True. They also tell us that we must make conclusions about what we think is true based on objective evidence and the personal evidence our subjective experiences. We refine our conclusions or reach new ones based on new evidence and new experiences
Well, it depends on what you mean by ‘personal subjective experiences.’ The reason certain classes of personal experiences (e.g., sensory experiences) are taken to be evidence-providing is that they are intersubjectively verified. But if by ‘personal subjective experience’ you mean something else–something that is not subject to verification–then no, I don’t think I will admit that these have evidential import. And why should I? If someone hallucinates, they are having a personal subjective experience, but there is no reason we should regard it as providing evidence for any claim about the world. Not all personal subjective experiences are created equal.
then please explain how they are falsifiable or some other clarification.
Well, we’d need some kind of definition, first. I suppose we could find people who aren’t curious about anything…
Anyway, love and curiosity are demonstrable and not easily explained by other means (i.e. a creature without a brain doesn’t display love or curiosity, leading us to the theory that love and curiosity are neurological). There’s nothing about God that isn’t explicable by other means, including substituting equally arbitrary concepts like the universe being sneezed into existence by a giant squid.
Given that love and curiosity are concepts describing an emotional state, and ones that many people claim to have, I expect you’d have to falsify them by understanding the brain well enough to prove that other people didn’t have them.
I suppose to falsify them in the truest sense of the word, you’d need to be a species that lacked those emotions, in a universe where they were impossible. Or lack those emotions yourself and prove that solipsism was true.
It’s hard to come up with a scenario falsifying something for which there is so much evidence. And no, it’s not the same as “experiencing” God; emotional states are claims of subjective states, not an external being, and people consistently claim similar emotions, as opposed to wildly different gods. And emotions don’t break the laws of physics.
As an afterthought, if cosmosdan had been born in Athens circa 300 BCE, he could very plausibly experience love and curiosity indistinguishable from his 21st-century self, but his primary deity would most likely be Zeus, suggesting the emotions are universal and exist but religious belief is bound to the culture one is born into.
True.
there is no reason we {you and I} should say it says something about the world as we know it. The person who has the experience will certainly feel differently unless they decide it was a hallucination with no meaning other than that.
With religion or subjective spiritual experiences there is the group reinforcement thing. People share their personal experiences with others and the conclusion about what that means about reality is influenced by the group.
Isn’t that how we learn how to define and assign meaning to other subjective experiences? Isn’t there a strong intersubjective element to those experiences as well?
That may be true but is it relevant? Use whatever means you wish to explain things that jibes with your own subjective experience. We have no way of knowing whether people incapable of expressing love are still capable of feeling it.
Also true to a large extent and also irrelevant. Obviously we interpret our experiences influenced by the level of knowledge and the trends within whatever culture we’re in. Mankind has grown and continues to grow with a huge percentage of it’s population being believers. Evidently religion doesn’t bind that tight.
Who said God was external?
Virtually everyone who believes in the thing. You know quite well that the term “God” almost always refers to an external entity; redefining “God” in some weird way so you can claim it’s a subjective thing just means that you are defining “God” differently than everyone else, not that God is real.
Self-selecting groups reinforce themselves. Groups of people whose experience tells them God is like A (say, God is loving and kind) reinforce each others’ beliefs; ditto for groups of people who think God is like B (vengeful and angry), ditto for C. It’s false intersubjectivity. It’s as though (I apologize in advance for the offensive analogy, but it’s the best I can come up with on 3 hours of sleep) all the people who heard voices in their head got together and said, “Hey, we have intersubjective verification!” It’s not intersubjective verification if you selectively choose those who have experiences consonant with your own and systematically exclude those whose experiences contradict your own. That’s just a version of confirmation bias.
I can’t speak for virtually everyone but there’s
The concept that we experience God subjectively within is widespread. I agree that it doesn’t mean God is real. We may discover those experiences are something else internal, perhaps a chemical reaction in the brain. Until we know that with some sort of certainty people will continue to decide for themselves what those experiences might mean.
Well that explains why non coffee drinkers don’t join the coffee club and write rave reviews about the Columbian hazelnut.
