First let me say that I appreciate the opening post, which is very thorough, logical and intelligent. Not surprisingly I disagree with almost all of it, but I find it an excellent example of how to talk about religion with politeness and respect.
To begin with, “each faith’s claim to be exclusively true” is somewhat suspect. Some religions make many claims in that direction, some make few, some make none at all. There’s a tremendous amount that could be said about the relationship between the various religions, much more than could be said here. I might point you to authors like Thomas Merton and E. F. Schumacher, both of whom were devout Catholics but also practitioners of other religions to some extent. What we can say about all religions is that they all believe in the existence of beings ‘higher’ than humanity, and the ability of humans to reach higher levels. That there would be both a large set of higher beings and a variety of methods for humans to climb upward is hardly illogical. That most religions appear to hold contradictory viewpoints is again suspect. Many things appear to be contradictory only because of ignorance or unawareness. For example, light being a particle and a wave was once contradictory, but only because of our limited knowledge.
(The definition of ‘higher’ I intentionally left out since it would take to long, but I can discuss that if you like.)
In any case, I don’t agree with the assessment that atheism “isn’t any more wrong that almost all religions”. Consider classical music as a metaphor. I may feel that Mozart is the greatest composer, while others would name Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, or any number of others. But while all but one of us may be wrong, a person who dismisses all classical music as worthless would be a great deal more wrong than any of us.
The conclusion here begs the question, “what is reason?” You give the Pythagorean theorem as an example but certainly if the materialist worldview were right then nobody knew the Pythagorean theorem before humanity came along. No chimpanzee knows it. It’s unique to humans. This suggests that reason is unique to humans.
More importantly, most people would agree that most of what they call “reason” is stuff that deals with humanity, and depends upon the uniqueness of humanity. Hence if you look at the works of Aristotle or Confucius or Aquinas or most other great reasoners, they focused most of their thinking on human topics. The idea that one can be a great thinker owing through only the hard sciences is unique to a small part of the world in modern times.
So by meaningful standards, in your scenario, this future sentient race could not rediscover reason because it would die with humanity. Any speculation about this race’s ways of thinking is pure speculation and we really have no idea what they would believe, think, or do.
Those who believe in a god sometimes state that [he] can be experienced by just about anyone with a functioning brain - and indeed mystic states can be induced through prayer, fasting, meditation, drugs, etc. Some even experience this by listening to classical music …
Of course whether such states = direct experience of God is debatable. I myself think they do not, but are, rather, an experience which is filtered through the particular culture of the perceiver. But there is no question that lots of people “experience” God in some form or another (though again I’m not arguing they are correct in their analysis of what they perceive, just that this objection to the analogy does not work).
I think his point was that the analogy is absolutely not equivalent.
That these composers existed is scientifically and objectively verifiable. That music can be heard and experienced too is a scientific question which delves into how sound waves travel through a medium and are interpreted through the biological machinery that is our ear and nervous system.
You can’t seriously be telling me that if you changed the names from Beethoven to Krishna and Schubert to YHWH the analogy holds, can you?
It does? I can easily imagine a sentient species on a planet far from Earth, or whatever sentient species might replace humanity, discovering mathematics and realizing that 3[sup]2[/sup] + 4[sup]2[/sup] = 5[sup]2[/sup] because this is always true and observable, even if the symbols for the numbers are different. It’s entirely unclear that any form of theism meets this standard.
The Pythagorean theorem didn’t create the relationship that exists between the sides of a right-angle triangle on a plane, it merely describes it. This relationship existed long before humanity and will exist long afterward.
Certainly, they can observe and write on subjects about human behaviour, but this behaviour is itself the offshoot of a lengthy and laborious evolutionary process. Were bees the first species to achieve sentience, I’m sure they would have great bee philosophers as well, writing on the social structure of hives which may be as alien and incomprehensible to humans as, say, our JudeoChristianity would be to them. But whatever mathematical discoveries they make (I’m sure they’d consider the hexagon to be nature’s perfect shape) could translate.
You’re using “reason” in a very unreasonable fashion. While philosophies are, no doubt, species- and culture-specific, I don’t see how math, physics and chemistry could be.
I’m raising a specific objection to his objection. Lots of people “experience god”, it isn’t really all that uncommon, and the state of mind of “experiencing god” is certainly scientifically and objectively verifiable.
