. Is this not what the book means?
This is obviously true. It is slightly amusing that this is then used to imply that God choose what things actually exist, while I as a naturalist take it to mean we have to empirically look at the world to determine what exists.
> Do you think the attempt succeeds?
Alright. So I suppose I don't think the attempt succeeds, no.
Take a table. It has a quality: it's solid. As compared to air, which is gas. However, in what sense is it meaningful to say that an individual atom is solid or gas? Isn't it true that concept of solid or gas only comes in when there are a group of atoms, none of which individually have a "state"? Yes of course, the property is inherent (eminently or virtually as you say) in an atom, but it only materializes in relation to other atoms, not individually. And so on down the abstraction levels.
The book defends PPC with arguments that are quite weak and only work they are talking about the same emergent level. Yes, giving $20 works only when I have $20. But do atoms which constitute me also have $20 dollars? It's absurd no? The concept of owning $20 does not "exist" at the level of atoms. Same for the argument about evolution. Within genetics, the same DNA is evolving into different forms. But again, what about the atoms constituting the DNA?
So no, I don't think it makes sense to talk about qualities that emerge in higher levels to hold at the lower levels. First Cause doesn't have the quality of tables, states of matter, or human will directly, only in an indirect weak sense. The book says it too: "explanations in terms of potentialities may often be only minimally informative", but this "minimalness" makes all the difference! How can this minimally informative quality expanded to be maximally relevant when talking about the First Cause? Yes, the First Cause in a causal chain leads to human will. Minimally weak sense. Wondering how you think instead that First Cause has will "in the same sense as human beings or in some greater sense".
> part of the effect (the human intellect) is not material > given some things in reality (human beings) have a will
I will note that these are agree-to-disagree statements, given the basis of consciousness is an open question for now. From my naturalistic perspective, humans only have emergent "free" will, not libertarian free will, which is what theists usually mean by the term. But I'm happy to accept these statements for this discussion and am more interested in understanding why First Cause needs to have any will, given human will.
I should have read your point more charitably, my bad :)
> This is perhaps true for metaphysical existence, but the ontological existence of a lion and the non-existence of an unicorn can absolutely be determined by the physical laws and the initial conditions of our universe
This may ve true, but irrelevant to my point. The 'laws of physics' are themselves one thing, and not another. It is logically possible to imagine a universe with anti-gravity instead of gravity (that is, where mass repels mass), or where natural processes were such that a lion's DNA ended up giving rise to a unicorn. It is equally logically possible to imagine a universe where unicorns pop in and out of existence, independently of any biological process. And infinite other possibilities. But this is not so. Your appeal to physical laws doesn't affect my point, which is not that we can know firstly about God's Willing, and secondly (and thereby) know about the existence of one and the non-existence of the other. Rather, it's that reality is certain particular things, and is not certain other particular things that it might logically have been. And this implies that certain concepts (lions, gravity) are willed into existence, and continue to be so willed here and now; and certain other concepts (anti-gravity, unicorns) are not.
The multiverse concept does not affect my point. If such a thing existed, there would be a Will that willed unicorns (and the supporting laws of physics/biology/etc) exist in the other universe, but not our one. This is unaffected by infinite multiverses. So the point stands.
>> You could describe the concept of anything in infinite detail without knowing whether that thing exists or existed. > Yeah I read this, but not sure if I agree. That infinite detail would contain its history and details of its components, no?
I was careful to refer to the concept of lion/unicorn , which exists independently of how particular examples of said concept came to exist.
>> you wouldn't know from what I had told you which is real, which is historical and which is imaginary. > This is obviously true. It is slightly amusing that this is then used to imply that God choose what things actually uexist, while I as a naturalist take it to mean we have to empirically look at the world to determine what exists.
These are not mutually contradictory. In any case, is it 'obviously true' or are you 'not sure if [you] agree' as you stated in your first reply? :-)
On a larger level, I don't think we can continue without discussing ontological reductionism. I can see that the PPC would make no sense if you think everything can be explained entirely in terms of its constituent atoms, which I think is your view. My own view is that the objects of our senses -- like pieces of wood, or apples, or dogs, or human beings -- cannot be reduced to the particles* that constitute them. To put it another way, what these things are is not the same as the particles they're made of. Nor is it the same as a particular arrangement of particles. "What a thing is" is a unity, and is distinct (though not separate) from the particles that compose it. This unity determines the particles' behavior -- or more generally, the whole determines the parts, not vice-versa. This also is true for an individual thing's properties, like color, ability to move, and (crucially) will.
If you think this is a useful line of enquiry, start kicking my view!
* Choose whatever level of particles you like: molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, quarks, etc. It doesn't affect the argument.
Good. I think we can agree to disagree at this point. I try to reach the core premise of viewpoints I don't agree with and I think we have reached it here. I'll try to explain my viewpoints a bit more, but I imagine you'll remain unconvinced. Well, my own overall takeaway is still that I don't need the (personal) God hypothesis to explain the universe (yet) (~Laplace).
I'll say this though. You promised much better arguments than what I had encountered before. I'll admit I found my readings of natural theology pretty interesting. My exposure to arguments beyond using the Bible was only the Kalam Cosmological argument. Many of the ideas in Feser's book and blog articles were a refreshing take, and I had to think a bit about them before I could pinpoint the core ideas and where I disagree. So thank you for that.
> This unity determines the particles' behavior
To me, an empirical study of the universe we sense seems to indicate that the properties of the parts completely determines the properties of the whole. After we have explained the properties of H and O, the properties of H2O are completely fixed and determined. The game of life starts with a simple set of rules and an initial state, and the wonderful patterns that emerge [0] are completely determined after that. Same for the Mandelbrot set. Same for everywhere we look.
My question is, what will help convince you that the behavior of a whole can be determined by its parts? Is being able to accurately predict its behavior by predicting the behavior of just the parts not sufficient? What is left after accounting for the behavior of all the parts of a lion? What is in this essence of lionness that cannot be explained just from the combined behavior of cells?
> The 'laws of physics' are themselves one thing, and not another.
See here we agree. Our universe has a particular set of laws and initial conditions that could have been otherwise. Science takes this as a premise and studies what happened after that. But now take a Laplace's Demon [1] and ask, given the premise, does the universe contain [2] a lion? Answer: yes. Does the universe contain a unicorn? no. Does the universe contain a forum called hacker news where sdht0 and geye1234 are discussing natural theology? yes. I don't see why we need a God who is choosing things to exist or not. We may need God to fix the premise, but everything after that can be God-free. I'll try to explain my viewpoint another way:
> And this implies that certain concepts (lions, gravity) are willed into existence, and continue to be so willed here and now; and certain other concepts (anti-gravity, unicorns) are not.
This is a statement I can agree with, but our takeaways are so different. Imagine a canvas with a lion but no unicorn. If I'm correctly interpreting your concept of "willed", you're saying that there is a God who has two cutout images, that of a lion and a unicorn, and He decided to put the lion on the canvas but not the unicorn. I'm saying, there is a "God" who has a computer program, consisting of just 0s and 1s, which when run on a computer controlling a brush drew a picture of a lion on the canvas.
So I'm just repeating myself now, but regardless of the essences of the objects that inhabit our universe, their existence and behavior is completely determined once the laws and initial conditions have been set as a premise. The question of course remains, where does the premise come from? Here I'm open to possibilities. First Cause. God. Eternal physical laws. Etc. When I read the 5 proofs, that's what I thought, that the books are showing the existence of God at this level. At the edge/beginning of the chain. But you seem to have something else in mind (also as per your other comment) which I don't understand/agree with.
I think you'll agree that given the axioms of mathematics, 2+2=4 is true and not even God can change that. In the same way, as a naturalist, I'm saying that given the laws of our universe (whatever they are) and the initial conditions, lions exist and unicorns don't and even God cannot change that. I'll freely agree that the former is from logic and hence necessarily true. But the later is just from empirical observations. As I said before, if tomorrow God does choose ;) to reveal Himself in a convincing manner, I'll have to change my views completely. Similarly if unicorns start popping in and out of existence.
> I was careful to refer to the concept of lion/unicorn , which exists independently of how particular examples of said concept came to exist.
I'm not sure how to separate those. Doesn't the concept of a lion contain the fact that a lion hunts for food? Which needs biology, chemistry, physics, etc to explain. Or by concept do you mean just the shape? Then is a statue of a lion an actual lion? Like I'm trying to imagine how to explain to an alien from another galaxy the concept of a lion. How can we do that without explaining the entire history of life of Earth, etc?
[0] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace's_demon
[2] I'm assuming a deterministic universe for simplicity, but it can be sufficiently adapted for the quantum nondeterministic universe by taking about a tree of possibilities and whether any or how many of the branches have some property.
* There is a crucial assumption in the 5 proofs that I think is worth thinking about. Given that something exists (I, the world, causes, parts, etc), it follows that there must be a First Cause/God. Also given ex nihilo nihil fit, it follows that the First Cause has to be eternal. The debate then is about the rest of the qualities, which I'm distinguishing as impersonal vs personal. However, note that this reasoning relies on the apriori fact that the world exists, from which we (and the proofs) intuit the presence of a First Cause. This still does not answer the big question: why is there anything at all? [0] There could have been no world and even no First Cause. We can imagine that there would exist only logical possibilities but no ontological "existence". There would be just be Nothing. Yes, the First Cause is eternal. But why? How did the First Cause arise in the first place? I think it's a valid question but it's unclear what the answer could be. One possibility is that logical existence is all there is. [1] But in any case, the eternalism of the First Cause, as in the proofs, is contingent on cogito, ergo sum and is not a necessity beyond that. I find it an interesting realization.
* I am curious what you exactly mean by "the whole determines the parts, not vice-versa". One reading of it clashes wildly with all of our scientific investigations. From being a civilization which attribute everything to Gods and angels--making the sun go around the sky and natural calamities and good luck and bad luck---we've managed to figure out that we don't need such an attribution. Simple rules can generate a lot of complexity. Thus emergence and not God is what makes the world go. But the above statement seems to bring those ancients ideas back somehow. What am I missing?
Also, I think even granting PPC and that the whole determines the parts still does not prove will. God can still be bound by some underlying rules. I don't know if logic alone can lead us to God's free will, until we have some empirical proof such as God actually willing unicorns into existence instead of lions. Even for humans, just saying I have will ("I can will myself to fly but don't want to") doesn't really count until I show it.
* I'd like to hear your thoughts on my earlier question. If Christianity were to be shown as "false" as the other religions, and thus no human religion can demonstrate divine providence, how much will your belief in a personal God remain? Just from the proofs, do you think you will still strongly take a loving caring God who actively created and sustains this universe to be true?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts when you have the time.
[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/08/13/epis... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
It is not logical to appeal to the laws of physics in order to undermine what I'm saying, since (to repeat myself) these are as contingent as anything else. We can conceive that the laws of physics might have been otherwise, that they might change at some point in the future, or that they might not govern every event in reality. These concepts are logically possible. So are multiverses where the laws of physics are different. Therefore, the laws of physics are contingent, not necessary like mathematics.
It therefore follows that, if the Proofs successfully establish the existence of the First Cause, then said Cause must be causing some concepts to exist, and not others. There is nothing in the concepts themselves that make one exist, and the other not-exist. Choice is the ability to bring about effect A xor effect B, where A and B contradict. Therefore there is something on the part of the Cause that is causing one to exist, and the other not. And this obviously implies will on the part of the Cause. (Again, Feser and I are talking about the First Cause causing existence from instant to instant; not about looking back in time to what brought the universe into existence in the first place.)
Obviously the natural sciences (physics, zoology, etc) give us true information about the lion. For example, part of the concept of being a lion is that it needs food to continue its existence; that it is made up of cells that behave in a certain way; etc etc. And the details of all this could fill libraries. This is uncontroversial. But the natural sciences cannot provide a complete explanation of the lion's existence and the unicorn's non-existence, because (among other reasons) the the natural sciencse themselves are one concept rather than another, and because the need for things to 'obey' the laws of natural sciences is itself a concept that exists, etc. So your reference to biology, zoology, etc, while true, does not undermine my point. It is an explanation -- thus far we agree -- but it is a partial explanation of existence, which can't explain why some concepts exist and not others.
As for reductionism, hopefully you're happy with my definition (that everything's behavior can be explained in terms of my constituent particles). In effect, this would mean that natural objects are like artifcats. Consider an artifact like a computer. It's possible to explain how a computer works by explaining the behavior of its component parts, and then referring to their arrangement. For example, copper behaves a certain way, the plastic in the PCB behaves a certain way, the silicon in the ICs behaves a certain way, the electrons passing through the copper, silicon, etc behave in a certain way, etc. And then these things are arranged in a particular structure, and the combined behavior of all the parts gives us a computer. Obviously the same is true for a car, or a house, or whatever artifact you care to list.
