Errors in the Torah and Septuagint - Fact or Fiction?

Great Debates
201

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

“1) The bible (that you claim inerrant but don’t have to believe) says god does deny us free will.”

No I don’t, and no it doesn’t. The gods of the book demand things of humanity, of course. But the people they demand them of sometimes choose to do what’s demanded of them and sometimes dont, they sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. I don’t think the question of free will (i.e. the question of whether or not we are the cause of, or in control of, our actions) is raised as a question. It seems the governing assumption in scriptural texts is that people are the cause of, and hence responsible for, their actions.
[/quote]

Not too familiar with the bible are we? Read Romans, read Ephesians.

I cited relevant verses in a recent discussion here:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=383104&page=2

I also gave specific examples of god interrupting what would seem like free will, and then killing men, women and suckling child, for decisions he forced them to make.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=382757&page=3

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

  1. Free will is incompatible with an all knowing, all powerful, all sovereign god. "

No it’s not. Free will is the ability to make decisions for oneself and to act on them. No religion believes that God moves people around like puppets. In fact debates usually revovle around whether or not God ever intervenes in human affairs.
[/quote]

The bible teaches that god moves people around like puppets. Calvinists in particular accept this. I imagine other groups as do as well.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

They do however believe that God knows what will happen. The standard theistic free will problem is this: “if god knows what decision I’ll make before I make it, how is it free?” The standard answer is that foreknowledge is not the same as coercion. Knowing something isn’t the cause of its being true.
[/quote]

The standard answer is BS. God created the universe (in theory) and created man with his weaknesses. God knows where man is destined, to heaven or hell (most to hell) and according to the Romans verses man can do nothing to escape this. As Paul put it, man can neither will for, nor work for, salvation. If god knows what decision man will make from the beginning of time, man can in no way escape this without making god incorrect. Man may not know he’s a puppet, but he is one none the less. So goes the theory.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

“3) Free will is incompatible with physics and chemistry as well, and yet we see humanity existing.”

I agree that modern science – in the guise of hard causal determinism – raises troubling questions for belief in free will. But since we’re arguing from the standpoint of, as you put it, standard christian apologetics, it’s not at issue. (My preferred answer to this question is the transcendental idealist one…)
[/quote]

Does your transcendental idealist answer give you free will? If so why?

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

“4) For you to say free will is the greater good, yet evil results from it, then either heaven must have evil, or we will be lacking free will. Either way, by your reasoning, heaven sucks.”
5) If by miracle free will were present, how much is it worth, how many children must starve, be raped, be drowned in bathtubs so that you can choose vanilla over chocolate or hell over heaven.
6) Your asserting free will is the greatest good, again without evidence."

#4’s actually an interesting point. I guess the idea is that the good people go to heaven. (Lame answer, yes.) But the real problem for apologetics seems to me to not be moral evil, but natural evil. We can argue all day about whether or not free will is a good. But at least there’s an explanation for the existence of the evil that can lean on a possible good. Earthquakes and tsunamis, however? That just seems like bad planning. The answers to that one that I’ve seen are singularly lame, either ‘the universe is so big and complicated’ or ‘god works in mysterious ways.’
[/quote]

The bible does say god created evil. God also sent evil spirits unto people to make them do what he wants. I don’t think it was man that placed the snake in the garden either.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

To #6: You may think my evidence is crappy, but it’s there: “without free will we are not human and our lives are meaningless.”
[/quote]

Well, you don’t have free will. Does that make your life meaningless to you? What do you mean by meaning anyway?

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

The idea is that ‘meaning’ in life is a good, and that a life in which we see ourselves as determined by forces outside of our control in all our thoughts and actions would be one without meaning. (Because we would have no hand in its shaping.) Thus we recoil at the thought of not having free will.
[/quote]

I don’t.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

(Or, alternatively, we assert that we don’t have free will but refuse to think that premise down to its disquieting consequences. The only exceptions to this I can think of are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s stuff about the eternal return.)
[/quote]

I don’t do that either. I don’t see what Nietzsche’s eternal return has to with this though. While I admit Schopenhauer can be a bit disquieting (I love him though), I’ll take his pessimism over being the victim of this evil you think so necessary. I also think it quite selfish that you think it best that children be raped, starved and drowned, just so that you can make undetermined choices. I bet you would change your tune real quick if it became your turn to be put on the slab at an unfairly young age.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

To #5: Without a concept of free will we cannot hold baby rapers and other bad doers responsible for their actions in any more than a ‘proximal cause’ sense. Without a concept of free will we are constrained to see all human action as either determined by nature or by God. That, to me, would make the atrocities you mention even worse.
[/quote]

I don’t see how it would make atrocities worse. Rape, killing, and torture really sucks for the victims, whatever the cause. As for holding people responsible; sure we can, sure we should, and sure we will. It’s called deterrence. We don’t hang men for stealing horses; we hang them so that horses will not be stolen.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

It certainly is. But to be fair I marked it as such – an attempt to push the religionist line as far as I can.
[/quote]

Why?