I think the way his analogy was meant to work was more like you change the names from Beethoven to Roman Catholicism and Schubert to Zen Buddhism; so that just because there are many different religions and people disagree about which one is “best,” this is no more an argument against religion per se than the fact that there are many different composers and people disagree over which one is best is an argument against classical music. Is that your point, ITR? (I’m not necessarily endorsing it, just trying to clarify it.)
At any rate, the religions of the world have matters on which they agree (or overlap) and matters on which they disagree. Some of their differences are true incompatibilities, where if one is right, another must necessarily be wrong. Others are just seeming differences: they’re using different symbols or metaphors or language to try to express the same underlying reality.
Let’s have it right; if man hadn’t spread the word, there would be no religion.
Unless you want to point to an instance where a religious artifact has appeared in nature?
And don’t say look at our wonderful universe. By all current accounts, the universe is a cold, lifeless expanse, the size of which either renders us totally insignificant, or the most important thing in it.
If it is the latter, I don’t put that down to some invisible deity.
I certainly believe that religion (and religious perception) is a byproduct of evolution. That doesn’t mean it has no insights to offer, though again I do not believe in the literal existence of any god.
And yet, lots of people don’t. Not the case with classical music - if it is being played within earshot, you will experience it. I don’t see how the analogy holds.
But amazingly–or at least 99% of the time–only seems to happen to people who were raised in religious households. (Or at least those are the only people who consider temporary euphoric states as being divinely inspired.)
God or god’s existence is independent of cognition. Either God exists or she doesn’t; human cognition doesn’t enter into it. Atheism might be the first type of cognition (null-state) but it is still an mental state and falls under the umbrella of cognition. It still disappears when there are no cognitive agents around.
So does religion. Of course, when those truths are counter to what they claim to be true, they start looking foolish, but don’t confuse that with not allowing the search of truth. I have yet to meet a Christian, Muslim, or other that vehemently denies the Pythagorean theorem or length x width = area. There have been many people (e.g. Thomas Aquinas and other naturalist theologians) that would argue your claim that religion is counter to any search for truth.
This one I’ll agree to.
I agree in principle. When attempting to describe a physical world, one should only use physical properties. Metaphysical properties would be outside the realm of a scientist because otherwise they would have discernible physical observances. Atheism does lack descriptive power to describe an actual miracle though.
That would, however, lead to a faith whose only tenet is basically to have faith, since that does seem to be about all the various faiths have in common; and a lot of faiths even explicitly deny this possibility by making some sort of uniqueness claim. And even if we collect all the various poly-, mono-, and pantheistic faiths, throw in a dash of folk beliefs from all over the world to arrive at some vague notion of there being ‘something ineffable’ about the world, I believe my reasoning holds: In this case, the hypothetical future race might re-discover this notion, vague and of little substance as it is; however, it also might not, in which case they’d basically be atheists. Atheism still would be the more natural position to adopt, at least in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
However, some conceptualisations are preferred over others, which I’ve attempted to show with the ‘reasonable assumptions’-argument: if you start down the path of incorporating faith-based notions into your world view, it’s difficult to see where it’ll lead, how to tell ‘true belief’ from ‘false belief’, how to tell different gods from one another, or even the ‘ineffable something’; however, if you keep your assumptions reasonable, you might err, but that’s eventually self-correcting.
I believe his point was more along the lines that the internal experience of seeing the colour red matters very little, as long as both call it red, because if that’s given, everyone knows exactly what’s being talked about. This assumes an underlying objective reality of which our subjective perception is at least an approximation, i.e. that the object whose colour is being talked about exists and indeed reflects light in a given frequency range; but not permitting that assumption means not being able to reason about the world in any meaningful way (and furthermore, it’s also a reasonable assumption).
I’ve allowed for that in my OP; however, that god would still have to assert himself again, and lay down the rules for worship and the tenets of faith, which still makes for a fundamental difference to atheism, since the latter is entirely rediscoverable by reason. In other words, even if there were the one, true religion, nobody would know about it unless having been told.
There’d still be no way to assert its truth from the physically accessible realm, and I’m uncomfortable with all the extra-universal stuff for other reasons I’ve attempted to illustrate (I’ve called it the ‘interface dilemma’ in the OP).
Well, they’re all we have, right? I mean, the same reasoning applies to any ‘scriptural’ truth, and again leads us only down the path of solipsism.
