This is not my area of expertise, but to give a concrete example, intuitionistic logic rejects some of the assumptions or definitions of Aristotelian logic, chiefly the law of the excluded middle (A v ~A). From this rejection, other seeming oddities follow. For example, in Aristotelian logic, ~~A → A, but in intuitionistic logic ~(~~A → A). It’s just a different set of axioms; non-Aristotelian logics just like non-Euclidian geometries. Which set of (logical or geometric) axioms applies to the real world? That, we must investigate empirically.
Sure. Most people believe in their religion because their parents or peers do, and often because they’ve been sent to religious indoctrination ^H^H^H instruction when young.
The crucial distinction between moral philosophy and much of religion is that moral philosophers hardly ever torture anyone to get them to join their movement, and seldom kill those in other movements. Not many philosophers favor laws inhibiting the freedoms of people based on what Kant wrote, while lots of religious people do based on what is in the Bible. Not all, by any means. Religious people who believe provisionally won’t, and religious people who think that the commandments of their god apply only to them won’t either.
In some cases, like the axiom of omnibenevolence, you can compare the result to reality, coming up with the problem of evil. In others, such as the axiom of a deity being both omnipotent and omniscient, you can show a contradiction without reference to reality - this this is more like math.
Hmm, I tend to be suspicious of any argument that that parallels: “The vast, vast majority of all living things are single-celled bacteria. Therefore it is statistically safe (probabalistically speaking) to assume that any randomly selected living thing is a single-cell bacteria. Therefore, every person on this message board is probably a single-celled bacteria.”
But virtually everyone considers it a subjective experience of an objectively real being. Again, not like an emotion. You are simply wriggling, trying to redefine God according to his critics, until God becomes something it’s own followers would never call God.
That’s not a justification. The fact that all they have are contradictory personal experiences ( those that aren’t lying ) is part of what makes their beliefs unjustified.
Of course there are. The laws of physics don’t allow for an entity with the powers of God. The uncertainty principle and the speed of light limit both rule out omniscience, or anything remotely close to it, for example.
And if you strip away all his abilites so he fits the laws of physics, he’s not the “God” people are speaking of.
No, faith is just madness. It’s making up answers out of nothing, or buying into answers from people who’ve done that, and ignoring any and all contradictory evidence.
No, they are subjective “answers” about objective things. In non-religious areas, this is called a “lie” or a “delusion”.
Yes, it does cover that; it says there isn’t one.
Mathematics and science don’t need that justification. Mathematics is arbitrary, and science works; religion claims to be objectively true and doesn’t work. Religion, whenever it actually speaks on something that can be checked, virtually always fails. It’s worse than random guesses. There’s no justification for taking it seriously; it has nothing to back it up, is inconsistent, and has a history of being wildly wrong. Religion is faith in the sense of denying reality.
Would you care to point out where science excludes the possibility of the supernatural?
I dunno about Der Trihs (who tends to go somewhat further than I do in his assertions) but I’d say that the specific possibility that human behaivor is controlled or strongly influenced by some sort of undamageable, eternal, noncoporeal soul is strongly argued against by the observable effects of changes on one’s brain chemistry (or physical brain structure) on one’s personality and behavior. That is, one would not expect a soul to get drunk just because a little chemical alcohol is sloshing around the physical grey matter.
If he can’t, what does that prove? Besides, suppose you define Concept A as supernatural and Concept B as supernatural - can you then sort out which, if either, is true?
Keep a civil tongue, or I’ll whip you with my flagella.
I heard Ed Fredkin talk about the universe as a simulation in 1973. This is nothing new, though I haven’t heard the odds before. I’m suspicious of them also - I didn’t read the paper, but if my skimming was accurate, instead of 1 in 4, if every posthuman kid is playing Sim Universe, the odds of our being a simulation might be 99.999%. If, that is, there is any reason for anyone to do this detailed a simulation in the first place.
I 'unno, so they can cast our bits into a hard drive of fire when we question the wisdom of the simulation?