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

But “standard Christian apologetics” refers to a centuries-long era of philosophical thinking. I don’t think it can be dismissed out of hand.
[/quote]

Watch me.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

And I’m not sure claiming that ‘meaning’ in life is tied to free will is standard apologetics. It’s a bit too existentialist for the Angelic Doctor.
[/QUOTE]

Trust me, it’s standard. The other standard it to appeal to it so that we can blame man rather than god for all the worlds travesties.

202

Well, I’ll give you one thing. You caught me in not knowing scriptural details. I’d forgotten all the OT “god hardened their hearts” stuff. When I think about God I think in terms of the philosophical concept (all-powerful, all-good, necessary being etc…) and go from there. I’m enamored of the idea of a sacred book for a bunch of reasons, some of which you can get at by reading Borges and some of G.K. Chesterton’s flawed but fascinating apologetics…I’m well aware of all of the dreary arguments against it, and you’ve trotted out most of them…The thing you’re not getting is that I’m not interested in defending the bible against unbelievers. I’m interested in finding effective arguments to wean literalists away from literalism.

Atheism and materialism haven’t been a threat to anyone’s health or well-being since at leat 1989. Scriptural literalism, obviously, is. But atheistic attacks on literalism fail to convince the person they’re supposed to convince, the literalist. You can’t go into the argument without having any shared premises. When you do, ad hominem’s and ridicule are your only available mode of communication. (“You’re so stupid…you believe stupid things…you stupid guy.”) That’s one reason I’m experimenting with this premise…one much more effectively argues against aspects of religious belief that foster ignorance and narrow-mindedness by avoiding tactics that instantly enrage the person you’re trying to convince.

Nonetheless, you continue to believe that I’m trying to defend the bible from materialist attack. (Since you deny free will on the basis of physical determinism I’m assuming you’re arguing from a materialist perspective.) That’s why this conversation is going nowhere.

Two little clarifications before I go:

Transcendental idealism offers a way out of the free will/determinism problem by drawing a distinction between what can possibly be known, i.e. perceptible objects and reasonable extrapolation from our observation of those objects, and what cannot possibly be known, i.e. the world as it is independently of our ability to observe it. (“Beyond all possible experience,” as the phrase goes.) It’s a slender thread, but most philosophical threads are. It claims that we cannot know whether or not we are free, and whether or not there’s a god, because there’s no possible sensory evidence that can confirm (or deny) either claim. (3rd Analogy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the locus classicus of this argument.) It’s not a vindication of either determinism or voluntarism. It just gives space for a rational suspension of judgment about it.

Nietzsche’s eternal return is relevant to the free-will question because it is tantamount to a denial of free will: anything you are about to do you have done infinitely many times already and will do infinitely many times in the future. It’s a hardcore version of the “god knows all” problem. Few actually think that N. advanced this as a metaphysical claim, its more of a test: “can you say yes to this?” It’s the formula of his attack on Schopenhauer’s “Buddhism”: “yes, and again.”

Best,
I Tichy

203

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
But atheistic attacks on literalism fail to convince the person they’re supposed to convince, the literalist.
[/QUOTE]

There are actually atheists who were formerly Biblical literalists; more than once, I have heard or read such people state that what turned them away from religion was actually sitting down and really reading the Bible. I doubt very much anyone has ever gone from full-on fundamentalist Christianity to being a secular humanist after one conversation with an atheist, but pointing out places where the Bible contains obvious inaccuracies, contradicts itself, or says things which are not in accord with the moral beliefs of the vast majority of modern Americans (Christian or not) is not an entirely futile exercise.

204

[QUOTE=MEBuckner]
There are actually atheists who were formerly Biblical literalists; more than once, I have heard or read such people state that what turned them away from religion was actually sitting down and really reading the Bible. I doubt very much anyone has ever gone from full-on fundamentalist Christianity to being a secular humanist after one conversation with an atheist, but pointing out places where the Bible contains obvious inaccuracies, contradicts itself, or says things which are not in accord with the moral beliefs of the vast majority of modern Americans (Christian or not) is not an entirely futile exercise.
[/QUOTE]

Hi there – thanks for responding:

I operate under the assumption that most literalists – especially those who would be bothering to post to a board like this – are aware of the terms of the debate, e.g. that they believe things that are (or at least appear to be) contradicted by the scientific record. I take the literalist position to be “yes yes I hear you, nonetheless it’s all true.” That at least is the position I have in mind when I’m trying to craft an argument. Now, if a person is unaware that the scriptural texts have all sorts of problems of the type you mention, well then good God they ought to be made aware of them.

