Ah, so I absolutely agree that ascribing the inexplicable to a deity is completely illogical. If the logical fallacy is “begging the question”, if God created man, then man was created by God, you’d be correct. The OP asks what is rational and I’m not sure where deductive logic fits in with the question.
Specifically: " … is their room for a watchmaker type deity and deism as a belief system?" You’re answer is no because it cannot be deduced, it is always irrational. I’m wondering what can be deduced to explain our existence, and failing an original assumption, is asking the question always irrational?
The OP explicitly tried to steer away from the “God created Everything, so get over it” type of explanation, rather is any deism in the smallest amount irrational?
I like this. The imagined deism does “explain” things. The adherent can say, “I get it now; God created everything!” It allows him to imagine a greater purpose, a goal, a destiny. It also allows him comforting ideas such as life after death and perfect justice. The imagined ideas could improve one’s quality of life.
But it doesn’t point in the direction of any specific action that can’t also already be justified by other moral reasoning. It doesn’t even suggest prayer, churchgoing, or worship, because the deity is removed from intervention (and, besides, already knows everything you could possibly say in prayer.)
But is it irrational to say a clockwork deity makes QM and GR say the same thing while we’re busy formulating unified field theory? At some point, I think it’s completely rational to accept miracles.
Nothing in your post suggests that there is any difference between belief in A and belief in B (beyond the trivial observation that one of the beliefs happens to be correct and the not).
It would be a substantial hijack to start debating the nitty gritty of an answer to your question. Suffice to say that “good” and “bad” are usually defined by reference to basic human impulses such as to remain alive while in comfort. Of course, we tend to place large amounts of abstraction (such as morals as ends in themselves) between the terms we use and the basic human impulses, but for most widely held moral beliefs, there are good solid practical things underlying our morality. You could debate the precise linkage between the term “bad” and and beating your children, but it is a debate amenable to evidence once the terms have been defined.
It’s a debate in a whole other category to making up creation myths based on nothing.
I think you will find that this is The Great Unwashed’s point.
One of the distinctive characteristics of deism is that it doesn’t call for any action. Deists point out that we have no reason to think that God cares what we do, or that he will react to it in any way.
As for “just making stuff up”, couldn’t you say that about most attempts to address metaphysical questions? Is the assertion of a woman’s right to choose, for example, just “making stuff up”? There’s a tendency in some quarters to assume, or to act as if, the scientific method is the sole valid epistemology, and that it is universally applicable to all meaningful questions, and one can glide very easily from that into the assumption that any position which is not arrived at throught the scientific method is “just made up”. I don’t accept this.
If you want to consider whether the OP’s deism is irrational, you have to start by examining and evaluating his reasons for being a deist. If you skip this essential step, and simply allege that it’s irrational because his reasons are not scientific, you fall into the error just outlined. And in that case your position is much, much more obviously irrational than deism is.
Yes, I know. It’s mine too. I had already made it clear that I thought there was no difference, but The Great Unwashed seemed to think that in saying so I was refusing to engage with the question. When faced with an interlocutor who won’t take “yes” for an answer, what can I do except underline why I am compelled to agree with him?
All you’re doing there is inviting me to agree that staying alive and staying in control are “good”. In other words, you’re trying to defend the claim that “A is good” by showing that A leads to B, and by asserting that “B is good”. But if I ask you to show that “B is good”, how are you going to do that except by showing that B is connected to C, and asserting that “C is good”? This cycle only stops when you and your interlocutor arrive at something that you can all agree is good, even though it’s goodness is undemonstrated by empirical evidence.
In other words, ethical claims are, fundamentally, unsupported by empirical demonstration. They are incapable of being empirically demonstrated. The most you can show by empirical evidence is that they follow if other ethical claims are accepted as true. But why should we accept those other claims as true if, as is asserted, it is irrational to accept the truth of claims whose truth cannot be empirically demonstrated?
You haven’t shown that the OP’s deism is based on nothing. All you have shown is that it is not proven by empirical evidence. It seems to me that the leap from the latter statement to the former must rests on unstated assumptions whose truth cannot be empirically demonstrated. Obviously, you can’t rely on such assumptions to argue that accepting claims that cannot be empirically demonstrated is irrational.
Not in any relevant sense, no. This is where and why your whole position falls apart. A woman’s right to choose is a concept with substantial empirical effects. It definitely exists at least in the sense there are clearly people who consider a woman has a right to choose, and whether or not a woman can or cannot choose has actual measurable real world effects.
Your whole shtick involves attempting to equate real if debatable or poorly defined concepts like morality with shit people make up out of whole cloth, like deities for which there is no evidence of existence at all.
It just doesn’t work.
The crux though is your description of the difference between A and B as “trivial”. If you think that existence and non existence is a trivial difference between two things, then, how shall I put this? Your position is most interesting but not one that I can take seriously.
