I've grown used to being corrected, to the point that it's a pleasant surprise to be told I might be right.
What I notice more and more, is the "you're wrong" is used to buttress opinion masquerading as fact. If you preface "I think that.." to asserts it doesn't stop the "you're wrong" but it at least puts the discussion into the realms of conjecture about things, including facts, rather than simple asserts of facts which are often not as factual as they seem.
I also notice that argument by analogy is being over-used. Because you want to compare your large single CPU to a multi CPU doesn't mean it actually is a Bull compared to a herd of chickens. Or that cat-herding is actually much harder than it looks: you need the right kind of cream. Wait.. that analogy might not work here..
> I also notice that argument by analogy is being over-used
This one seems especially pernicious, not because of extremely over-wrought comparisons, but because sometimes the analogy fits really well on the surface. But beyond the structural fit, it does not really help prove anything.
Too often I'll encounter an analogy wielded as if it proves the underlying point, when the reality is that it breaks down quickly if you dive into the details.
Analogies can be great to help establish new mental models, or to try out an idea with terminology that people already understand, but can be quite misleading. Better used for learning than trying to prove things.
They can be arguments, for example if you want to show that the other person has inconsistent views due to feelings or bias an analogy between the two inconsistent scenarios can make that clearer. I've changed my mind thanks to analogies many times.
To split hairs a bit, analogies can support arguments, but are not considered a conclusive form of evidence/argumentation in and of themselves in formal logic.
While the analogy may have been instrumental in helping change your mind, it likely did so by helping you understand the actual underlying argument.
If a human based their views solely on formal logic then they wouldn't have an inconsistent world view in the first place, so I don't see why you bring up formal logic here.
> While the analogy may have been instrumental in helping change your mind, it likely did so by helping you understand the actual underlying argument.
The world would be a much better place if that was true, but sadly people base their world view largely on feelings and those feelings often doesn't care about the underlying arguments but they can feel the analogies. That goes for you and me as well, feelings are a fundamental part of human thinking, you can't just ignore that just because formal logic says it isn't important.
For example, a person might say that they are against racism but they are pro discriminating against white people. That aligns with their feelings, but it is inconsistent and you would need something more than formal logic to make them see that inconsistency. And once they see it you didn't do it by making them understand a formal argument, you did it by changing how they feel about things, they already agreed with you that discrimination is bad they just didn't apply that consistently due to their feelings clouding their minds.
I agree that people are often swayed by feelings, and that we don’t operate as perfectly logical/rational beings.
But if the only thing that convinced you of a thing is an analogy or emotional appeal, and if in being convinced you learned nothing about the underlying argument the analogy is supporting, you are susceptible to being convinced by similarly compelling analogies or emotional appeals that may or may not have any grounding in a solid argument.
I’m not claiming that people can’t be convinced this way. I’m pointing out that this form of persuasion is problematic and insufficient. “Argument from analogy” is considered a fallacy for this reason. It can lead people to take on new beliefs for bad reasons, even if the position they take is the “right” one.
While emotions absolutely influence our beliefs, it’s not accurate to downplay the role of formal logic, which is often implicitly invoked by emotional dialogue. The two are not mutually exclusive, and they work together.
For example: in a discussion about climate change, a purely logical presentation of facts about the temperature of the ocean and receding ice is not compelling without understanding the implications. Painting a picture of potentially cataclysmic outcomes and mass extinction events and migrations evokes an emotional response that is also necessary for humans to take action.
In this example, either one without the other can be problematic. Pure facts logically presented are hard to interpret, especially if you aren’t a climatologist. And if there is no logical foundation whatsoever, the argument is on shaky ground and the person who now believes it will have no reason not to believe the next emotionally compelling thing.
It’s easy to argue against and for “badness” of any reasons. It’s a totally valid, and good argument that somebody just feels it. All of us do this on some level. Just because I feel it that we should consider things “good” when they are generally good for world’s society in general in some specific metrics, and builds my thoughts about more topic solely on that, from how to handle cigarette buds to how to ask something from a waiter, it doesn’t mean that somebody has a less valid point when they didn’t made the effort to follow through every questions regarding that, and cut it at “I feel X way”. No matter what they think regarding any topic.
Of course, when they are expressing this feeling, they should be upfront about it. But they are almost never, and they almost never too far away from the feeling.
And even then, you can have internal conflicts. Just because of your feelings.
Case in point: eating beef. It’s not good to anybody. I still do it. I violate my core principles for it. All the time.
And of course some topics are way foggier. Like travelling. It’s definitely good for my state of mind, and my friendships, but it’s definitely not good for the society that I fly every other week and I travel to other countries by other means every week.
I was referring to the formulation of beliefs based on reasoning that is not sound, e.g. an emotional appeal that convinces someone but has insufficient evidence to back the underlying claim.
For example, I convince you that flying causes insanity because my uncle once flew and went insane, and the situation affected me so deeply that I urge you with every ounce of persuasion I have not to suffer the fate of my uncle. Let’s say you stopped flying because of my story, and later found that you had no reason to believe it. This is what I’m referring to. Maybe it’s “good” that you stopped flying for climate reasons, but the reason you stopped was “bad”. And this matters because the moment you realize the reason was a bad one, you may think there’s no longer a reason not to fly (assuming my story was the only reason you were avoiding it).
You’re describing a scenario where you understand the potential “badness” - presumably based on evidence - but choose the “bad” option anyway. This is a very different scenario and not what I was getting at.
Nope, I wrote that based on a feeling not formal logic. But now I'm starting to feel that I was wrong there, see my mind is changing without any formal arguments.
Then I have to change my mind. But I think right now, it's not that I'm wrong to prefer orange cream, it's that I can't justify it from objective criteria except that one time I split a tooth on hard nougat which might colour my preferences
Analogy discussions break down when people aren't in agreement about which features are or aren't important to map across... or worse, when one or both sides haven't even considered what they are.
So far I haven’t seen an argument in this thread for why it’s bad reasoning when you want to show that the reasons are not what’s stated. It was just stated that it’s bad. So why is that?
Somebody states that they think X because of Y, and they don’t say anything else (Y can be also a group of reasons). You show an analogy where Y would cause Z too (provided the logic is solid). The other party states that they think differently about Z - the reason doesn’t matter.
In this case, either Y isn’t important at all, or there is also something else besides Y, which is not stated. In other words, X is not because of Y logically.
I don't see a problem or a point. A cause can have more then one effect, a logically sound analogy doesn't make all analogies logically sound. And producing causal arguments is inherently hard, we've spent centuries holding irrelevant things as fundamental causes of phenomena, and we still don't know fundamental causes for most observations we have produced.
Arguing by analogy is indeed problematic. You can often find rough analogy which supports the argument, but also a different analogy which disproves it.
Additionally, I think arguing by analogy is a sign that you lack real / structural arguments, real understanding.
Ina a similar vein, when people talk about managing creative technical types as ‘herding cats’ I respond that this is a management style issue: You don’t herd cats, you give them something to chase.
That's Hitchens, of course. Here's a set of philosophical razors. [1]
There are social contexts where clarity of statement and lucidity of thought *are not* among the tools/objectives of an encounter/interaction.
But in debate or education or in any other case where clear words and ideas are indeed among the tools/objectives, avoiding them or undermining them is being a different kind of jerk.
I have grown accustomed to being wrong a lot as well, especially online, but it would be nice being right more often too. It's like "Am I really that far off the mark? Maybe I am. Downvotes coming." I like to think my opinions are not that bad. Yet when it comes to investing in other aspects in life ,where money is at stake or making income, I have been right more often than not. So I guess I right where it matters most, and wrong about the less important things. Or maybe I am wrong about those things because I don't invest as much mental energy into having the perfect or correct opinion compared to things where there is money at stake.
Of course "I think my opinions are correct" is a tautology. But what people mean when they say things like "I think I have good opinions" is that they think they were reasonably careful and thoughtful in forming their opinions... that they don't hold opinions just because they read a comment on an internet forum, for example.
I suppose they meant that their opinions are not that controversial or against the norm. I've encountered this when I talk online about car safety, speeding, and generally about safe streets. There's a particular type of car lovers who are always waiting to swamp any dissenting opinion with downvotes, effectively drowning the discussion. I think my opinions are not that bad but for that crowd, it would make you reconsider your priors; if they're so offended by what I said, am I wrong?
The problem with opinions is not that they are good or bad, it’s how difficult they are to change. Other people who are unwilling to change “bad” opinions in the face of contradictory evidence is easily observed. If you find yourself never changing your own opinions, then you probably have a problem.
The odd thing is, and I think this is Socrates, that it's hard to
tell. Having been won over by the gentle force of the better argument
what were once not your ideas feel like your ideas. In fact, now they
are your ideas, and feel like they always were.
> In fact, now they are your ideas, and feel like they always were.
Some people don't remember what opinions they had in the past? Remembering all the time I was wrong and learned something new or changed my mind etc is embarrassing, not sure how you could forget all that.
Like, people must remember which candidates they voted for in the past, right? So if they switch side during an election, do they really fool themselves into thinking that they always supported their new side? I don't really believe that. I'd rather believe that they lie about their past because it is embarrassing to have been wrong.
> Like, people must remember which candidates they voted for in the past, right?
I have noticed that in myself, but I have observed in some people it takes the form of “I didn’t shift, the party did”.
They aren’t completely wrong either, political parties like the people that comprise them are constantly changing. But if you aren’t careful to avoid fooling yourself it’s not too hard to do.
Perhaps you missed the communication subtext? Once I'm certain I'm right I'm not going to talk it about it ever again. What would be the point? There's nothing left to learn. I'll have moved on to new topics where I don't yet know what is right – where I'm hopefully wrong so there is something to learn.
How would you go to right but unsure to right but sure without learning anything? I don't think that being right prevents you from learning, at least you had to learn something about other arguments so you could reject those.
"best-practice" is a specific, over-used term in the tech industry. People instinctively give opinions and say "well best-practice is..." to fortify it against being criticized, and then lean heavily on the fact that if you actually ask them to support that notion then they imply or accuse the questioner of being hostile.
"It's best practice" should invite the question of "according to who, in which publications? What are the circumstances of the practice, are they similar to our circumstances?"
> A weasel word, or anonymous authority, is a word and phrase aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said when in fact only a vague, ambiguous, or irrelevant claim has been communicated. The terms may be considered informal. Examples include the phrases "some people say", "it is thought", and "researchers believe". Using weasel words may allow one to later deny any specific meaning if the statement is challenged, because the statement was never specific in the first place. Weasel words can be a form of tergiversation and may be used in advertising, (popular) science, opinion pieces and political statements to mislead or disguise a biased view or unsubstantiated claim.
There's a spectrum isn't there, between weasel words that are avoidant
and non-attribution which is done out of respect or kindness. News is
full of passive prose; "A source claimed yesterday", because anonymous
sources need protection. A barrister might say in court; "It has been
said that...", not to invite libel or misidentify a witness. Or a
teacher might say "It's been brought to our attention that some
children..." not to embarrass a kid in front of everyone.
Nah. Best practice usually means "assume a spherical cow". The idea is to point in the right direction because there are no one size fits all solutions for anything. It's a starting point that isn't stupid and is backed by the blood of poor bastards from the past.
But frequently, in technology, the term "best practice" is used where it's not really settled whether it's a good practice 80% percent of the time or only 20% percent of the time.
If you look at the history of industry trends over the last X decades, most of which were replaced by the next trend due to the pain that was eventually discovered, you will find many people claiming the new trend was "best practice" typically mid-way through the hype cycle and before the actual trade-offs become well known.
If someone asks you 'why?' can you tell them? If not, you are using it as a weasel word. If so, then you are using it as shorthand for 'I could explain it but I don't think I need to right now'.