But I’m not really interested in turning people into atheists. Most atheists I’ve come across are pretty, well, religious about it…they share at least one trait with the fundamentalist: the question’s not open for them anymore.

205

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
Hi there – thanks for responding:

I operate under the assumption that most literalists – especially those who would be bothering to post to a board like this – are aware of the terms of the debate, e.g. that they believe things that are (or at least appear to be) contradicted by the scientific record. I take the literalist position to be “yes yes I hear you, nonetheless it’s all true.” That at least is the position I have in mind when I’m trying to craft an argument. Now, if a person is unaware that the scriptural texts have all sorts of problems of the type you mention, well then good God they ought to be made aware of them.

But I’m not really interested in turning people into atheists. Most atheists I’ve come across are pretty, well, religious about it…they share at least one trait with the fundamentalist: the question’s not open for them anymore.
[/QUOTE]

I’d like to say I understand what you say you are trying to do in this argument and hope this somehow turns out to yield such a item for discussions. I’d like to add that I am an atheist but not one of the Evangelical Atheists types. By that I mean I don’t attempt to convert others to my way of thinking unless challenged. To the contrary, I will tell them that I don’t want to have this conversation with them. Unless they persist, I drop it. If they do, I feel free to present what I believe and why and question the same from them.
As to the

I don’t believe in UFOs of Alien Abductions, Ghosts, ESP, Atlantis or other such things. I have considered these things and found the evidence wanting. Until new and more indisputable proof is offered I don’t spend a lot of my time on these subjects. Theology and organized religion fall into this category as well. Given the information and evidence available to date I have discounted it as unsupportable.

To sfworker- If you are still monitoring this thread I hope you will consider making the move to join the SDMB. We may not agree on many points but you are questioning and rerasoning and you would be an asset to the Board.

To Polycarp, TomandDeb, Diogenes the Cynic, Contrapuntal and others, as always I am in awe at the knowledge you bring to these discussions. The background, referances, experiance, training and insights are enlightening and humbling.
Thanks to all on both sides of a very informative and civil discussion.
carry on

206

Let me sketch an argument about why Bible literalism actually is more rational than picking and choosing. I’m an atheist, by the way.

  1. God cares about what we get out of the Bible. Some gods may not, but the Christian god does, and must consider it important in being an inspirartion for salvation, which we can assume he cares about.

  2. God is capable of creating an inerrant Bible. Even if God doesn’t write the words himself, if the person he inspired makes mistakes, god can reinspire them to correct them. A court reporter may write things down incorrectly, but a judge can review the transcript and correct the record, perhaps by listening to the tape.

  3. God can write something to allow us to distinguish between parable and history. That the parables are fiction does not impact the truth of the Bible. Job can be considered the same way, being outside history. Chronicles, and Exodus, however, are clearly written as history, not fiction. If God wanted a message such as shown in the David and Bathsheeba story, for instance, he could have made it outside of history. The direct connection of that story to Solomon shows it is meant as truth. Other historical narratives can be considered similarly.

Now here’s the interesting one:

  1. An errant Bible discourages belief. As has been mentioned above, the existence of contradictions leads to lack of belief. Wouldn’t an accurate Bible cause many people, including me, to believe? Now, there was the argument that contradictions lead to study, but this implies that study is more important than salvation - and study often leads away from salvation. Would an inerrant Bible discourage free will? Not unless an accurate history book does. The idea that god must be absent to encourage faith is contradicted by the Bible itself - God was very present during the Exodus, and the Hebrews had no trouble with free will.

Conclusion - any deity who is perfect could cause a perfect Bible to be written, and any who cares about his people would cause such a Bible to be written. That the Bible is not perfect either implies God is not perfect (and is thus not God under most definitions) or that he is does not care, and thus is unworthy of our worship, or does not exist. I’ll go with the last option myself.

207

[QUOTE=I Tichy]

But I’m not really interested in turning people into atheists. Most atheists I’ve come across are pretty, well, religious about it…they share at least one trait with the fundamentalist: the question’s not open for them anymore.
[/QUOTE]

Pretty much untrue. Most atheists I know have read the Bible and are very familiar with its precepts - though most theists don’t understand why people become atheists. Many atheists might be convinced if the evidence was there. The reason you might think the question is no longer open because the evidence for a god is not only not getting stronger, but is in fact getting weaker. Choosing not to believe on faith is not the same thing as not having an open mind.

