# Materialism and Faith **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 30, 2003, 11:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585 "2003-01-30T11:19:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 11:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/1 "2003-01-30T11:19:15Z")
In [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=159421), RexDart wrote regarding “death”: > [@](#): > > As nonexistence is incomprehensible (nobody can picture it or really know what it would be like to not exist), it’s tough to tell. I know nonexistence is in my future, but thankfully the very nature of nonexistence means that I won’t have to deal with it, merely with the apprehension caused by my knowledge of its approach. If nonexistence is incomprehensible, cannot be pictured, and completely lacks any epistemological foundation (cannot be known), how is it that materialists can ponder its nature, apprehend its approach, and believe with conviction that it is in their future, and that they will cease to exist? ---
**Author:** ![SentientMeat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@SentientMeat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SentientMeat)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 11:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/2 "2003-01-30T11:23:36Z")
I suggest a more accurate word would be _non-sentience_, since the dead materialist would still exist as dispersed atoms. _Nonexistence_ is a word perhaps better suited to discussions of cosmology and the like. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 11:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/3 "2003-01-30T11:31:54Z")
I’m afraid that pushing it back a step is no real help. We can say that RexDart is speaking about the existence of his sentience, and that he believes that his sentience will cease to exist. And now we’re right back square in front of the dilemma. How can the future nonexistence of his sentience (or anything else) be believed in? ---
**Author:** ![RexDart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b77776/32.png) [@RexDart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RexDart)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 11:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/4 "2003-01-30T11:34:59Z")
Aaah, the very question that popped into my mind as I was writing my remarks. I have a renewed respect for your reasoning skills, my friend. As I’ve been up all night and have class in 8 hours, I can’t give a full response right now, but my gut response…is kind of evasive. It’s my contention that infinite existence is not comprehensible either. We never experience infinity. Infinity can’t be seen, it can’t really even be experientially conceived. All experiences are defined by finite elements. As infinity cannot be the sum of any finite numbers, it is unreachable to our conceptions. Ergo, the alternative to nonexistence, being infinite existence, is no more conceivable and therefore not really a solution to the problem. So I say that my answer at this juncture is somewhat evasive, as I can only rule out the obvious alternative, but not give an adequate explanation for the preferred solution. I suspect that the ultimate solution may be to deny the concept of “time” entirely. Nonexistence may be inconceivable because there is nothing there to conceive it, and infinity may be nonsense because there is only a single moment in which something is conceived by the conceiver. What I call “myself” may exist only in a single moment, to be replaced with a later entity daring to call itself by the same name, and only the _instantaneous_ conception of self-identity is accurate. I will endeavor to ponder this and see if I can come up with something more complete. Those are my hunches, and I’ll settle for that as a response for the “time” being 😉 ---
**Author:** ![SentientMeat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@SentientMeat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SentientMeat)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 11:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/5 "2003-01-30T11:39:20Z")
**Libertarian** : The _past_ nonexistence of his sentience can be believed in, do you not agree? I spent 12 billion years being nonsentient. I wasn’t bored once! A= sentience, -A = nonsentience. Is your question “why can’t we understand (A & -A)”? ---
**Author:** ![Tristan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tristan/32/18058_2.png) [@Tristan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tristan)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 11:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/6 "2003-01-30T11:46:37Z")
**Rex** - I think you may have just given the most clear and concise arguement for Solopsism that I’ve seen in years. The flip side is, since each person is a unique individual, how can you deny that I, or **Lib** , or someone else may say “I can see the Infinite, I can sense eternity, I am one with the universe, and cognitive awareness lies ahead after your death.” Then again, it’s late and I’m starving, so it’s possible that I am pulling stuff out of my butt and calling it art. We’ll see. ---
**Author:** ![RexDart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b77776/32.png) [@RexDart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RexDart)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 11:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/7 "2003-01-30T11:50:47Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by SentientMeat \* > \*\ ***Libertarian** : > > The _past_ nonexistence of his sentience can be believed in, do you not agree? I spent 12 billion years being nonsentient. I wasn’t bored once! > > \*\* Before I get some sleep, let me remark that this is a good point. I know that I was nonexistent (defining “I” as