Can you explain how intersubjective verification can result in 100% agreement? Isn’t varying interpretations of our subjective experience the very nature of them being subjective?
People who experience love don’t always agree on it’s nature because so many other facets of our humanity affect how we view the experience of love. In my experience people may have a sincere profound experience and want to find some way to describe it, or understand it. If they attach themselves to a group for whatever reason then every experience they have after that will be viewed through that lens and influenced by those around them. Yes, it’s confirmation bias, but that doesn’t change the reality of the experience. It just affects how they interpret it.
The basic agreement of the experiences is that God is. The details of what that requires of the individual will vary depending on other influences.
I’m not offering this as proof of any kind. I’m aware it isn’t.
The statement in question is that “How one ought to reason is not determined by how most people in fact reason.” Your experiment seems designed to falsify the statement that “most people do not in fact solve statistical problems using standard statistical approaches.” It’s a great experiment for resolving the latter question, but nowhere does it deal with the word “ought,” nor does it explain what DOES determine how one ought to reason.
I’ve encountered a similar argument recently, an argument that suggests that any worthwhile question may be answered using the scientific method. This argument has a similarly fatal flaw in it: simply ask the question, “What constitutes a worthwhile question?” Such a question cannot be answered in a manner both scientific and significant.
There’s no shame at all in admitting that science starts with certain nonfalsifiable assumptions, that it’s a game with rules just like every other approach to understanding the world. That doesn’t take away from science’s marvelous predictive powers, from its utility, from its elegance, simplicity, and consistency. Treating it as the only game in town, however, seems to me to undermine its own methodology: no scientific methodology can result in such a claim, and those making the claim must resort to distortions of scientific tools in order to make them.
Daniel
I’m wondering how this relates to the quote above it about the nature of the bible.
I understand how it relates to people who claim the bible is literally the word of God and who hold beliefs such as a 7000 year old earth etc. but clearly Pleonast does not hold those beliefs.
I agree that denying the nature of hard evidence is willful ignorance. IMO that means we must be open to an ongoing process of redefining the details of our faith.
cool post.
I disagree. Take a population with a 1% base rate with AIDS. Give a bunch of people a test that is 99% accurate. Take all the people who get positives on the test and figure out how many of them actually have AIDS. Now, without giving people the results of your empirical research, ask 100 people on the street how many of the positives will be false positives. Then ask a statistician. The statisticians answer will be closer to the *correct * answer. That’s where your ought comes from–the statistician’s method yields answers that are right.
And I am skeptical that science has too many unquestioned assumptions. As someone much smarter than me once said, science is rational because it can call any claim into question, although not all at once. Your view is foundationalist–science has some assumptions, and everything is built on those. But the real view is more holistic–any scientific view or precept–even the most fundamental (even ones that are simply stipulated to be true, like M=RV) can be falsified. That’s what makes science rational.
But for every one of these passages, there are numerous others that have God creating the universe, causing the great flood, raining fire down on Sodom and so forth, performing actual physical feats. If God is internal, were these events hallucinations?
For a statistical question. The statement I asked you to falsify did not include the word “statistical” anywhere in it.
What if you ask a follow-up question: “What is the proper response to a positive test?” This is if anything a more meaningful question, as it’s literally a life-and-death question (whereas the previous probabilistic question isn’t). Ask it of the statistician and of the populace at large. Where does your experiment get you?
And that’s precisely my point. There are questions that scientific methods can answer with tremendous accuracy and precision. There are other questions–meaningful questions–that science doesn’t answer.
As for some of the assumptions science makes:
-If P is true, ~P is false, for all statements P.
-The cosmos operates according to the principles of reason.
-The cosmos has an objective reality.
-The objective reality of the cosmos may be apprehended by humans through the use of our senses (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly; when indirectly, it often involves using our senses to perceive scientific instruments we have built).
There are various traditions that deny each of the above claims. I don’t subscribe to their newsletters, though their ideas intrigue me. I’ve got a lifetime subscription to Scientific Process. I am aware, however, that Scientific Process cannot falsify any of the above principles.
Daniel