If you disagree with that, I’ve got a bridge to sell to you. :slight_smile:

208

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
Well, I’ll give you one thing. You caught me in not knowing scriptural details. I’d forgotten all the OT “god hardened their hearts” stuff. When I think about God I think in terms of the philosophical concept (all-powerful, all-good, necessary being etc…) and go from there. I’m enamored of the idea of a sacred book for a bunch of reasons, some of which you can get at by reading Borges and some of G.K. Chesterton’s flawed but fascinating apologetics…
[/quote]

I’ve never read an apologist who wasn’t either self deceived or a deceiver. This is probably why some of the not-so-flattering stuff in the bible surprised you, they hide it.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
The thing you’re not getting is that I’m not interested in defending the bible against unbelievers. I’m interested in finding effective arguments to wean literalists away from literalism.
[/quote]

That’s where we are fundamentally differing. I’m more interested in discouraging biblical liberalists, not because it’s worse but because it’s generally ignored. By attacking literalists only, you give liberalists the feeling, and often the false pride, that they are correct and learned. Also what literalists do and believe that has all rationalists upset (from killing abortion doctors to bashing homosexuals), is done in the name of faith. Liberalists, while they may oppose a particular hateful action of a literalists, give tacit approval of the literalists worst by promoting faith as a virtue. Faith is the problem and it should be discouraged wherever it shows itself.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
Atheism and materialism haven’t been a threat to anyone’s health or well-being since at leat 1989.
[/quote]

I don’t think atheism or materialism has ever been a threat. It seems her that you are trying to conflate the two with communism, which isn’t even remotely the same thing.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
But atheistic attacks on literalism fail to convince the person they’re supposed to convince, the literalist. You can’t go into the argument without having any shared premises. When you do, ad hominem’s and ridicule are your only available mode of communication. (“You’re so stupid…you believe stupid things…you stupid guy.”)
[/quote]

I don’t agree.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
That’s one reason I’m experimenting with this premise…one much more effectively argues against aspects of religious belief that foster ignorance and narrow-mindedness by avoiding tactics that instantly enrage the person you’re trying to convince.
[/quote]

This sounds analogous to treating the symptoms but ignoring the disease. You ignore disease of believing things so because you want them so, or believing things so because you were told to do so. By leaving the disease in place the symptoms will likely continue to emerge.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
Nonetheless, you continue to believe that I’m trying to defend the bible from materialist attack. (Since you deny free will on the basis of physical determinism I’m assuming you’re arguing from a materialist perspective.) That’s why this conversation is going nowhere.
[/quote]

Like Santana, I believe idealism is without a doubt true but of no great consequence. For all practical purposes we all live our lives as materialists.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
Transcendental idealism offers a way out of the free will/determinism problem by drawing a distinction between what can possibly be known, i.e. perceptible objects and reasonable extrapolation from our observation of those objects, and what cannot possibly be known, i.e. the world as it is independently of our ability to observe it.
[/quote]

Since when is determinism a problem anyway? Also claiming ignorance to a problem doesn’t solve anything. And while were at it, people make far better and more practical decisions assuming determinism and causal roles as their guide. I think it was Schopenhauer that said intelligence was nothing more than the ability perceive cause and effect roles, and he was an idealist too.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
(“Beyond all possible experience,” as the phrase goes.) It’s a slender thread, but most philosophical threads are. It claims that we cannot know whether or not we are free, and whether or not there’s a god, because there’s no possible sensory evidence that can confirm (or deny) either claim.
[/quote]

As I recall of Kant, it also says you can’t know whether or not you should leave your home by walking through a doorway or through a wall. But I’ll bet Kant and you, generally use a doorway, for as much as you might protest against materialism it does rule your life.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
It just gives space for a rational suspension of judgment about it.
[/quote]

Do you rationally suspend judgment on leprechauns too, or are you comfortable stating a belief for, or against? How about invisible pink dragons in my garage, or teacups orbiting the planet Pluto?

Also you still left a lot of questions unanswered. Some relevant to the points you raised, and some simple yes and nos.

209

[QUOTE=badchad]
I don’t think atheism or materialism has ever been a threat. It seems her that you are trying to conflate the two with communism, which isn’t even remotely the same thing.
[/QUOTE]

That was a joke. But it had a point as well. The one thing that communism does when it’s in power is try to enforce atheism. (I’m not talking about China. I don’t think it’s communist anymore, just authoritarian.) The point at which any creed (or non-creed) becomes dangerous isn’t when people believe it, but when they think it licenses them to enforce things that offend against reason, freedom, and goodwill.

[QUOTE=badchad]
This sounds analogous to treating the symptoms but ignoring the disease. You ignore disease of believing things so because you want them so, or believing things so because you were told to do so. By leaving the disease in place the symptoms will likely continue to emerge.
[/QUOTE]

The assumption here is that religious believers only believe because a) they wish it were true or b) some authority told them to. It occurs to me that this discussion is not really about scripture, it’s about whether or not there are rational reasons to believe in a divine being. You clearly think there are not. Are we agreed that this is the real issue?