sentience) for quite some time in the past, under conventional terms. Such is incontrovertible fact. Yet I still am unable to conceive of my own nonexistence. The more interesting question festering in my mind now, just as I must go to rest and probably forget it by morning, is whether there is anything significant about the fact that there is a factual statement to be made about the world (that I did not exist at some point in the past) that I am completely unable to relate to. I can clearly make a statement about it, I just have, and such statement has a truth value. Yet I cannot relate to the event. Odd. Well, something to ponder for the future I suppose. (If it really is a statement about the world that exists outside of any person’s perspective than I say HA, take _that_ Putnam, Derrida, Foucault, and all your antirealist postmodern partners in crime.) ---
**Author:** ![RexDart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b77776/32.png) [@RexDart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RexDart)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/8 "2003-01-30T11:53:58Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Tristan \* > \*\ ***Rex** - I think you may have just given the most clear and concise arguement for Solopsism that I’ve seen in years. > > \*\* Ha, take _that_ Heinlein! ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/9 "2003-01-30T12:18:29Z")
RexDart As always, I am greatly impressed by the manifest mystical nature of materialism. Materialists routinely speak of what they call incomprehensible and unreachable things, like “infinite existence”. Apparently, such things are conceivable at least long enough to posit that they cannot be conceived. Substantive denials of positive ontological propositions abound deep within materialism’s mysteries. So you find yourself caught between a rock (nonexistence) and a hard place (infinite existence). Neither of them is conceivable. What else is there to do but what you have done? — deny the existence of time! Although time is an essential attribute of the material world, and is found in nearly every significant formula of physics either as a variable or as an implication, the same incomprehensible ontological statement must be made about time that is made about sentience and, lo, about existence itself. There is not a theistic philosophy that can scarcely hope to achieve that level of mysterious agency and metaphysical charm. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/10 "2003-01-30T12:48:08Z")
SentientMeat wrote: > [@](#): > > The past nonexistence of his sentience can be believed in, do you not agree? I spent 12 billion years being nonsentient. I wasn’t bored once! Clearly, a man can believe in whatever he wishes — even inconceivable things. But unless you can recall the origin of your sentience, I don’t see how you can categorically deny its eternity. Logical extrapolation in this regard seems redundant (or tautological) if not irrelevant. Even an infant who cannot reason its way out of a paper bag is said to be sentient. Of course, it depends on how sentience is defined, and definitions can be tricky things. Biology, for example, has not yet found a suitable defintion for the very thing it studies: life. Since you cannot recall any awareness of the beginning of your sentience, you will not have an awareness of its end. Therefore, your awareness of sentience will continue. That is at least as reasonable an inference as the one that says it never existed before and will cease to exist in the future. > [@](#): > > A= sentience, -A = nonsentience. Is your question “why can’t we understand (A & -A)”? No. This is not a matter of first order logic, but of temporal logic. What will become of sentience in the future? It requires the weak tense operator, F (It will at some time be the case that…). And Fp, where p is a temporal proposition, is directly equivalent to ~G~p, where G is the strong tense operator (It will always be the case that …). Therefore, it is a question of how F~p can be believed to imply ~Gp. All we can really extrapolate future-wise in a strong sense from p is that p -\> GPp (What now is will always have been), and indeed, that is one of the four axioms of Minimal Tense Logic K[sub]t[/sub]. ---
**Author:** ![SentientMeat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@SentientMeat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SentientMeat)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/11 "2003-01-30T12:48:45Z")
**Lib** , did you make a point? I got the one about time and sentience-from-atoms being as mysterious as God. I’d agree. (_For now_. Give us a few hundred years of continued human endeavour, that’s all I ask!) > [@](#): > > Materialists routinely speak of what they call incomprehensible and unreachable things, like “infinite existence”. Do we? This offal in my cranium has limits. It cannot truly experience infinity because it hasn’t existed for ever. How am I being mysterious? > [@](#): > > Substantive denials of positive ontological propositions abound deep within materialism’s > mysteries. I would not deny the positive ontological statement “I can think”. Which particular denials to which particular positive metaphysical statements do you find mysterious? > [@](#): > > Neither [nonexistence nor infinite existence] is conceivable Again, I am unsure precisely where you are placing the absurdity here. What is absurd about temporary sentience? “Nonexistence is inconceivable” is merely a truism, surely? > [@](#): > > the same incomprehensible ontological statement must be made about time that is made about sentience I understand that I once did not exist. Is “I once did not exist” an incomprehensible ontological statement? I only did one term of Logic at uni. I feel sure that one as experienced as you could Reductio some Absurdans in this thread. Are you