Are you two splitting some fine intellectuals here?
Really. You both agree that all knowledge is based on accepting some basic assumptions which we each may or may not choose to accept, and that most which we think we know is not “known” but induced with variable levels of confidence based on our experiential datasets.
(And BTW “tautology” is a noun; “tautologic” is the adjective that is in question)
Clearly some approaches to knowing are LESS tautologic than others? If one acknowledges that a set of initial premises are indeed postulates, rather than facts, and follow out logic which is internally cw those postulates, and that result is cw the observable world, and SOME phenomenum could concievably be observed which incompatable with the truth of the initial set of postulates, then it isn’t really a tautology, is it? I’d concede that many versions of faith fail this test, but not all.
Spiritus rightly demands the utmost in precision. Debate with him is a joy, and an exercise that always leaves me learning more than before we began. Fine, yes. But significant.
But Spiritus places special significance on observation as an epistemological validation. I don’t.
Did it somehow appear that we didn’t know this? I think tautological is the more common adjective, at least in the US.
Arbitrary. Whatever the approach, it comes from a mediation.
But you miss the point.
Yes, you state your postulates. But before that, you state your undefined terms. You have to state them as undefined, because if you define them, you have to define the terms in your definitions, and the terms in their definitions, and the terms in their defintions, and so on.
All you’re doing is picking a place on the circle to start from. But it’s still a circle.
I also am interested in illusions, but see a different significance in them than you seem to. (I think) Rather than signify the the limitations of observation as a means of proof, I see them as a model for induction as the basis of all intelligence, even given its limitation.
(If you’re not familiar with Steven Grossberg work with adaptive resonace theory and illusions, I heartily endorse the material to you)
We percieve based on incomplete information. Our brains have learned that when four corners are facing each other, it is usually a square, if “boundries” is saying it is a square, then “surface” induces a difference. Induction is at the heart of all perception from our outermost receptors on to all scientific and philosophic inquiries. These inductions generally allow us to percieve an accurate understanding of what is there in the face of limitted information, because the underlaying assumptions are generally true. Illusions illustrate what happens when we are face with circumstances in which the assumptions do not hold. Still perception requires these inductions. And observing that these perceptions are inaccurate under particular circumstances reveals much about the nature of perception.
All of which may be as it may. I just read a quote in last weeks Science that may be pertinent to this converstion:
“Contempory philosophers of physics like Nacy Cartwright argue that scientific fundamentalists who accept Wilson’s reductionist claim have no more evidence for it than religious fundamentalists have for claiming that God’s benevolence is manifest throughout the Creation.”
A last thought on metaphysics: in biology a maxim (not entirely true) is that ontology recapitulates phylogeny. Could this also partly hold in metaphysics? Could developmental cognitive psychology hold parallels for the ontology of ontogeny? (I’ve always wanted to type that phrase!)
Induction is also the basis of metaphors which is the basis of imagination and understanding.
To wit I will quote from my favorite secular humanist, Jacob Bronowski, in “The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination”, in which he eloquently states that “every act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were felt unlike.”
We recognize that two phenomenae are alike in some way, and induce what else would follow assuming that the similarity is translatable. We make a metaphor and follow it out. The wheel provides a model for the solar system, which provides a model for atomic structure, and on to resonating strings as a model for the most elemental bits of the universe.
Rather than thinking of these as “memes” I’d prefer to present them as geometric transformations (rotation, translation, enlargement, reduction) of what Peter Gardenfors has coined “conceptual spaces” across the muliplicity of various dimensions and domains of human perception and cognitive processing.
To bring this back to theism and atheism. You are correct that we are epistemilogically limited by the fact that our humanity grants us only human perception. Again, Bronowski, “what we think about the world is not what the world is but what the human animal sees of the world.” IF there is a power well beyond us, then it is, Duh, beyond us. We attempt to understand it by metaphors, but these metaphors are not God. Is this construct a tautology? Perhaps.