Oh, so that’s where our bits go. What a relief - I’ve been worried about /dev/null filling up for years.
Logic (i.e., the rules of inference) isn’t an assumption? Where did it come from? It didn’t come from mathematics.
Once you start trying to match mathematics up to the world, you’re doing science, not math. You may justify your axioms or logic because of your observations, and that’s exactly the point I was trying to make–axioms and logic are the starting point of mathematics and cannot be justified within it.
I don’t see how it’s possible to objectively compare subjective statements about untestable claims. That’s why your statement is a value judgement.
What do you mean by “justified”? If you mean something like “supportable with objective evidence”, then you’re merely restating that religion is based on faith. No one here is disagreeing.
The uncertainty principle and the speed of light concern the acquisition and transmission of information, not the existence of information. And that assumes God is within our spacetime.
You’re arguing against positions no one here espouses.
Really? Which laws of nature address whether or not souls exist? The laws of physics certainly don’t.
Again, you’re arguing against positions no one here has claimed.
I wonder if that’s true. I see a gradual shift in beliefs. Didn’t the Mormon church start ordaining black priesthood members in recent years? The church I used to belong to went through some major changes a few years back and began ordaining women. I heard a priesthood member say from the pulpit that a gay church member had asked for help and years later he believed he was saved and still gay, indicating a shift in beliefs about homosexuality. Churches in the south supported slavery and then segregation in the past. Over time, with access to information and with challenges to traditional beliefs, the face of religion is slowly changing. Because of the clearer lines drawn by science dealing with the objective I think the changes are slower in coming but they are IMO inevitable.
Most people, believers or not, would have a concept that the truth is a reality that remains constant for all of us, even if we don’t acknowledge it, wouldn’t they? Atheists believe that no god exists and that is the truth for every human. Believers the opposite. Right? People may have a different of what the truth is ultimately, but most people believe the truth is what remains constant when all illusions and mistaken concepts fall away. Don’t they?
Nobody’s concept of truth starts from scratch.
No doubt, but I’d love to see it. IMO that’s where mythology is vulnerable in a modern age where facts are easily accessible. Beliefs about the Bible, the flood, creation, and other dogma that the facts show to be untrue would bring the focus of religion back to the more relevant aspects. Unfortunately there are some issues that are unlikely, unnecessary, and still unfalsifiable. Those will be hard to shake , but the first step is to approach the ones we have facts about.
Speaking for myself and not begbert2–axioms of logic cannot be justified because they are in a sense arbitrary. They are stipulated. Asking for a justification of a particular logical rule, whether in Aristotelian logic, multi-valued logic, or whatever, is like asking for a justification for using the word ‘cow’ to refer to a particular type of quadruped. There’s no justification for this use; it’s just stipulated that that’s how we use it. But the fact that ‘cow’ means ‘four-legged cud-chewing ungulate (fill in blanks)’ doesn’t tell us anything about the world–it is, in an important sense, not a factual claim. We can go find out whether there are things in the world that satisfy that definition, and *only then * have we learned a matter of fact.
So the reason axioms and other stipulated claims cannot be justified isn’t because they are assumed or taken on faith–it is because in an important sense they are not making any factual claims in the first place. They don’t have any factual content to justify. (I feel like I am channeling A.J. Ayer.)
That is, of course, what I was suggesting: I was talking about the foundation assumptions of science, not of proposed formal logic systems. My understanding is that the scientific method assumes that if P is true, ~P is false.
Okay, fair enough–but then you don’t get to appeal to #4 until we get there. That means no references to data gathered by the senses. If you’re unwilling to meet that criterion, then no objecting to my pointing out that such data may be flawed.
The problem is that the descriptive power of statistics assumes a rational universe: if the universe is irrational, statistical theory is useless for providing theories. In an irrational universe, that compelling evidence is nowhere near compelling. You can’t assume that which you’re trying to demonstrate.