Or literally that’s the only information what you really have. I haven’t met a single person except universities who knew more about this topic (ie they’re rare). Even the library/interface which is used is not well understood usually, even on the surface level.
It's not clear, even, to what depth this 'best practice' applies. Writing your own crypto primitives is probably a bad idea, but what about combining them? AEAD approaches demonstrate there can be nuance even with battle-tested primitives and how they're combined or used in practice. Oh, but what about key derivation or protecting the keys in general? What good is that library's encrypt method if the DIY key secrecy/rotation/exchange is sloppy?
I believe analogies should be used to communicate clearly, not advance an argument. In a good faith discussion, everyone needs to understand other perspectives - analogies are a lossy/impressionistic tool that can help people understand your argument.
On the topic of opinion masquerading as fact - if you check the dynamics there it quickly gets quite interesting. Political arguments are unusual if they involve an expert. On the big ones (economics, medical, military and technical policy) it is relatively rare to see an expert and doubly rare to find one who isn't pushing some sort of agenda. There tends to be a tiny pool of people doing a speaking circuit that turn up again and again and they're there for a reason. If you run the numbers on (informed people informing the discourse about a topic) / (people who know about topic) the numbers are a bit grim too.
And a big driver of that seems to be that either the debate isn't about facts so nobody cares, or frequently that the experts don't have a well advertised an opinion on an important subject. It really turns up in economics where finding facts is a challenge. The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are.
I'm sure that there are economists who are devoting their lives to figuring out what happened in China because it is an interesting and important topic. But where the facts are being surfaced is not obvious and it isn't going to make its way through the broader public discourse.
TLDR; finding any facts in any public discussion is actually a bit of a challenge. It tends to be opinion all the way down until the trail goes cold.
I generally agree with you, but at the same time don’t think it’s always nefarious. At least personally, I’d say I definitely am more opinionated (have more of staked out positions) in areas I know something about / spent time thinking through - I’d imagine the same is true for many “experts” - it doesn’t mean they are “right” but based on their underlying conceptual frameworks[1], most of the time they’ve come to a conclusion and are going to push that.
[1] I find most policy debates I get into with friends have nothing to do with the policy at hand but rather more core political/philosophical questions underlying their thinking (e.g. do the ends justify the means or are they more individualist va collectivist)
> The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are.
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I think it's pretty well understood that the growth of China is thanks to the market reforms in the 70s and 80s.
Yeah, but it's not market reforms advised by the WTO, IMF, neoclassical economists or capitalist countries. If anything, they are bending the rules as much as possible, to the point that the market aspect is a red herring. It's not just a market economy.
My understanding is that China modelled itself on Singapore too, so I'm not expecting any radical policies. But part of the miracle is the scale of the thing, not just what happens per capita. If we go small enough, one man can go from whoever to billionaire in one generation. Getting a billion people up to a nice standard of living is harder than that.
Ptolemy was wrong. But he was wrong with a large pile of actual measurements of celestial bodies, and a falsifiable theory. That made him wrong in the positive sense of wrong in the phrase "not even wrong", where wrong is just the first step of the ladder.
I wish I could say the same about Freud, but that ladder is distressingly horizontal.
There is a strong analogy in software engineering here. Often the first implementation is "wrong" in the sense that it doesn't resolve the inherent tensions in the system. But that doesn't make it useless - in fact, it's quite useful because it actually showed you what is important. Plus, the people who attempt the initial solution to a problem deserve special honor, even if their work is eventually tossed away, specifically because they revealed these system tensions. The common dictum to "write a prototype and throw it away" is largely based on this insight.
What I'm saying is that Ptolemy, Aristotle, etc did a great service to humanity by taking a stab at hard problems, even if their solutions were convincing but wrong. Whether they knew it or not they were the primordial programmers writing a throw-away prototype upon which all future progress was based.
I work on healthcare at Alphabet, and in late 2016 I set out to build a flexible DICOMweb STOW-RS receiver in the form of a GCP API - the first time anyone had done that at Alphabet. (I've worked on the same project across Verily and Google). In the process I researched and built a bunch of little prototypes built in a variety of ways, and for example had to rule out building it as an App Engine API - because DICOMweb uploads can potentially be gigabytes in size, and App Engine didn't support handling a POST as a stream as it arrived.
At any rate, along the way over the course of 9 months or so I found a technology stack that supported all my requirements and ran into a bunch of roadblocks. Lots of things related to how internal bits of GCP APIs are handled - the internal libraries had documentation indicating that streaming APIs were supported, and that each chunk of the request would be passed from the API proxy/backend multiplexer to the actual API server as they arrived. This worked for streaming responses, but not for streaming requests, and so I had to add that functionality to the API proxy. That was a huge pain - really hairy c++ code using fibers with multiple layers of request processing wrappers. But I worked thru that and got it landed into the google-wide binary, and never worried about it again.
I got this project to the level I needed it to support the precise requirements for the (regulated medical device) system I was working on. Around this time the GCP Cloud Healthcare group was getting started, and they built a new system using a fair number of bits of my implementation, which they'd eventually replace completely. But my first system saved them most of a year or work, resulting in the CHC feature set rapidly leapfrogging what I'd built.
A similar idea about the importance of planning as a way to improve your understanding of a problem was expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, said in a speech while he was in office as the US President in 1957 [1].
Reflecting on his experience in the Second World War, he said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning."
I think the right phrase here is not 'not even wrong' but 'wrong but for the right reasons' or 'all models are wrong, but some models are useful (possibly by being less wrong'
> "Not even wrong" is a phrase often used to describe pseudoscience or bad science. It describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but uses faulty reasoning or speculative premises, which can be neither affirmed nor denied and thus cannot be discussed rigorously and scientifically. The phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous with "unfalsifiable".[0][1]
I'm not sure "not even wrong" actually means the same thing as "unfalsifiable" like Wikipedia claims? I thought "not even wrong" means the asker is so confused that their question doesn't make sense. As I understand it, "ghosts exist" (or even "the universe is infinite") may well be impossible to falsify, but it doesn't signal any sort of confusion on the part of the asker. But if the statement was "ghosts exist because the universe is infinite", then I thought that would fall into the "not even wrong" bucket.
I understand “not even wrong” to be synonymous with unfalsifiable in the sense that the statement being described as such is not a truth claim, or is otherwise not a valid formal statement or claim, such that the scientific method is not able to be deployed to consider its validity.
> In religion, a truth claim is an assertion that the belief system holds to be true; however, from the existence of an assertion that the belief system holds to be true, it does not follow that the assertion is true. For example, a truth claim in Judaism is that only one God exists. Conflicting truth claims between different religions can be a cause of religious conflict. The theory of truth claims has been advanced by John Hick.
I think that your example is something I would consider “beside the point,” whereas the flavor of “not even wrong” to me seems to describe a statement or claim that has truthiness[0] rather than a truth value[1].
A statement which is not even wrong is one that can’t or isn’t expressed properly as a logical assertion or argument but rather asserted without evidence or in such a way that it is made to seem inherently or intuitively obvious. Such a statement isn't argued for or against properly or logically, or isn’t otherwise properly expressed or derived, or a statement or claim which falls short of making a concrete point or argument which can be dismissed or validated on the basis of evidence or logical argument.
> Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. Truthiness can range from ignorant assertions of falsehoods to deliberate duplicity or propaganda intended to sway opinions.
> In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values (true or false).
Trying to apply falsifiable theory to Freud (or to psychoanalysis) is wrong in itself, as a matter of fact thinking about Freud and psychoanalysis in the realm of scientifically right or wrong is, well, scientifically wrong.
He (Freud) had some very good insights, almost genius-like, for example the part with Eros and Thanatos. With that said, I don't think there's a best way to approach his works, I do know though that treating them as science would do no-one any good.
As for psychoanalysis as a whole, it's definitely not my preferred cup of tea but I do believe those people that say that it has genuinely helped them, in which case all the power to them and to psychoanalysis. Maybe treat it through a functionalist prism? (just an idea) Similar to meditation, let's say (similar as in there's no scientific "basis" behind it but I also do believe that meditation helps some people, similar to psychoanalysis).
Of course, that would not solve the issue with "what should we do with the psychoanalysis crooks?", the same issue that probably gets asked when it comes to meditation crooks, meaning grifters trying to live off psychoanalysis/meditation/any similar movement. I don't know what the best answer for that would be, maybe some sort of community-based validation/word of mouth thingie?
Wonderful piece. Dennett knows how to write. And he captures the pleasure and privilege of Hacker News with this felicitous phrase:
> Distributed understanding is a real phenomenon, but you have to get yourself into a community of communicators that can effectively summon the relevant expertise.
I agree. We have an eclectic community of thoughtful laypeople and experts. That's why I remain here. It's lazy to point out warts in any community (even peer-reviewed ones!), presume that good is the enemy of perfect, and thus dismiss said community. But I think the SNR here is wonderful presently, and I appreciate you all.
Yes, you have a combination of people who learn and people who know here. That is what he described, and environment where you are allowed to be wrong and where people will correct you when you are. You don't get banned from HN for being wrong, so you are allowed to be wrong here, unlike many other forums like most of reddit.
What is being described is that people will know what they're talking about, which is debatable. You might be corrected on here, but I've seen more cases of people being loudly wrong but having enough general knowledge on a subject that they sound correct, and lucky enough that no one with specific knowledge stumbled on their posts to correct them.
Frankly, I don't think hackernews is all that different in terms of community from Reddit. People are just better at hiding it. Many are regurgitating rhetoric they've heard in other posts without having experience with a subject. Even in the realms of programming, it's not hard to see how little experience people have with the things they demonize or evangelize.
I actually got a little suckered in, and thought this might be Dennett opening up to being wrong and giving some new account of what he might now think is correct.
Especially after all the debates on free will with Sapolsky.
Instead it ended up being backhanded self complement, more like, "a lot of other great people agree with me, so maybe I'm wrong, but probably not".
"Descartes’s theory of everything is, even in hindsight, remarkably coherent and persuasive. It is hard to imagine a different equally coherent and equally false theory! He was wrong, and so of course I may well be wrong, but enough other thinkers I respect have come to see things my way that when I ask myself, “What if we are wrong?” I can keep this skeptical murmur safely simmering on a back burner."
I had an interesting email exchange with Dennett in the 90s. He had just brought out his book "Consciousness Explained". I read it and emailed him a short note saying that I thought the book was mistitled - the contents were an explanation of what we were conscious of not how we could be conscious.
I expected him to write back with some eloquent or witty or pithy defense of the link between the title and the contents, but he just thanked me and said, "yes, now that you put it that way, it probably is the wrong title. Oops, too late."
The beauty and flexibility of radical skepticism :). Minsky, another noted skeptic of idealist claims (from the opposite angle?), had a quote that stuck with me from one of his YouTube lectures on Society of Mind. I can’t find it at the moment but it was along the lines of; “when you write your own cognitive theory, leave room in the edges for it to grow. You never know what parts will be proven wrong, and you shouldn’t let that stifle the overall exercise.”
In other words, any attempt to break down the mind into component parts is better than declaring it a lost cause and hypothesizing your favorite alternative instead (god, soul, one-ness, consciousness as an essential property, etc).
This probably means I'm a bit younger than you, but I also had some e-mail conversations with Dennett about the same book, I think in 2001 or so. I always found him gracious and patient and he is still the only public intellectual I have ever carried on a meaningful conversation with and gained insight from in this way, and I was just a random college student, not even his student.
Dan was toying with you ... his thesis was on the distinction between consciousness and the contents of consciousness, and he more than anyone was familiar with the point you were making (erroneously).
You're welcome to your opinion. At that time. I had read pretty much everything Dennett had published (books, papers etc), and I didn't/don't share your position. But YMMV.