This sort of ‘logical’ god runs into a whole host of other problems I did not go into in the OP, though, such as having himself (by the way, I intend no disrespect by consistently choosing the male form of address, it’s just for convenience and seems to be the most widely spread custom) the need for a creator and on and on; I tried to limit myself to the most general notion of god, or rather the supernatural, which to me includes the possibility of entities not governed by logic, which I think is all my argument needs. Furthermore, if you want a logical universe, I’d dispute the notion that there’s anything supernatural about it at all, since anything following by mere logical inference would appear to be governed by physical laws.
Thus my reasoning that if you want a supernatural universe, logical deduction is not necessarily valid within it, and knowledge has a fundamentally different, completely uncertain basis – essentially saying that, for any statement ‘if A then B’, supernatural interference could always make it so, that B doesn’t follow.
Thanks, it’s good to see that my efforts are appreciated.
That’s a given; however, I need only for some to make such a claim, and for different faiths to exist, for my reasoning to be valid, I think.
However, many things also appear contradictory because they are contradictory. The reasonable assumption to make when encountering things that appear different is that they are, in fact, different; you may be wrong with that, and will have to correct your assumption in the light of contradictory evidence, but still, to assume them to not be different from the outset would have been unreasonable; so, it’s natural to assume contradictory religious tenets to be, in fact, mutually exclusive until evidence to the contrary comes to light.
Just as an aside, I wish people would stop with this wave/particle duality thing; there is no duality, the photon always behaves like a quantum object, and does so nice and orderly. The supposed paradox only comes from trying to shoehorn its behaviour into familiar categories, i.e. assuming there’s any need for the photon to behave like either wave or particle. But that’s really not germane to the discussion.
Classical music, however, doesn’t require faith; the contradictory position, that classical music doesn’t exist, isn’t valid. The analogy would be more pertinent if nobody had ever heard any classical music, and people still would discuss the relative merits of Beethoven and Schubert. (Wait, ‘nobody’ isn’t quite correct in the last sentence, at least not that I can prove; there is always the possibility that there are genuine religious experiences, however, those experiences are, if they exist, ineffable, whereas classical music isn’t.)
Well, it’s realisation in the form of the Pythagorean theorem is human; the fact that the squares of the triangle’s sides sum to the square of the hypotenuse in a right-angled triangle is not. Humanity did not invent this result of geometry, we merely discovered it.
Hard sciences are themselves unique to modern times, and represent a development that stems, in my opinion, from the rigorous application of a succession of reasonable assumptions, which is really just saying ‘scientific method’ with different words.
I disagree; they could rediscover the same rules for doing geometry, for doing analysis, for algebra, and even for basic logic. They would probably formalize them differently, but the fundamentals remain the same, independently of either them or us.
But it is the same thing for any potential cognitive agent, other than any specific gods barring their self-assertion.
Well, I’ve tried to give some justification to my argument that knowledge rests on a fundamentally different basis in a faith-based system – basically, in a nutshell, an omnipotent god can void any reasoning you might undertake, and thus all knowledge is automatically called into question.
This is the ‘special pleading’ I’ve referred to in my OP, the claim that the supernatural exists ‘outside’ the scientific domain; I’ve tried to outline with two arguments why I consider it to be invalid, one being that the supernatural is either evidence based or irrelevant (since if there’s no evidence for it, the universe is indistinguishable from one in which it doesn’t exist), the other being that I believe it only shifts the dilemma to how the interface between the supernatural and the natural should look like, if it is extra-universal. (This is, by the way, not an argument from ignorance in the form ‘I don’t know how the two should interface, so they can’t’ – that they can’t is merely the reasonable assumption to make in the absence of evidence that they do.)
Whew, this is getting like work! However, I’m greatly enjoying the discussion so far, both the support of my arguments and the challenges to them. Now I’ll need to shift mental gears and attend to some real world stuff, though.
You went to great pains to define atheism with some specificity as the absence of all faith in supernatural things. You’re right that the definition is unusual since it necessarily includes faith in ghosts, ESP, and a host of other phenomena unrelated to gods. It’s all the more strange since the “theism” part of “a-theism” specifically points to gods. It seems more to me like you’re talking about materialism (or physicalism) than atheism, but okay. I’m pretty generous when it comes to definitions of terms as long as we all understand what they mean. This, of course, implies that it is important you don’t change or refine the meaning as our discussion progresses. If you mean something other than what you’ve said, clear it up now rather than waiting until we’ve gone two pages talking past each other.
