I think you are abusing the term “prove beyond a doubt”.
Granted, if we’re using “coherent” and “meaningful” in the context of rational discourse.
I’m not trying to tweak you here; I personally don’t object at all to applying rationalist-materialist constraints to discussions of reality, thought, and the natural world, and as you note, that’s how I tend to talk about them myself.
I just want to emphasize that we don’t have rigorously demonstrable epistemological grounds for demanding that everybody else accept those constraints too.
Yes, you’re absolutely right that that means that discourse carried on without those constraints is on a fundamental level incapable of being coherent and meaningful, as we rationalist-materialists understand those terms.
Yup, you’re absolutely right. If somebody says “Rationalist materialism is inadequate to describe all of reality and there exists a supernatural God” and you respond “That is intrinsically impossible because 2+2=5”, your response is not automatically any less rational or logical than their statement, because once the rationalist-materialist constraints have been removed, all bets are off.
I think what’s bothering you is that theists often try to discuss the supernatural in a way that superficially seems rational and meaningful, but reserve the right to retreat into irrational claims at awkward moments. It’s logical discourse with a Get-Out-of-Logical-Contradiction-Free card, which naturally seems unfair.
But it doesn’t bother me. Like it or not, all the rational arguments against the existence of God do depend on accepting the premise that rationalist materialism describes all of reality, and if somebody else doesn’t accept that premise, I have no way of making them do so. I can’t win because they won’t play. Well, that’s life.
Coherency is rational.
As far as anyone understands anything. Even the neurons in our brains operate according to rational, coherent physical laws. The denial of rationality is the denial of all thought of any kind, even insane thought.
One of the problems is that historically people have applied all sorts of semantic tags to the concept of god - such as being timeless and outside of the universe - which makes no rational sense. This worked because it was before the discovery of logic, and the universe did not seem very rational in the first place.
When logic can disprove certain popular types of Gods, like the tri-omni one, theist retreat into the God is beyond logic argument.
With this argument I could support a four sided triangle - and eventually demand equal time for it in geometry class. Three sided triangles are just a theory!
“Before the discovery of logic”? When are we talking about here?
Certainly Aristotelian logic did not prevent people in antiquity and afterwards from continuing to assign characteristics like “timeless” or “outside space” to the concept of god.
That’s your theory.
It’s not clear that time began with the Big Bang. What is clear is that we can’t say much about what was before it. Anything we can’t say much about is generally ignored by scientists (and sensibly so), but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Occam’s razor is a useful tool, not a proof.
Syllogistic logic makes it possible to talk “logically” about all sorts of nonsense. It makes it possible to prove that things don’t exist do, because it treats existence as a property. If you’re interested in more info on this, ask, and I’ll dig up a paper by Bertrand Russell that explains it.
However, regardless of that, it’s always possible to imagine that there are things that are beyond our imagination. One can’t say much about them in any definite way, though. It seems to me that the definition of God has to keep moving in this direction to avoid being caught in a contradiction.
In any case, I can’t come up with a definition of God that makes any sense to me.
One of G.K. Chesterton’s “Father Brown” mysteries involves a fellow priest who rhapsodizes about the possibility of a world where nonsense makes sense, and where assumptions we see as mad are factual. Father Brown exposes the man as a sham priest, because of his attack on reason, which is quite un-priestly.
Of these two approaches to knowledge, I do have to state my whole-hearted preference for the appeal to reason. The other approach is not only undisciplined, but undisciplinable! It can, with a trivial effort, be used to arrive at and defend any proposition.
Who can demonstrate that there aren’t gigantic space bunnies who will slather the earth with strawberry jam and snort them up their nostrils? The claim, “You can never prove a negative” is a pathetic excuse for believing in utter nonsense.
They were grandfathered in. Consider Genesis. Any culture which studied logic (or literary criticism for that manner) would have tossed it out as being internally inconsistent, But once it has been accepted as the word of God as given to Moses for hundreds of years, we start inventing justifications for it, claims that God is too complex to understand, claims that God is beyond rationality, and saying it is a metaphor one minute and vitally important the next.
If they had Nitpickers Guides back then we’d all be in better shape.
Of course there are some people who you can hit over the head with Aristotle and they’d never get it.
The example is the problem. Haven’t you heard Mormons justify their irrational beliefs by saying that they are no more irrational than Christianity?
Okay, you guys are going to have to duke this one out between yourselves: Learjeff seems to be arguing that Aristotelian logic enables theological irrationality, while Voyager seems to be arguing that Aristotelian logic would have prevented theological irrationality if they’d thought to use it.