If it is, my position is that there’s a neglected alternative to your dichotomy: that people can and do believe in God for rationally defensible reasons. (I’m also hoping we can agree to dismiss the slippery-slope argument. Thoughtful religious belief is not a ‘gateway belief’ to the hard stuff. That’s just silly.)

[QUOTE=badchad]
Like Santana, I believe idealism is without a doubt true but of no great consequence. For all practical purposes we all live our lives as materialists.
[/QUOTE]

Do you mean Santayana? In any case I have no idea what this means…it seems to go against the hard-headedness you pride yourself on. It’s probably true but we can ignore it? If it’s likely true that there’s aspects of the universe that we can’t possibly discover through observation and experimentation, that’s likely quite relevant to any discussion of whether a theist has a leg to stand on. At the very least it means that the materialist doesn’t have the right tool to kick his leg out from under him. (I keep swingin’ and he keeps standin’)

Conversely, the theist doesn’t have the right tool to kick the materialist’s leg out from under him either…this is what I called talking past one another. I submit that a materialist denying the rationality of thoughtful religious belief on the basis of materialism is about as sensible as a theist denying the scientific record on the basis of his or her belief in the existence of God. Neither one is being thoughtful in their belief, because neither one realizes that they’re talking about different things.

That’s the important thing for transcendental idealism: the distinction between what can possibly be known and what can’t. For all practical purposes, as long as we’re talking about ourselves as physical objects and physiological organisms, yes, materialism – or one of the more recent, subtler versions of it that acknowledge an intentional component to thought and language-use that can’t be cashed out in physicalist terms. (physical objects aren’t “about” things, only thought and language are.)

But once we start talking about ourselves as moral beings, who want to have meaningful lives, and want to know how we ought to live, then we’re talking about something that intersects with our lives as physiological organisms, but that cannot be considered identical with it. (Ditto any value judgment that we don’t simply want to pin on animal responses to physical pleasure or pain.) This is the space in which talk of the rationality of belief is relevant. (It’s also the space where art and the practice of science is relevant…a biologist may explore the character of the physiological organism, but the reason why he or she believes that it is important to do so is due to a value judgment, a decision about how he or she ought to live a life and why.)

[QUOTE=badchad]
Since when is determinism a problem anyway? Also claiming ignorance to a problem doesn’t solve anything. And while were at it, people make far better and more practical decisions assuming determinism and causal roles as their guide. I think it was Schopenhauer that said intelligence was nothing more than the ability perceive cause and effect roles, and he was an idealist too.
[/QUOTE]

It does when the ignorance one claims is principled ignorance. It’s not “I don’t know” but “It is in principle impossible to know,” from which follows “You don’t know either.”

When we talk about the existence or non-existence of God, we are talking completely in the dark, theists, atheists, and agnostics alike. This is why I consider the agnostic position to be more intellectually honest as long as we’re talking about knowledge claims. The atheist certainly can say that there’s no convincing evidence for the existence of a necessary being, and he’s right. The problem is the assumption, by both sides, that the question is about knowledge, and not the rationality or irrationality of belief.

And here I’m not talking about belief in this or that scripture, but belief in an entity that corresponds to the concept of God that all monotheistic faiths share. (I figure if Averroes, Maimonedes and St. Thomas all agree, it’s a good enough a concept to use for discussion.)

But I also have to say I’m perplexed by people who attest to determinism and then try to convince me of things, or tell me what I ought to do or believe. If we have no free will, then we have no choice in the matter. (Or if you’re a young Wittgenstein, we do have choice, it just doesn’t affect anything: “The world is independent of my will.”) This is what I referred to earlier as not thinking through the premise to its conclusions. Determinism is no problem at all as long as we confine it to empirical science, and don’t try to bring it into the moral/ethical sphere, which operates according to different laws. (Ought-laws, not is-laws.)

Schopenhauer’s a weird kind of idealist. He believes that the world as representation (perceptible and possessable objects) is a horrible folly and self-deceit, and that the world is actually Will (blind striving without an object). According to Schopenhauer we should stop, as much as possible, creating the world as representation for ourselves. This is what Nietzsche referred to as ‘willing nothingness’ and Schopenhauer’s ‘buddhism.’ This is weird as idealism because it involves claiming that there is a ‘thing in itself’ and that we can know what it is. A transcendental idealist claims that we cannot have knowledge to license either of those claims.