Reductionism basically says that natural objects are like this as well. But this is false. Consider water, made up of H and O. Now hydrogen is a gas at room temperature, it burns with an invisible flame, it combines with nitrogen to form ammonia, with carbon to form methane or any number of things, it has one electron 'orbiting' one proton, and so on. All these things are properties of hydrogen. It is by the existence of these properties that we know hydrogen is present. Now, obviously, none of these things are true for water: literally everything I've listed is false. Certainly, hydrogen is present as a part of water -- don't get me wrong! But everything indicating the presence of hydrogen ceases to exist once it becomes part of water: an entirely new set of contradictory properties take their place. The behavior of the hydrogen has changed completely. And the same is true for the oxygen. The behavior of water cannot be explained by considering the properties of hydrogen and of oxygen, and 'combining' them in the way we would to explain the behavior of an artifact. In an artifact, the parts are unchanged, they just happen to be arranged in a certain order. In a natural thing like H20, the parts are completely changed to adapt to the whole of which they are part. So an artifact is the sum of its parts, but a natural thing is not.
You can consider a similar thing with a lion. A lion's liver, or eye, or paw, only acts like a liver/eye/paw while it is part of the lion. If you tear it out, its behavior fundamentally changes (it stops being a liver and becomes a lump of rotting flesh). So similarly, a lion cannot be said to be the sum of its parts. Rather, its parts can only be understood in terms of the whole of which they are part.
Therefore, empirically, it is false to think of every natural thing as the sum of its parts. Rather, the parts are derivative of the complete object, which is fundamentally one object. This is true for molecules, rocks, plants, animals, and human beings, along with any number of other things.
That's one reason reductionism is false. A second is that reductionism says that objects like lions are nothing more than particles arranged in a certain way. But the only way it can define this 'certain way' is by referring to a real lion. Sure, it can describe the 'certain way' in great mathematical detail, but ultimately it will be describing a lion. Reductionism is therefore circular. The only way out is to say that the lion doesn't really exist, and that it's a concept that we 'impose' on the particles. But there's no good reason for thinking this, and obviously, claiming that lions don't really exist can lead you into some pretty weird and anti-rational territory :-)
Thirdly, there is no actual good reason for thinking that things are nothing more than the sum of their parts. The fact that one can explain a thing's behavior according to its parts in no way implies that it is 'nothing more' than those parts as they would exist separately from that thing. Methodological reductionism does not imply ontological reductionism.
> Just from the proofs, do you think you will still strongly take a loving caring God who actively created and sustains this universe to be true?
To answer very, very quickly: I'd believe in the qualities that Feser outlines. But not 'loving caring' in a personal way. Not in the sense that one would hope a good parent to be. Only in the sense that God wills that which is good for everything. We'd know of His existence, but He would be very distant and unknowable. The Trinity and the Incarnation are complete game-changers in this regard, which is why they are the absolute foundational teachings of Christianity :-)
I already agreed to this when I said that "the later is just from empirical observations. As I said before, if tomorrow God does choose ;) to reveal Himself in a convincing manner, I'll have to change my views completely. Similarly if unicorns start popping in and out of existence.", which covers your first 2 paragraphs that you didn't need to spend time defending.
> then said Cause must be causing some concepts to exist, and not others. > something on the part of the Cause that is causing one to exist, and the other not.
Let me put it this way. Do you have any way of showing that the First Cause has any choice as to what it is causing? Yes, out of all logical possibilities, lions exists but unicorns don't. Do you have a way to showing (logically, not the Bible) that the First Cause can cause unicorns to exist? My overall point is that the First Cause itself may only have the power to only cause lions and no power to cause unicorns. Because that is all what we see right? How can we attribute choice until we actually see that alternative choices are being made? It could have been otherwise but did it?
Anything that exists depends on God. Fine. Everything that could exist but doesn't, if they existed, would also depend on God. Fine. But how can we then turn around and say that God has the power to create everything that could exist? That doesn't follow. We can only attribute enough power to God to only be able to cause the things we do see exist. Can God create lions? Yes. If unicorns popped into existence tomorrow, can we say God can create them? Sure. Given that unicorns don't exist today, does God have the capacity/power/will to bring them into existence? Unknown. Do you see the difference? This is what I mean by impersonal vs personal.
Which is why I've been saying that it is only empirical observations (resurrection, etc) that can show will. Otherwise omnipotence is just an empty claim. It is logically possible that I could fly, but I'm bound by gravity, and hence cannot. Similarly the First Cause could be bound by rules to be able to cause only the universe we see and nothing else. Other logical possibilities exist but may not within its power.
> But the natural sciences cannot provide a complete explanation of the lion's existence and the unicorn's non-existence, because (among other reasons) the the natural sciencse themselves are one concept rather than another
Again, it's all empirical. Yes, tomorrow unicorns could start popping into existence and then we'd have to revise what we think of the universe. But until then (this is crucial, my claims are contingent on observations), apriori natural laws seem to be able to explain everything we see. No personal God needed. If you want to continue believing in a personal God, of course all power to you, but it'd be incorrect to continue to claim that God is the only logically possible explanation, as per the book. There are other possible explanations that fit our observations, as of today.
> The behavior of water cannot be explained by considering the properties of hydrogen and of oxygen
This is the home ground of science, and if someone could show this to be true, there are Nobel prizes waiting for them, just for starters. But it is not true. To use words from the book, hydrogen has many potential properties, including burning (which makes it combine with O :)) and being wet (when combined with O). These properties are actualized based on the key ideas of emergence and locality. Potential properties of natural objects (and I consider artifacts such as computers to also be natural) are actualized based on where they are in spacetime. Electrons "know" nothing about wetness. They continue to behave like electrons, including repelling other electrons and attracting protons. And yet when many such interactions occur in the vicinity of other electrons and protons, atoms and water and wetness emerges in that group. There is nothing mysterious or contradictory about these higher level properties. So this line of thinking definitely doesn't work. Again, this is all from empirical observations. If tomorrow water changes its properties or the sun rises in the west, we can come back to it.
> If you tear it out, its behavior fundamentally changes
Similarly, emergence and locality.
> But the only way it can define this 'certain way' is by referring to a real lion. > Reductionism is therefore circular.
Not at all. Think of the game of life (GoL). Simple rules + initial conditions = glider (say equivalent to the lion). Glider exists, contingent on the GoL rules. No circular reasoning needed. Similarly, (some) physical laws + initial conditions = lion. Where is the circular reasoning? Somehow you seem to be starting with the concept of lion apriori and saying that is the "real" lion and physical laws are some mathematical details. But why? Real lions only exist in the context of these physical laws, both logically and ontologically. Triangles only exist in the context of straight lines. Etc.
> The fact that one can explain a thing's behavior according to its parts in no way implies that it is 'nothing more' than those parts as they would exist separately from that thing. Methodological reductionism does not imply ontological reductionism.
It's a claim but can you give some examples where it holds true? I think the only place I've heard this "strong emergence" claim is consciousness. But that's an open question and if that's the only example then we can agree to disagree. Everywhere else we look, weak emergence holds.
> Only in the sense that God wills that which is good for everything. We'd know of His existence, but He would be very distant and unknowable.
Yup, which I'd say is compatible with an impersonal First Cause and hence compatible with being an atheist or naturalist.
> The Trinity and the Incarnation are complete game-changers in this regard, which is why they are the absolute foundational teachings of Christianity :-)
For sure. Empirical observation :)
So to summarize where we are at this point, I think we agree on the following (either in reality, or for the sake of argument): - that the First Cause exists, - that it sustains everything else that exists moment-by-moment, and didn't just create everything else and then go away, - that the existence of the lion and gravity are caused by the first cause, and that the existence of the unicorn and anti-gravity are not, - that the laws of physics, along with everything else we observe, are contingent, unlike mathematics and logic; there is no a priori reason that everything we observe is not going to reverse tomororow.
I think the key difference is whether the concept of a unicorn or anti-gravity has existence independent of our minds. My position is that such concepts have existence as concepts, and only as concepts, but that concepts nonetheless are real in a sense. A concept is not an invention of the human mind, but rather is a pre-existing reality that is grasped by the human mind. Given the real existence of concepts, some explanation is needed as to why the concept of a unicorn lacks existence as a concrete object but the concept of a lion has existence as a concrete object. And the same with the concept of gravity vs anti-gravity, and the concept of things behaving according to scientific laws vs popping into existence in violation of physics. Etc.
Whereas your position is that concepts are meaningless, or somehow like 'images' perhaps, or cardboard cut-outs, and perhaps only exist in human minds? And that therefore my position makes no sense. I don't want to mis-represent you, hopefully this is fair. Again, all this links directly to reductionism, since really by 'concept' I mean something like Aristotelian forms, which I think have existence independent of the objects that instantiate them. So I think it really comes down to reductionism.
So onto that topic:
>> The behavior of water cannot be explained by considering the properties of hydrogen and of oxygen > This... is not true.
Agh, you're quoting my sentence without the second half, which makes me sound silly and gives a false impression of what I think. The second half was "and 'combining' them in the way we would to explain the behavior of an artifact." This is the key point: that we can't mentally combine the properties of the parts to explain the properties of the whole, because the properties of the parts no longer exist.
You can perform such an exercise with an artifact. Copper in a computer behaves exactly the same as copper outside a computer. It has been arranged with other things in a certain way, and therefore the behaviour of the computer is 'weakly emergent'. You can explain the computer entirely in terms of the behaviour of its constituent parts. This is not so with hydrogen and water. Hydrogen has lost all its properties when it becomes part of water. (Of course, it has done so because it is bonded in such a way as to make water and therefore can't do what it does in the absence of said bond, but this doesn't undermine the point.) When all a thing's properties cease to exist, we can infer that it hase ceased to exist as a 'thing' in its own right, although it continues to exist in a derivative sense as a part of something else. Similarly, water's properties don't exist partially in each of its constituent elements. It's not as if H makes you partially-wet, and O completes the job. The power of making wet exists only within water as a whole. So similarly, when all of water's properties come into existence when H and O combine, we can infer that a new substance has come into existence.
Obviously we can't say that in no sense can water's properties be explained by its parts. I'm not saying that. Water's wetness can be explained by pointing at its structure. But you will be pointing at water first and foremost, and hydrogen and oxygen only in a derivative sense (because, to repeat, the properties have ceased to exist and therefore we can infer that the substances have ceased to exist as independent things).
> To use words from the book, hydrogen has many potential properties, including burning (which makes it combine with O :)) and being wet (when combined with O). These properties are actualized based on the key ideas of emergence and locality.
Hydrogen has an actual (not potential) property of being burnable. It is potentially burning and thereby ceasing to exist :-). But insofar as it's hydrogen, it can't be wet. It isn't actually wet (like water) or potentially wet. You can't do anything to hydrogen to make it wet. If something is wet, it is not hydrogen. Nor can we say that hydrogen supplies 'part of' the wetness of water and oxygen another 'part'. It is water as a whole that is wet.
Do you agree that hydrogen and oxygen lose all their properties when they become part of water, due to the bond they form? Am I being fair when I say this implies that the substances themselves cease to exist as complete entities, and continue to exist only as part of something else that is now itself the complete entity?
> Where is the circular reasoning?
Would you say a lion is particles arranged in a certain way? I'm not talking about how the lion came into existence (which I think is what you're saying with "physical laws + initial conditions = lion"). If I point at a particular lion and say "what makes it a lion?", what do you say? Many reductionists say that it's a collection of particles arranged in such a way that they're a lion. Would you agree with this? If so I would say this is circular, for the reason given in my previous comment.
> to summarize where we are at this point
I think it's a fair summary, yes. I hope you understand by now my views on the words "sustains" and "caused": (possibly) passive, not active.
> Whereas your position is that concepts are meaningless, or somehow like 'images' perhaps, or cardboard cut-outs, and perhaps only exist in human minds
Ah no. I'll try to clarify.
So what is our overall goal? We exist. We sense a universe. And we're trying to explain where we and this universe came from. By logic, there has to be some First Cause. But we don't know the properties of this First Cause directly. We can only observe the effects and try to surmise what First Cause can consistently explain all the effects we see. Makes sense? Now given our observations, there are multiple hypothesis that fit our observations. Personal God. Impersonal physical laws. Brain in a vat. Simulation in a matrix. Etc etc. I got pulled into this (fun) conversation because the book claimed that it can logically show that the First Cause has to be a personal God. And my attempt has been to show that the questions raised in the book can be explained by impersonal physical laws as well. I'm not saying that the First Cause is definitely impersonal. I'm only claiming that given our current observation as of today, impersonal physical laws can explain all of our observations and we don't need the personal God hypothesis to explain anything (logically). Only by including observations such as divine resurrection does a personal God make sense, but that is beyond the scope of the book (and hence I've tried to stay away from in this conversation, even though it does interest me to know your views on that aspect as well).
> I think the key difference is whether the concept of a unicorn or anti-gravity has existence independent of our minds.