postulating that future and past sentience is logically _necessary_? Are you saying it is _impossible_ for a piece of meat to start to think, having once been dispersed atoms? ---
**Author:** ![SentientMeat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@SentientMeat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SentientMeat)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/12 "2003-01-30T12:59:13Z")
Sorry, simulpost! > [@](#): > > That is at least as reasonable an inference as the one that says it never existed before and will cease to exist in the future. I disagree. How _could_ I have existed before? Do you believe _you_ existed before? Solipsism is all very well, but you would honestly say it was _at least as reasonable_ as materialism? > [@](#): > > ~Gp. All we can really extrapolate future-wise… But we agree that -Gp (sentience not always exists) has been fulfilled for those 12 billion years, _ie. past_wise? ---
**Author:** ![SentientMeat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@SentientMeat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SentientMeat)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/13 "2003-01-30T13:09:18Z")
> [@](#): > > I don’t see how you can categorically deny its eternity I can’t any more than I can catergorically deny that I am a brain in a jar which has been programmed to think that (A&-A) is “not allowed”. But your earlier post questioned _believing in_ the end of sentience, _ie_ ascribing to it a greater than 50% chance. Do _you_ ascribe a greater or lesser chance than 50% that there was a time for which your sentience did not exist? ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/14 "2003-01-30T13:10:16Z")
SentientMeat wrote (with respect to my response to RexDart): > [@](#): > > Lib, did you make a point? Yes, I did. I made the point that RexDart found himself simultaneously unable to exist both temporally and eternally. > [@](#): > > I got the one about time and sentience-from-atoms being as mysterious as God. I’d agree. (For now. Give us a few hundred years of continued human endeavour, that’s all I ask!) Endeavor in what, science? I’m afraid you’ll be waiting more than a few hundred years. It’s like asking me to wait a few hundred years for you to find both the scalar and the vector of a subatomic particle. You cannot devise a falsifiable test for sentience outside of biological life — whatever that might be. > [@](#): > > Do we? This offal in my cranium has limits. It cannot truly experience infinity because it hasn’t existed for ever. How am I being mysterious? I’ve already explained that. It’s what the whole OP is about. > [@](#): > > I would not deny the positive ontological statement “I can think”. Which particular denials to which particular positive metaphysical statements do you find mysterious? I’m not sure that “I can think” is an ontological statement. “I exist” would be an ontological statement. But in any case, you spoke of ontological statements in your preface sentence, but then switched to metaphysical statements in your question. Assuming that’s an unintended switch-a-roo, I’ll say that denying your exisence (or the existence of your sentience) is a substantive denial of a positive ontological proposition. (That’s what RexDart ended up doing.) > [@](#): > > Again, I am unsure precisely where you are placing the absurdity here. What is absurd about temporary sentience? “Nonexistence is inconceivable” is merely a truism, surely? Nothing is absurd about it per se, until you make it contingent upon some absolute temporality that you take on faith. RexDart’s solution was to deny the existence of time. > [@](#): > > I understand that I once did not exist. Is “I once did not exist” an incomprehensible ontological statement? Not to me, it isn’t. But then, I’m not a materialist. But how you know that you once did not exist is mysterious indeed. > [@](#): > > I only did one term of Logic at uni. I feel sure that one as experienced as you could Reductio some Absurdans in this thread. Are you postulating that future and past sentience is logically necessary? Are you saying it is impossible for a piece of meat to start to think, having once been dispersed atoms? With all due respect, that’s no excuse. I have no college education at all, other than one wasted semester of mostly partying. There are materials available in plentiful supply on these matters, and it would behoove all of us to review them before making up our minds about what we do and do not believe. Sentience is not necessarily thought. As Princeton University’s _Wordnet_ defines it, sentience is a “state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness”. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/15 "2003-01-30T13:20:55Z")
SentientMeat wrote: > [@](#): > > I disagree. How could I have existed before? Do you believe you existed before? Solipsism is all very well, but you would honestly say it was at least as reasonable as materialism? What I would honestly say (and so will you, if you speak honestly) is that I said nothing about solipsism. So I will not even address that distraction. What I will address, however, is the notion that a syllogism may be discounted by exclaiming, “But how could that _be_!”. If you do not know when your sentience began and you will not be aware of its end (you cannot be aware of something when you have no awareness), then you cannot reasonably presume a priori that your sentience is temporal. > [@](#): > > But we agree that -Gp (sentience not always exists) has been fulfilled for those 12 billion years, ie. pastwise? I don’t even understand that question. Sorry. It sounds to me more like you’re positing either ~Pp (It has not at some time been the case that…)or ~Hp (It was never the case that…). > [@](#): > > I can’t any more than I can catergorically deny that I am a brain in a jar which has been programmed to think that (A&-A) is “not allowed”. But your earlier post questioned believing in the end of sentience, ie ascribing to it a greater than 50% chance. Do you ascribe a greater or lesser chance than 50% that there was a time for which your sentience did not exist? I simply believe what I have been told, i.e, that I am eternal. I believe it on faith. ---
