35 posts tagged “philosophy”

I was surprised to see these points made by an atheist in a blog post elsewhere. 

1. Having an explanation does not make your position superior to that of those who may lack one.
2. Not being able to explain a phenomenon doesn't preclude you from legitimately assuming the reliability of that phenomenon
3. Assuming the reliability of a phenomenon without being able to 'account for' it does not mean that you implicitly accept the world view of people claiming that theirs is the only explanation of that phenomenon.
4. The failure of a person to explain a phenomenon doesn't invalidate their world view or render it inconsistent.
5. Acknowledging that you don't have an answer is better than making things up.

These points were made in attempt to refute presuppositionalism, a position for which I have no opinion. My question is does the author offer the same concessions to theistic belief that it has allowed for himself in these five points?  I don't think so.  For sake of discussion, I think it is fair to equate the concept of a lack of explanation to acceptance by faith.

1. Having an explanation does not make your position superior to that of those who hold their position by faith.
2. Accepting a phenomenon by faith doesn't preclude you from legitimately assuming the reliability of that phenomenon.
3. Having faith a phenomenon by faith without being able to 'account for' it does not mean that you implicitly accept the world view of people claiming that theirs is the only explanation of that phenomenon.
4. That a person accepts a phenomenon by faith doesn't invalidate their world view or render it inconsistent.
5. Acknowledging that you accept some things on faith is acceptable.

I believe having an explanation is the superior position, that not being able to offer an explanation forces one to take things for granted and/or to rely on something/one external to decide for us what is true, that the worldview of other people with an explanation may be less dependent on faith, that the inability to explain, while not necessarily invalidating one's worldview, certainly calls into question the reasons for holding said worldview, and that the more options held open the more likely one is to find truth.  I believe that both theists and atheists accept certain premises on faith and that acknowledging that they do so is better than dissembling, equivocating, and wrapping oneself in blankets of deliberate ambiguity.

I have no idea where I'm going with this.  Apparently I just needed to get something off my chest.  Anyway, overall you'll find a thought-worthy article although I think the author probably needs to revisit his five points in light of a broader application.  Presuppositionalism is something I need to understand eventually--probably sooner than later.

Why do we believe the things we do? Fans of evolutionary psychology might be tempted to construct an evolutionary story about how such-and-such a belief might have proven beneficial to our ancestors on the African savannah. (Freudians and others might construct other stories.) But this is usually the wrong level to focus on. Evolution has equipped us with reliable general faculties of sense and reason. This means that the specific conclusions we reach are better explained by what's justified than by what's adaptive. In other words, if a belief is justified then no further explanation is necessary. It is only blatantly unreasonable beliefs that call out for special explanation -- perhaps in terms of evolved biases, developed disorders, social pressures, or the like.
This is important because people often treat evolution (and causal explanations in general) as an argument for moral skepticism: whatever caused our beliefs, it presumably isn't the abstract moral facts themselves!

From Politics and the English Language by George Orwell (yes, that guy):

...one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.

I'm back on Clifford's Principle again today--the one in which he asserts "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

Consider these propositions:

    P1 Theism is true.
    P2 Atheism is true.

The theist believes P1 and atheist believes P2.  The tendency is to demand the theist provide evidence while the atheist gets off the hook.  A negative cannot be proved, they argue.  Phooey, I say.  Neither should get off the hook.  If person believes P2 he should have evidence supporting that proposition.  To quote Carl Sagan, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  Lacking sufficient evidence, agnosticism is the only reasonable position and not only in religious matters.

I've never heard Clifford's Principle invoked against anything but religious belief.  I wonder why. 

From Panenthiesm.net:

Theology is ordinarily understood as the study of God and the relationship of God to the world, usually in the context of a specific theological system and a related body of theological opinion. It is considered to embrace the investigation of spirit, the human soul, teleology and divine qualities such as omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence.

Traditionally, its preferred methods of inquiry have been rational rather than empirical, and have thus relied on a combination of faith and logic rather than observation. Logical theology shifts theological inquiry in the direction of logic and mathematics, seeking to reposition it within the domain of modern analytical tools including model theory, the theory of formalized systems, and the logical theory of reality.

Whereas standard theology takes the existence of God as axiomatic and then attempts, often naively, to characterize the relationship between its assumed definition and a more or less concrete model of reality, logical theology explores a logical formulation of ultimate reality for any divine properties that might naturally reveal themselves; given that divine law (if it exists) would necessarily incorporate the laws of logic and mathematics on a basic level, it seeks evidence of divinity in the context of a reality-theoretic extension of logic, the CTMU. The implied convergence of theology, mathematics and science yields a reality-based theological framework with the strength and capacity to support realistic solutions to various real-world problems.