Okay so regarding the concepts. I definitely agree that concepts exist outside human minds. That's what I mean by logical possibilities. Now I said that impersonal physical laws can explain the universe we see. Imagine instead that there was no universe. No First Cause. Nothing. And yet, all logical possibilities, including entirety of mathematics, would still "exist". So taking the physical laws of our universe as an axiom, the entire history of our universe would still logically exist (think of it as sort of a blueprint or wireframe), right? And in this ghost universe, lions will "exist" and unicorns won't. Do you see what I mean? The concept of a lion is not contingent on actual instantiation, but definitely needs the logical axioms of a universe.
> > If I point at a particular lion and say "what makes it a lion?, what do you say?"
To take another example, it is hard to imagine what the concept of a triangle would mean without first assuming the axioms of geometry, including points and straight lines. Triangles depends on those base concepts and exist in this larger world of geometry. Similarly, I'm saying to explain "what makes it a lion?", it is both necessary and sufficient to state the physical laws + initial conditions of our universe, not instantiated but logically. And as soon as we state the axioms, the corresponding ghost universe will naturally contain in it life and evolution and lions by logical implication. In this sense, lions exist outside human minds, not independently, but as part of this larger logical universe. God may be needed to give concrete life to the axioms, but the rest can be just a natural outcome without separately needing God to cause each thing individually.
> some explanation is needed as to why the concept of a unicorn lacks existence as a concrete object but the concept of a lion has existence as a concrete object.
Now of course there are many many possible logical universes: Our exact universe. Our universe but anti-gravity. Our universe but unicorns popping into existence 14 billion years after a big bang. Our universe but with a personal God. All logically valid possibilities. I think this covers what you mean by physical laws being contingent. And the question is, which among these universes do we actually live, given our observations. And logically, it is possible (and as a naturalist is obviously more likely to me) that we live in a universe which started with one set of rules (the First Cause) which instantiates the ghost universe implied by those rules into a concrete reality. This is what I mean by "bursting forth". The eternal immaterial First Cause in my version is just a one set of rules (out of many possibilities), from which the universe as we see it emerges as naturally as all the patterns of a Game of Life emerges from its rules. Whether this is actually reflects the true reality or not is up for discussion, but this fits our current data, and hence disproves the exclusive theistic conclusion of the book, which is all I'm trying to establish in this conversation.
> Hydrogen has an actual (not potential) property of being burnable. > It isn't actually wet (like water) or potentially wet.
Sorry I was being sloppy with my words here.
> Do you agree that hydrogen and oxygen lose all their properties when they become part of water, due to the bond they form? Am I being fair when I say this implies that the substances themselves cease to exist as complete entities, and continue to exist only as part of something else that is now itself the complete entity?
This is again a case where I seem to agree with the sentence but our takeaways are very different, possibly because we're attaching different meanings to the words "lose all their properties" and "cease to exist". And I'll refer again to the concept of (weak) emergence to explain how I think about these things. All there is in reality is a set of base rules, which are the physical laws that govern this universe and gives properties to base entities (whatever they are). Of course we don't know the full story yet. But whatever we know so far: quantum mechanics (fields) + general relativity (spacetime), that emerge out of the base rules, gives a huge explanatory power to our ability to understand and predict how the universe works.
It is also important to realize that in our everyday conversation, we heavily use multi-level abstractions. To reuse an example I read, say my partner asks, why is there a pizza delivery at our door (and say it is), there are many possible answers. Because I ordered pizza. Because I was hungry. Because we live in a capitalistic society which allows things like pizza delivery. We can keep asking why, and will ultimately end up with a base reason: Because of the physical laws and initial conditions of the universe (or because God willed it so). So which is the correct answer? All of them. At different levels of abstractions. Hence, emergence. And of course, we have to use the right abstraction when answering questions. Saying the initial conditions of the universe as an answer to there is pizza might be okay as a geeky joke at a physics conference, but will probably only lead to an unhappy partner if used as an answer at home :)
So back to the hydrogen example. All that exists are the base rule. H/O/H2O do not "exist" in the base rules. Instead, they are emergent out of the base rules at some level of abstraction. H itself consists of protons and electrons, with protons made up by quarks etc. So when H combines with O to form H2O, think about what happens to the electrons and protons in the H and O. Do they change in any sense? No. They keep being electrons and protons. So what changed? Only the emergent properties of a group of H and O. And only at the level of everyday human experience. When we look at the H inside water and the H in a hydrogen tank, we will still find electron and protons behaving in the exact same way. So nothing has changed there. What has changed is what is in the vicinity of H. When there are only other H in the vicinity of H and O2, it has the property of being able to burn. Why? Because it has a free electron that gives H the property of being able to attract an O. But once it has succeeded on attracting an O, and thus is in the vicinity of O (not O2), the property to burn has "ceased to exist". But only in the sense that it is latent due to the presence of O. H still is a complete entity and O still is a complete entity, but in the presence of each other, some properties become latent. And sometimes electrons can actually completely cease to exist, say by colliding with a positron and turning into photons. But even here, what matters is that all these interactions are consistent according to the base rules, say of conservation laws. This is the beauty of emergence.
Now I also realize that your critique is of "reductionism". I am not particularly attached to this word if that helps. I only aim to explain why I think that the God the proofs are trying to show is only needed at the edge of the hierarchical chain. We may need God to explain how the universe started. But once it got going, physical laws can (and do) completely explain the rest. We don't need God to separately explain lions and hydrogen and gravity. Consider the idea from the book of me giving $20 to Alice. So sure, I caused Alice to have $20. Now say Alice, unknown to me, gives the $20 to Bob. Thus I caused Bob to have $20. But only indirectly. I didn't even know Bob existed. Similarly God sustains the physical laws and the physical laws sustains the next level and so on, until lions emerge out of the linear/hierarchical causal chain.
[0] https://youtu.be/6avJHaC3C2U?t=297, highly recommended video
And when electrons say annihilate by combining with a positron, then the artifact in this case is the say particle physics and energy conservation, whose behavior completely explains electrons and positrons, which then are emergent entities.
The naturalist claim is this happens all the way down to the base rules, which are the core never changing artifacts out of which all properties/behavior is emergent.
So my naturalist view is bottom up rather than top down. It is not that H2O exists and I'm trying to explain if the parts explain the whole. I'm saying the only thing that really exists is the First Cause. Everything else is an artifact (say) originating from different arrangements of this base reality.
I think it misleads us to try start with the concept of H2O and ask, is it made of its parts or is it something more. We should instead start with the base rules and see where they end up. In our universe, we end up with electrons and protons and when they combine in different ways, the behaviors of H and O and H2O emerge. And in general, any universe that starts from the physical laws of our universe but say different initial conditions will likely have H and O and H2O in it (there are caveats but the general idea holds).
Q: Why do lions exist and unicorns don't, even though it could have been otherwise?
A: Because of the physical laws and initial conditions of our universe.
Q: Why these particular physical laws and initial conditions and not something else?
A: Impersonal First Cause
Q: Could there be other universes with unicorns or anti-gravity?
A: Possible but unknown. This multiverse could still be based on an impersonal First Cause.
My takeaway remains the same: A personal God is a logically valid possibility, but not a logical necessity, contrary to what the book claims.
There is no reason to think that the FC is personal. One reason for this is that there is no reason to think that the FC can choose what it causes. The fact that lions exist and unicorns don't may be because the FC is choosing to cause lions and not unicorns, but there is no reason to think this. How could we know whether it could cause unicorns but doesn't, or simply can't cause unicorns? And in a universe where unicorns popped into existence at random points in history, the same would apply -- the FC would be causing such things, but how would we know that it is choosing to do so? Could random unicorns not be 'bursting forth', in the same way that laws-of-science-obeying lions already are?
[I am not clear which of the next two paragraphs reflects your view, since they seem to contradict, and I think you've said things that could imply either:]
Even in the absence of a FC, logical possibilities (concepts) would still exist. Given these concepts, and regardless of the existence of the FC, the entire history of the universe (including whatever caused the Big Bang) would also exist hypothetically, since the interaction of every object with every other object would already be 'mapped out'. The script would be written, so to speak; the source code would be written even if it were never compiled and executed. Even if the universe never came into existence, its full history would already be theoretically written, given logic and concepts. Logic/concepts lead to the entire theoretical history of the universe, just as the axioms of geometry lead to the details of triangles. The FC's role is limited to making this theoretical history an actual history.
[OR]
Even in the absence of a FC, logical possibilities (concepts) would still exist. The FC is one set of rules (or chooses one set of rules), out of infinite logical possibilities, that governs the universe's behavior. Given these concepts, and this set of rules, the entire history of the universe (including whatever caused the Big Bang) would also exist hypothetically, since the interaction of every object with every other object would already be 'mapped out'. Etc etc. The FC, as a ruleset, governs the behaviour of the 'theoretical' universe, AND makes the theoretical univese actual.
It is therefore false to say that the FC in some sense chooses to make the lion exist but not the unicorn. The FC simply brings the ruleset, and the subsequent theoretical history of the universe that necessarily follows from the ruleset, into actuality. OR: The FC is simply a ruleset that governs things' behaviour. IN BOTH CASES: the ruleset determines everything that will happen subsequently, including the existence of the lion & gravity and the non-existence of the unicorn & anti-gravity.
Is this a fair summary of your views, or have I unwittingly misrepresented them?
More to follow on water and hydrogen when I get another spare minute...
> And in a universe where unicorns popped into existence at random points in history, the same would apply -- the FC would be causing such things, but how would we know that it is choosing to do so?
So this particular event, if it happened, would actually be in favor of a personal God! For lions, we can trace a history from big bang to earth to life to evolution to lions, everything consistently explained by emergence. Popping into existence would violate conservation laws for example and would make it more likely that a personal God is causing unicorns, not impersonal laws.
The second paragraph seems closer to what I have in mind. But I'm not sure what the contradiction is between the two paragraphs. To me, "the FC's role is limited to making this theoretical history an actual history" seems to be a variation of "FC is one set of rules out of infinite logical possibilities, that governs the universe's behavior." Perhaps you can clarify a bit more?
The bigger picture: my discussion of logical possibilities and FC as rules is mainly in response to "certain concepts (lions, gravity) are willed into existence, and continue to be so willed here and now; and certain other concepts (anti-gravity, unicorns) are not." or "there is nothing about a lion as such that makes it real." as you wrote a while back. And I am positing that instead of saying "God causes their existence from moment to moment", we can say: the axiomatic rules (physical laws + initial conditions) of our universe causes their existence from moment to moment. And everything else was to try show how axiomatic rules can cause the concept of lions without referring to one particular arrangement of particles or something in human minds.
Side note: even if there is a personal God, it seems to still be the case that God chose to create a universe based on a set of rules, because it is consistent with what we observe, right? A personal God can still intervene as He wishes (and presumably did at least once), in the same way that I can arbitrarily intervene at any generation of the Game of Life to change the state without any regard to the rules. But in general, I only need to make sure the computer is running, but otherwise let the rules do their thing. In the same way, we can say God is letting the universe do its thing based on its rules. But of course in this case, He can change the rules anytime, say by bringing unicorns into existence tomorrow even if they are not implied by the rules.
> IN BOTH CASES: the ruleset determines everything that will happen subsequently, including the existence of the lion & gravity and the non-existence of the unicorn & anti-gravity.
Yes. "Why lions and not unicorns" is explained by axiomatic rules of our universe, and "why these axiomatic rules and not something else" is explained by the First Cause.
In the first paragraph, the ruleset is distinct from the FC; the FC simply actualizes the ruleset. It makes the theoretical history an actual history. In the second paragraph, the ruleset is the FC. (If I could, I would strike out the part "or chooses one set of rules", since it muddies the issue, and makes the second appear more like the first).
So case 1: the FC actualizes the rules, but is distinct from them; in case 2, the FC is identified with the rules. To me that seems a contradiction.
> So this particular event, if it happened, would actually be in favor of a personal God! For lions, we can trace a history from big bang to earth to life to evolution to lions, everything consistently explained by emergence. Popping into existence would violate conservation laws for example and would make it more likely that a personal God is causing unicorns, not impersonal laws.
I don't know that this follows. Suppose the unicorn popped into existence (let's call this event E). There would be nothing to stop you saying that before time T1, the FC was unable to perform E; but at T1, it was able to do so. And you could say the same thing about conservation of energy, the consistency of emergence, etc etc. So the existence of events such as E would not imply a "willing" FC. You could equally well say that events such as E are, nonetheless, acting according to the FC's necessary actions.
Likewise, the fact that things behave in observably regular ways does not, of itself, imply that the FC is bound to act in a certain way. I would be wrong to use this as an argument in favour of the FC's freedom. Like if I were to say "we know God exists because things act in certain ways, and therefore we can see God is constantly willing them to do so", it would obviously be faulty. And similarly, if event E happened, it would be no argument in my favour.