**Author:** ![hawthorne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/c89c15/32.png) [@hawthorne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hawthorne)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/16 "2003-01-30T13:31:40Z")
Good thread. One answer to the OP is the temporal equivalent of Steven Wright’s > [@](#): > > You can’t have everything… where would you put it? It’s not that I “believe with conviction that no-existence is in my future”, it’s that I don’t believe that existence is in my future. I can’t rule it out of course, but given the radical lack of information and that I don’t know how to deal with the radical lack of information, I just tend to ignore it. Assertively if my angst is playing up. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 1:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/17 "2003-01-30T13:47:58Z")
Hawthorne I’m glad you like the thread. 🙂 With all due respect, I don’t think you change the meaning by restructuring the negation that way. I can say, for example, “I don’t mean that it’s necessarily true; I just mean that it’s not possible that it isn’t true.” They’re the same. “I believe that nonexistence is in my future” is equivalent to “I don’t believe that existence is in my future”. But ignoring it, well that’s a different matter. I’ve just never had much patience for the popular assertion among materialists that we believe on faith while they don’t. Clearly, RexDart revealed an abiding faith in his future nonexistence. And I would so much more respect any materialist who admitted that he holds his belief on faith. It is frankly a bit annoying if not insulting when I’m told that my faith is unreasonable while you are merely not holding any faith. I don’t think that I’m making random and unreasonable points here, and I don’t think that a reasonable case has been made for the apprehension of something that is not conceivable. ---
**Author:** ![TVAA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c57346/32.png) [@TVAA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TVAA)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/18 "2003-01-30T14:53:51Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Libertarian \* > If nonexistence is incomprehensible, cannot be pictured, and completely lacks any epistemological foundation (cannot be known), how is it that materialists can ponder its nature, apprehend its approach, and believe with conviction that it is in their future, and that they will cease to exist? Is existence comprehensible? picturable? possessing an epistemological foundation? If not, then how can you think about either existence or nonexistence? If it is, then the answer to your question is trivial: since nonexistence is simply the opposite of existence, we understand just as well as we understand existence. ---
**Author:** ![SentientMeat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@SentientMeat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SentientMeat)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/19 "2003-01-30T14:57:52Z")
Look at the terms which I used earlier: _believed in, reasonable, understand, as mysterious as_ Now look at what you introduced: _know, categoraically deny, falsify_. Do you see what happened here? You asked in your OP “how can they believe with conviction?” This is not, and I never took it to mean, “how can they know absolutely and prove conclusively?” When I said “surely _past_ nonsentience can be believed in”, you began to decry the blunder of taking this as _proof_ of future nonsentience. **Lib** : I’ll say it! _Everything_ is faith. It _might_ be the case that you are a brain in a jar which has been filled with all of this “logic” nonsense, all of it actually completely useless and wrong. Other beings might be laughing at your puny inability to hold two mutually contradictory statements as being true during a debate, and your pathetic insistence on following their fallacious “rules” and “reasoning”. But for me to bellow that your use of logic represents a categorical denial of this scenario misrepresents you. You are using the rules of logic “on faith” that they are _not_ wrong. We’re all doing _everything_ on faith, that’s why brains are so mysterious in the first place. Having said that, there a altogether _different orders of magnitude_ when it comes to what one _believes_ or not. I put it to you that it is _beyond reasonable doubt_ that there was a time when human sentience did not exist. I offer that it is not mysterious in any way to believe that “nonsentience before birth” is not fundamentally different to “nonsentience after death”. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2003, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585/20 "2003-01-30T15:06:05Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by The Vorlon Ambassador’s Aide \* > \*\*Is existence comprehensible? picturable? possessing an epistemological foundation? > > If not, then how can you think about either existence or nonexistence? > > If it is, then the answer to your question is trivial: since nonexistence is simply the opposite of existence, we understand just as well as we understand existence. \*\* You’re joking, right?. I’m not a materialist. I’m not in a position of claiming that they are both nonexistent and inevitable. For what I believe, I have no compunction about declaring that I believe it on faith. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/materialism-and-faith/151585.md?page=2)