From here.
I said:
I am not such a person.
I have seen that some (not all) of the atheists on this board believe Christians and Christianity get a free ‘bye’ on this board to make theistic assertions that strike them (the atheists in question) as the epitome of the ignorance we’re supposed to be fighting, and (they, the atheists in question, beliieve that) then they (the atheists in question) get remonstrated, officially by mod or informally by pile-on, for attacking Christians who haven’t claimed to have made provable, falsifiable assertions; they’re just saying this is what they believe, not that it can be shown (proven) that they (the christians in question) are right and the atheistis wrong.
And it is my observation that the focus of the acrimonious disagreement is often the larger meta-question of whether anything can be said to exist if it doesn’t exhibit any qualities that can be used to formulate falsifiable statements. That the atheists in question (or some of them at any rate) take it for granted that of course it is meaningless to discuss something as real if no falsifiable statements can be generated that are contingent upon some aspect of that thing’s existence! From their standpoint, any theistic person is exhibiting ignorance in need of stamping out whenever they speak of harboring such a belief, just as much so (if not moreso) than a truebeliever who claims to have PROOF that such-and-such a theistic belief is true because “it says so in the Bible” or “God said so to Noah” or “It was determined to be so at the Council of Trent” or etc etc.
Meanwhile, the Christians and also the nonchristian defenders thereof (including many of the board’s other atheists) do not see it that way; an assertion of proof (or empirically substantiated claim, if you will) is to them a different thing from an assertion of belief, and they do not consider it to be an act or trait of ignorance to consider something to truly exist merely because it exhibits no empirical qualities.
Let’s get started, shall we?
First off, like the prescientific villagers of centuries past who thought it self-evident that the sun goes around the earth, the radical empiricists have a relationship understood backwards of how it actually works:
Empirical evidence is centrally the evidence of the senses; the aspects of a thing that you can see, smell, touch, taste, and hear. Add to that the spectrum of similar data we can obtain from the measuring and testing apparatuses we’ve invented over time to extend our reach (which translate other inputs into human-accessible readouts that we can ascertain with our original five senses) and there you have it: empirical data.
But it isn’t “just there”. It has to be perceived. And recognition has to occur. To make sense of it, it has to be categorized.
One can say “Maple leaves are red”. One can hold a leaf in one’s hand and make visual determination that the leaf is red —we know that, we’ve done it — but how? There is no homonculus running around in little offices inside the brain doing meta-empiricist tests to determine that the color of the leaf is indeed of the category of color-appearances that the mind maintains for itself called “red”. It is not, in fact, a rational process at all; it’s not a process that we’re able to point to as a series of steps. Instead, it is an emotional process. Some folks would say you “just know”, others call it “intuition” or “instinct”, but what it is is an emotional process. And without that central reliance upon what feels right — that intuitive emotional little “aha” of pattern-matching — thinking could not occur. {Note: these aren’t cites, they are prior posts of mine elaborating on this perspective}
The empirical and the rational, in other words, is a specialized subset of the emotional-driven process of leaping to conclusions because they sit will with the rest of what we think and believe. NOT AN ALTERNATIVE, NOT A NICE CLEAN LABORATORY ENVIRONMENT SCOURED CLEAN OF SUCH THINGS, but a subset which, in the close-up and small aspects of its functioning, continues to rely upon them and could not function without them.
So that’s for starters: there is no knowledge that is not faith-based. It’s just that some knowledge is meticulously subjected to a formal process of testing as many of those leaps as we are able to test, and, wherever possible, to build only on a solid foundation of information that has already been subjected to those processes. Come to think of it, the word “just” doesn’t normally have a useful function in that sentence — that little “just” allowed us to put human footprints on the moon and to know with a surprising degree of precision what happened on this planet in the millions and billions of years before there were humans. And let’s not neglect to mention that progress in that direction took place only at the expense of superstitious beliefs, where “superstitious beliefs” were beliefs that were build on the questionable foundation of things “known to be true” but never tested, and which were themselves never tested for verification.
But for purposes of this debate, “just” is appropriate. The things we know, we still know, ultimately, as a consequence of a mental process that is akin to puzzle-piece matching — gradually building up a large pattern of smaller patterns, and looking at each piece of new sensory data and intuitively fitting it into a place where it fits well because it feels right to put it there.
Now, having put that on the board, let’s consider that great big pattern, the “map of reality” we carry about in our heads, the larger pattern that we’re constantly fitting the new experiences into and recognizing things as part of. You ever worked a puzzle? If you have, you are entirely familiar with the phenomenon of the hypothetical piece. It goes right there. Haven’t seen it yet, but you know what it’s shaped like, you know what colors it’s going to have on it. Like any analogy, this one may fall short at some point, but it will do for starters: we do posit the existence of things for which we have no evidence per se because of how the overall pattern of reality makes sense if there is something of that nature.
Many such things, once thought of in this fashion, become named abstractions, and without us ever having empirical evidence of them, their existence becomes a part of our model of reality.
Character traits — “stubbornness”, “idealism”, “compassion”; Principles — “justice”, “freedom”, “fairness”; Emotional experiences — “despondency”, “anticipation”, “nostalgia”… some of these things may at this point be associated, albeit loosely and
in a fashion dependent on term-definitions, with measurable objective phenomena, but for the most part little to none of it was when these things were first given names.
We believe in abstractions; we utilize them in our mental language of the world. We don’t expect them to leave empirical “footprints” because they do not name concrete objects, but they are nevertheless real to us.
The scientific method is great for those areas of life amenable to what it can usefully investigate.
Once there was a patrolman walking his beat and he came upon a businessman on hands and knees next to the streetlight and, thinking the man to be a drunk, came closer only to be told by the businessman “I’m looking for my keys, I dropped my damn keys”. Police officer brings out the maglite and switches the beam on and helps look for a moment, sees nothing, and says, “Are you sure this is where you dropped them?” Businessman says, “No, I dropped them back yonder in that dark alley, but it’s too dark to look for anything back there”.
In the science departments of our universities, the curiosities of graduate students are diverted from what they are interested in to what can be usefully approached for empirical study with the tools we’ve got. Many things of great interest to us as a species are not studied by our sciences because they are in the dark alleys; the matters of inquiry are things that, at least as we’re able to formulate our thinking about them at this time, do not manifest with any empirical qualities.
That last little disclaimer is an important one, I think —in time, things that are abstractions to us now may be understood in ways that tie them more directly to specific matter-and-energy phenomena, empirically discernable things, quantifiables even.
That disclaimer is not one I’m ready or willing to posit as a gateway threshold requirement for the real, though: some of the things that are abstractions to us now may never, ever, be anything but.
And in either case, they are real for us now, and a radical empiricist approach to metaphysics and epistemology is not useful for understanding our world or dispelling its ignorance.
And if you push it, everything you can hold in its grasp crumbles away until you’ve got nothing to hold onto to call real and you’re left with ‘there ain’t no there there’.