[QUOTE=badchad]
As I recall of Kant, it also says you can’t know whether or not you should leave your home by walking through a doorway or through a wall. But I’ll bet Kant and you, generally use a doorway, for as much as you might protest against materialism it does rule your life.
[/QUOTE]

I have no idea where you got the doorway/wall thing. As long as what we’re talking about what can be observed, Kant is a straight-up empiricist, and was a well-respected scientific thinker. (First to come up with the nebular hypothesis, for example.) Nothing is admissible into scientific discussion that isn’t part of possible experience.

Suspension of judgment doesn’t have to do with belief, it has to do with claims to knowledge. I’m going to stop here because I’ve written way too much already for one post.

Hopefully I’ve at least clarified why I think the idealistic line is relevant to our discussion, and what I take the ‘space’ in which we talk of rational or irrational beliefs to be. I know I haven’t yet gone into the reasons why I take it to be possible for religious belief to be rational.

If you’re interested in responding to this, I’ll be interested in writing more.

210

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
That was a joke. But it had a point as well. The one thing that communism does when it’s in power is try to enforce atheism.
[/quote]

Communism had a lot of problems. I don’t think the fact that some of its leaders were atheists was one of them, and of many things they enforced atheism was probably one of the more innocuous.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
The assumption here is that religious believers only believe because a) they wish it were true or b) some authority told them to. It occurs to me that this discussion is not really about scripture, it’s about whether or not there are rational reasons to believe in a divine being. You clearly think there are not. Are we agreed that this is the real issue?
[/quote]

I have little truck with deists. I can’t speak of numerous other religions that I know little about, though I know of no particulars that I find rational. Judeo-Christianity however I find particularly irrational and virulent. I do believe Islam is similar though my knowledge is only superficial.

For the Christian god, I say no.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
Do you mean Santayana?
[/quote]

Yeah, that’s the guy.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
In any case I have no idea what this means…it seems to go against the hard-headedness you pride yourself on. It’s probably true but we can ignore it?
[/quote]

It means that it is admitted by most philosophers (and I) since Hume that we can not know that thing in itself. This it seems can never be solved by the nature of our senses and brain. Still the universe seems to behave as if our senses are for the most part correct. Subsequently science has since abandoned absolute truth and now works with overwhelming probabilities. These probabilities are enough that we are able to discover, create and control our environment in ways that were largely unimaginable without materialistic methods of exploring the physical universe. If idealism had never been conceived I don’t think things would be much different.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
If it’s likely true that there’s aspects of the universe that we can’t possibly discover through observation and experimentation, that’s likely quite relevant to any discussion of whether a theist has a leg to stand on. At the very least it means that the materialist doesn’t have the right tool to kick his leg out from under him. (I keep swingin’ and he keeps standin’)
[/quote]

Nothing about idealism, that I recall, points to a god. It certainly does not point to a Christian one. It does not prevent us from kicking the legs out of those theists who make plenty of materialistic claims.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
That’s the important thing for transcendental idealism: the distinction between what can possibly be known and what can’t. For all practical purposes, as long as we’re talking about ourselves as physical objects and physiological organisms, yes, materialism – or one of the more recent, subtler versions of it that acknowledge an intentional component to thought and language-use that can’t be cashed out in physicalist terms. (physical objects aren’t “about” things, only thought and language are.)
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You lost me.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
But once we start talking about ourselves as moral beings, who want to have meaningful lives, and want to know how we ought to live, then we’re talking about something that intersects with our lives as physiological organisms, but that cannot be considered identical with it.
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Are you claiming moral thoughts and wishes of meaning do not have a basis in our physiological structure?

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
(Ditto any value judgment that we don’t simply want to pin on animal responses to physical pleasure or pain.)
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I see a lot of “want” in your system.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
When we talk about the existence or non-existence of God, we are talking completely in the dark, theists, atheists, and agnostics alike. This is why I consider the agnostic position to be more intellectually honest as long as we’re talking about knowledge claims.
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By your reasoning when we talk about the existence of werewolves we are equally in the dark. Yet I don’t see you or anyone else saying we should be agnostic about them. The atheist generally isn’t a person who thinks there can not possibly be any gods, he just thinks the evidence in favor of the god theory is about equal to that in favor of the werewolf theory. I don’t think agnosticism is particularly honest when, for all practical purposes, most agnostics have no problem not believing in a plethora of other things they can not prove don’t exist.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
But I also have to say I’m perplexed by people who attest to determinism and then try to convince me of things, or tell me what I ought to do or believe. If we have no free will, then we have no choice in the matter.
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We have passions and prejudices because it is our fate to do so. I’m perplexed by those who believe in free will because, save for want and vanity, there is no reason why the belief should be held. Your entire discussion here is nothing but your response to my and others posts, filtered by your past environment and your biology, none of which you chose. A real time example of action, reaction, cause and effect.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
Determinism is no problem at all as long as we confine it to empirical science, and don’t try to bring it into the moral/ethical sphere, which operates according to different laws. (Ought-laws, not is-laws.)
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The problem with determinism here is what? The world isn’t as you want it? It isn’t how you think it “ought” to be? Well hell, perhaps if the world were created by an all powerful and loving being, it would be. Instead were stuck with what we have and what we can/will make of it.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
Schopenhauer’s a weird kind of idealist.
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From what I gather there are lots of different kinds.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
I have no idea where you got the doorway/wall thing.
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If you can’t know the thing in itself, you can’t know that some day what appears to be thin air might bump you in the nose or that some day what appears to be a solid wall might let you pass right through. Idealists sometimes get inconsistent with this kind of stuff, stating we can never know this, and never know that, yet behaving consistently and confidently as if they do know a great deal.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
I know I haven’t yet gone into the reasons why I take it to be possible for religious belief to be rational.
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I want to know first why or if you think Christian belief can be rational, as it was a Christian belief you responded to.