So there is no connection between the regularity of the universe, and necessity on the FC's part.
So your position cannot arise from empirical considerations; and therefore the following statement, insofar as it claims to be empirical, is faulty:
> given the axioms of mathematics, 2+2=4 is true and not even God can change that. In the same way, as a naturalist, I'm saying that given the laws of our universe (whatever they are) and the initial conditions, lions exist and unicorns don't and even God cannot change that. I'll freely agree that the former is from logic and hence necessarily true. But the later is just from empirical observations.
There is a further problem, though. Let's grant your position that
> the axiomatic rules (physical laws + initial conditions) of our universe causes [lions'] existence from moment to moment.
Of all the possible rulesets that could exist, why this one and not another? (Or if multiverses exist, why this ruleset in our universe?) There are infinite (or at least very many) logical possibilities and therefore infinite or very many possible rulesets. Why this one? We agree that there is no logical necessity about the ruleset being what it is. For me, it's easy to say that God willed such a ruleset out of the infinite ones He could have willed. (To will something just is to bring about X instead of Y, where X contradicts Y, but where X and Y are both possibilities prior to the actualisation of one of them.) Since you have no recourse to willing, what is it about the FC that makes it be (or makes it actualise) one set of rules instead another? Why is it X rather than Y?
We agree that logic is prior to the existence of the universe, so any answer implying that logic doesn't apply here will not be accepted :-)
On that subject, do you think logic precedes the FC? I don't think your position allows logic to be 'downstream', so to speak, of the FC, so I think your argument implies this. But I want to hear your thoughts on this before continuing.
I had to write this in a hurry so hopefully I haven't missed something. Again, I haven't forgotten the talk of hydrogen and oxygen, hopefully will have time to return to it at some point :-)
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We can only be sure of two things with 100% certainty.
G1: "I" exist.
G2: logical truths.
Everything else is contingent, right? We observe certain things with our senses. And we're trying to surmise what it is. How it works. What's causing it. Etc. And any knowledge we gain can never be given 100% certainty, can it? Because our senses are fallible. Can we guarantee we are not living in a simulation, being experimented on by showing Divine events such as a resurrection just to see how we react? Can we guarantee that we are not a brain in vat being fed signals that generate our universe. Can we guarantee there is no unknown unknowns we can't even think of because of our vantage point in reality? I don't think we can. And until we can eliminate these logically valid causes, we can only talk about how likely one possibility is over another. We can try to do the best we can, but we have to be humble. But as long as we are dependent on our own senses, no other knowledge we gain can ever go up to 100% certainty apart from G1 and G2. I hope there is not much to disagree about here?
(For the purpose of our discussion, let's eliminate the other possibilities and assume that the world we see is "real" with say 99.99% certainty. Thus G1 implies "I" and world we see.)
Using G1 and G2, we can come to a conclusion with 100% certainty that:
C1: An eternal First Cause exists.
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What piqued my interest in this conversation was the book's claim that a personal God can be shown with 100% certainty, just from logic. If true, that'd be amazing. We'd settle the question of God once and for all. I won't be able to deny logical truths.
But I don't think the book succeeds. It shows FC for sure. But it does not succeed in showing that FC has free will. My claim is that there are still (at least) two possibilities for FC: FC is a personal God or FC is a set of impersonal rules. Both these possibilities can explain everything we see in the world. And our quest is to try figure out which one reflects the True nature of FC.
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> Of all the possible rulesets that could exist, why this one and not another?
If you notice, G1 is also an observation. By which I mean that it could have been the case that I didn't exist, right? Which means even FC doesn't have a 100% certain reason to exist. Given G1, FC definitely exists. But:
P1: it is logically possible that nothing (neither I nor FC) existed.
I'd love it if you could show that P1 isn't a valid possibility.
So given P1, we can then ask the question: why does FC exist in the first place, right? From our vantage point, we are asking, what causes/sustains us and the world we see. The answer is FC. But what causes FC? Well:
C2: FC is a brute force fact of reality.
Given G1, FC always has to have existed. We can ask "why FC?", but is has no answer. I think you'd agree to this?
So let's say FC=God. That is, God is real and He caused G1. We can ask the question: why does God exists? And the answer is C2. He just does. I've heard it put this way: that God is His own cause. So the takeaway is that C2 is valid: base reality FC can (and must) exist without any reason attached to it. Makes sense?
Thus, when you ask: "why this one and not another?", my answer is the same: C2. That it is a brute-force fact of reality. We cannot expect a reasonable answer to the question because there isn't any. The difference is what we are applying C2 to. Theism applies it to FC=God. Naturalism applies it to FC=base ruleset.
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> So case 1: the FC actualizes the rules, but is distinct from them; in case 2, the FC is identified with the rules. To me that seems a contradiction.
Right sorry. The difference to me is which rules we are talking about. One is the rules of our universe. General relativity. Quantum mechanics. Whatever base rules lie underneath them. However, I am thinking in more general terms. As I said in the first paragraph, it is not necessarily the case that there is FC and then our universe, right? It could be the case that our universe is a simulation in supercomputers of another universe. It could be the case that I am a brain in vat being fed signals that match the rules of our universe. More realistically, we could be one out of many universes originating from eternal inflation. And FC would then be some base rules causing base realities, inside which the rules for the universe we actually see embedded in an emergent way.
So more generally, I think of: FC -> emergence1 -> emergence2 -> ... -> our universe -> physics -> ... -> lions.
I don't know if you agree yet, the idea is that the explanations for the world we see comes in layers of what I am calling emergence. Why lions? Because biology. Biology can completely explain lions, except the question: why biology? Then we say because chemistry. Why chemistry? Because physics. Why physics? Because FC. Why FC? Brute force fact. (Note that there could be more layers between physics and FC, as per above.)
The important takeaway I want to convey is that FC can be just an impersonal set of rules out of which everything emerges
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> So the existence of events such as E would not imply a "willing" FC. You could equally well say that events such as E are, nonetheless, acting according to the FC's necessary actions.
Words are tricky. Especially in discussions like this one. When I said "in favor of", I meant more in a probabilistic manner. E wouldn't imply with 100% certainty that there is a personal God. But it will make Him more likely than it is currently.
Let me put it this way. Take Conway's Game of Life (GoL). We humans created this "GoL universe" that runs on a grid based on a simple set of rules. Say I am running a GoL instance on my computer with an initial generation G0. G0 is a choice. There are infinite number of possibilities for G0 and I chose one of these to start with. But as soon as I fixed G0, the state of G1 to G-infinity is then automatically implied, right? I don't have to then setup G1, G2, etc. I can just let it run according to the rules. But I can intervene at any generation if I want to. At any generation Gi, I can modify the state in a arbitrary manner without regard to the rules and the state of Gi-1.
Now let's posit some observers embedded inside GoL. Say they start observing at generation k, such that 0<k<i. And say they don't know the base rules when they start. What will they see? For generations Gk to Gi-1, they might eventually be able to figure out that the state changes in a highly regular manner and thus surmise what the base rules are. However at Gi, they will see that the rules they thought were true break down.
So then reality for these observers could be 3 possibilities. Reminder that this is an analogy, so focus is on the ideas rather than the details.
P1: FC=I, sdht0. I setup the computer and choose to run GoL instead of say chess, and I chose the state of G0. This explains why the rules broke down at Gi.
P2: FC=rules of GoL + G0 (+ the computer). In this case, I sdht0, don't exist. Base reality started with G0.
P3: FC=rules of GoL + G0 + unrelated changes at Gi not implied by G0. This basically implies a discontinuous function for the rules.
I hope you can see how the analogy maps to our universe. (The random change at Gi is the popping in of unicorns.) So yes, as you said, we can never eliminate P3. But my point is: say we're only choosing between P1 and P2, theism vs naturalism, the fact that unicorns popped into existence would make P1 more likely. Conversely, the fact the universe has never broken its regularity would imply P2 is highly likely, because then God will be an extra things that we would not need to explain what we see. But none of the cases can be asserted with 100% certainty.
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> Likewise, the fact that things behave in observably regular ways does not, of itself, imply that the FC is bound to act in a certain way.
Again, "bound to act" is a claim of certainty that I'm not making. I'm only saying it makes it highly possible that regular rules is all there is to it.
Let P be "observation shows us that the universe 'unfolds' predictably"
Let Q be "the FC lacks free will"
You are claiming that P implies Q, and !P implies (or at least suggests) !Q.
But I am claiming that there is no connection between P and Q. P may be true, and Q may be true, but there is no necessary connection between the two. P is an empirical observation, but you cannot thereby claim that Q is an empirically-derived statement. And therefore, I think, we have no reason to believe Q.
Hopefully this very short summary clarifies things, and not the opposite :)
From my earlier comments: "I'm not saying that the First Cause is definitely impersonal. I'm only claiming that given our current observation as of today, impersonal physical laws can explain all of our observations"
To use your format:
W: Observe that world has causes, parts, etc.
FC: Eternal First Cause as a brute-force fact.
M: FC has will.
N: FC does not have will.
Claim0: W -> FC.
Claim1: W -> M.
Claim2: W -> N.
I think we both agree on Claim0.
The proofs in the book (and you) are asserting Claim1. W is true, hence M is true. In other words, FC has to have free will in creating this world.
Me: !Claim2. So no, I'm NOT claiming FC has to have a lack of free will. I agree with you, that doesn't follow.
Me, instead: W -> (M or N). That's all. If you agree with this, then my job here is done. The book claims: "The real debate is not between atheism and theism." My objective is to show this statement is not true. Atheism is very much still on the table.
Thus, given the observations as of today, we cannot assert Claim1, as the book is doing. Why not? Because we have NOT eliminated N, as it also fits the observations. So no, not everyone should turn into a theist. (But we cannot assert Claim2 either.)
> There is no necessary connection between the two.
There is no necessary connection. But there is a possible connection. P from your comment can explain W (all that FC is is the unfolding of rules) and if so, then Q/N will be implied.
Where does that leave us?
Today: Either M or N is true, but we don't know which. Thus, naturalism is as valid a stance as theism. Neither can claim the other is false. We can only talk in terms of how likely it is that M or N is true. As a naturalist, my claim is that N is likely because we can explain the world using rules. We don't need a Divine explanation. Not definitely, but possibly. And that it helps to adopt something like Bayesian reasoning when thinking about matters such as these.
Tomorrow: God does a (second) revelation. M is then shown to be true and N is false.
Tomorrow: Not likely but possible, science figures out how the universe is self-sustaining. N is then shown to be true, and M false.
My position is that the existence/non-existence of regular laws, and the personality/impersonality of the FC, have nothing to do with one another. As I stated earlier, event E would be compatible with the FC's personality/impersonality, and so is the universe we currently observe.
I don't believe this is your position (and admit my precis of your views earlier may have been inaccurate). I think your position is that observation of the universe's regularity affects the question of God's personality, hence your insistence that this is an empirical question (which I deny). You said:
> ... as a naturalist, I'm saying that given the laws of our universe (whatever they are) and the initial conditions, lions exist and unicorns don't and even God cannot change that. I'll freely agree that the former is from logic and hence necessarily true. But the later is just from empirical observations.
And further up the thread :
> ...it's all empirical. Yes, tomorrow unicorns could start popping into existence and then we'd have to revise what we think of the universe. But until then (this is crucial, my claims are contingent on observations), apriori natural laws seem to be able to explain everything we see. No personal God needed.
And more recently
> So this particular event [unicorn popping into existence], if it happened, would actually be in favor of a personal God!
and
> As a naturalist, my claim is that N is likely because we can explain the world using rules. We don't need a Divine explanation.
All these quotes indicate that you think that the empirical observation P (in my prev comment) at least suggests Q (which = N). Or alternatively, that you think that the truth of P undermines the need for M.
Again, my position is that P and M vs N have nothing to do with one another.
(P and W are different, and we have been using terminology more like P for the past dozen or so comments, hence I discuss P here rather than W.)
> the empirical observation P (in my prev comment) at least suggests Q (which = N).
> Again, my position is that P and M vs N have nothing to do with one another.
So the question we start with is, why do you think M is correct? You agree that you and the book are asserting Claim1, i.e, W can only be explained by a personal God (= M) with 100% certainty?
One answer you've mentioned is: only M can explain why concepts such as lions exist and unicorns don't.
My counterpoint then is to bring in P and say: P also explains why concepts exists or doesn't exist. Thus, we don't need M to be true and Claim1 is incorrect.
Since P can entirely explain everything we see, the certainty of M is eliminated, thus leading to the possibility of N (= Q). Hence, M or N.
Nitpick: P is part of W. W is everything we see. Causes. Parts. And regularity.
EDIT: I may have been using P incorrectly when I meant FC=rules. See below.
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P = Our universe is regular to a high degree of accuracy.