You miss the point. Sure, there is no such thing as absolute morality independent of subjective views. I would never claim there was, any more than I would claim there was a deity.
I think the overall thrust of your argument is “there is no such thing as absolute morality outside of subjective opinion, but you believe there is absolute morality outside of subjective opinion and that is a belief that cannot be rationally justified. So your position is no more rationally justified than the position of someone who believes in a deity without rational justification”. Your argument falls totally flat with me and, I suspect, most humanists because I don’t think there is such a thing as absolute morality outside of subjective opinion.
I think that morality exists as beliefs, and that those beliefs are based on what humans want and what they perceive will achieve those wants.
Consequently, there is just no parallel to be drawn between the sense in which I believe moral concepts exist (and why I believe what I believe) and shit people make up from whole cloth about deities.
So I can assert something whose truth is undemonstrated and undemonstrable, and whose assertion has serious real-world implications for what other people can and cannot do, and that just fine and dandy. But if I assert something that is undemonstrated and undemonstrable and that doesn’t impact in any way on other people, I’m being irrational? I think there are some gaps in the argument. As you point out, “there are clearly people who consider a woman has a right to choose”. I am one of them. You need to tell me why I am not being irrational in asserting this. The fact that my position has public policy implications doesn’t seem to me to be enough to do the necessary heavy lifting here.
It doesn’t work. But it’s not my shtick. I have explicitly said more than once that I am not equating deism with ethics, or deism with euclidean geometry. I have offered ethics and euclidean geometry as counter-examples to the claim that it is inherently irrational to accept empirically undemonstrable propositions, or to the claim that if propositions cannot be evaluated empirically then they cannot be evaluated at all. So if you want to criticise Deism as irrational, you need to show more than that it is a metaphysical proposition. (Or than that it has no implications for public policy.)
You misunderstand. In the present context, it is trivial for me to point out that A exists and B does not when The Great Unwashed explicitly stipulated from the outset that A exists and B does not.
A more interesting question is why The Great Unwashed seems miffed at the fact that I am failing to disagree with him on this point; I honestly do not see why he would ever have expected me to disagree. But he hasn’t come back yet to explain his hurt feelings.
Which is why atheists and deists can live in harmony. We might argue, buts that’s as far as it would go.
If you think a woman’s right to choose is made up, then so is all secular ethics. Ethical principles exist in a sense though we might disagree on their justification. The 10 commandments exist, even if we might dispute their validity. The made up thing I was describing was an entity. Just as made up as if you said the 10 commandments were valid because space aliens handed them to Moses.
As someone who studied philosophy, and still reads it sometimes, I’d never say that science is the only path to rationality. Placing a deity at the beginning of the universe because you don’t accept non-supernatural origins for the universe is kind of rational, if wrongheaded. Putting a deity there because a universe with a purpose is more comfortable isn’t.
While it may seem that a woman’s right to choose is an assertion, it actually is the end point of an ethical argument involving the integrity of one’s body. If someone did just assert this with no argument, it would be a poor excuse for anything. I suspect you have good arguments for your position that a woman has a right to choose also.
Well, I hope I do. But ultimately they all come back to saying that I assign moral value something else, and an affirmation of the right to choose flows from that. And do I have good arguments for that position? Well, it flows from some further preceding moral position. Etc, etc.
Ultimately, I suspect, you are likely to judge my arguments for my moral stance to be “good”, and my stance to be “rational” if my arguments are reasoned from a moral position which you and I both agree on, so we don’t ask one another to prove it. Whereas if I took a position you didn’t like - you’re a right-to-chooser, say, and I’m a right-to-lifer - and arrived at it by arguing from a moral starting-point which you didn’t share, you are much more likely to think my arguments unsound and my position irrational, even though my reasoning, the steps by which I proceed from my premise to my conclusion, might actually be perfectly sound.
(This is the generic “you”, you understand. I don’t wish to impute opinons to Voyager.)
In short, condemning someone’s position as irrational usually means that it proceeds from a premise which the speaker doesn’t agree with. He may say that his reason for disagreeing with it is that it is undemonstrable, but this doesn’t really stand up as a complete explanation, since he invariably accepts and acts on lots of other undemonstrable propositions. And if you ask people in this situation why accepting some undemonstrable propositions is OK while accepting others is irrational, you often get more vehemence that clarity in the response. Terms like “fairy tale”, “just making stuff up”, “shit”, “myth”, and “based on nothing” will abound, but an actual coherent account of when it is rational to insist on empirical evidence and when not to is not so much in evidence. And when this happens, you can’t avoid the suspicion that you’ve touched a nerve.
It’s a comfortable alliance of interests. Neither is really threatening to the other, and, meanwhile, theology is an endlessly interesting topic for discussion.
Oh! I would have said it was. Martin Gardner held to the principle of credo consolans: “I believe because it gives me comfort.” It seems rational enough, in a kind of “cost/benefits” sort of way. It improves the quality of life (for some) and doesn’t require any deep commitment. If that kind of belief were something one could simply turn on and off like a spigot, I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be less rational not to employ it. Sort of like taking an anti-depressant medication.