Yeah but he’s engaging seriously with self-doubt. Which I think is admirable. I also find his “explaining away” of the rest of the field tiresome, but I don’t think calling it self-complimentary is necessarily fair. After all, this is a retrospective/polemic, not a revelation of some new discovery
It's just from the title, I thought there was going to be some 'inciteful about face', like he had some new 'other way to think about things' that just couldn't wait for the next book. So had hopes up more.
Have you considered the possibility that you're wrong? Because I for one think you're seriously misreading and mischaracterizing his piece, and failing to extract from it some valuable advice.
Daniel Dennett is still the only modern philosopher I know of that is capable of explaining his ideas to non-philosophers without it devolving into meaningless(to me) babble, or even worse, an endless cataloguing of all the possible views one could hold on something, along with their names.
I think the more important question is, "How would I know if I were wrong?" As a thinking Christian, and I've thought very carefully on what kind of evidence could be presented to me to show that Christianity was wrong; I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong.
> I've thought very carefully on what kind of evidence could be presented to me to show that Christianity was wrong
This is inside out. What evidence was presented to you that made you believe Christianity was right?
I became an Atheist in large part because I took Latin my first year in high school and realized that the Roman's actually believed in their gods the same way that I believed in the Christian god. And I gradually realized that they had the same reason to believe that I did ... they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up.
> I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong.
I can't speak for Dennet, but for me it would just be ANY evidence: a verifiable miracle, proof of life after death, or meeting an angel/demon.
>This is inside out. What evidence was presented to you that made you believe Christianity was right?
I don't think this is really the right way to think about Christianity for many believers. C.S. Lewis says, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." It's not so much that Christianity is just another fact lying out there that we just happened to stumble upon, and now we use scientific tools to investigate whether it's true or false. No - it's a belief that shapes the very way we understand the world. It's a worldview. That's not to say that it's necessarily correct, but just that it's not a belief that we necessarily acquire in the same way we might acquire a belief about what 1+1 is or how many planets orbit the sun. It's much like how someone born and raised atheist doesn't hold their belief in atheism because of some evidence for that view.
We can still argue about Christianity, atheism, or other religions, of course, that's fine - but it's not obvious that there's some inherent irrationality in asking "what could show Christianity to be false" instead of "what convinced me Christianity is true".
>they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up.
This is true, but if the implication is that belief in Roman paganism is on just as firm intellectual ground as belief in Christianity, that seems unfair given the rich intellectual history spanning millennia of the latter to which the former isn't really comparable at all.
I don't have evidence someone is a psychic, but I have common sense that if they're predictions could apply to anyone, they are probably scamming me.
Just like if someone chalks up inconsistencies in the Bible to "God testing us" or the fact that the Bible has been edited repeatedly, picking whatever parts supported their authority at the time, that I'm probably being scammed.
Now Christianity is so fragmented and personal in it's belief system that to say "what evidence do you have that it's not real" does feel backwards. I have equal evidence in any religion as I do in Christianity.
Well, inconsistencies in the Bible are traditionally chalked up to flaws in our interpretation of it. Maybe that sounds like a cop-out to you, but that's fine.
My point was not you, as an atheist, shouldn't ask "what evidence do you have that Christianity is true". Rather, my point was that a Christian, in thinking rationally, is not forced to ask "what evidence do I have for this belief?". You as a nonbeliever might see just as good evidence in other religions as Christianity, great, that's fine.
> No - it's a belief that shapes the very way we understand the world. It's a worldview.
For Christians. You kind of do have to grapple with the fact that billions of people do not have that worldview, and therefore you do have to compare the Christian worldview to the non-Christian worldview.
> >they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up.
> This is true, but if the implication is that belief in Roman paganism is on just as firm intellectual ground as belief in Christianity, that seems unfair given the rich intellectual history spanning millennia of the latter to which the former isn't really comparable at all.
Maybe that's the case with Roman mythology (though I don't have the dates), but what about Hinduism? Buddhism? Islam? Judaism?
>therefore you do have to compare the Christian worldview to the non-Christian worldview.
For the Christian, this is presumably part of asking "what would lead me to believe Christianity is false?". That is, asking whether other religions should lead one to conclude Christianity is not true.
>Maybe that's the case with Roman mythology (though I don't have the dates)
Well, more than just the dates, it's about the intellectual rigor of people thinking about the theology. There is no serious equivalent in Roman mythology to, for example, Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, which includes grappling with questions such as "Whether the existence of God is self-evident?", "Whether God is the supreme good?", and "Whether sacred doctrine is a matter of argument?".
>but what about Hinduism? Buddhism? Islam? Judaism?
These are all fine traditions! Far and above Roman mythology. You could replace "Christianity" with any of these in my original comment, and it would still apply.
There's a world of difference between "a silly belief that people held when they were a child and continue to hold just because of inertia" and "a serious belief with a rich intellectual history, though one among several other such beliefs".
> Well, more than just the dates, it's about the intellectual rigor of people thinking about the theology. There is no serious equivalent in Roman mythology to, for example, Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, which includes grappling with questions such as "Whether the existence of God is self-evident?", "Whether God is the supreme good?", and "Whether sacred doctrine is a matter of argument?".
I'm genuinely curious - do you actually know this? Or are you just assuming this based on the age of the Roman empire, the fact that they were older generations, etc? Cause I personally don't know that much about it, but we know ancient civilizations grappled with these kinds of questions all the time.
> These are all fine traditions! Far and above Roman mythology. You could replace "Christianity" with any of these in my original comment, and it would still apply. There's a world of difference between "a silly belief that people held when they were a child and continue to hold just because of inertia" and "a serious belief with a rich intellectual history, though one among several other such beliefs".
Yes, but I think you misunderstood my meaning. I was saying, if you substitute "Roman Mythology" with e.g. "Islam" in the parent comment, you can't just as easily brush it aside by saying "there is not rich intellectual tradition there".
As a Christian believer, I think you do have to grapple with billions of people, some of them as smart and sophisticate as any Christian, who follow a different belief system. That's why you have to argue "from the inside" as it were about why Christianity is right - some reason it is more correct than any other belief, or that other beliefs are wrong.
An Atheist makes a simpler argument - all of these beliefs are wrong. That is applied equally and consistently to all the different beliefs. A Christian by definition agrees with the Atheist on 99% of religious beliefs - namely all non-Christian beliefs - and probably for the same reason (lack of evidence that they are correct).
>I'm genuinely curious - do you actually know this?
I say this because there are no seriously-taken arguments for the Roman mythological gods (or anything like them) like there are for foundational beliefs of the other religions you mention (none that I have heard of in my studies, at least... I'd be very interested to hear them if they exist). And because the ancient philosophers - e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus - generally drifted away from popular mythology to something more akin to monotheism.
>Yes, but I think you misunderstood my meaning. I was saying, if you substitute "Roman Mythology" with e.g. "Islam" in the parent comment, you can't just as easily brush it aside by saying "there is not rich intellectual tradition there".
I see - I made that point about intellectual history there because the implication originally seemed to be that both Roman mythology and Christianity are just silly beliefs that people held as children and continued to hold because they hadn't thought about it. That isn't to say that that alone shows Christianity is true, just that it's a set of beliefs we need to take more seriously.
>As a Christian believer, I think you do have to grapple with billions of people, some of them as smart and sophisticate as any Christian, who follow a different belief system. That's why you have to argue "from the inside" as it were about why Christianity is right - some reason it is more correct than any other belief, or that other beliefs are wrong.
If Christianity was a conclusion reached after a set of rational arguments, you would be right. But belief in Christianity is sort of logically prior to rational argumentation. Of course, we have Christian apologetics, which make arguments for certain aspects of Christianity, but this isn't really the reason to believe so much as it is just motivation for people who think in more intellectual terms to take it seriously. Faith is beyond the domain of human reason - the Christian's belief is founded in a kind of immediate, self-evident spiritual experience that comes logically prior to arguments. We might still discover internal inconsistencies that might motivate us to rethink this worldview, of course.
This might sound kind of silly. But there is a point at which your justifications of your beliefs have to bottom out. Can you start with only naturalist/scientific premises and reach Christianity? No, even if you agree to Christian apologetic arguments, they will not get you to Christianity proper. In this sense, atheism, Christianity, and other religions are each in a kind of bubble that arguments alone can't let you escape from. It still makes sense to talk about internal consistency (inconsistencies should probably lead us to drop the system), but I don't think we can really make any progress by trying to argue about the foundational premises themselves, if that makes sense.
As for your final comment - Christianity does share a lot in common with other religions. It shares a lot with Islam and Judaism, the other Abrahamic religions. It's maybe not apt to characterize Islam and Judaism as "simply false" from the Christian perspective - there are significant elements of truth even though the overall system is false. This is true, I think, even for the eastern religions.
> But belief in Christianity is sort of logically prior to rational argumentation. [...] I don't think we can really make any progress by trying to argue about the foundational premises themselves, if that makes sense.
Yes! I think this is the crux of the matter. I also think this is why discussions involving religion are often unsatisfactory to me. This very thread started with a discussion on _evidence_. And the rest of the discussion is from a _rational_ perspective. But then evidence or rationality only work with scrutiny, including and especially of the axioms. So if discussions on Christianity start with the _premise_ that Christianity is true, then can there really be any further discussion? For instance, elsewhere in a comment you wrote:
> a Christian, in thinking rationally, is not forced to ask "what evidence do I have for this belief?"
In everyday life, this is fine. But when discussing Christianity rationally, questioning the premise is an important part of the process, no?
I present some of my own thinking below. I am taking Christianity only as an example in the context of this thread, but it applies to any revealed religion.
"I" exist. Presumably the universe I experience also exists. Why? There's a First Cause that brought them into existence. We can call it God. This is the closest religion and science can get, because this definition of God is without any pre-defined qualities. For instance, God can be non-dualistic (God _is_ the universe, or in other words, the universe is its own cause), and even mathematical (Physics' Theory of Everything, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis). We only have a set of possibilities here.
But Christianity then takes certain leaps.
* God is omnipotent and omniscient. Why? Even a God that is only finite in power and knowledge could have created this universe. Think "super-scientists" in a base reality. So do we really have to take God to be limitless in His capacity?
* God is all-loving and personally cares about His creation. Why? God could have just created the universe and stepped aside, not caring at all about human prayers or actions. So do really have to worry about Heaven and Hell, especially as defined in Christianity?
* God is Good. Why? A fallible God (or even the _evil_ Devil) could have created this universe. It would explains the problem of suffering, or why God seemingly revealed Himself multiple times with conflicting mutually exclusive instructions, perhaps due to incompetence or deliberate manipulation. So say God did actually reveal Himself as the life and tribulations of Christ. Is Christ a reliable arbiter of what is true and good? What if it was the Devil who came down multiple times as Christ/Allah/Buddha, just to mess with humanity? This is an important question I think, and would love to hear if there is a better justification than a priori faith.
Faith plays an important role for many of my family members and friends and by no means would I want to take it away. But I do get interested whenever religion wants to be an exclusive arbiter of reality and what's right or wrong. And every time, I have found it to fall short of all its claims.
I think the context matters. The original context for all of this is whether from the perspective of the Christian, in thinking rationally for himself/herself, must have an argument for Christianity. I think the answer is no, just as the atheist, in thinking rationally for himself/herself, does not need an argument for atheism. I think the context of a generic discussion of Christianity is different - if we set the topic of our discussion to be whether Christianity is true or not, then yes, obviously we cannot just take its truth as a premise.
Maybe I'll draw an analogy - a foundational premise of science is that the past resembles the future. If we determine certain laws of nature based on past experimentation, that's not going to change in the future. Does the scientist, in thinking rationally for himself/herself, need to have an argument for this belief? I don't think so - the scientist can go on analyzing and understanding things scientifically through the scientific worldview without ever needing to construct an argument for this foundational premise. He/she is, however, on the lookout for contradictions - things or events that science can't explain or seem to defy science. I don't think I've described an irrational person here.