You stopped short of defining what you’re contradicting. Ordinarily, atheism and theism would be opposites, but in this case a theist would be someone who believes in complex numbers or anything else they couldn’t touch. It would be good if you would define exactly what you say isn’t true or doesn’t exist.
Until (2) is cleared up, we’re in the awkward position of conflating empiricism with reason. You appeal to both, but in an equivocal way. While they may both be used, they’re not the same. Reason may draw premises, but not inferences, from empiricism. And empiricism may appeal to reason, but may not draw conclusions from it. It is certainly reasonable that 2+2=4, and we can prove it deductively. But empiricism will never give you more than an inductive assurance, depending on how assured you are by drawing generalities from specifics.
You’ve divided religion up into subgroups of differing tenets, but you’ve lumped all atheists together into one big Borg collective. It has been my experience that atheists don’t like that. They normally insist that they are independent thinkers. Even within your own definition, there is room for difference. An atheist as you describe him may completely lack faith himself, but that doesn’t mean that he demands faithlessness from everyone else. But another atheist might. There, already, are two different kinds, and by your assertion the latter dies right along with the believer.
Your premise is rather bizarre in that it concedes that rocks and trees are atheists. You tied religion to humans, but did not do so with atheism. This sort of error — a category division — usually points to a circularity in reasoning. And sure enough, you’ve concluded that atheism is the null hypothesis by asserting that atheism must be the null hypothesis. It’s almost a claim that atheism is everything conceivable plus everything that isn’t.
If we are to derive our premises from empirical observation, then we have to concede that man seems to be hardwired for religious faith. Studies and experiments by neurological researchers have shown that the brain’s limbic system clearly has the capacity to produce religious experience. What the experiments cannot tell us the source of that production. It may be that man invents a god in his temporal lobe, but it may just as well may be that the temporal lobe is the instrument by which a god contacts man.
I consider gods merely a special case of the supernatural, thus I have broadened the definition of atheism somewhat, yes. However, the concept of a god is not all that well defined in itself – consider the differences between the Greek gods, who were much like men, and the Christian god as an omnipotent spirit of some sort (yes, I know that definition is far from complete, and probably not strictly correct, however, that’s of little relevance to my argument). So, for instance a belief in fairies may well be called a theistic belief, with the fairies playing the role of ‘gods’. There’s no fundamental difference between the two, hence I consider my choice of broadening the definition of atheism as being opposed to all faith a reasonable one.
This puzzles me somewhat – I have certainly never used ‘the ability to be touched’ as a criterion for anything having reality, because that would be silly. In fact, I have repeatedly used a quite untouchable example, i.e. the Pythagorean theorem, as having existence independent of human cognition. And I don’t get where you’re going with the complex numbers example at all – they’re as real as any mathematical concept, faith isn’t involved in the slightest.
I’m not clear on what you’re trying to say here – what would an inference drawn from empiricism look like, anyway? Inferences can be drawn from knowledge, and knowledge can come from empiricism, as I see it.
Again, I’m not sure if I catch your meaning here. Empiricism can support or disprove a conclusion, but how can you use it to draw one?
No finite amount of observation ever proves a generality, that’s not a shocker. It’s also not needed for any part of my argument; what’s needed is merely that, unless contradicted by evidence, the reasonable assumption is that any empirical proposition is general – i.e. from the observation of one white sheep, the assumption that all sheep are white is reasonable, however soon contradicted by the observation of black sheep.
I merely required of atheists that they do not have faith, which is in line with the ‘usage note’ of the word atheism I’ve given in my post.
No; I concluded atheism to be the null hypothesis because every faith depends on non-reasonable assumptions, and their elimination leads naturally to atheism.
Try the converse: could people today be Christians if the gospels had never been written? Could they be Muslims if Mohammed had never been born? No. Every faith needs tradition to proliferate, and believers to exist. Atheism can be arrived at in a total vacuum from pure reasoning. I did not tie atheism to humanity because it does not depend on humanity; it is, in fact, of a different category than faith. That was the whole point of my post. There is no need to even assume the existence of ‘something ineffable’ without evidence for it; the default position has to be atheism.