I was surfing the web for info on panentheism when I came across this site and the term logical theology jumped out at me.  I'm not the least bit sure what any of this means but the term resonates with me.  Maybe some of you might be interested as well.  I'm voxing it for future reference and pondering.

There's a nice piece by J.P. Moreland over at the Scriptorium discussing logic, God, and Jesus as a logician.  I really respect Dr. Moreland's appreciation of logic.  If I'd been raised around believers who had a similar appreciation, perhaps I wouldn't be struggling as much with matters of faith and belief as I am.

I value logic highly as a truth finding tool.  If God exists, logic is such, in my opinion, that I must agree with Moreland when he writes that it "comes from the very nature of God Himself."  I might even go one step further and assert that logic is God which can be biblically supported by John 1:1.

Moreland refers to an article called Jesus the Logician by Dr. Dallas Willard, a professor of philosophy at Southern Cal.  Another related article, also written from a biblical perspective, is God and Logic by Dr. Gordon H. Clark.

Good reads for believers and non-believers alike--for believers because most traditional Christians don't take logic seriously and they should and for non-believers because it is refreshing to discover some Christians out there that understand and embrace the value of logic as a mechanism of truth.

Although I've become quite the skeptic or agnostic of late, it troubles me when ill-informed unbelievers, disbelievers, atheists, or whatever claim that it's reasonable to conclude there is no God because there is no scientific evidence of his existence.  Such claims beg the question.  Science deals with the natural world.  To demand scientific evidence of God assumes that God is not supernatural and therefore is not God at all.  Not only is this type of reasoning begging the question, it is also an example of the argument from ignorance because it assumes the existence of God to be false because it has not been proved to be true.

Victor Reppert has linked to a thought provoking article called "Is There Scientific Proof of God?" that is worth reading.  Here's a snippet:

...the only way science can empirically prove the existence of ‘God’ is if the Naturalist position is correct.  But if ‘God’ were empirically proven, He would necessarily be a part of Nature, and thus not Supernatural – nor God – at all.  To prove Him scientifically would be to disprove Him. In other words, if the Naturalist position is correct, science could never offer proof of Supernature because once science proves a thing, it proves that thing belongs to Nature.  If the Supernaturalist’s position is correct, no manner of science could ever offer proof of a supernatural God, because by definition God is 'not of Nature', the only realm where science is equipped to speak.  "...god isn't a scientific phenomenon, and hence cannot be evaluated using scientific methods."

From On Philosophy:

In philosophy arguments can either serve to establish a theory or tear it down. Here I am going to focus on the arguments that are meant to establish philosophical positions as true and leave discussing arguments against theories for another time. This might seem redundant, after all isn’t an argument still an argument no matter what it is about? But in philosophy at least the two are quite distinct. Arguments against theories proceed by tearing the theory down, by showing that its claims don’t measure up to some standard (whether it be accuracy or logical consistency). In contrast, arguments for theories focus on working upwards from simpler ideas so as to establish them as true. And so such arguments will proceed by different methods and be subject to different criticisms.

But before we bother getting into the details about how arguments for a theory might proceed let me come out right away and make a contentious claim, that arguments for particular theories can be unnecessary and detrimental, and that it is best to evaluate a theory by what it claims rather than how we might be led to hold that theory.

Continue reading...

John Wesley, in The Importance of Developing Positive Beliefs, writes:

Belief is a funny thing. I used to think that it was entirely objective. The mind receives information, processes it, and creates the appropriate belief. There is no room for choice — your beliefs depend entirely on the information you’ve absorbed. If this were true, it would be ridiculous to judge someone for their beliefs. After all, they have no choice in the matter!

While I still believe that people shouldn’t be judged for beliefs, time and reflection have reversed my opinion on the matter of choice — all belief is rooted in choice. But why? How can something as important as belief be subject entirely to whim?

The reason is uncertainty. Every piece of knowledge has inherent uncertainty. Our tools for measuring and interpreting information are inaccurate. Although some areas (like science) provide a high degree of certainty, others (such as morals) provide virtually none. Even the most established facts could be (and often are) proved false by new discoveries.

Unlike knowledge, beliefs don’t have the luxury of uncertainty. You either believe something or you don’t. In order to go from uncertain knowledge to certain belief, the mind has to fill in the gaps. It has to look for additional information and draw conclusions. This is where choice is used to develop and reinforce belief. As soon as you choose to believe something, your mind goes to work gathering information that supports your rationale.

Continue reading at Pick The Brain

The rest of the article goes on into evangelizing about positive thinking, however, in his introduction, Wesley raises some points about belief that have always intrigued me.

Is belief a choice?  Does it involve an act of human will?  I think yes and yes.  What about you?