P is a provisional truth. It is true and no one can deny it today. If there is a God, no one deny that He chose to create a universe that is regular. But the fact that it is true today doesn't mean it will remain true tomorrow.
Question: what FC is able to cause a universe whose observers see P.
There are probably infinite possibilities, but let's focus on the two interesting ones to us:
A1: FC=base_rules. P is emergent out of base_rules. N is true.
A2: FC=God. He chose to actualize base_rules. P is emergent out of base_rules. M is true.
In both cases, FC is a brute-force Truth.
The book claims that only and only A2 is possible. I'm claiming that A1 is also possible.
If P were not true (unicorns popping in), then it will harder to justify A1, though not impossible as you pointed out. But since P is true as of today, positing A1 is more straightforward.
I'm further claiming that as long as P is true, A2 is in fact unnecessary as it is adding one extra thing when it is not needed to explain P, but we don't need to get into that. I'm content just showing that A2 is not the only logical possibility.
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I'm not saying we observe regularity and thus FC=rules. In a sense, I'm saying the opposite. In any universe where FC=rules, its observers will definitely observe P. Thus our observation of P makes FC=rules a good possibility. And I think then it's clear that FC=rules is mindless N.
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The book is making a claim of logical truth: W -> M, that is, if "the observations of our world" then "FC has free will", because only M can explain what we see => N is impossible.
But something is shown to be a logical truth only when all other possibilities are eliminated right?
Is N, i.e, a FC without will, able to explain everything we see? My answer is yes, since we would definitely observe P in a universe where FC=rules. And if my claim that this is a valid possibility is correct, then W -> M is not true.
So a concrete goal for natural theology is to be able to find at least one observation of our world that FC=rules cannot explain, even in principle.
Apart from the foundational examples such as resurrection, I think last frontier in this regard is consciousness, but of course here too I think rules is all there is, even though we have a lot way to go in being able to say how.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on this point. You have already raised some good questions: "how can we explain lions but not unicorns" or "why these rules and not others". I think I have good answers to these at least to my satisfaction, if not yours. But would be glad if you can raise more pinpointing issues against FC=rules that will reveal a gap in my understanding.
P does not imply N because there is no logical connection between the two. As stated, P vs !P and M vs N have no bearing on one-another.
Let's grant that N is true. Your assumption is that the regularity we observe is the same as base_rules/impersonal FC. As a concomitant, you're saying that the regularity we observe cannot change with time. But suppose both these assumptions are false. (After all, neither is logically necessary, and neither can be empirical, because we can't observe the future. Nor can either be probable, because probability assumes that the future will be like the past; it can't be used to show it.) Suppose base_rules, in fact, said that a unicorn will pop into existence on 1/1/2025, and pop out the following day. The FC has no free-will in this scenario, but its 'programming' simply declares that regularity will be suspended for the first two days of 2025. Clearly P is false in this scenario. But why would this be incompatible with N? I think it's entirely compatible.
The possibility that base_rules and observed-regularities are distinct seems implied by your statement here:
> ...it is not necessarily the case that there is FC and then our universe, right? It could be the case that our universe is a simulation in supercomputers of another universe...More realistically, we could be one out of many universes originating from eternal inflation. And FC would then be some base rules causing base realities, inside which the rules for the universe we actually see embedded in an emergent way.
Therefore, non-willing, non-free FC is compatible with unicorn events.
As stated above, if P (empirically-observed) and !P (empirically-falsified) are both compatible with N, then N cannot be said to be empirical.
> A2: FC=God. He chose to actualize base_rules. P is emergent out of base_rules. M is true.
This is not the claim. There is no claim that God actualises base_rules; rather, the claim is that all existence of anything and everything, including logic itself, proceeds from God. (Actually, God, in a sense, is logic; the word "logic" derives from "Logos", meaning the Word, meaning the Second Person of the Trinity; but that's really a whole separate discussion.) The base_rules don't exist independently of God (because then there would be some principle independent of God, which would mean He isn't God).
Further, it is change, not regularity, that the book uses as the starting point. Change could exist in an entirely irregular universe, or could exist in the brain-in-a-jar universe (because I would go from thinking-about-being-a-brain-in-a-jar to not doing so). None of the book's arguments use regularity or order as a starting point. Some Protestant arguments use regularity to argue for God's existence, which you may have at the back of your mind. I think these arguments for God's personality fail. (The reason I'm discussing regularity is because you brought it up as an argument against the FC's having will.)
So If I'm correct, we've established that regularity and God's having or lacking free-will are entirely orthogonal. Not probabilistic or logically implying, but simply irrelevant and disconnected.
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Responding to your other comment here:
> I'd love it if you could show that P1 isn't a valid possibility.
Sure. Logic exists. Where does it come from? I say it proceeds from the FC; it is an expression of the FC's being. (The FC is not the FC if something, namely logic, is independent of it.) Insofar as logic shows us what might be (and what can never be), it is a form of existence, if only potential existence. If there were literally nothing, there would be no logic; but if there's no logic, then there's no argument, and therefore no valid or invalid possibility, and no discussion about anything. A bit simplistic, but that's off the top of my head :-)
> Given G1, FC always has to have existed. We can ask "why FC?", but is has no answer. I think you'd agree to this?
Only insofar as it has no answer outside itself. As you say, we believe that "God is His own cause". But "brute fact" implies "no reason", which is not the same as saying "His own reason". We say "God's essence is His existence"; they are one and the same thing. God is existence (which isn't the same as pantheism, but that's another discussion). Existence doesn't need a reason outside existence for existing; in fact, it is illogical for such a reason to exist.
Given that God is existence, it is impossible for God not to exist, so He is the reason for His own existence. He needs no reason outside Himself for existing. It is illogical for Him not to exist.
This cannot apply to base_ruleset, which logically might have been otherwise (anti-gravity, etc): that is to say, it might not have existed in the way we observe. It therefore needs a reason, outside itself, for being what it is. My reason is in a way very simple: the existing-things we see around us, like gravity and lions, were willed by God, and the logically-coherent-but-not-actually-existing things like unicorns and anti-gravity were not. Or, if you prefer, base_rules were willed by God, and some_other_hypothetical_rules were not: the principle is identical.
My position is logical. The position you propose, on the other hand, is forced to resort to the explicitly-illogical concept of a "brute fact" to explain it. Do you agree that reference to brute facts is illogical? If so, why is it ok to violate logic here, but not elsewhere? "From a contradiction [one contradiction], anything follows." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
(To be clear, I am not making a full case for God's existence here; only showing that my position (of a willing FC) is logical, while I respectfully suggest your position is not. Therefore, your tu quoque against my position -- that I am also arguing for a brute fact -- does not succeed.)
> So a concrete goal for natural theology is to be able to find at least one observation of our world that FC=rules cannot explain, even in principle.
Hopefully I have shown that, while I think observed rules are compatible with both positions, FC=rules is not logical, while FC=Personal God is.
This obviously isn't the same as a contradiction.
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Alright. We've to first get into the meaning of the word existence.
From my perspective:
There is a property of reality called existence. And clearly the existence of 2+2=4 is very different from the existence of lions. Thus existence is of two kinds: potential existence and actual (ontological) existence. Concepts of both a universe with gravity and a universe with anti-gravity exist potentially (what I called ghost universes). But only the universe with gravity actually exists, but universe with anti-gravity doesn't.
Is is possible for there to be no potential existence? No, there is always potential existence in the form of all logically valid possibilities, because logic (potential existence) necessarily exists. It is illogical for logic to not exist.
But is it possible there were no actual existence? Yes, because we see some concepts exist and other don't. To paraphrase your words, there is nothing inherent in the concepts of something that can turn them into actual existence. Actual existence could have been otherwise, including there being nothing actualized.
Reality also contains some mechanism by which potentials can become actualized. This mechanism consists of "stating a purely actual axiom/FC" after which the rest of Reality follows. Theists state FC=God who then chooses which of the many potential existence to actualize. Naturalists state FC=base_ruleset out of which the rest of reality emerges.
Hopefully this clarifies my position in a different way.
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>> I'd love it if you could show that P1 isn't a valid possibility.
> Sure. Logic exists.
Haha okay that's on me, I set the bar too low [0]. But as per above, I was talking about actual existence, not potential. Of course logic exists, but logic needs an axiom to start with. The question then becomes, is there necessarily some purely actualized axiom/FC? I think the answer is no. There could have been no actual existence. No "I", no FC, no God, nothing. Only potential existence, but nothing to actualize any of it.
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> Hopefully I have shown that, FC=rules is not logical, while FC=Personal God is.
Detailed responses below, but briefly, FC=Personal God still needs to be taken as an axiom, same as FC=rules. You've tried to use existence as the logical basis, but as I show above, on clarifying the definition of the word existence, "it is impossible for God not to exist" fails.
More importantly, the fact that God has free will is still not proven. Maybe God can only create the universe we see, but no unicorns, no anti-gravity. The choices God has might be limited to 1.
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> rather, the claim is that all existence of anything and everything, including logic itself, proceeds from God. (Actually, God, in a sense, is logic [...])
This is a main point to discuss, because I don't understand what you mean by "God, in a sense, is logic". I get that God is traditionally defined that way, but I am not able envision what it would mean to say that an entity that has "free will" is logic or the basis of logic.
How can God, who is claimed to be purely actual existence, be logic, which is purely potential existence?
Logic works on axioms. Logic by itself doesn't have any say on the axioms. It can say: if axioms, then something. But it cannot itself state the axiom. There is no such "will" in logic to posit axioms. But for each "stated" axiom, the logical truths contingent on that axiom automatically manifest. These truths are absolute and indisputable and not even God can change them.
So to me, logic precedes everything. Even God would be bound by logic, not the other way around. Can you explain why you think otherwise?
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> God is existence. Existence doesn't need a reason outside existence for existing; in fact, it is illogical for such a reason to exist.
I am not sure which existence you're talking about. Clearly concepts like lions or unicorns need an external reason for existing. You may mean potential existence, for which the statement is true, but then God is not potential but purely actual existence. And the statement doesn't generally apply to actual existence.
> Given that God is existence, it is impossible for God not to exist, so He is the reason for His own existence. He needs no reason outside Himself for existing. It is illogical for Him not to exist. > while FC=Personal God is [logical].
This is a making a logical leap though. First we have to define God appropriately before we can equate God to existence. Because see, the point of contention is that God has a free will or not. So if you say God is existence, then aren't you by definition circularly proving God?
To show how, let replace God with Blob. Then, given that Blob is existence, it is impossible for Blob not to exist, so He is the reason for His own existence. It is illogical for Him not to exist. Therefore Blob has free will. Yes silly, but my point is God or Blob are just words at this point. We'll have to do more work to prove the other properties of God, especially free will.
Similarly, when you say, "[logic] proceeds from the FC; it is an expression of the FC's being. (The FC is not the FC if something, namely logic, is independent of it.)", then it seems to me you're just defining FC to have this property and calling it God who is of course personal. As I mention above, to me logic is separate and supreme to God, as it has a different kind of existence than God.
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> Do you agree that reference to brute facts is illogical?
You already clarified this statement. But I was thinking about axioms. They are the free variables. There is no logical precedence to axioms. They just are posited as priors, and logical reasoning proceeds from the axioms/brute fact. Thus, it is all part of logic and hence not illogical.
And this "stating of axioms" is what the discussion is about. Why this axiom and not that axiom? Why a personal God and not a base_ruleset or vice versa.
> if you say one thing can happen without a reason (brute facts), you are thereby forced to say anything can happen without a reason, and that therefore you have no reason to think (say) that a chocolate cake can't start doing calculus, or some other bizarre idea.
Well no, because brute facts are also bound by logic. A "chocolate cake" as usually defined, does not have the capability to do calculus, otherwise it is not a chocolate cake, but say a cartoon character in the shape of a chocolate cake. The meaning of the words obviously matter. Unstoppable force and immovable object are "defined" to be impossible at the same time. Thus, bizarre ideas are ruled out by definitions/properties and rules of logic.
In particular, FC=base_ruleset is a brute fact. But base_ruleset has to be consistent with our observations W.
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> P does not imply N because there is no logical connection between the two
> As stated above, if P (empirically-observed) and !P (empirically-falsified) are both compatible with N, then N cannot be said to be empirical.
> Not probabilistic or logically implying, but simply irrelevant and disconnected.
Perhaps the disagreement is that my approach is from Bayesian reasoning, asking the question: given W, which of A1 or A2 is more likely relative to each other. And seems like you're coming from the perspective of proving M or N with 100% certainty?
> Therefore, non-willing, non-free FC is compatible with unicorn events.
But if you want to talk about certainties, then yes, non-willing FC is definitely compatible with unicorn events, as I also showed with the Game of Life example.
And since N has a non-zero probability, that actually a proof against the 100% certainty of a FC with free will, no? As in okay, let's forget W. Just from logic, everything CAN be explained by "programming" (=N), so how can one logically posit M with 100% guarantee?