What you’re basically trying to do is to get faith back on the same level as atheism; I, however, contend that atheism is the more fundamental position of the two, and that’s basically the central thesis of my post. Why I think that is easily said – atheism, though it may be based on assumptions, always contains at least one less assumption than even the most basic faith, which I’ve previously called the belief in ‘something ineffable’ (that assumption is obviously the existence of something ineffable). Also, if you have one faith, the belief in something ineffable, you immediately have to admit infinitely many other faiths, the beliefs in some other ineffable thing. This schism naturally occurs with faith, and it is impossible to choose one faith over another. Atheism does not suffer this schism, since not having faith is a well defined and unique position.
And there are probably good evolutionary reasons that the brain has the capability to incite what we call religious experiences, they are however beyond the scope of this discussion. However, I’m curious as to how you cannot count this as evidence that there is, in fact, no god? The existence of those structures in the brain, and the fact that they can be artificially stimulated – for instance, by strong magnetic fields – to create seemingly religious experiences seem to point strongly to a naturalistic explanation of those phenomena. If those structures didn’t exist, and people still had those experiences without outward cause, and without them being easily replicable in the lab, then there might be something to thinking about whether possibly ‘god did it’.
True, any idea needs a “thinker” in order to exist. Atheism just doesn’t get the special protection you wanted to give it. It might be the first in the order of philosophical stances. If, however, God exists, then belief in God would have the same necessity as no belief in the super-natural.
Not if the world is like a computer program (I shouldn’t be dragging the Matrix into this) and God is the programmer. The program runs fine on its own except where God makes changes. Those changes can affect the program retroactively so that code and solutions from one place will change with the whole system. Within the system it wouldn’t be noticeable and everything will have stayed consistent (and “lawful”). Searching for the code of the system would not be pointless, just sometimes frustrating. Unless movies have lied to me about how programmers work and then dismiss my analogy.
Unfortunately this position needs a little work. Firstly, there have been multiple religions that believe in the same deity - trivially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam today. Secondly, religions were not necessarily exclusive - the Greeks had an altar to the ‘unknown god’. Thirdly, you ignore the possibility that at their base, they are all correct. That last sounds very odd, but consider that everyone experiences everything uniquely, and an experience of the Divine is going to be very unique indeed. Compare with crime and accident witness reports.
See, I don’t think I’d agree here – any idea needs a thinker to be thought, but not to exist; it doesn’t even need a thinker to be right or wrong. To abuse the example some more, would the Pythagorean theorem be any less true if nobody ever thought of it?
Not unless god asserts himself; even in a world where some god or something similar exists, atheism would be the default stance. It would, however, be wrong; but that can only be recognised in the face of evidence for god’s existence.
Even in this case, knowledge before the change of programming would be different from knowledge afterwards, even though you wouldn’t notice and firmly believe that yes, Oceania has always been at war with East Asia. Every knowledge you have now might be undone by a change in programming at any point.
But I don’t require for all faiths to claim to be (or actually be) mutually exclusive, only for a sizeable proportion; from there, it follows that there obviously are wrong religions (or belief systems in general – barring the ‘they’re all right’ case, which I’ll come to later), and from there, it follows that all of them could be wrong even if there exists a right one, and from there, that there are infinitely many mutually exclusive possible beliefs that are wrong (all the gods nobody’s thought up yet).
The ‘in fact, they’re all the same’-case just leads back to the watered-down belief in the ‘ineffable something’, that each faith attempts to grasp differently. But even this most general of all possible faiths is not unique: it can, because the ineffable something is not exclusively defined, always be contrasted with a belief in some other ineffable thing, which in turn leads to a possible belief in yet another ineffable thing, and so on, so that you again can construct a limitless amount of mutually exclusive, possible faiths that are almost all wrong.
I disagree with both of these assessments. Classical music is not able to be experienced by anyone. Before a person can experience classical music, he or she must be willing to listen to it, be willing to give it serious attention, and be willing to approach the process of listening in a sophisticated and intelligent way. If a street punk refuses to listen to Mozart, he can’t experience Mozart. If he listens to Beethoven but has decided beforehand to scoff at it, he can’t experience Beethoven. If he listens to Haydn but won’t give the music as much effort as it requires, he can’t experience Haydn. Listening to music is an intellectual experience that goes far beyond the physical fact of sound waves hitting the eardrum. In order to experience a piece of music as meaningful, memorable, and sublime, the listener must make a conscious choice to give the music a certain amount of mental effort. (Nor, obviously, do music conoisseurs care about the ear and nervous system. It’s the music that matters, man.)
Every knowledge you have now might be undone by a change in programming at any point.