I’m not suggesting that things will start going completely random: I’m suggesting that they’re going completely random right now, and that it’s sheer chance (or else some strange alien unreason that our brains are ill-equipped to comprehend) that has resulted in our belief that things operate according to reason. I don’t believe for a second that that’s true: I take it on faith, I take it as axiomatic, that it’s not.
If things started going haywire, I’d drop the axiom, in the same way that Euclid would’ve dropped “the shortest distance between two points is a line” if someone showed him how to get a shorter distance using an arc. In neither case does a willingness to drop the axiom in the face of countering evidence suggest that it’s not an axiom.
Yes, which is why I said that science accepts it as axiomatic that our senses provide a more-or-less accurate understanding of the objective universe.
Going back to Euclid: can you connect two dots in a way that’s shorter than a line drawn between them? If not, do you reject Euclid’s assertion that this is an axiom?
NObody is saying science is flawed, and this is a common misconception among scientists: a belief that a system with axioms is a flawed system. It ain’t. Every system rests on the back of axioms.
Daniel
I mostly concur with this post, although I’d say there are some senses in which a definition broadly, or an axiom of logic/rule of inference/etc. specifically, could be justified; for example, one could justify the claim that it formalizes our conventional usage. That is, the same way one might in some sense justify a definition of cow as “four-legged cud-chewing ungulate (fill in blanks)” by pointing out “Hey, all the archetypal things we call cows are like this, and we’d rarely be inclined to call anything a cow if it were significantly different from this” or object to a definition of “cow” as “four-legged barstool”, or quibble over whether the context is appropriate to take “cow” to actually mean “female ungulate (…)”, so too can one justify logics/rules of inference/whatever as accurately capturing external linguistic norms in this sense (e.g., “Well, of course A & B should imply A; that is a hallmark of how people generally use conjunction”).
And then there is another sense, in which one might feel one could justify a definition in a particular context, even one which would depart from existing linguistic norms, on the grounds that another way of speaking might be more useful or natural in some way; e.g., one might argue the most natural use of the term “ape” in biology would refer to a clade encompassing humans despite the historically more restricted, but less biologically useful, use of the term, and thus that its definition, within that context, should reflect that. (A logical analogue might be something like justifying taking universally quantified propositions to lack existential import, despite reservations as to whether this tracks common usage in ordinary language, on the grounds that it leads to a more natural mathematical system. Similarly, one might justify (restricting ourselves to) the rules of intuitionistic logic, within the context of certain tasks, by arguing that this usefully aids the relevant analyses we would like to carry out, even where this departs with ordinary practice or other logics)
But overall, I do agree with you; it’s meaningless to take claims about rules of logic to be factual, as though there were a distinguished “logic of the real world”, whose properties we might hope to discern by external investigation.
I find myself noting a bad messageboard habit: something catches my interest, I rush to post my first draft response, and then end up modifying it frantically as the edit window closes on me, only to end up staring at my locked-in text at some stage, still feeling it somewhat inchoate. It would probably pay to spend more time revising to begin with, before actually posting. Ah well… anyway, I wanted to emphasize, where I perhaps failed to above, that the kinds of justification discussed above were, of course, not particularly the sort of justifications of belief usually discussed when discussing faith.
We’ve talked about the provisional thing before. I agree that the nature of religious beliefs should be provisional. I’d say even the believers who cling to beliefs as absolute actually hold them provisionally. I mentioned long held traditions that have changed. When believers and religious leaders cling to certain beliefs as absolute they merely slow their own growth. The weight of evidence and the progress of those around them will gradually erode those absolute beliefs. Progress has been slow but as our modern age makes information more accessible and people begin to challenge beliefs, we’ll see them change more quickly.
There is a difference between a *real *spiritual being and an *objectively real *being. Most believers would say God is *real *but I think if you asked if God was objectively real , such as had a physical form, was measurable in some way as far as height and width and weight etc. very few would agree. If you have some other definition of objectively real then please elaborate.
Unless you have some cite to give concerning believers thinking of an objectively real god then we don’t really have a debate, just a difference of opinion.