Leaving you to settle that issue separately, I’ll just ask Voyager: then what about the Hellenistic embrace of early Christianity and its integration into classical Greek philosophy, including Aristotelian logic?
Hellenistic Greeks didn’t have the Judeo-Christian deity “grandfathered” into their culture and didn’t particularly care about Mosaic Law or ancient Hebrew assumptions about divinity. Yet many of their brightest thinkers thought that classical philosophy/logic and Christian faith went together like peanut butter and jelly (or bread and olives, to be less anachronistic).
How can we explain that, if logic is supposed to be a safeguard against the “internal inconsistencies” of religious faith?
The Greeks of the Roman times were hardly of the intellectual caliber of those of the Socratic time. Early Christians seemed to adopt Aristotle lock, stock and barrel. If you read Aristotle, he sometimes talks of something that sounds like a single god, and sometimes like multiple gods. (Though it might be the translation I read that is to blame.)
I think most of the philosophy from the time that is remembered is non-Biblical, arguing for God from first principles, not from the Bible.
It is also telling that the further we get in time from pagan influences, the worse the intellectual climate becomes.
To illuminate Kimstu, I agree with this. Once you inherit something you are supposed to believe in, or want to believe in, it is easy to construct a bogus argument. Better arguments in those days might be hazardous to your health. It is not surprising that Christianity spread not from intellectual arguments, but from the conversion of princes, seldom the brightest knights in the bunch.
To play devil’s advocate here, (heh), I propose something seemingly out of left field, and this kind of cross-polinated with the Intelligent Design—Who Done It? thread:
The humans we evolved to be, can rational expect there to exist life somewhere else in the universe. Intelligent or not, and with only one data point, but an educated guess, it’s widely accepted there is life elsewhere.
I find it interesting that we think only in terms of “inert matter” and “lifeforms”. However you define them, it’s a very polarized view, galvanized by only our intuition, and the relatively scant evidence we have to go on about how the universe really works.
What I’m just tossing out there is, “Are we falling prey to, for lack of an more precise logical trap, the Excluded Middle”? In the sense that we think of matter as living or non-living.
We can’t know if there’s something in the “middle.” Some other third thing. Or fourth. Or fifth, etc. What this could possibly be, I couldn’t say, but I can’t rule out that if intelligence can arise out of a seemingly inert, non-living universe in meat bodies, who’s to say this is the only form of intelligence?
It could be everything from a self-replicating silicon, yet cold intelligence to perhaps some form of energy (being the flip side of matter anyhow) that is beyond any ability to communicate, as we wouldn’t even recognize it as anything but some anomaly or—who knows what?
To close this very open ended thought, I’ll say it’s impossible, as far as we know, to see beyond the singularity of the big bang. All this matter, energy, space and time, was ALL laid on top each other, infinite in density, yet, zero in dimension.
Logic tells us to stop righ there. There was nothing before. How could there be, “time”—as we know it—didsn’t exist. The idea of a before seems nonsensical, although it feels like there should be.
Well; maybe there was. And maybe it was this “third” option. Maybe it’s “God”. Maybe It has a “God” too?
We can’t really know, can we? To say with absolute conviction, no matter how ridiculous it seems, is to be as close minded as any of the religious.
Shit, I find the idea of sapience arising out of somethingness, that could’ve just as easily been nothingness as far as we know, infinitely ridiculous as it is. But how I feel, and what I know, doesn’t have any bearing on the reality of reality.
To think we’re even here having such a discussion is banal and not mind-bogling insane, is to not really grasp how profound existence, in and of itself really is. Let alone intelligent life rising out of it, and asking, “WTF?!”
Still, ask me, “Is there a God,” and I’ll tell you, “Well, it’s not looking good.” To put it very lightly.
Really? So Thomas Aquinas, for example, or Bradwardine or Oresme is intellectually “worse” than the early-Christian Greeks of the Roman period?
I’m not saying you can’t have a valid point on this, but I’m definitely not seeing what it is yet.
Well okay, but then how do you reconcile that with your earlier statement that any culture with a tradition of studying logic would be able to detect and “toss out” internally inconsistent ancient religious beliefs?
It seems to me that you’re somewhat contradicting yourself here, or at least being rather unclear. Could you clarify exactly what you think the relationship of classical logic to pre-modern Christianity is?
Did logic prevent or reduce the adoption of irrational doctrines by calling out their logical fallacies, as you initially asserted it would? Or did it encourage the adoption of irrational doctrines by bolstering them up with pseudo-logical “bogus arguments”, as you now seem to be claiming? Or both at once? Or what?