Actually, that’s ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, a phrase coined by Ernst Haeckel, who also coined the phrase that has inspired Nazis everywhere, politics is applied biology. But alas, it isn’t true. “The ‘law of recapitulation’ has been discredited since the beginning of the twentieth century. Experimental morphologists and biologists have shown that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between phylogeny and ontogeny.” (Haeckel’s Scientific Thought)
Well then, your suffering is over! You have your reward. As to your question, sorry, I have no idea what it means.
Like I said, not entirely true. (Did you get the sense I meant one to one?) Still, true enough to help inspire new understandings even today (I refer you to recent reports of fetal titanosaurus skulls inspiring new thoughts on the early evolution of the species)
And, yup, I reversed them. And I’m sure that I butchered the meaning of “ontology.” The meaning meant is wondering if developmental cognitive development has any parallels to the development of the development of epistemological systems. Not too serious a thought, but that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t seriously considered it.
Of course not, that is the whole point, don’t you see?
I haven’t read any of the responses to this thread so someone might have come up with this answer. Oh well.
You can’t disprove or prove the existence of god. That is the power of god: the existence or nonexistence is unimportant and should not cause anyone stress.
A splendid observation! I agree. I never bought into the omniscience precludes free-will argument; I’ve yet to see it presented without a non sequitur. What would preclude free-will, however, is the ability to prove objectively God’s existence.
The basis of rational decision making can be said to be based on the only means that we have to observe our world- our senses. If a god were to exist, why would this god not make itself apparent to us, through our most obvious channels, our senses. As I, as well as the rest of the rational peoples of this earth, have never actually SEEN god, or HEARD god in an objective sense, one must hold that god does not exist.
Suppose, for the sake of contradiction, that “god” gave us our senses to make the decisions in our lives that will affect us. (This is ignoring intuition, as it is our solution to making a decision on which we have no sensory information to base it on). When you are doing something as mundane as eating, you might look at the food first, deem it edible, then smell it, and finally taste it- if it tastes good, you make the decision to eat it- its as simple as that. If a god created this decision making process, it is going to be the same across the board- on a fundamental level, you choose to do a mundane thing the same way that you would choose whether or not to believe in a god at all.
So, extending the same logic, use your senses to determine if there is a god- and unless this “god” has vibrated air molecules at a frequency corresponding to the sounds that your brain can interpret as words, or this “god” reflects specific wavelengths that when transmitted through your optic nerve to your brain, are reassembled to form an image of a all powerful, all knowing being, than no, there is no god.
Also, if you consider principles as Occam’s Razor, which is really more likely; that an all powerful god created all of the complex systems that exist in our universe- or that god was merely a comforting, survival like mechanism that humans created to give some meaning to their otherwise cosmically insignificant lives??? I think the answer is obvious.
To me, what is more important than serving the notion that there is some superior god, whose methods are unknown to us “humans”, is to focus on our interactions with the people around us. If everyone were to simply deal with and improve our interactions with those people who we care about, as well as those that we dont, we would be alot better off. Look at the middle east for example- people turn the ideals on which the notion of god was invented into justification for their own expansion/benefit.
And I suppose that anyone who claims to have experienced God in an objective sense in so doing excludes themselves from your collection of the rational peoples of this earth?
And I say that if you cannot prove or disprove god then god has no power whatsoever, unless you are attributing equal power to all that cannot be proven or disproven, from Santa Claus to the IPU. The statement is not valid unless it applies across the board.
I know of no valid proofs OF god, so I don’t believe. But that doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be a valid proof out there somewhere: how would I know?
Disproving god is not anyone’s job. Disproof is only relevant once a vlaid proof is found. Until then, the burden of proof is on the claimant. Conclusive inductive negative proofs of existential claims are impossible.
Deductive disproofs of A god might be possible, but only because the specific god might have self-contradictory elements. But that only would disprove the particular being claimed in the premises. A deductive disproof of ANY concievable god is impossible, because it could have virtually any characteristics.
Your argument can show that God must have given us something other than our senses “to make the decisions in our lives that will affect us”. Is that what you intended?
Ockham’s Razor is about hypothesis formation, not truth determinition.
I would say that a demonstration that God does not exist is required of anyone who would have me accept “God does not exist”, because I do have a valid proof of his existence. My proof of his existence is “by faith” (which is indistinguishable from “by assumption”, and) which is trivially valid.