[QUOTE=I Tichy]
If you’re interested in responding to this, I’ll be interested in writing more.
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I think the materialism/idealism stuff is interesting. In the last couple of years, among others I have read both Kant and Schopenhauer. Personally I got little out of Kant, and Schopenhauer’s talk on idealism was the part I liked least. Still I’ve never talked with someone who labeled himself an idealist so it is different and interesting. However, unless you think it is particularly relevant to this thread on Christianity it might be best to start a new thread under a different heading.

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We probably oughta move this thread. I don’t think any of the others are following it anymore, we’ve drifted way off the ‘are there errors in the septuagint’ question. I think sfworker has gone home.

First off, I’m not interested in defending the specifics of Judeo-Christian belief to anyone. I’m interested in the philosophical notion of God (all-perfect, necessary being), and the partly philosophical and partly aesthetic notion of a sacred (i.e. perfect) book. I believe that when we reject the possibility of these, we lose whole vistas of thought, and impoverish the world for ourselves.

Thus, I am interested in (and study) idealism, and I am not interested in (and do not study) the free will/determinism problem. I talk about it when I have to, but it always seems to become a bad tennis match. I will always come down on the claim that if we have no free will then it is not worth talking about, and nothing’s worth doing at all, because no one’s actually doing anything, we’re all just being done to. No one I’ve said that to has ever responded directly to the claim, except to say something like ‘that’s the breaks, kid.’ (The argument that comes out of this may be paraphrased: “IS NOT.” “IS TOO.” “IS NOT.” “IS TOO.”)

Note that I do not claim to know whether or not we are free. Being a good transcendental idealist, I claim that we cannot possibly know whether or not we are free. And being a good transcendental idealist, I acknowledge that from the perspective of the empirical world, determinism is the rule. (Actually a TI takes a stronger line on this than a Humean does, because a TI claims that it is demonstrably true that the world as we experience it is governed by causal laws, whereas a Humean dismisses even that as a metaphysical claim that cannot be supported by the evidence.)

So, idealism.

Hume was not an idealist. He didn’t deny the “thing in itself,” because the term hadn’t been coined yet. (It’s Kant’s terminology, and he was in part responding to Hume.) Hume did, however argue against all metaphysics – i.e. any attempt to make claims about how the world really really is. This includes scientific or materialist claims. Put extremely crudely, he argues that all we can say about science is that it seems to be working out pretty well, as opposed to explanations of phenomena that require supernatural entities.

Hume argued, as Kant did, against taking either revelation or ‘natural theology’ (i.e. philosophical attempts to prove God) as evidence for the existence of God. (Kant is generally credited with destroying the last shreds of credibility for ‘proofs of God’ by showing that all proofs of God rely on the ontological proof, and that the ontological proof makes the error of assuming that existence is a predicate: A parody of the ontol. proof would read “God is perfect, therefore God is.”)

But in both of these cases what is argued about is knowledge (evidence for/against), and not the rationality of belief. Kant concludes that there is no evidence for or against that is convincing. Therefore he claims that we ought to disavow all knowledge of the existence/non-existence of God, and he argues strenuously against anyone who tries to make knowledge-claims about the existence of God. (He called them “Schwaeremerei”: “swarmers,” and made bitter, witty fun of them at every opportunity.)

So we cannot know whether or not there’s a God, and we cannot know whether or not the world as we experience it is the way the world actually is, independently of our ability to experience it. But this does not end up with the wall/door problem you bring up, because it’s not an ‘anything might happen’ kind of line. The space it creates for empirical science is inviolable, the boundary between knowable and unknowable is a hard and clear one: there aren’t going to be any surprise intrusions from a “thing in itself”, because “thing in itself” just means the world independently of our ability to perceive it. (Which of course we can’t perceive.) Bizarre or unexpected phenomena, like walls suddenly disappearing, would be exactly that, bizarre or unexpected, and a TI, like a Humean would respond by seeking an explanation that accords with the available science.