Of course, if we have a discussion about the enterprise of science and its validity as a whole, then it may come to questioning this premise. But does a scientist in doing science have some kind of burden of proving this premise? I don't think so, just as the Christian in looking at the world through the Christian worldview does not have some kind of burden of proving Christianity.
>I present some of my own thinking below...
What you've outlined here is actually firmly in the scope of natural theology, the project of establishing certain theological claims through human reason alone, though not all Christians agree that this project is successful. You may be interested in section 5 of chapter 2 of The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology that addresses the Gap problem, which is exactly what you've described, the problem of the gap between the conclusion of a cosmological argument, i.e. the existence of an ultimate cause, and the traditional omnipotent/omniscient/omnibenevolent God.
Christians who don't buy natural theology would instead just say that God and His most important properties are self-evident through spiritual experience. (Even Christians who buy it would agree, I think, that this purely rational project doesn't really get you to the fullness of Christianity, and that spiritual experience is key to having the fullest sense of who God is, the presence of Christ here today, our role in the world, etc.)
As to your last point about whether we're being tricked, it is true that we cannot have certainty about these claims. Uncertainty is part of the human condition. But that doesn't prevent us from having knowledge of things. I know that there's a floor beneath me, even though I don't have a certain proof of it (it's not necessarily true - I could be dreaming, there could be an evil demon feeding me false sensory data, etc.)
>But I do get interested whenever religion wants to be an exclusive arbiter of reality and what's right or wrong. And every time, I have found it to fall short of all its claims.
Well, religion being an exclusive arbiter of reality is only something held by a fringe group of religious people I think. Most reasonable religious people will have no problem with mathematical proofs or scientific evidence revealing things about reality. Many religious people will also accept that those of other religions can have knowledge of moral truths. But if you just mean that religion wants to be the ultimate truth, well, yeah, it does.
> He/she is, however, on the lookout for contradictions
I'll just note that contradiction is not the right term in context of the premise. Rather, it'd be discrepancy that when studied further will become part of normal science: that the laws of physics evolve over time.
> But does a scientist in doing science have some kind of burden of proving this premise
To be a little clearer, yes, scientists do not need to prove the premises in everyday research. However, they do need to kept in mind when reasoning about reality. The current scientific premises are based on strong observational foundations. We have data to show that experiments done 50 years ago give exactly the same results today. If tomorrow the results change, then the premise will most definitely come under question.
> Uncertainty is part of the human condition
Definitely. Cogito, ergo sum is the only absolute surety we have. Everything else is Bayesian reasoning :)
Same for believing the floor is real vs the resurrection might not be. I've empirically tested the claim about the floor and it has never failed to hold up. When it does, I'll have to update my priors. But we only have one data point for the resurrection and thus have no real way to make strong judgements about what's the actual reality behind the resurrection.
> Well, religion being an exclusive arbiter of reality
Sorry I didn't mean to imply arbiter of reality to the exclusion of science, although religion did try back in the day when science was getting off the ground. Today, religions make specific claims about reality for which science doesn't have an answer (gaps). However, when asked why one should believe those specific claims (eternal heaven/hell after death) but not other contradicting claims (reincarnation), the answers ultimately fall back to taking it on faith. And at that point, one gets to basically pick and choose which faith-based answer feels the best.
Well, "past resembling the future" doesn't seem to be something that's properly justified by empirical observation. What would that look like? "Since the past has resembled the future in the past many times, that gives us evidence that the past resembles the future." That's circular. And it's not a claim that's logically necessary. So our belief in it is justified by intuition, not by empirical evidence or logic.
>And at that point, one gets to basically pick and choose which faith-based answer feels the best.
Well, faith isn't just belief in arbitrary things for no reason, it's a belief grounded in spiritual experience that doesn't contradict our reason. (Though there are reasoned arguments for heaven/hell given certain premises.) Talking more broadly, there is a point at which your justifications for your beliefs bottom out, a point at which you believe in things not because of empirical or logical reasons, even if you reject all religions.
> Since the past has resembled the future in the past many times, that gives us evidence that the past resembles the future
Ah not evidence in the strict sense of the world. I mean in the sense of probabilistic Bayesian reasoning [0], which I think we all use in some form (consciously or subconsciously) in forming our beliefs of reality. Since the laws have been stable in the past, we can hold a strong credence (say 99%, but never 100%) they will continue to hold in the future, until new data proves otherwise. Same reason we don't think twice before stepping into an airplane, trusting the .
In general, our intuitions do develop from our empirical evidence and logic. How can it be otherwise? Even our evaluation of which religion is true depends heavily on our upbringing and which ideas we are exposed to the most, which feed our intuition.
Right, but what's at stake is induction itself, which is what Bayesian reasoning is just a formalization of. I never understood why Bayesianism could be a solution to the problem of induction, it just seems to move the problem elsewhere - like, in Bayesian language, what justifies our choice of a particular prior (assuming a uniform prior is still a choice).
>How can it be otherwise?
Chains of reasoning have to bottom out somewhere right?
Right that's a good question. I'll point to an answer Sean Carroll gave in an AMA episode [0] of his Mindscape podcast:
The pros and cons of Bayesian reasoning are almost all in the choice of a prior. People who are pro-Bayesian will say, look, as long as your priors aren't completely crazy, if you collect enough data, the priors cease to matter. [...] The promise of Bayesian reasoning is that data overwhelms your prior ultimately. And therefore, there is no algorithmic way of choosing what your prior should be. It's a little bit fuzzy to say when things are priors and when things are posteriors because we all have certain inclinations, intuitions, pictures of the world, and that's perfectly okay. But as a good Bayesian, you shouldn't be too worried about picking your priors. You should be mostly worried about updating those priors when data comes in, when information comes in.
> Chains of reasoning have to bottom out somewhere
Absolutely. We should do our best to keep asking the why question, but at the end, we'll be left with a brute-force fact. The question then is, where do we stop, right? In the context of this thread, religion wants to say, God is the final answer. What caused God? Nothing, God is His own cause (kalam cosmological argument). And as a naturalist I'd say, the universe can be its own cause. There's no rational inconsistency there, contrary to what the kalam argument claims. Theists and atheists give different credence to these two viewpoints. And until we have more data, the question cannot really be settled with certainty. So both will keep trying to justify why one viewpoint should have a higher prior over the other, based on secondary evidence.
FWIW, I'm a Christian (convert to Catholicism) and I respectfully but completely disagree with the GP when he says:
>> If Christianity was a conclusion reached after a set of rational arguments, you would be right. But belief in Christianity is sort of logically prior to rational argumentation. Of course, we have Christian apologetics, which make arguments for certain aspects of Christianity, but this isn't really the reason to believe so much as it is just motivation for people who think in more intellectual terms to take it seriously. Faith is beyond the domain of human reason - the Christian's belief is founded in a kind of immediate, self-evident spiritual experience that comes logically prior to arguments. We might still discover internal inconsistencies that might motivate us to rethink this worldview, of course.
I respectfully disagree with every sentence (except the last).
Firstly, I think God's existence can be proved rationally, using arguments that take very basic empirical observations as premises (for example: "things change", "things behave predictably", "there are multiple instances of the same thing"). I don't think these are arguments that fit into a combox, which is frustrating but that's the reality -- although I think most of the common arguments against God's existence can be dealt without many words.
Secondly, once God's existence is established, I think the empirical basis of Christianity specifically (evidence for the resurrection) is sound. I think the common objections fail. Many of the objections are variants on Hume's, which amounts to "the resurrection is so unlikely given my philosophical assumptions that literally any explanation for the observed facts is more likely". Once Hume's assumptions are undermined (in stage 1), the facts take on a very different light.
Thirdly, I think Catholicism is internally consistent and has further evidence in its favour -- including miracles, continuity of institutions and continuity of teaching -- whereas I think Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy lack these qualities. While intra-Christian disputes may seen beyond the scope of this discussion, I think they have some bearing. For example:
>> Faith is beyond the domain of human reason - the Christian's belief is founded in a kind of immediate, self-evident spiritual experience that comes logically prior to arguments.
This is a specifically Protestant view (although many Catholics mistakenly hold to it since it chimes so easily with the post-Enlightenment concept of religion). I would say faith is a rational assent to revelation. But more importantly for the present discussion, I would say God's existence that can be established by pure reason, independently of faith.
> "I" exist. Presumably the universe I experience also exists. Why? There's a First Cause that brought them into existence. We can call it God. This is the closest religion and science can get, because this definition of God is without any pre-defined qualities. For instance, God can be non-dualistic (God _is_ the universe, or in other words, the universe is its own cause), and even mathematical (Physics' Theory of Everything, Mathematical Universe Hypothesis). We only have a set of possibilities here.
There are solid arguments against all these and in favour of monotheism. Again, no way of summarising in a combox, but I can give a few thoughts, which should not be taken as even an adequate description, let alone a complete defence that is intended to convince you :-).
Pantheism is false because it can't explain change. A thing can only be changed by something else; therefore the first principle (First Cause) of reality can't change, because otherwise it would not be first. But the universe is changing; hence the universe can't be the first principle of reality. Each of these points is obviously controversial, but I think defensible.
Alternatively one could argue that change is an illusion, like many eastern religions do. But speaking very generally, one object is distinguished from another by how it changes (that is, how it acts or is acted upon). We distinguish the presence of hydrogen from that of helium by how they act, or how other things act on them. We also distinguish a human being from a dog by how they act -- not least, how they act on our sight, sound, etc. And so on. If change (that is, action and being acted on) is an illusion, it means that individual objects (like stones, trees, dogs, human beings) are not actually individual at all; their individuality is only an illusion. But if this is so, predication is impossible, because we are predicating only of our illusions. Since this is not so (because if it were, why are we even bothering with this discussion?), pantheism must be false. Such is the vague outline of another argument that a monotheist would make.
Alternatively one could argue that a thing need not be changed by something else -- that it can change itself. The trouble with this is it fails to explain why things act in one way rather than another. If things could change themselves, they would act completely randomly, because there would be no cause of their change, and therefore no reason. This is not so.
Pythagoras was the first to propose that mathematics was the basis of everything. But there are things that are not numeric or can be reduced to number. For example, non-mathematical logic, which is a fundamental aspect of reality, and can't be reduced to number. Again, a counter-argument would proceed on these lines.
I'm not going to attempt any other answers in a combox because these are profound questions that require, and have received, book-length expositions. I am only attempting to give you the vaguest idea of the thought processes I go through in arriving at my beliefs. But I have not yet found an argument that makes me doubt my Catholicism, and I think it's profoundly false to say that Christianity is independent of logic or observation.
> I think God's existence can be proved rationally
We have to be careful here by what "God" means. God as in a First Cause is trivially true, but is not what most people mean when they say God. The existence of the God of religions, i.e., a personal all-loving human-caring God who listens to human prayer can only be shown true or false empirically. In my comment, I posited alternative universes, for example, the Devil acting as God. Which universe we actually live in among a large number of possibilities is not something that can be proved rationally.
> empirical basis of Christianity specifically (evidence for the resurrection) is sound
Yeah, I remain unconvinced and give higher explanatory power to human affinity for divine miracles (see followers of modern age "gurus"), ability of hearsay to go "viral" (especially in an era without books and modern scientific knowledge), and a new religious movement asserting stories for a "greater good".
In addition, as I already mentioned, even if the resurrection is true, the only thing we can be sure of is that certain "magic" can go beyond the usual laws of physics. That's it. There could be a number of reasons behind the resurrection. The Devil playing games. The Matrix scientists testing a "what-if" scenario. A fallible God trying to do some good. And of course, a genuine all loving God.
Christianity would have been so much convincing if Jesus had mentioned at least a few futuristic but concrete facts that only God could know, and that future generations could verify happened exactly as written in the Bible.