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> There is no claim that God actualises base_rules
> it is change, not regularity, that the book uses as the starting point
Right yes, not explicitly in the book. I'm just extending it from what the books imply. FC has to explain everything we see (W). And I hope you agree that we do observe regularity (as part of W). Everything that we look at follows deep regular rules. In other words, the change we see is regular. It is thus implied in the book, even though it is not explicitly mentioned.
And that is also why we don't need to explain the change of everyday objects like lions. We have to explain the base_ruleset that gives rise to the regularity that explains the changes. Hence, A1 or A2.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-on-me-i-set-the-bar-too...
So I wasn't intending anything like a defence of God's existence. As I said:
>> To be clear, I am not making a full case for God's existence here; only showing that my position (of a willing FC) is logical, while I respectfully suggest your position is not. Therefore, your tu quoque against my position -- that I am also arguing for a brute fact -- does not succeed.
So if it's ok, I'm going to limit the discussion to that, rather than attempting a full defence of God=existence in a combox.
My goal was to show that we need some reason for base_ruleset actually existing, and hypothetical_ruleset not actually existing. "God wills it" is one such reason: in fact, it's the only reason we have had so far in this discussion. Your alternative, of asserting that something can happen without a reason, forces you to allow that anything crazy can happen (like a calculus-doing chocolate cake). You haven't refuted this point:
> A "chocolate cake" as usually defined, does not have the capability to do calculus, otherwise it is not a chocolate cake, but say a cartoon character in the shape of a chocolate cake.
I agree. But this is irrelevant. We both know what the words 'chocolate cake' refer to. We both know I'm talking about a real chocolate cake, not a cartoon character. And we both know it can't do math (and we both know why) -- that is, we both know there's a reason it can't do math. But if we say things can happen without a reason, then anything could happen. Bayesian reasoning won't protect you from this outcome, because that itself is a form of reasoning, and probability also assumes that things will continue to behave as they have in the past.
> But I was thinking about axioms. They are the free variables. There is no logical precedence to axioms. They just are posited as priors, and logical reasoning proceeds from the axioms/brute fact. Thus, it is all part of logic and hence not illogical.
Because there needs to be some reason for base_ruleset actually existing. We've already established that it might have been otherwise, because base_ruleset is not true in and of itself in the way 2+2=4 is. base_ruleset could just as easily have been hypothetical_ruleset. It therefore needs a reason outside itself for actually existing (or alternatively, one must explain why one doesn't need a reason, but that doesn't work, as just stated). base_ruleset is not axiomatic.
Do you agree base_ruleset might have been otherwise? Do you agree that you have given no reason for base_ruleset actually existing, and hypothetical_ruleset not actually existing? Finally :), do you agree that my position -- that God willed base_ruleset but not hypothetical_ruleset -- is at least internally consistent and does not fall to the same objections that I think your position falls to?
> Perhaps the disagreement is that my approach is from Bayesian reasoning, asking the question: given W, which of A1 or A2 is more likely relative to each other. And seems like you're coming from the perspective of proving M or N with 100% certainty?
I don't think Bayesian reasoning will help you here. I think I've shown that A1 must fail unless one is prepared to assert that things happen without reason (in which case the 'chocolate cake' argument applies). So questions of probability don't come into it. I don't know if I've proved A2, but so far, it's one of only two options that we have mentioned in this discussion, and the other has been disproved.
Your argument depends a lot on this claim, but it's fine.
> "God wills it" is one such reason: in fact, it's the only reason we have had so far in this discussion.
> Your alternative, of asserting that something can happen without a reason,
> do you agree that my position -- that God willed base_ruleset but not hypothetical_ruleset -- is at least internally consistent and does not fall to the same objections that I think your position falls to?
This is the key claim of theism that I don't understand. On one hand, you're claiming base_ruleset needs a reason to exist, and on the other hand, you're willing to accept God just existing "as His own cause". No matter words you want to use, you cannot evade the fact that you're positing a very complex being (despite the book describing Him as simple) as an axiom: one who can process and understand multiple possibilities across eons of timesteps and then somehow can actively choose to actualize some possibilities based on some internal criteria.
So you claim, God is existence and thus logically necessary. My question is: what happens if God did not exist? Yes, there would be no existence. "I" wouldn't exist. The universe wouldn't exist. Nothing would exist. There would just be logical possibilities "floating around". Is this not logically valid? My claim is that existence itself not necessary. The fact that something does exists does not invalidate the claim that it could have been otherwise and nothing could have existed. And if that is established, then God also has the same status as base_ruleset, didn't have to exist, but does exist, but we cannot ask why because it's an axiom, a brute fact.
Moreover, note that even God is not free from the "it could have otherwise" argument. For instance, God can either be omnipotent or just have enough power to create our universe. When we walk around New York looking around at the high rise building, we don't think, wow, someone with infinite power must have created these building. No, we only need conscious creatures with intelligence and raw materials much smaller than infinity. Similarly, maybe God only has the power to actualize this particular universe. So then the question is why omnipotent and not limited, or vice versa? Is there any answer better than, that's a brute fact?
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> Do you agree base_ruleset might have been otherwise? Do you agree that you have given no reason for base_ruleset actually existing, and hypothetical_ruleset not actually existing?
Okay let's address this other keystone of your argument. I've been accepting this for simplicity but I don't actually agree this is established. Here's why:
Let's take the example of a universe with unicorns and without. Yes these are 2 possibilities, but I hope you agree that they cannot be true at the same time. A universe can either have unicorns or not. The same object can either be here or there. And so on. We as conscious creatures will necessarily experience only one of these infinite possibilities from our individual vantage points. So let's say the 2 universes exist, the humans in one universe will see unicorns and think, it could have been the case that unicorns didn't exist, and the humans in the other universe think the opposite. But they won't know if the other universe also actually exists or not.
By which I mean to point out that we can only experience our own universe. But can we really claim the other universes don't exist? We don't have access to all of reality. There could exist another universe with unicorns. There could exist another universe where I'm typing this from a cafe instead of at my desk. And the same for every possibility.
Yes, base_ruleset might have been otherwise. But we don't know the ontological status of these other possibilities. If it is a key argument for a personal God, then I'm happy to posit that all possibilities exist. Just not at the same time and not at the same place, as that is illogical. We live in one universe and that is what we experience. That doesn't rule out these other possibilities.
So if it could have been otherwise, maybe it did, just not in our local vicinity. We don't need to reason why just this one possibility. Instead, all possibilities exist. To me this is more reasonable that positing a willing thinking being who just exists as His own cause.
Note that is not a multiverse from physics' perspective. I'm saying whatever "otherwise" you can think of, it just exists. In the same way what we experience exists. The "God" I'm positing doesn't have to choose. He actualized all potentials.
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> probability also assumes that things will continue to behave as they have in the past.
Aside: this is not exactly correct in Bayesian reasoning. It has priors that get stronger and stronger as more data comes in, but that never turns into certainty. If the next new data falsifies everything before, then Bayesian reasoning demands from us that we throw away everything and start again.
And that's pretty much the only way for us humans to reason about our sensory reality. Just as an example, you must have a high degree of belief in Christianity, but if tomorrow the Hindu god Shiva reveals Himself, then you'd have no option other than to discard your earlier beliefs (and vice versa).
Also, my claim is these are exactly the same. 2+2=4 is only true because of the axioms of number theory. Maybe geometry is more illustrative where different axioms give rise to euclidean or hyberbolic geometry, etc. base_ruleset is similarly an axiom of reality.
My usual example of the rules of Conway's Game of Life applies. The rules don't have any reason to exist, but once posited, the board generations naturally follow.
> A1 must fail unless one is prepared to assert that things happen without reason (in which case the 'chocolate cake' argument applies)
To be explicit here, things happening without a reason (positing an axiom) is in no way the same as things being illogical. Axioms are part of logic.
Wishing you all the best as well :)
Maybe I'll draw an analogy - a foundational premise of science is that the past resembles the future. If we determine certain laws of nature based on past experimentation, that's not going to change in the future. Does the scientist, in thinking rationally for himself/herself, need to have an argument for this belief? I don't think so - the scientist can go on analyzing and understanding things scientifically through the scientific worldview without ever needing to construct an argument for this foundational premise. He/she is, however, on the lookout for contradictions - things or events that science can't explain or seem to defy science. I don't think I've described an irrational person here. Of course, if we have a discussion about the enterprise of science and its validity as a whole, then it may come to questioning this premise. But does a scientist in doing science have some kind of burden of proving this premise? I don't think so, just as the Christian in looking at the world through the Christian worldview does not have some kind of burden of proving Christianity.
>I present some of my own thinking below... What you've outlined here is actually firmly in the scope of natural theology, the project of establishing certain theological claims through human reason alone, though not all Christians agree that this project is successful. You may be interested in section 5 of chapter 2 of The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology that addresses the Gap problem, which is exactly what you've described, the problem of the gap between the conclusion of a cosmological argument, i.e. the existence of an ultimate cause, and the traditional omnipotent/omniscient/omnibenevolent God.
Christians who don't buy natural theology would instead just say that God and His most important properties are self-evident through spiritual experience. (Even Christians who buy it would agree, I think, that this purely rational project doesn't really get you to the fullness of Christianity, and that spiritual experience is key to having the fullest sense of who God is, the presence of Christ here today, our role in the world, etc.)
As to your last point about whether we're being tricked, it is true that we cannot have certainty about these claims. Uncertainty is part of the human condition. But that doesn't prevent us from having knowledge of things. I know that there's a floor beneath me, even though I don't have a certain proof of it (it's not necessarily true - I could be dreaming, there could be an evil demon feeding me false sensory data, etc.)
>But I do get interested whenever religion wants to be an exclusive arbiter of reality and what's right or wrong. And every time, I have found it to fall short of all its claims.
Well, religion being an exclusive arbiter of reality is only something held by a fringe group of religious people I think. Most reasonable religious people will have no problem with mathematical proofs or scientific evidence revealing things about reality. Many religious people will also accept that those of other religions can have knowledge of moral truths. But if you just mean that religion wants to be the ultimate truth, well, yeah, it does.
Fair enough :)
> He/she is, however, on the lookout for contradictions
I'll just note that contradiction is not the right term in context of the premise. Rather, it'd be discrepancy that when studied further will become part of normal science: that the laws of physics evolve over time.
> But does a scientist in doing science have some kind of burden of proving this premise
To be a little clearer, yes, scientists do not need to prove the premises in everyday research. However, they do need to kept in mind when reasoning about reality. The current scientific premises are based on strong observational foundations. We have data to show that experiments done 50 years ago give exactly the same results today. If tomorrow the results change, then the premise will most definitely come under question.
> Uncertainty is part of the human condition
Definitely. Cogito, ergo sum is the only absolute surety we have. Everything else is Bayesian reasoning :)
Same for believing the floor is real vs the resurrection might not be. I've empirically tested the claim about the floor and it has never failed to hold up. When it does, I'll have to update my priors. But we only have one data point for the resurrection and thus have no real way to make strong judgements about what's the actual reality behind the resurrection.
> Well, religion being an exclusive arbiter of reality
Sorry I didn't mean to imply arbiter of reality to the exclusion of science, although religion did try back in the day when science was getting off the ground. Today, religions make specific claims about reality for which science doesn't have an answer (gaps). However, when asked why one should believe those specific claims (eternal heaven/hell after death) but not other contradicting claims (reincarnation), the answers ultimately fall back to taking it on faith. And at that point, one gets to basically pick and choose which faith-based answer feels the best.
>And at that point, one gets to basically pick and choose which faith-based answer feels the best.
Well, faith isn't just belief in arbitrary things for no reason, it's a belief grounded in spiritual experience that doesn't contradict our reason. (Though there are reasoned arguments for heaven/hell given certain premises.) Talking more broadly, there is a point at which your justifications for your beliefs bottom out, a point at which you believe in things not because of empirical or logical reasons, even if you reject all religions.
Ah not evidence in the strict sense of the world. I mean in the sense of probabilistic Bayesian reasoning [0], which I think we all use in some form (consciously or subconsciously) in forming our beliefs of reality. Since the laws have been stable in the past, we can hold a strong credence (say 99%, but never 100%) they will continue to hold in the future, until new data proves otherwise. Same reason we don't think twice before stepping into an airplane, trusting the .
In general, our intuitions do develop from our empirical evidence and logic. How can it be otherwise? Even our evaluation of which religion is true depends heavily on our upbringing and which ideas we are exposed to the most, which feed our intuition.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/
>How can it be otherwise?
Chains of reasoning have to bottom out somewhere right?