It's not my usual practice to post entire articles.  However, C.T. Rossi's article "on the ancient philosophical battle against the neocons" makes so many excellent points that it defies my ability to summarize or choose an excerpt that characterizes the whole.

    Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
    Hamlet: Words, words, words.
    Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
    Hamlet: Between who?
    Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

– Hamlet, II, ii, 191–195

Perhaps the greatest crime against Americans has been the debasement of our currency – though I am not talking about fiat money. What I am talking about is the debasement of our words and ideas.

There is something about words. Essentially they are the vessels of our ideas. It was Cicero who observed that only two things separate man from the beast, ratio et oratio – reason and the ability to speak. If we are robbed of our ideas or the means to pass our ideas along to others, our intellectual economy is destroyed and with it the underpinnings of society itself.

There is something sacred about words. Christ Himself is worshipped as the logos – a Greek word infinitely richer than our word for "word." Is there any greater joy than that of a parent watching their infant progress in the development of the ability to recognize, react and speak? Is their any greater sadness than a child watching a parent descend into the foggy mists of dementia, the second childhood?

But awe-inspiring as meaningful words are, words without meaning are vampiric monsters of the mind. Nature abhors a vacuum, and these empty words tend to suck the life out of all that they encounter. The wastelands which such words naturally inhabit are the wilds of political speech. The words of politicos are crafted to be empty, like an intellectual dribble cup. They are designed to fill the belly and pacify, if not stultify, the listener. Meanwhile, the political ideas of our leaders remain shrouded behind the shield of blather.

While politicians have most certainly always been men whose stock and trade was the empty phrase, a critical eye turned to today’s political establishment shows that we have done history a turn worse. Our politicians have ceased to believe in ideas themselves, as noted by the White House aide who presciently remarked that, as the vanguard of the American Empire, the neo-cons are free to "create our own reality."

Notable intellectuals have commented on such folly. Richard Weaver charged us to remember that ideas have consequences. Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his Brothers Karamazov, explored the theme that if God does not exist, everything is permissible.

As fantastical as it may seem, the rise of the neo-con empire of self-creating reality is the latest chapter in a battle between two medieval scholastics – St. Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham.

Without descending too deeply into the world of metaphysics (and vastly simplifying it as well), Thomas held the moderate realist position, that the idea, or form, of something is really found in the things themselves (hence the term metaphysical "realist"). William’s position was that we just give things names for the sake of convenience. William, therefore, was a nominalist.

Thomas would say that there is a quality of "treeness" found in certain objects in the world and so we call them trees. William counters that every tree is different from every other tree and so we just label them as "trees" to make things easier. Botany aside, this is not the silly little argument it may seem.

Instead of trees, let’s use the word "freedom." The followers of Thomas would look at human interactions and relationships and see if there was any common "freedomness" that could be detected, i.e. individuals being allowed control over their own minds, bodies, associations, and speech. Meanwhile, Ockhamites would say that "freedom," like every other word, is a mere linguistic convenience. If our Ockhamite was also a "patriotic" American, he might say that since America is a "free" country, "freedom" is shorthand for whatever it is that Americans do. And since it is too difficult to say what every American does, it’s even a better, more efficient shorthand to link freedom to what the American government does.

How many times have you heard the argument that Americans are free because we have elected leaders or because of "checks and balances" or because we have a Constitution? Do you ever hear that Americans are free because they may have liberty to do as they please, keep all the property that they have acquired by their own labor, and speak boldly and candidly their thoughts? The reason you never hear the second descriptors used to describe American freedom is the result of nominalists (most of our current political, intellectual, media and judicial elites) reading documents written ostensibly by realists (the Founders) – they just don’t get it.

In the current race for president, Ron Paul is the only man who speaks like a metaphysical realist. His unassuming personality takes a backseat to what he calls the "message of freedom." In his speeches he addresses those particularities of "freedomness" that are the essential elements of real freedom. What is most striking about Dr. Paul, and what makes him most dangerous to the establishment, is that he actually believes that freedom is real and that people can obtain it.

By contrast, the dominant nominalist metaphysics of the other candidates, Democrat or Republican, is apparent in their words. They talk as if reality is optional, as if it were a cake which they can prepare in their own signature style. They promise a reality where there is complete "security," a reality where property is "reallocated" from rich to poor, a reality where "money" is printed at will to "keep the economy strong." These alternative realities (impossible to really create) may sound attractive to some people but one thing is for sure – none of them bear the indicia of "freedomness." These political visions also make it clear that none of the "mainstream" candidates seem to have ever considered that freedom is anything more than an empty word – a paltry slogan.

Regardless of whether Ron Paul is successful in his bid for the White House, he has shown that most Americans are instinctually Thomistic in their belief that freedom is a real thing. He has also shown that our would-be emperors not only have no clothes, but have no idea what freedom even is.

From LewRockwell.com