> A thing can only be changed by something else
I can only say, why? :) By a universe, I mean a set of physical laws and a bunch of stuff those laws act upon. Nothing prevents say a cyclic universe where both laws and stuff exist without a beginning, just evolving from big bang to big crunch to big bang, repeated ad infinitum.
Again, all your objections can be answered, and if I were either rich or childless I would do so myself. But I'm neither, so all I can do is provide you with a book recommendation: check out Edward Feser's work, especially Aquinas and Five Proofs. If you want to see Dawkins refuted in his own tone, see The Last Superstition.
What research have you done up to this point to answer your questions?
I've been promised such many many times, and every single time the arguments have fallen hilariously short of the promise. For instance, the "Five Proofs" are basically a variation of the statement: I insist X has to exist, and X=God. The simple refutation is: Nope :). X can be reasoned about in other ways. Maybe I'll take a look at the other resources at some point, but my credence is low those will have any solid arguments either.
I often wonder why such arguments are taken so seriously. I've honestly tried to see if they have enough substance to make me change my mind. But each time I become more convinced religious arguments are simply wish fulfillment. Moreover, the word is God is so flexible that it's hard to pin down the exact thing people have in mind when discussing religion. And so it'll continue. As long as we live and let live without imposing viewpoints by force, that's okay!
"But each time I become more convinced religious arguments are simply wish fulfillment."
Funny, I feel exactly the opposite, but of course everybody, whether religious or not, sees what he wants to see :-)
"For instance, the "Five Proofs" are basically a variation of the statement: I insist X has to exist, and X=God."
This is false. Or please tell me what work you've read that gives you that impression. It perhaps works as a parody of the ontological argument (which is not one of the 'five proofs'), but no more than that.
The book Five Proofs is not the same set of five that Aquinas very briefly summarises (though there is some overlap). The ontological argument, which I think fails, is not one of either sets.
Anyway, I've pointed you in what I hope is a profitable direction. I recommended the Five Proofs book in particular because one chapter (IMO) successfully rebuts every atheist argument that I've encountered online or in print. These books' arguments are not what you will find in typical pro-religion discourse, much of which I agree is risible. I wish you well!
Most definitely. Though I do think (hope?) we humans can rise above our limitations to grasp the actual Truth quite a bit.
> The book Five Proofs is not the same set of five that Aquinas very briefly summarises
Alright I got the actual book now. To correct the mistake, I'll give the book a honest read and post my impressions here in a day or two. I hope you can be around to respond if I got something wrong. If not, nice talking to you!
> Most definitely. Though I do think (hope?) we humans can rise above our limitations to grasp the actual Truth quite a bit.
Sure. I don't mean to imply I'm a subjectivist or that the situation is hopeless. But seeing things as they are, rather than as one is inclined to see them, takes serious effort and self-training. That's not an argument in favour or against anything; it's true in every aspect of life, from the most mundane to the biggest questions.
Feel free to respond to this comment or some more recent one, and I'll try to remember to check. Regardless of whether you're convinced, you'll at least be responding to much better arguments than what you've likely encountered so far. Enjoy!
Alright, it took longer than expected. I wasn't able to give full attention to all the arguments of the book, but I think I got the main arguments and counter-arguments.
So the thesis of the book "Five Proofs" is as it says in the intro---the real debate is not between atheism and theism---by trying to show that God, as accepted by theists, definitely exists.
By God, the book means an entity with certain qualities, which I'll divide into two sets:
* personal: will, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, love
My main criticism of the five proofs is that, even if accepted, they can only used to demonstrate the impersonal qualities above. The book bolts on the personal qualities with thin arguments that don't follow from the proofs. And this has been my observation in many such discussions, that the meaning of the word "God" switches mid-conversation to fit the conclusion.
An impersonal "God" is actually compatible with naturalism, because here "God" is just a word being used to describe the ultimate nature of reality. So whatever the ultimate nature of reality is, if one wants to call it God, that's totally fine. To differentiate my perspective, I'll call that ultimate reality the Theory of Everything (ToE) instead. ToE has all the impersonal qualities, ToE is what sustains the universe, ToE is eternal and immutable, etc.
* ToE is what sustains the hierarchical series at each moment.
* ToE is base part out of all other composite parts of made of.
* I don't see why "there must be a necessarily existing intellect which grasps all of the logical relationships between all propositions". Truth and logic just are. They don't need to be grasped by anything to exist. However, if one wants to call this collection God/ToE, that's fine. But it doesn't follow that such a God is omniscient (as there isn't any will that "understands" in such a collection).
* I don't really see how the Thomistic Proof is different from the Aristotelian Proof, but in any case, I think ToE can be the essence of this universe's existence.
* "There must be at least one necessary being, to explain why any contingent things exist at all". Yes, the First Cause, but ToE and not a personal God.
ToE/God, with the impersonal qualities, can be the final conclusion from all the 5 proofs. But theists need "God" to be something extra. They need God to have the above personal qualities as well. And that cannot be shown with the proofs. Because the reality we observe is consistent with an impersonal ToE creating and sustaining it. ToE doesn't need to have a will, or to be perfectly good, or to love its creation. These qualities don't follow from the proofs at all. So personal qualities can only be accepted if one accepts some revelation to be true. But that is outside the scope of this discussion. All I want to show is that the thesis of the book is incorrect and atheism is back on the table.
To reiterate, something cannot come out of nothing. Cogito, ergo sum. Something (I) exists. Hence there is some brute-force First Cause for this something. Theists call this First Cause God. Atheists can call this ToE (say). I claim that God = ToE at this point. Theists go one step further to give personal qualities to God, who willed this universe into existence (but could have chosen not to) and cares about its constituents, including humans, whose prayers and actions He listens to and judges, and has revealed himself at least once (if not more). Atheists reject this second part. I instead adopt a naturalist viewpoint modulated by Bayesian Reasoning. If I find some strong evidence for a personal God, I'll of course have to change my mind and become a theist.
There is a lot more I can say of course, given its a book length discourse. I'll just say one more thing. The book criticizes and rejects the idea that "science is the only genuine source of knowledge". I think this is a common misunderstanding of what science is. The books says "The trouble now is that scientism becomes completely trivial, arbitrarily redefining “science” so that it includes anything that could be put forward as evidence against scientism." But that is what science, or more precisely, the scientific method is!
For instance, if the 5 proofs had actually logically and definitively proved that a personal God exists, then yes, that knowledge would become part of science.
Conversely, is it not true that the actual bedrock of religions are the books/revelations. Imagine a world where were no such revelations. Would people have as much faith in a personal caring God just on the basis of proofs?
And if the revelations were actually shown to be true, that would become part of scientific knowledge. Say God appears on Earth today and agrees to undergo scientific observations of His nature (say by turning water to wine or parting the ocean under experimental scrutiny), then naturally His existence will have to be accepted as part of reality.
The scientific method is used by everyone, whether consciously or unconsciously and to the best of their ability, to survive and understand the reality we observe. There is no other way to judge right from wrong. Scientists obviously use it to study physical reality. And theists use it for instance to judge which among the various religions (and which denomination within a religion) is actually true. Yes, that is also an application of the scientific method, looking at the arguments for the different religions and judging which one (or none) seems to be true. The disagreements come in when we don't have enough data to make a definitive judgement between the alternatives. And that's where all the wonderful imaginative ideas continue to exist.
Much depends on the sense in which we take the term 'science'. Does it mean 'rationally-held knowledge of any sort', or does it mean 'knowledge derived from physics, chemistry, geology, biology and other material things'. You seem to be arguing for the science-in-the-first-sense here, which I'm basically in agreement with (I may quibble here and there). All knowledge, including the content of Divine Revelation, is rationally held to if it is true knowledge. The goal, the purpose of the intellect is the attainment of truth; thus all true knowledge is rational, while all false knowledge is irrational, and is a failure of the intellect to achieve its end.
But quite a few atheists say that claims about anything that is outside science-in-the-second-sense's domain is irrational. Example: Alex Rosenberg states that any knowledge outside of physics' domain is irrational (in line with his reductionist philosophy, he holds chemistry, biology, etc to be physics on a bigger scale). Hume also seemed to be pushing such views with his fork. This claim is trivially easy to refute, I assume you know the arguments already so I won't waste your time with them.
Yes the first one, if the distinction needs to be made.
I'll even go further and claim that distinction itself is meaningless and only matters when say organizing university departments.
What needs to be kept in mind is emergence. Chemistry emerges from physics, then biology from chemistry, ecology from biology, etc. Experimentally verified God will become the base level out of which physics emerges from in the other direction. In that sense, physics' domain perhaps includes everything. But it all depends on how we define the terms.
> the purpose of the intellect is the attainment of truth
This I wholeheartedly agree. Maybe you'll enjoy reading this blog post [0] that proposes Truthism as life's goal.
Thanks for the response and taking the time to follow my recommendation.
I'm at work so need to be brief, but I assume you read the discussion of the five qualities you list as personal, on pp.205-229. What did you think were the weaknesses in the argument? If you want to focus on just one or two of the five qualities to keep the discussion within boundaries, that's obviously fine.
Would you agree that the proofs, if successful, prove the existence of something that is other than the universe, even if the arguments for the personal qualities of this entity fail?
> prove the existence of something that is other than the universe
I'm not sure. I think the proofs show some base entity that is needed to sustain the universe. But is it something apart from the universe? Whatever exists, say God and His creation, all together constitutes the universe. Of course by universe I mean the totality of reality that the proofs refer to.
Perhaps you mean that the something "other" always exists even though the universe might not have. As I say in the other comment, God might not have a choice in creating the universe, so this is an open question that cannot be discussed within the context of the proofs.
So to give a bit more of an answer to this, and having not heard your thoughts on pp.205-229, which discuss this issue:
First, I don't think "Theory of Everything" is a good phrase for what you're trying to get at. Any theory is necessarily incomplete, since a theory attempts to describe reality using formal symbols, and formal symbols cannot be equal to the reality they attempt to describe. They cannot capture the entirety of the reality. But this is kind of nitpicking.
The very very short summary is as follows:
Omnipotence: if we accept that (at least one of) the Five Proofs succeed, it follows that God causes any given thing to exist at any moment in time. If he causes its existence, he also causes its power to act. Without God, nothing can act.
Omniscience: again, accepting at least one proof succeeds, it follows that God causes everything to be doing what it is doing at that time. Hence any 'state of affairs', like 'the cat sits on the mat', will be caused by God. Therefore he knows about them (yes I know this doesn't logically follow, the book obviously goes into far more detail).
Perfect goodness: this is a bit more complicated, since we hit disagreement about what good and evil actually are. As a premise, let us say that in classical philosophy, any evil (or bad-ness) is a defect, or alternatively, a failure of a thing to instantiate its essence. Hence a tree might be bad to the extent that it's diseased and therefore failing to grow; a dog might be bad to the extent that it has only three legs. With human beings, some defects are moral defects, which are defects of intellect and will: the person fails to perceive his true good, and therefore fails to pursue it. But moral defects are not fundamentally different from the amoral defects of trees, dogs and even artifacts like chairs and computers. This is one area where classical philosophy differs radically from modern philosophy, which posits a fact-value distinction that allegedly cannot be overcome.
To summarise, a defect in classical philosophy is where a particular, concrete example of a thing fails to instantiate its essence: that is to say, it lacks what is proper to it.
Since God's existence is the same as his essence (if you accept the Thomistic proof), it follows that God cannot have any defects, and therefore must be completely good.
Love: God does not have emotions. But to love a thing (and 'person' is included under 'thing') is to will its good: that is, its true end. Since God does this, he loves everything.
Again, all this is the ultra-ultra-cliffnotes version.