Right that's a good question. I'll point to an answer Sean Carroll gave in an AMA episode [0] of his Mindscape podcast:
The pros and cons of Bayesian reasoning are almost all in the choice of a prior. People who are pro-Bayesian will say, look, as long as your priors aren't completely crazy, if you collect enough data, the priors cease to matter. [...] The promise of Bayesian reasoning is that data overwhelms your prior ultimately. And therefore, there is no algorithmic way of choosing what your prior should be. It's a little bit fuzzy to say when things are priors and when things are posteriors because we all have certain inclinations, intuitions, pictures of the world, and that's perfectly okay. But as a good Bayesian, you shouldn't be too worried about picking your priors. You should be mostly worried about updating those priors when data comes in, when information comes in.
Absolutely. We should do our best to keep asking the why question, but at the end, we'll be left with a brute-force fact. The question then is, where do we stop, right? In the context of this thread, religion wants to say, God is the final answer. What caused God? Nothing, God is His own cause (kalam cosmological argument). And as a naturalist I'd say, the universe can be its own cause. There's no rational inconsistency there, contrary to what the kalam argument claims. Theists and atheists give different credence to these two viewpoints. And until we have more data, the question cannot really be settled with certainty. So both will keep trying to justify why one viewpoint should have a higher prior over the other, based on secondary evidence.
[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/04/03/ama-...
It sounds like maybe some people are taking this as a challenge from me to atheists. I'm not really; just like Dennet is in TFA, I'm talking about general principles for someone trying to live as a rational creature: each of us should examine our own beliefs, and not only ask "What if I'm wrong?" but "How would I know if I were wrong"? That goes for Christians and Hindus and Muslims as much as for atheists. "Take the plank out of your own eye before you try to remove the speck out of your brother's eye" and all that. It's specifically because Dennet is such a deep thinker and effective communicator that I genuinely wonder how he'd answer that question.
I'm not sure what evidence was provided to me as a child that the world was round; but I had relatives who lived in Germany and Thailand, and at the age of 12 I'd actually flown to Thailand and experienced jet-lag. The "world is round" hypothesis satisfactorily explained my experience (both first- and second-hand, through people I knew personally) in a way that the "flat earth" hypothesis doesn't.
In the same way, the vast majority of evidence I had as a child to confirm what as taught about Christianity to me was experiential. But of course, all sorts of people from different faiths have religious experiences; how do I know that there's not some better explanation for my experiences -- either religious or reductive -- which will be more predictive (in the sense of getting better results more efficiently)?
> I became an Atheist in large part because I took Latin my first year in high school and realized that the Roman's actually believed in their gods the same way that I believed in the Christian god. And I gradually realized that they had the same reason to believe that I did ... they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up.
This seems a bit strange to me... so the Romans believed in supernatural beings, and the Christians also believed in supernatural beings (and of course so did the Greeks, and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and...); but instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort (with some people maybe being closer to the truth of the matter than the others), you decided this was evidence that there weren't supernatural beings?
Isn't that like reading several different conflicting scientific theories, and then deciding that all science is bunk?
Sorry I don't have the exact quote, but there's a place where C.S. Lewis points out that being a Christian, he's free to believe that people of other religions were partly right and partly wrong; but that when he was an atheist, he had to believe that the majority of humans were completely wrong about the most important questions in life.
If the entire world were atheists except Christians, wouldn't that be far stronger evidence against the supernatural? The fact that the Romans believed in the supernatural and the afterlife is evidence -- weak evidence, I grant, but evidence nonetheless -- that the supernatural and the afterlife exist.
> but for me it would just be ANY evidence: a verifiable miracle, proof of life after death, or meeting an angel/demon.
What would satisfy your requirements for a "verifiable miracle"?
It sounds like a lot of these might be very personal experiences. First of all, if you had a single experience of an angel, would that actually change your mind? Wouldn't you be inclined to believe you'd had some sort of hallucination (wondering perhaps if someone had slipped LSD into your drink or something like that)?
Similarly, once you had that experience and became convinced, how would you convince anyone else? Supposing there were another person who was exactly like you -- the fact that you were convinced you'd seen an angel wouldn't have any effect on whether they were convinced that angels existed, would it?
FWIW I know a lot of people who started out as atheists and became Christians, and although this sort of rational "apologetics" sometimes did factor into part of their decision, by far the biggest influence was personal experience: first with genuine Christians, then with with Jesus, through reading the Bible and worshipping him at church. I tend not to focus on that kind of thing in a venue like this, because it's the least logically sound reason; but if you're genuinely interested in having a personal experience to let you put Christianity to the test, that's what I'd look for.
As for me, I've got what I consider to be more objectively sound reasons to believe; but "“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which however [this comment] is not large enough to contain.” Hopefully at some point I'll write it up in a way that's easy to link to.
> so the Romans believed in supernatural beings, and the Christians also believed in supernatural beings (and of course so did the Greeks, and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and...); but instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort [...] you decided this was evidence that there weren't supernatural beings?
Humans are REALLY good a creating stories and investing in them.
Not at all, I'm engaging in good faith here.
> This seems a bit strange to me... so the Romans believed in supernatural beings, and the Christians also believed in supernatural beings (and of course so did the Greeks, and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and...); but instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort (with some people maybe being closer to the truth of the matter than the others), you decided this was evidence that there weren't supernatural beings?
This is a common misinterpretation. Rather it made me rethink why I thought Zeus was a myth and my God was real and that led to me realizing there was no evidence that God was real, I had been taking it on faith.
If there is one thing the explosion of popularity for fantasy stories has shown us is that it is really easy for people to invent the supernatural.
> If the entire world were atheists except Christians, wouldn't that be far stronger evidence against the supernatural? The fact that the Romans believed in the supernatural and the afterlife is evidence -- weak evidence, I grant, but evidence nonetheless -- that the supernatural and the afterlife exist.
Many people believe that vaccines cause autism. There is no evidence that it does and I don't lend the theory any credence. Lots of people believing in something says very little.
But at a basic level, religion has numerous aspects that make it useful, good and bad, to people in general and people in power in particular. Christianity has long been used to manipulate and control for instance; but it also provided community, a common moral code (again, good and bad), shared joy in weddings and births, solace in grief and purpose.
> What would satisfy your requirements for a "verifiable miracle"?
In an age where everyone has a very high quality video camera in their pocket the sasquatch, the loch ness monster and other such things have mostly disappeared but miracles have not appeared.
OK, I think I see what you were getting at. The first thing you should do is ask, "Is there actually any reason to believe this?" I sort of took that as a given, because I went through that process in high school: "Is this something my parents believe, or is this something I believe?"
And that's certainly useful, but the problem is that you can find evidence for all sorts of things. It's simply not accurate, for instance, to say that "there's no evidence that [vaccines cause autism]". There is scientifically robust evidence against it; but there are tens of thousands of personally compelling "anecdata points" in favor of it. To wit: there are tens of thousands of people who had the experience that their child was given a vaccine, and within a month or so they noticed symptoms of autism. "X happened and then Y happened, so Y may have caused X" isn't a logical certainty, but it's certainly valid Bayesian operation to say that "there's a non-zero probability that Y caused X". If you eat something new and then you get sick, you would certainly do well to consider the possibility that the new thing you ate may have been the thing to make you sick; genes of people who did otherwise would quickly have died out in favor of people who do.
To believe in the scientific consensus over and against your own personally compelling anecdata point (and that of dozens of other people you've met online) takes a kind of faith in the unseen power of statistics (and the reliability of the all-too-well-seen scientific and medical establishments) which many people simply don't have.
There are loads of situations where there's implicit confirmation bias which makes non-things seem like evidence. Hence why it's important to move on to the second question: How would I know if this belief of mine were wrong?
> In an age where everyone has a very high quality video camera in their pocket the sasquatch, the loch ness monster and other such things have mostly disappeared but miracles have not appeared.
Really? I haven't looked, but I kind of assume that if I searched for "faith healing" on YouTube I'd see loads of videos of "miracles". Would this sort of thing count? If not, what kind of video would count?
(To be clear, my basic stance towards these would be skeptical as well.)
I think Aquinas's essence-existence distinction, once one understands it (and understands and accepts its premises) is sound. It's impossible to summarise in a combox though, mainly because its philosophical background is very different from the place most people are coming from; so quite a bit of preliminary work needs to happen before it can be understood.
Aristotle's unmoved mover is also sound; there's one point of detail I'm a bit hazy about, but it the main it works. Again, some preliminary work also needed.
The final arbiter is repeatable verifiable data. Everything else to subject to doubt.
So how would I know if naturalism is wrong? God could come down again in a public revelation and agree to undergo a scientific scrutiny His nature. Who can then deny His existence?
Lacking that, how do I know religion is wrong? Well, religion plays two roles: a source of strength in this world full of suffering, and an explanation for our existence. The former is necessary for many people and will probably never go away. But the second role has always been that of a "God of the gaps", with the gaps drastically shrinking with improving scientific knowledge. All arrows are point to a naturalistic explanation of the universe. So pending some strong "evidence", none of the religions seem to be correct in the second role. To me, it is better to say "we don't know yet" than accept something on "faith", especially when it comes with seemingly arbitrary commandments on practical matters of life.
> instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort
This is a good point. I think this would make sense if there was some sort of consistency in these claims. However, almost every religion assert their own mutually exclusive claims on how the world is, and wants us to take up those claims on faith. It is easier to consider these claims as wish-fulfillment of the first role I mentioned above, than any sort of proof for actual divinity.
I've come at this from the other side many times and, though there's certainly a part of me that would like to, I just cannot find it within myself to believe that the human condition is explained in any way by Christian theology.
I've found a good deal of resonance in the mystical traditions of various religions - I'm especially a fan of some of the Jewish mystical stuff (e.g. Kabbalah and other portions of the long tradition of debate and interpretation of scripture).
But in spite of a lot of examination I've still wound up with, at most, a kind of "spiritual but not religious" attitude, which usually translates to, frankly, not much.
I've found myself somewhat jealous of people of faith, who can find some system of belief that seems resonant enough to provide comfort and a framework for living a good life - but also, frankly somewhat nonplussed that people can buy into these various theologies and not run up against the same "...really, that's supposed to explain all this?" that I do.
Sure - and as a matter of fact, this is largely the angle I approach religion from these days - i.e. that we collected a series of parables, rules, and traditions that, when combined, lead to a "good life" (or, more cynically, provide competitive advantages to societies who adopt them in a sort of "memetic natural selection" paradigm).
But when I look at the mythology of Christianity, especially the parts of it that are mainstream and not parts of mystical or esoteric traditions, I don't find it to be a compelling enough story to base my life around (or at least, not enough to go and declare my faith in it every Sunday).
The central "myth" of Christianity is that humans are born into a state of sin and cannot reach salvation (Heaven, eternal life, or maybe more "mystically" a state of oneness with the Divine). And the myth goes on to state that God essentially allowed/caused humans to sacrifice his son to Him so that this original sin could be washed away and allow humans to be "saved."
It seems to me that this has very little explanatory power for the sorts of existential questions like "why are we here," "why are we conscious," "why is there so damn much other stuff in the universe".
As a story, there's a lot of appeal to me. Jesus as a role model, as an example of how we ought to try to be, has some good features (some bad ones too, but that's OK with me since I'm not taking the story as the literal word of God). I just don't know how people go from "this story has some nice features worth meditating on in a secular way" to "this story explains why things are the way they are and what we're supposed to do about it."
This is one of the things I find more appealing about Judaism, because there appears (to an outsider) to be much more of a tradition of grappling with faith, of trying to unpack the meaning of the "words of God" and relate them to the human condition. I'm sure there's some of that in Christian traditions too, but it was never a mainstream feature of the Catholicism that I grew up with.
The purpose of our life is to be in a loving relationship with God. This entails becoming who we are - becoming our true, ideal selves, who express our love for God through our lives, building the kingdom of God. This is why God has created us.
We cannot attain this full self-actualization without the help of God. Thankfully, in God's infinite love, He has given us His son, allowing us to attain salvation. Indeed, no matter how wretched and sinful one might think one is, because of Christ's sacrifice, nobody is beyond repair (see Luke 15).
>This is one of the things I find more appealing about Judaism, because there appears (to an outsider) to be much more of a tradition of grappling with faith, of trying to unpack the meaning of the "words of God" and relate them to the human condition. I'm sure there's some of that in Christian traditions too, but it was never a mainstream feature of the Catholicism that I grew up with.
I grew up as a Catholic as well, so I understand why you might think this. But I really do not think this is because of Catholicism so much as it is because of shallow education (possibly because it's hard to get someone to think deeply about these issue when they're young, and it's far easier for them to get them to be able to recite John 3:16). If anything, Catholicism is a highly intellectual tradition. I know Orthodox Christians and some Protestants actually dislike Catholicism because they think it is too rational, that they bring too much of human reason into religion when they should just trust in the traditions handed down to us. Catholicism, and Christianity in general, have a very strong tradition of grappling with faith and trying to understand how the words of God relate to the human condition. Like, it's quite surprising that your takeaway is that Christianity doesn't do this and that this is the reason you don't find it appealing because if anything this is a key characteristic of Christianity. 2000 years of people arguing about biblical exegesis, theology, Christology, etc. It is really a great shame that catechesis today is so poor that people like you who are genuinely open to it have come away thinking "These people aren't really grappling with their faith or seriously engaging with the word of God and what it means for us today."