(Obviously, there are limitations. If the purpose is “Spread love as widely as may be,” that’s kind of cool. If the purpose is, “Convert the Jews, or else put them to the sword,” we’ll have issues.)
It’s not clear what you mean by undemonstrated and undemonstratable.
If you mean the existence of your ethics is undemonstrated and undemonstratable then that is clearly wrong. We both agree you do have those ethics. Your post is my cite.
If you mean that the correctness of your ethics is undemonstrated and undemonstratable then it depends what is meant by correct:
[ul]
[li]It is impossible to empirically demonstrate that ethics have any absolute, universal correctness. To assert to the contrary is inherently irrational because there are value judgments involved and people’s values differ. Consequently, ethics in this sense are not useful to you as a counter example since it is inherently irrational to accept empirically undemonstrable propositions. If you think a woman has a right to choose as a matter of some sort of universal truth, then your belief is inherently irrational. [/li][li]However, it is not impossible to empirically demonstrate that ethics can be correct (or incorrect) in the sense that a particular ethic might propose behaviour that actually will (or will not) tend to achieve an end. However, in this sense, ethics are not useful to you as a counter example since while it may not be inherently irrational to accept an ethic in this sense, that is because its usefulness is empirically demonstrable.[/li][/ul]
You miss the point spectacularly. If one can’t in any relevant sense equate deism with ethics or euclidean geometry, they are not useful to you as counter examples.
As to The Great Unwashed’s point, you are not engaging with it because the crux of his point is not whether A and B are themselves different but why it makes sense to believe in A when there is no more evidence for its existence than for B, which is non-existent.
Perhaps it would be useful to postulate the possibility that **The Great Unwashed **lives in a different time-zone to you, or maybe he has a life with Things To Do Other Than Argue On The Internet.
Let’s put a couple of things in context:
[QUOTE=UDS]
Why? Are you assuming that only empirically observable things can exist? Is there any evidence for that? Could there even be any evidence for that? And, if there is no evidence for that, why is it OK for you to believe it?
[/QUOTE]
Now you have conceded that belief in A and belief in B are non-different (you might well have believed this all along, I wouldn’t know, my mind-reading skills aren’t as finely tunes as they were when I was young and stupid).
So, where are we? Oh yes, **now **that we agree that belief in non-empirically-measurable things is the same as belief in non-existing things, perhaps you can see why I believe that only empirically observable things can exist.
I will go further. A and B are not just similar, they are identical; the difference that you propose (that A exists an B doesn’t) means nothing – A and B have identical null effects in the universe.
Whoa nellie, do you know how many people in the world today believe in a deity? Do you know how long people have been believing in a deity? As far as I know, only ancient Egyptians had our proper and real Cat-God, all others were make-believe, ** but we believe in them anyway**.
We evolved the ability to believe in gods, and abilities don’t evolve without a damn good reason. Although I agree with your logic, that bolded sentence of yours above is as irrational as I can call it here in Great Debates. We cannot empirically observe religion, but it’s everywhere and seemingly at all times in human existence … and faith in a god clearly allows greater fulfillment of reproductive capacities.
Faith in a spouse does not exist?
Joy at watching a child play baseball does not exist?
Pity for a widow-woman whose house just burned down does not exist?
Hope does not exist?
Each of the above are completely rational to believe in, yet illogical. I say your statement above is irrational, though completely logical.
All of those things are empirically observable/measurable. Your suggestion that we cannot empirically observe religion (as evidenced by the many places of worshippers, sacred texts and faithful congregations) indicates that you do not understand the adjective “empirical”.
If by “empirically measurable” you believe that I mean that a precise value can be ascribed, eg: “Your spouse 3.14159 on the faithful scale”, then that is further evidence of your misunderstanding.
That the simple faith of spouses is apparent everyday is an empirical observation – as are; the joy of parenthood, the grief of a widow, and indeed, any other existing thing you care to mention…
Yes indeed. Any interesting ethical discussion involves an analysis of the outcomes versus conflicting principles, and the weight one assigns to these determines where you stand. Since we each assign different weights, we never arrive at the same place. The difference between moralistic theists and the rest of us is that they claim that the weights get assigned by God, and are not individual views.
There are two ways of being irrational. The first is to not produce a logical argument, no matter what the premises are. The second is to have bat-shit insane premises. The guy wearing a tinfoil hat because the CIA is beaming radio waves into his brain would be quite rational if they actually were. He’s making up the premise.
As for deism, I contend that deists are making up a god, though they are proceeding rationally from the definition of the god they made up. However there seem to be some people who claim that God is unknowable yet know what he wants. They are irrational in both respects and are on the fuzzy border between deism and theism - deists when you ask for evidence of a god, theists in terms of justifying their morality through god.