More generally, God cannot possibly lack anything, including the 'personal' qualities you describe. Again, you realise this is so when you grasp that God causes everything to exist, and therefore causes all their qualities as well. It would be impossible to cause something that you don't in some sense have yourself (either formally or eminently -- hence the objection "but God doesn't have ears!" fails). Also, remember that evil is a defect, a failure to have something, so therefore God cannot 'have' evil qualities. In a strict sense, nothing 'has' evil qualities, it only lacks corresponding good ones.
I am on the ebook, but I assume you mean Chapter 6, which I did read but as you can imagine, the arguments are not convincing to me. I think the meaning of the terms omnipotent, omniscience, goodness, etc is quite fluid in the book, so let's try to pin those down.
I posit that an impersonal God, let's call it iGod since you nitpicked ToE, serves as a final answer coming out of the proofs. Let's grant it all the qualities that the proofs need. iGod is what causes and sustains the universe. However, since iGod is impersonal, He did not choose to create the universe. Ultimately, He does not have any will. He just is. Maybe you at least agree that atheism/science is compatible with iGod in this sense.
And that is the key difference from theism, which needs a personal God (pGod) with a sense of will. As the book says (emphasis mine):
* "Since God exists in the fullest possible way, he must have the capacity to act in the fullest possible way."
* "God apprehends all the things that could exist, and causes some of those things actually to exist while refraining from causing others of them to exist."
I don't see how this sense of a will follows from the proofs. iGod, the unmoved mover/unactualized actualizer, may not have any control over actualizing. The universe can just burst forth naturally from iGod without any sort of active decision to bring it forth. The book's defense of this sense of free will, where God is free to choose not to cause the universe, is simply that "the freedom of the divine will is mysterious to us", which I think you'll agree is not any sort of proof. If you can show me how a sense of will arises from these or other proofs, I'll reconsider my position, since this is the keystone to the rest of the qualities I'm calling personal. Without will, the meaning of the rest of the personal qualities become the same as iGod's.
Some quick comments on the rest of the qualities:
Omnipotence: I am not sure if we can extend the quality of iGod causing "any given thing to exist" just from observation of this one universe. More concretely, I am still thinking about whether the purely actual actualizer being unique holds. But in any case, if iGod's omnipotence means that it causes and sustains "any given thing to exist", that is fine. But this is a passive power. If pGod's omnipotence means that He has the power to cause anything but can withhold a subset of them based on a willful decision, then that is not an outcome of the proofs. As I said, the will part matters.
Omniscience: To give a sense of where I am coming from, I'll give two example. Base axioms in mathematics cause all the rest of the theorems to be true or false, in an eternal sort of way (as also discussed in the 3rd proof). But it's absurd to attribute omniscience (about mathematics) to mathematics. And electrons cause emergent phenomenon such as electricity and working computers, yet they don't "know" anything about these emergent levels built of top. Similarly, iGod, in an impersonal way, causes the universe, following a chain of causation. But in what sense can we attribute a sense of knowing in iGod? Again, it just is. Without proving a mind/will, using the word omniscience is I think a mistake and just leads to miscommunication.
Goodness and love: I think these only exist in an emergent level of reality, i.e., in human minds. You'll agree that atoms that constitute our physical bodies don't have these attributes, right? I posit that in the same way, iGod, the impersonal base reality which constitutes everything else, also does not have these attributes. The book (and your comment) is redefining the terms (goodness = lack of imperfection, love = "that God creates things entails that he loves them") to mean something different from how we use it in our everyday conversation and which is why I think using these terms is again a mistake. We're free to use whatever terms we like of course, but it just leads to a miscommunication that makes these discussions more murky than they need to be. In any case, goodness/love in pGod again needs a sense of will to make them useful, because otherwise by the same definitions iGod is also good and all-loving.
> God cannot possibly lack anything ... It would be impossible to cause something that you don't in some sense have yourself
I understand the sense of what you're saying here, but I want to make a distinction between base qualities and emergent qualities. For example, atoms "lack" the quality of being a table, even though a table is constituted entirely by atoms. Tableness is an emergent quality. In the same way, iGod only has the properties needed to actualize the next potential that in the causal chain gives rise to entirety of reality, including our universe. But that does not mean iGod itself can be attributed the quality of being an atom or a galaxy or a human body. Causing some quality to exist down the causal chain does not mean it is meaningful to port those qualities back up the chain. In the context of the proofs, all we can be sure of is that some First Cause base reality iGod exists. But the minimal qualities we need to attribute to iGod do not use terms like goodness, love, evil, etc without entirely redefining those terms. But theists cannot then turn around and use the same words back with their original meaning in the same context.
I read some more of Feser's writings. And the more I read, I more I see that the quibble is less about what is and more about what we should call it.
The major thrust of the book is that the proofs show the God exists, hence everyone should be a theist. But you see, the terms God and theist are not defined that well. God, in the context of the book, is an entity that has some qualities that are defined to be something "analogous" to the usual meanings of the word. And that creates a lot of ambiguity in the message. More so because theism is not defined at all.
"The real debate is between theists of different stripes—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, purely philosophical theists, and so forth—and begins where natural theology leaves off.", the book says. Well here's a thought. Let's take Christians. They necessarily believe that the God revealed in the Bible is True. Moreover, they believe the God of all the other religions are necessarily false [0]. Now of course, as the book itself says, whether Christianity is true or not is outside the scope of the proofs. So for the sake of this discussion, let's say that yes the God the proofs is true (necessarily), but no human religion, including Christianity, is true. That is, God hasn't revealed himself to humans directly. Where does that leave us? Should we still be a theist? A "purely philosophical theist", as the above quote says? What would that mean? What should the beliefs of a theist without any of the current religions be?
In other words, what difference does the presence or absence of this proof of God make in our lives to be able to define us as a theist or an atheist? God may be perfectly good and all knowing and all the rest of the qualities. Alright, so what? Does it have any implication for our lives? At this point I expect the theist to jump in and say (among other things), yes of course it matters. God is the perfect role model, and we imperfect humans should try to elevate our lives to try and match his perfectness. This I think is fine. However, I think this is compatible with being an atheist! Attempting to reach our maximal potential is a valid goal regardless of whether that perfectness is already "actual" or not.
And that is my overall point. That's why I tried to point out the "personal" qualities earlier. When I resist the term theist, for me personally, I am resisting the idea that God is somehow actively participating in the daily affairs of the universe. That He sets the rules for what is good or bad, not as the perfect being, but as defined in the Bible (or other books). That there is a judgement of the our actions and we go to heaven or hell (or cycle of rebirth based on karma, etc). And this later part is I think where most of the disagreement between theism and atheism is. And these later ideas don't (and cannot) come from the proofs. Moreover, there is a subtle flip in the meaning of the terms even when discussing the proofs. For instance, take the first proof. Everything has a (hierarchical) First Cause. Let's call it God. God is the cause of everything. Hence, God causes everything to exist. But you see, there is a flip from the passive "is a cause of" to an active "causes". Which then naturally is taken to mean a God with a will who has the power to cause the universe but also has the capacity to choose to create or not create the universe. And that is I think an unjustified misreading of the words "cause". To make an analogy, electrons "cause" tables to exist, without having any active godly qualities. God can similarly cause and sustain the universe, without having any active role in it.
So yeah, in short, natural theology as described here can actually be compatible with philosophy of science/metaphysics in my reading, and the quibble is more about terms and boundaries. The main challenge for theism is to show the next step, that God revealed Himself to us. Because only that can show that God is personal/active rather than impersonal/passive. And that can only be shown empirically I think, not through philosophical ponderings.
I probably didn't manage to express my thoughts fully, and I hope you'll try to read into the spirit of the message when pondering it.
> Maybe you at least agree that atheism/science is compatible with iGod in this sense
I note the equation of atheism and science but make no further comment :-)
>The book's defense of this sense of free will, where God is free to choose not to cause the universe, is simply that "the freedom of the divine will is mysterious to us", which I think you'll agree is not any sort of proof.
Feser is not offering this as proof of the existence of God's free will. He's answering a particular objection: how is it that an unchanging Being can will, given that we, as changing beings, necessarily change from willing to not-willing and back again? He says that using this as a ground against God's having will is to commit the fallacy of accident. And then he's saying we can't understand the full details of how God can will without changing, but that we can nonetheless safely say what is not the case: that God lacks will. (My summary of his argument is below.) Therefore I think your characterization of his argument is inaccurate.
If either A xor B is true, and we can show that A is false, we know that B is true. Perhaps there are implications of B that are impossible to grasp even in theory, but this doesn't undermine the truth of B. Agree?
One way we know that God wills freely is by comparing a lion, a unicorn and a dinosaur (I'm paraphrasing the argument on Will in Chapter 6 here). There is nothing about the concept of a lion that causes it to exist, there's nothing about the concept of a unicorn that causes it not to exist, and there's nothing about the concept of a dinosaur that caused it to exist at one time but then caused it to stop existing. On the contrary: I could describe the concepts of a lion, a unicorn and a dinosaur in infinite detail, and you wouldn't know from what I had told you which is real, which is historical and which is imaginary.
What I said about those three animals is true about everything. You could describe the concept of anything in infinite detail without knowing whether that thing exists or existed. There is nothing about a lion as such that makes it real, and nothing about a unicorn as such that makes it imaginary. There is nothing about a lion that makes its existence necessary, and nothing about a unicorn that makes its non-existence necessary. The existence or non-existence is a completely separate question from what it is (its qualities, etc).
Now consider the principal of proportionate causality (described in the book in detail). This basically says that if a thing doesn't have a particular quality in itself, that quality must be caused by something else. Example: I can't lift myself 10000 feet into the air, but an aeroplane can cause me to 'have' this quality. A particular pool of water may be red; it is not the water itself that's red, so something else must be giving it this quality. Etc.
The result of this is that any object that exists must be caused by something else to exist, and that this 'something else' must exist in and of itself. (This is obviously contained in some of the proofs.) Obviously the proofs say that God is such a 'something else'. Therefore, God is causing lions to exist, caused dinosaurs to exist at one point but no longer does, and has never caused unicorns to exist.
But we know that there is nothing in lions that makes them exist, nothing in unicorns that makes them not-exist, and nothing in dinosaurs that makes them stopped-existing. So, assuming the claim that God causes their existence from moment to moment succeeds, if follows that their existence or non-existence is a matter of choice. The fact that He is causing one to exist and not the other two indicates that He is choosing to do this. Given that there is nothing in any of the three that causes it to necessarily exist, it follows that the real things we see are not some sort of 'natural bursting forth' from an impersonal being, but rather exist by the choice of this Being. If the universe 'burst forth' from God, then anything that could potentially exist, would exist.
>> God cannot possibly lack anything ... It would be impossible to cause something that you don't in some sense have yourself
> base qualities and emergent qualities...But that does not mean iGod itself can be attributed the quality of being an atom or a galaxy or a human body. Causing some quality to exist down the causal chain does not mean it is meaningful to port those qualities back up the chain.
I disagree with the reductionist account of a table that is I think implicit here -- I think tables (or at least the wood that constitutes the tables) are metaphysically prior to the atoms that compose them, and the same for all natural objects. By this, I mean that the parts can only be understood in terms of the whole, and must be understood as subordinate to the whole, not vice-versa. But if I understand your objection correctly, I think I can work through it even allowing for the reductionist ontology. The principle of proportionate causality illustrates things well. Could you read the book's account of this principle? It's early in Chapter 6, I think pretty much the first section. I think you're using the 'heirloom principle' to object, which assumes that the Principle says that an effect must exist formally in its cause, and ignores that it can also exist eminently or virtually. The book defines these terms, and attempts to explain why the objection is not valid. Do you think the attempt succeeds?
If you think the attempt succeeds, I will go on to discuss why, given some things in reality (human beings) have a will, it follows that that which causes human beings' existence must also have will, either in the same sense as human beings or in some greater sense.