[There’s a lot of debate in the Kant literature about whether the thing in itself/possible experience distinction is a metaphysical distinction (two worlds, a world of things in themselves and a world of experience) or an epistemological distinction (same world, two ways of looking at it.) I fall on the epistemological side of that question, because I think the important thing in Kant is the strong line between what can be known and what can’t.]

The wall/door problem is a common misconception about one tenet of idealism, the claim that the world as we experience it is in part constituted by our minds. People hear this and the first thing they think is – oh so I’m making it all up? You say I live in fantasy-land? At least for Kant this is decidedly not the case. (As for some of the freakier extrapolations from Fichte and Hegel, who knows.) For Kant, the “form” of experience is constituted by the mind. All possible experience will have certain characteristics: space, time, and causality (and some other hotly disputed quasi-logical laws, too). This is what the mind ‘gives’ to experience. The world as it is apart from our experience may also be in space/time and governed by causal laws, but we can’t know that, because we can only know what can possibly be experienced.

(Kant’s argument to this is something like: If our experience did not have these basic features, it would not be experience, but just disconnected twinges and images. But if we did not experience then we would not be able to form a functioning sense of self. But it’s clear that we do. Therefore we can be certain that all experience has these features. This is what is called a ‘transcendental argument’: ‘transcendental’ meaning 'having to do with the conditions of possible experience.)

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Ok, all of this gives ONE argument for the rationality of religious belief. A negative one. Belief in something demonstrably false is irrational. But neither theism nor atheism is demonstrably true or false. Therefore the atheist doesn’t have the ‘you believe things that are demonstrably false’ tool to kick the leg out from under the theist, and vice versa.

At this point the question becomes whether or not there are reasons to believe or disbelieve apart from demonstrable truth or falsity, because we can’t have that. So, yes, at this point it becomes about wants and needs, i.e. what the ancients called ‘ethics’. The question, what is a good life and how do I go about getting me one. My reasons for entertaining the idea of God and not dismissing it out of hand are at the top of the post. The concept of God, unlike the ad hoc logical puzzle counterexamples you’ve been bringing up, isn’t an imaginary but conceptually mundane creature like a Pegasus (take horse, add wings, there aren’t any around as far as we know, but it’s easy to think what one would be like) and it isn’t a logical contradiction (like a square circle). The concept of God is unique, as seen for example in Anselm’s definition “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” That doesn’t mean “the greatest thing” or “big daddy in the sky.” It is a concept unlike any other because in order to even try to think it you need to make up new rules of thinking: that than which nothing greater can be thought. Trying to think the thought takes one to the limits of our ability to conceptualize and think at all. It’s a focal point, an asymptote, something we approach but do not achieve, but in the process of approaching it our ability to think and to experience is enlivened and enriched in ways that other concepts don’t. It’s a “negative” concept in the sense of what they call negative theology, a thought that one can never comprehend – no attempt at a conceptualization ‘sticks’ – but attempts to comprehend it open up new conceptual strategies, manners of expression, and ways of thinking. (Ah, had to end with Nietzsche. It is a kind of hard-headed poetic ideal I’m championing here, much more than a confessional one. God is the Hard Thought.)

Now, if this thought doesn’t entice you, that’s fine. I’m not trying to convince you to entertain belief in God. I’m only trying to convince you that it’s not irrational to do so. Also, of course, what I’m championing here has little if anything to do with the doctrinal specifics of any religion. I do have to say that Christianity involves a massive twist on the Hard Thought that I don’t think any other religion shares: the belief that God became fully human at a definite and localizable moment in human history while remaining fully divine for eternity. If you like crazy metaphysics (and I obviously do) Christianity’s got the goods.

Note, this is not Kant’s argument for belief in God: his involves needing to postulate a divine judge in order to not fall into despair about the fact that the connection between being a good person and having a happy life is contingent. Deserving happiness doesn’t imply having it. I don’t find it to be a terribly convincing argument. He has earlier arguments about needing the concept of a necessary being in our conceptual repertoire in order to ‘orient’ ourselves in thinking about the world, which I like more. But that only requires what I’ve called “entertaining” the possibility of God’s existence, being open to it. It doesn’t require out and out belief.

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[QUOTE=I Tichy]
We probably oughta move this thread. I don’t think any of the others are following it anymore, we’ve drifted way off the ‘are there errors in the septuagint’ question. I think sfworker has gone home.
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Consider it moved.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7707611#post7707611