TL;DR - There's more to Christianity. Even if you haven't found anything I've said above interesting, it would probably be worth your time looking more deeply into it.
As for the issue of spiritual exegesis in Christianity, I'm certainly aware that it exists, and a lack of it also isn't my real issue. I guess my problem, in short, is that the central theology of the death and resurrection of Jesus doesn't seem to ... add up for me, for lack of a better way to put it. I'm sorry in advance, because this is going to feel like a move of the goalposts from my first posts.
I am once again going to struggle to express this clearly, especially in the context of an HN post, so fair warning, but here's my best shot:
God - a being/intelligence/force with the capability of creating a universe - sacrificed his son / himself to himself in order to wipe clean the cosmic debt of sin of humanity. This was done as a gift to humanity, because without this sacrifice, humans could never attain salvation - which, in short, means the ability to become our true, ideal selves - to have a relationship with God, to reach a oneness with him.
It just feels so ... small, in a sense. That the whole point of Jesus was to thread some cosmic loophole in the rules that gave humanity a clean slate in terms of sin. Surely there has to be some bigger explanation? surely knowing everything we know about what it took for conscious humans to exist on this planet - how can I be satisfied with this explanation that the cosmic currency of the universe and God and conscious beings is sin and sacrifice?
Now - with all that said - clearly there's room for exegesis and interpretation here. I can start to wind together explanations - maybe the whole notion of the "sacrifice" is not the full picture. Perhaps the life and death of Jesus was less about paying off some cosmic debt, but more about some sort of change in consciousness of humanity. Without that story and the culture / religion that spun out of it, maybe we never could have reached that understanding of the divine that would let us have that full relationship with God. I can play the game of rationalization all day and come to conclusions that feel more satisfactory to me - but it all feels like "theory building" and I don't see the same urge to that kind of thing in the average churchgoer.
But as soon as I have to start playing these games, it seems to call into question the whole central notion of the theology, and I'm left scratching my head, wondering what I'm missing. Either way, as much as I'm open to the ideas and the sort of "secularly obvious benefits of religion," I'm still left in a place where I certainly don't feel comfortable saying the Creed every Sunday. (And this discussion doesn't even begin to get into other ideas of Christianity/Catholicism, like the Eucharist, or problems inherent to any theism like the so called "trilemma").
I'm not sure if all that will make sense, it's a difficult feeling to express.
Anyway, I've enjoyed the discussion. Since HN isn't the best platform for these sorts of long running threads, if you feel like continuing the conversation, feel free to find my email in my profile. I am fascinated by these sorts of debates and always enjoy finding someone to have them with in good faith. If not, that's ok too, either way, thanks for the chat!
I don't believe this.
"I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong."
Perhaps the reason you aren't aware that he has addressed this at length is that you don't have have his name right.
Also, as Chris Hitchens noted, religion poisons everything, including this thread.
You can take parent at their word that he's thought about it and engage, or you can choose not to engage. No reason to disparage them.
So as to minimize confrontation, I won't respond to any further provocation.
I will also note that religion is off-topic at HN, for obvious reasons.
An important part of being able to truly ask oneself if they are wrong is the humility to seriously consider an alternative. The author's treating of ID research as a foregone conclusion, even with his acknowledgment that we could be wrong in the next paragraph, seems rather ironic. Isn't it this kind of hubris that he is precisely calling out?
I do think Dennett is being rather sneering in his inclusion of ID in the essay at all. But he's not wrong that good work can be funded, and genuinely useful, and appreciated without malice, for misguided reasons.
Which he did, at length.
"The author's treating of ID research as a foregone conclusion"
No, it's a consequence of massive amounts of evidence, not just of evolution, but of the character of the sort of people who work at the Discovery Institute.
I remember being told once, "Congratulations! It's your fault!". The thinking is that, if it's some[one|thing] else's fault, there's nothing I can do to change it, but if it's my fault, then I have the power to amend the situation.
In every conflict in my life; even when I am clearly in the right, and the other party is clearly in the wrong, I always have something to address, on my end. Sometimes, I may even need to apologize for it; which can really suck.
In my coding, I have found that writing unit tests always finds bugs. Happened to me yesterday, in fact. Since the test ran through 35,000 records, and took almost an hour, it was painful. I can't remember the last time that I wrote unit tests that didn't find bugs in the CuT.
But I am now satisfied that the code I wrote is top-shelf.
Well, would we call it a mistake if someone described what, empirically, was an ellipse, as a circle? The question itself "What if I'm wrong?" is flawed: we are always already wrong. But it is the wrongness which makes the world, for us; and to the extent our creations are false, to that same extent they are true. So why concern yourself with questions of true or false, right or wrong, Good and Evil? Go out, create your own truth, make the world anew...leave behind all this worrying over nothing.
Only if you have an overly strict definition of circle. I don't think it is wrong to call the outline of a ball a circle, or the shape you do if you take an Y shaped object and rotate it along one of those branches, it isn't a perfect circle but it is still a circle.
Ah, but in a circle the circumference is always equidistant to the centre, which is never true of an ellipse.
I suppose there is only one circle in the world.
It's never true of an ellipse that isn't a circle. i.e., this is a--ahem--circular argument.
Why do circles need to be ellipses anyway, why can't they be absolutely different? If they were absolutely different, then circles would be purely ideal, and yet an organizing principle (or as the say in Greek, an ἀρχιτεκτονική, from when we receive the word architecture). The only way to understand this, ontologically, is if we take the world to be in a constant tension with the "earth," as Heidegger puts it (cf. The Origin of the Work of Art), the thing in which the "rifts," which is the actual discourse of idealism, come about.
You know, I thought about it for a moment, and I don't think the visual circle is even universal. The schema of the circle may be, but the circle itself never appears. See this article below[0].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipse
Functionally, they might not be the same if you're programming them. For example, if you have a circle class with members detailing its center and its radius, it might be more efficient to draw an instance of it than an instance of an ellipse class that has two foci members that just happen to have the same values.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/goedel-phenomenolo...
Also, that definition of a circle as an ellipse via locus points (which you mentioned) still requires defining ellipses by an imaginary, ideal circle--even if transcendental (and I've mentioned elsewhere, the circle never appears). The circle that appears is always already an ellipse, empirically, so in pure mathematical terms as I've said the ellipse is actually absolutely different from the circle, which always exceeds it. In order for the circle and ellipse to be set in relation one must be forced to be analytically composed under the other.
Edit: Its clear that phenomenology was the most important philosophical influence on the modern theory of computation, but its curious to me that those that study pure math and physics haven't, for the most part, realized that yet, even as they employ computers to do so much of their work.
How so? I don't understand. It seems like the opposite to me: because a circle can be defined as a special case of an ellipse, then a circle is defined in terms of ellipses, not the other way around. The definition of an ellipse is a generalization of the definition of a circle.
What makes the circle unique (or a copy / scaling of the unit circle) is that it exists defined by a relationship that is true on the euclidean plane, something itself which is ideal, and only exists in our imaginations.
With mater being quantized at some level, we are always approximating, and for my car's sake, things rolling at several thousand rpms, we have some pretty circular things.
Two professors from whom I was fortunate to learn, who did something like this in classes:
* Marvin Minsky (MIT) -- While he was researching The Emotion Machine, class sessions would often be him talking about whatever he'd been working on earlier that day, and related thoughts from his formidable knowledge, and people would ask questions and share information. For example, one day, general anesthesia came up, and a physician/surgeon who was sitting in on class that day added to that (something about, in some cases, the patient is conscious but doesn't remember after, which was a memorable idea to hear).
* Peter Wegner (Brown U.) -- He was working on theory of interactive models of computation (e.g., whether interacting objects were reducible to Turing Machines), and some days would put up drafts of a paper on a projector, for class discussion around them. IIRC, he'd first read sections of the paper, and then ask questions of the class around that. Of course, we learned more than he did, but perhaps we were also a helpful rubber duck on some ideas he was thinking through.
Also, drafts of textbooks are a thing: Leslie Kaelbling (then Brown U.) arranged to use draft copies of Norvig & Russell's intro AI book, which were two comb-bound volumes with unfinished bits, and IIRC we could feed back comments.
Which reminds me of the time I was taking classes at the community college, and the author of one of the textbooks was in the department (though not my instructor), so I wrote down some comments as I worked though the book. The author seemed kind and delighted to be getting book feedback from a student, even though I assume now that my comments weren't of any help.
It helps a lot to find a day job where you can learn a skill that will help on one independent project you will tackle. It's a great idea as well to test ideas and arguments when having a casual conversation with someone: it both deepens the conversation and you have a better feel about how your opinion will be received.
I just felt like we were being kind of used as free editors, rather than peers to engage with the intellectual ideas.
I love this.
I go through similar experiences with software engineering. I notice some area of the field that appears overly complicated (build systems, CI/CD, version control, web frameworks, so on and so on) and start thinking to myself "Why all the complexity? Surely we could just-" and then I'm down a rabbit hole for weeks. The usual end result being I learn a lot of new things and discover for myself what all the complexity was for.
But hey, occasionally maybe I really do come up with a Next Big Thing.
I struggle with this question in the same way I think as the author, but in technology we are afforded less time to ponder if we are wrong and more time to test if we are wrong.
However the author points out, even in testing as he does with his students, we can be wrong in a fundamental way that all the branches of my iterations stem from the wrong source.
So I’m left with: who thinks I’m wrong and why does that matter.
I’m finding that outside of reddit, very very few people will tell me im wrong and this is deeply frustrating. Really only my wife who is tired of my pondering fully engages in what might be wrong with what I’m working on and I’m thankful for that.
But I wish more people would help me be “constructively wrong” which means they understand the goal but want to correct the approach.
Most online merely want to point out irrelevant wrongness for sport.
What's the value proposition? As you noted, not even your own wife will help you until she sees some kind of return for herself (abating her tiredness). Online actors pointing out irrelevant wrongness get to laugh at the meltdown of the maladjusted "intellectual" that usually follows.
This is what consultancy is for. You pay someone to look at what you are doing and tell you where you are going wrong. The pay offers the incentive. Most people are quite happy to offer consultant services for pay. But presumably you are having this wish because you want it for free?
Very very few people you are paying with genuinely critique or disagree with you for very obvious reasons.
However I can’t help but point out that you’re being exactly as I’ve described redditors…argue an adjacent point to just say the original point is ‘stupid’. It’s a waste of good brain cells.
I think you’re a troll and looking at your comments you seem to engage totally disingenuously with HN.
It seems you haven't. Apparently you've exchanged money for something, but apparently not what you were actually looking for. It seems, based on the description provided, that you just wanted to give away free money to whomever was willing to take it. What value proposition have you offered to get someone to actually point out where you are wrong?
> I think you’re a troll
I cannot be a troll. If I were, you would not feed me. It is likely I am disingenuous – but that's the whole charm here. One comes here because they want to interact with screen names, not people. A screen name implies nothing of what lies behind it. It could be an LLM for all anyone cares. Decidedly, it is not intended to be a real person. If a real person is pulling the knobs and levers behind the scenes, that's merely an implementation detail of the software.
> and looking at your comments
Well now I wonder what I wrote that made you think my other comments would be something worth reading?
> I had found— and partly invented— a prodigious explanation- device that reliably devoured difficulties, day after day. The insights (if that is what they were) that I had struggled so hard to capture in my dissertation and my first book have matured and multiplied, generating answers to questions, solutions to problems, rebuttals to objections, and— most important— suggestions for further questions to ask with gratifying consilience. I just turn the crank and out they pour, falling into place like the last pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps my whole perspective is a colossal mistake— some of my critics think so— and perhaps its abundant fruits are chimeras.
Perhaps the flip side to this is to consider when (if ever) lies or mistruths are allowable. After all, a lie, believed sincerely, makes the believer 'wrong' about something. I can certainly think of things told to me by people I care about, that if they turned out to be lies, I wouldn't gain any utility or value from their revelation.
On further thought, I think the only humane objection is whether truth can ever really be separated from judgment. People don't like being judged and especially not judged unfairly, and true propositions can nevertheless connote judgment by contextual salience of the particular thing we tell someone that they're wrong about and why they're wrong, etc.
XD
That's unsound. It prevents learning anything which is not widely known and simply explained.
I don't know the author. All the context I have is the article up to that point where I lost interest. However yes, if all you try to learn are the trivial things everyone agrees on, for some circular definition of "wrong", you won't be wrong.
Bad strategy. High value are things few people know. Highest value are things people know to be true that are not so.
If you understood Dunning and Kruger you would not post this not to mention make a Daniel Dennett appeal to authority case.