I'll try to respond to your other post when I get a chance. Some of the points are fairly different from what we're discussing here. I'm happy to talk about whether God revealed Himself, and in what sense he governs our conduct (or has a right to do so), but it's a pretty different conversation.
Ah sorry I didn't mean to imply an association, only that both atheists and scientists, from their perspectives, would have no qualms with (and in fact should necessarily accept) an impersonal First Cause.
> we can't understand the full details of how God can will
I'm quite wary of arguments that invoke the "beyond the capability of our minds to understand" clause. But I get it, let's see if A: "we can nonetheless safely say what is not the case: that God lacks will" holds up. I don't think the book makes a good case for A and only offers B, hence my comment.
In general, I think the quibble again is in the definition of the term existence.
* Logical existence: Everything, that is not logically inconsistent, logically necessarily "exists". God has no say here. This is the logical metaphysical landscape, with mathematics and all possible universes with all possible constituents such as tables and unicorns.
* Ontological existence: A small small subset of the metaphysical landscape that we experience with our senses. Here, some things "exist" and others don't. This is what we want to talk about right? What we think about when we ask the questions: where did this come from, who caused this, etc. At least I exist. Thus something exists. Ex nihilo nihil. And thus, a First Cause sustains this something's existence. And the question then is, of the things that do exist, how much control does First Cause have for their existence?
I think your argument above switches between these two definitions, hence the disagreement.
> You could describe the concept of anything in infinite detail without knowing whether that thing exists or existed.
Yeah I read this, but not sure if I agree. That infinite detail would contain its history and details of its components, no? And that would lead to a description of an entire universe, where we can judge whether it makes sense for that things to exist. But anyway, doesn't matter for our present purposes. We can take unicorns to be metaphysically true as an axiom, for instance.
> There is nothing about a lion that makes its existence necessary, and nothing about a unicorn that makes its non-existence necessary.
This is perhaps true for metaphysical existence, but the ontological existence of a lion and the non-existence of an unicorn can absolutely be determined by the physical laws and the initial conditions of our universe. As far as we have probed our senses, the physical world seems to be, with absolute consistency, following a set of laws. All the First Cause has "control" over (right now) is selecting/sustaining what the laws and initial conditions were. The rest of the entire history of the universe is then already logically implied, either deterministically (single line) or probabilistically (a tree), including +lions and -unicorns. First Cause has no say whatsoever.
> Therefore, God is causing lions to exist, caused dinosaurs to exist at one point but no longer does, and has never caused unicorns to exist.
> I disagree with the reductionist account of a table that is I think implicit here
> the parts can only be understood in terms of the whole
This is the core of the disagreement then. "Existence", by which I mean to take this physical universe that we experience with our senses, is empirically reductionist. No God is needed to explain why the Sun rises or why tables retain their form. Each emergent level [0] has a necessary and sufficient cause from the level below it. Tables -> atoms -> quarks -> QFT -> ? -> First Cause. In this sense, First Cause is causing and sustaining the universe. But again, passively, not actively.
Theists obviously disagree with this. But my point is, just from the proofs as the book claims, why can we claim that God chooses unicorn not to exist? All we can say is God chose/is the First Cause physical laws, no? The non-existence of unicorns is implicit in the laws (and initial conditions). No choice needed. And since I have shown an alternative explanation that is consistent with the proofs, a personal God is not a logical necessity, is it? Theist will have to rely on the Bible (etc) for that, not logical proofs.
And also:
> has never caused unicorns to exist.
> If the universe 'burst forth' from God, then anything that could potentially exist, would exist.
Well we don't know! We cannot make any claims about what "exists" beyond our universe. It is absolutely possible that unicorns exist in some other universe. It is possible that the entire metaphysical landscape has ontological existence. We just don't know. And thus these statement cannot be considered true (or false) with any certainty.
[0] Except the origin of our universe and consciousness. The former will ultimately have a brute force First Cause. And the later is an open question right now (a gap).
> I disagree with the reductionist account of a table that is I think implicit here
Even the proofs imply a reductionist account no? The first proof says: the table holds up the glass, the floor holds up the table and the earth holds up the table. And then asks, what holds up it all? Answer: necessarily God. But then God is at the edge (first) of this causal chain and the table is still holding up the glass (directly), no? And God is holding up the universe (directly) and everything in it (indirectly). Thus, saying that God is holding up the glass would be misusing the usual meaning of the term "holding up".
> you wouldn't know from what I had told you which is real, which is historical and which is imaginary.
This is obviously true. It is slightly amusing that this is then used to imply that God choose what things actually exist, while I as a naturalist take it to mean we have to empirically look at the world to determine what exists.
> Do you think the attempt succeeds?
Alright. So I suppose I don't think the attempt succeeds, no.
Take a table. It has a quality: it's solid. As compared to air, which is gas. However, in what sense is it meaningful to say that an individual atom is solid or gas? Isn't it true that concept of solid or gas only comes in when there are a group of atoms, none of which individually have a "state"? Yes of course, the property is inherent (eminently or virtually as you say) in an atom, but it only materializes in relation to other atoms, not individually. And so on down the abstraction levels.
The book defends PPC with arguments that are quite weak and only work they are talking about the same emergent level. Yes, giving $20 works only when I have $20. But do atoms which constitute me also have $20 dollars? It's absurd no? The concept of owning $20 does not "exist" at the level of atoms. Same for the argument about evolution. Within genetics, the same DNA is evolving into different forms. But again, what about the atoms constituting the DNA?
So no, I don't think it makes sense to talk about qualities that emerge in higher levels to hold at the lower levels. First Cause doesn't have the quality of tables, states of matter, or human will directly, only in an indirect weak sense. The book says it too: "explanations in terms of potentialities may often be only minimally informative", but this "minimalness" makes all the difference! How can this minimally informative quality expanded to be maximally relevant when talking about the First Cause? Yes, the First Cause in a causal chain leads to human will. Minimally weak sense. Wondering how you think instead that First Cause has will "in the same sense as human beings or in some greater sense".
> part of the effect (the human intellect) is not material
> given some things in reality (human beings) have a will
I will note that these are agree-to-disagree statements, given the basis of consciousness is an open question for now. From my naturalistic perspective, humans only have emergent "free" will, not libertarian free will, which is what theists usually mean by the term. But I'm happy to accept these statements for this discussion and am more interested in understanding why First Cause needs to have any will, given human will.
I should have read your point more charitably, my bad :)
> This is perhaps true for metaphysical existence, but the ontological existence of a lion and the non-existence of an unicorn can absolutely be determined by the physical laws and the initial conditions of our universe
This may ve true, but irrelevant to my point. The 'laws of physics' are themselves one thing, and not another. It is logically possible to imagine a universe with anti-gravity instead of gravity (that is, where mass repels mass), or where natural processes were such that a lion's DNA ended up giving rise to a unicorn. It is equally logically possible to imagine a universe where unicorns pop in and out of existence, independently of any biological process. And infinite other possibilities. But this is not so. Your appeal to physical laws doesn't affect my point, which is not that we can know firstly about God's Willing, and secondly (and thereby) know about the existence of one and the non-existence of the other. Rather, it's that reality is certain particular things, and is not certain other particular things that it might logically have been. And this implies that certain concepts (lions, gravity) are willed into existence, and continue to be so willed here and now; and certain other concepts (anti-gravity, unicorns) are not.
The multiverse concept does not affect my point. If such a thing existed, there would be a Will that willed unicorns (and the supporting laws of physics/biology/etc) exist in the other universe, but not our one. This is unaffected by infinite multiverses. So the point stands.
>> You could describe the concept of anything in infinite detail without knowing whether that thing exists or existed.
> Yeah I read this, but not sure if I agree. That infinite detail would contain its history and details of its components, no?
I was careful to refer to the concept of lion/unicorn , which exists independently of how particular examples of said concept came to exist.
>> you wouldn't know from what I had told you which is real, which is historical and which is imaginary.
> This is obviously true. It is slightly amusing that this is then used to imply that God choose what things actually uexist, while I as a naturalist take it to mean we have to empirically look at the world to determine what exists.
These are not mutually contradictory. In any case, is it 'obviously true' or are you 'not sure if [you] agree' as you stated in your first reply? :-)
On a larger level, I don't think we can continue without discussing ontological reductionism. I can see that the PPC would make no sense if you think everything can be explained entirely in terms of its constituent atoms, which I think is your view. My own view is that the objects of our senses -- like pieces of wood, or apples, or dogs, or human beings -- cannot be reduced to the particles* that constitute them. To put it another way, what these things are is not the same as the particles they're made of. Nor is it the same as a particular arrangement of particles. "What a thing is" is a unity, and is distinct (though not separate) from the particles that compose it. This unity determines the particles' behavior -- or more generally, the whole determines the parts, not vice-versa. This also is true for an individual thing's properties, like color, ability to move, and (crucially) will.
If you think this is a useful line of enquiry, start kicking my view!
* Choose whatever level of particles you like: molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, quarks, etc. It doesn't affect the argument.
I was wondering when a Christian was going to join the conversation!
>Firstly, I think God's existence can be proved rationally
I have never really bought that natural theology successfully gets you all the way. You're correct in identifying my lack of complete endorsement of Catholicism, I've always been sympathetic to Kierkegaard (Protestant) in thinking that Christianity is not merely an intellectual exercise in philosophy.
>This is a specifically Protestant view (although many Catholics mistakenly hold to it since it chimes so easily with the post-Enlightenment concept of religion). I would say faith is a rational assent to revelation.
Thank you for saying this, I think I spoke too clumsily here---I meant that the knowledge revealed through faith is beyond that of human reason. I'm here thinking of Aquinas when he says that reason is a preamble to faith, meaning the distinctly Christian beliefs only start beyond what reason can get us, though in going beyond reason we're not slipping into irrationality.
>I think it's profoundly false to say that Christianity is independent of logic or observation.
I dunno, I am kind of skeptical that a spiritual connection to Christ, which seems foundational to Christianity to me, is dependent on logic or observation.
Thanks for clarifying. Anyone, of any belief, can have immediate, apparently self-evident experience that validates or defines their worldview. But we need good reason to believe our experiences are about reality, and are not just a bunch of things that we feel very strongly are about reality, but in truth are not.
And again, there is a sense in which union with God is dependent on logic, inasmuch as logic (logos/Word) is just another way of saying reality :-). That which is illogical is not, and cannot be; it is non-being.
> This is inside out. What evidence was presented to you that made you believe Christianity was right?
It sounds like maybe some people are taking this as a challenge from me to atheists. I'm not really; just like Dennet is in TFA, I'm talking about general principles for someone trying to live as a rational creature: each of us should examine our own beliefs, and not only ask "What if I'm wrong?" but "How would I know if I were wrong"? That goes for Christians and Hindus and Muslims as much as for atheists. "Take the plank out of your own eye before you try to remove the speck out of your brother's eye" and all that. It's specifically because Dennet is such a deep thinker and effective communicator that I genuinely wonder how he'd answer that question.
I'm not sure what evidence was provided to me as a child that the world was round; but I had relatives who lived in Germany and Thailand, and at the age of 12 I'd actually flown to Thailand and experienced jet-lag. The "world is round" hypothesis satisfactorily explained my experience (both first- and second-hand, through people I knew personally) in a way that the "flat earth" hypothesis doesn't.
In the same way, the vast majority of evidence I had as a child to confirm what as taught about Christianity to me was experiential. But of course, all sorts of people from different faiths have religious experiences; how do I know that there's not some better explanation for my experiences -- either religious or reductive -- which will be more predictive (in the sense of getting better results more efficiently)?
> I became an Atheist in large part because I took Latin my first year in high school and realized that the Roman's actually believed in their gods the same way that I believed in the Christian god. And I gradually realized that they had the same reason to believe that I did ... they were told from a young age that this was real and just kept believing as they grew up.
This seems a bit strange to me... so the Romans believed in supernatural beings, and the Christians also believed in supernatural beings (and of course so did the Greeks, and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and...); but instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort (with some people maybe being closer to the truth of the matter than the others), you decided this was evidence that there weren't supernatural beings?
Isn't that like reading several different conflicting scientific theories, and then deciding that all science is bunk?
Sorry I don't have the exact quote, but there's a place where C.S. Lewis points out that being a Christian, he's free to believe that people of other religions were partly right and partly wrong; but that when he was an atheist, he had to believe that the majority of humans were completely wrong about the most important questions in life.
If the entire world were atheists except Christians, wouldn't that be far stronger evidence against the supernatural? The fact that the Romans believed in the supernatural and the afterlife is evidence -- weak evidence, I grant, but evidence nonetheless -- that the supernatural and the afterlife exist.
> but for me it would just be ANY evidence: a verifiable miracle, proof of life after death, or meeting an angel/demon.
What would satisfy your requirements for a "verifiable miracle"?
It sounds like a lot of these might be very personal experiences. First of all, if you had a single experience of an angel, would that actually change your mind? Wouldn't you be inclined to believe you'd had some sort of hallucination (wondering perhaps if someone had slipped LSD into your drink or something like that)?
Similarly, once you had that experience and became convinced, how would you convince anyone else? Supposing there were another person who was exactly like you -- the fact that you were convinced you'd seen an angel wouldn't have any effect on whether they were convinced that angels existed, would it?
FWIW I know a lot of people who started out as atheists and became Christians, and although this sort of rational "apologetics" sometimes did factor into part of their decision, by far the biggest influence was personal experience: first with genuine Christians, then with with Jesus, through reading the Bible and worshipping him at church. I tend not to focus on that kind of thing in a venue like this, because it's the least logically sound reason; but if you're genuinely interested in having a personal experience to let you put Christianity to the test, that's what I'd look for.
As for me, I've got what I consider to be more objectively sound reasons to believe; but "“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which however [this comment] is not large enough to contain.” Hopefully at some point I'll write it up in a way that's easy to link to.
> each of us should examine our own beliefs, and not only ask "What if I'm wrong?" but "How would I know if I were wrong"?
The final arbiter is repeatable verifiable data. Everything else to subject to doubt.
So how would I know if naturalism is wrong? God could come down again in a public revelation and agree to undergo a scientific scrutiny His nature. Who can then deny His existence?
Lacking that, how do I know religion is wrong? Well, religion plays two roles: a source of strength in this world full of suffering, and an explanation for our existence. The former is necessary for many people and will probably never go away. But the second role has always been that of a "God of the gaps", with the gaps drastically shrinking with improving scientific knowledge. All arrows are point to a naturalistic explanation of the universe. So pending some strong "evidence", none of the religions seem to be correct in the second role. To me, it is better to say "we don't know yet" than accept something on "faith", especially when it comes with seemingly arbitrary commandments on practical matters of life.
> instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort
This is a good point. I think this would make sense if there was some sort of consistency in these claims. However, almost every religion assert their own mutually exclusive claims on how the world is, and wants us to take up those claims on faith. It is easier to consider these claims as wish-fulfillment of the first role I mentioned above, than any sort of proof for actual divinity.
I myself am an atheist, but I gotta say that this is very well put
> so the Romans believed in supernatural beings, and the Christians also believed in supernatural beings (and of course so did the Greeks, and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and...); but instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort [...] you decided this was evidence that there weren't supernatural beings?
> As for me, I've got what I consider to be more objectively sound reasons to believe; but "“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which however [this comment] is not large enough to contain.” Hopefully at some point I'll write it up in a way that's easy to link to.
I think Aquinas's essence-existence distinction, once one understands it (and understands and accepts its premises) is sound. It's impossible to summarise in a combox though, mainly because its philosophical background is very different from the place most people are coming from; so quite a bit of preliminary work needs to happen before it can be understood.
Aristotle's unmoved mover is also sound; there's one point of detail I'm a bit hazy about, but it the main it works. Again, some preliminary work also needed.
> It sounds like maybe some people are taking this as a challenge from me to atheists.
Not at all, I'm engaging in good faith here.
> This seems a bit strange to me... so the Romans believed in supernatural beings, and the Christians also believed in supernatural beings (and of course so did the Greeks, and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and...); but instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort (with some people maybe being closer to the truth of the matter than the others), you decided this was evidence that there weren't supernatural beings?
This is a common misinterpretation. Rather it made me rethink why I thought Zeus was a myth and my God was real and that led to me realizing there was no evidence that God was real, I had been taking it on faith.
If there is one thing the explosion of popularity for fantasy stories has shown us is that it is really easy for people to invent the supernatural.
> If the entire world were atheists except Christians, wouldn't that be far stronger evidence against the supernatural? The fact that the Romans believed in the supernatural and the afterlife is evidence -- weak evidence, I grant, but evidence nonetheless -- that the supernatural and the afterlife exist.
Many people believe that vaccines cause autism. There is no evidence that it does and I don't lend the theory any credence. Lots of people believing in something says very little.
But at a basic level, religion has numerous aspects that make it useful, good and bad, to people in general and people in power in particular. Christianity has long been used to manipulate and control for instance; but it also provided community, a common moral code (again, good and bad), shared joy in weddings and births, solace in grief and purpose.
> What would satisfy your requirements for a "verifiable miracle"?
In an age where everyone has a very high quality video camera in their pocket the sasquatch, the loch ness monster and other such things have mostly disappeared but miracles have not appeared.
OK, I think I see what you were getting at. The first thing you should do is ask, "Is there actually any reason to believe this?" I sort of took that as a given, because I went through that process in high school: "Is this something my parents believe, or is this something I believe?"
And that's certainly useful, but the problem is that you can find evidence for all sorts of things. It's simply not accurate, for instance, to say that "there's no evidence that [vaccines cause autism]". There is scientifically robust evidence against it; but there are tens of thousands of personally compelling "anecdata points" in favor of it. To wit: there are tens of thousands of people who had the experience that their child was given a vaccine, and within a month or so they noticed symptoms of autism. "X happened and then Y happened, so Y may have caused X" isn't a logical certainty, but it's certainly valid Bayesian operation to say that "there's a non-zero probability that Y caused X". If you eat something new and then you get sick, you would certainly do well to consider the possibility that the new thing you ate may have been the thing to make you sick; genes of people who did otherwise would quickly have died out in favor of people who do.
To believe in the scientific consensus over and against your own personally compelling anecdata point (and that of dozens of other people you've met online) takes a kind of faith in the unseen power of statistics (and the reliability of the all-too-well-seen scientific and medical establishments) which many people simply don't have.
There are loads of situations where there's implicit confirmation bias which makes non-things seem like evidence. Hence why it's important to move on to the second question: How would I know if this belief of mine were wrong?
> In an age where everyone has a very high quality video camera in their pocket the sasquatch, the loch ness monster and other such things have mostly disappeared but miracles have not appeared.
Really? I haven't looked, but I kind of assume that if I searched for "faith healing" on YouTube I'd see loads of videos of "miracles". Would this sort of thing count? If not, what kind of video would count?
(To be clear, my basic stance towards these would be skeptical as well.)
I would be genuinely interested to hear what conclusions you came to - and I don't say that as a typical internet atheist waiting to pounce on some flaw in your logic.
I've come at this from the other side many times and, though there's certainly a part of me that would like to, I just cannot find it within myself to believe that the human condition is explained in any way by Christian theology.
I've found a good deal of resonance in the mystical traditions of various religions - I'm especially a fan of some of the Jewish mystical stuff (e.g. Kabbalah and other portions of the long tradition of debate and interpretation of scripture).
But in spite of a lot of examination I've still wound up with, at most, a kind of "spiritual but not religious" attitude, which usually translates to, frankly, not much.
I've found myself somewhat jealous of people of faith, who can find some system of belief that seems resonant enough to provide comfort and a framework for living a good life - but also, frankly somewhat nonplussed that people can buy into these various theologies and not run up against the same "...really, that's supposed to explain all this?" that I do.
Why is it that you think the human condition is not explained by Christian theology? To be sure, you don't mean "I think Christianity is false", right? It can be false but still explain the human condition.
> It can be false but still explain the human condition.
Sure - and as a matter of fact, this is largely the angle I approach religion from these days - i.e. that we collected a series of parables, rules, and traditions that, when combined, lead to a "good life" (or, more cynically, provide competitive advantages to societies who adopt them in a sort of "memetic natural selection" paradigm).
But when I look at the mythology of Christianity, especially the parts of it that are mainstream and not parts of mystical or esoteric traditions, I don't find it to be a compelling enough story to base my life around (or at least, not enough to go and declare my faith in it every Sunday).
The central "myth" of Christianity is that humans are born into a state of sin and cannot reach salvation (Heaven, eternal life, or maybe more "mystically" a state of oneness with the Divine). And the myth goes on to state that God essentially allowed/caused humans to sacrifice his son to Him so that this original sin could be washed away and allow humans to be "saved."
It seems to me that this has very little explanatory power for the sorts of existential questions like "why are we here," "why are we conscious," "why is there so damn much other stuff in the universe".
As a story, there's a lot of appeal to me. Jesus as a role model, as an example of how we ought to try to be, has some good features (some bad ones too, but that's OK with me since I'm not taking the story as the literal word of God). I just don't know how people go from "this story has some nice features worth meditating on in a secular way" to "this story explains why things are the way they are and what we're supposed to do about it."
This is one of the things I find more appealing about Judaism, because there appears (to an outsider) to be much more of a tradition of grappling with faith, of trying to unpack the meaning of the "words of God" and relate them to the human condition. I'm sure there's some of that in Christian traditions too, but it was never a mainstream feature of the Catholicism that I grew up with.
I don't know that the story of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection specifically is supposed to explain something like "why we are conscious", but here is my (somewhat shoddy) explanation of what Christianity says about the human condition:
The purpose of our life is to be in a loving relationship with God. This entails becoming who we are - becoming our true, ideal selves, who express our love for God through our lives, building the kingdom of God. This is why God has created us.
We cannot attain this full self-actualization without the help of God. Thankfully, in God's infinite love, He has given us His son, allowing us to attain salvation. Indeed, no matter how wretched and sinful one might think one is, because of Christ's sacrifice, nobody is beyond repair (see Luke 15).
>This is one of the things I find more appealing about Judaism, because there appears (to an outsider) to be much more of a tradition of grappling with faith, of trying to unpack the meaning of the "words of God" and relate them to the human condition. I'm sure there's some of that in Christian traditions too, but it was never a mainstream feature of the Catholicism that I grew up with.
I grew up as a Catholic as well, so I understand why you might think this. But I really do not think this is because of Catholicism so much as it is because of shallow education (possibly because it's hard to get someone to think deeply about these issue when they're young, and it's far easier for them to get them to be able to recite John 3:16). If anything, Catholicism is a highly intellectual tradition. I know Orthodox Christians and some Protestants actually dislike Catholicism because they think it is too rational, that they bring too much of human reason into religion when they should just trust in the traditions handed down to us. Catholicism, and Christianity in general, have a very strong tradition of grappling with faith and trying to understand how the words of God relate to the human condition. Like, it's quite surprising that your takeaway is that Christianity doesn't do this and that this is the reason you don't find it appealing because if anything this is a key characteristic of Christianity. 2000 years of people arguing about biblical exegesis, theology, Christology, etc. It is really a great shame that catechesis today is so poor that people like you who are genuinely open to it have come away thinking "These people aren't really grappling with their faith or seriously engaging with the word of God and what it means for us today."
TL;DR - There's more to Christianity. Even if you haven't found anything I've said above interesting, it would probably be worth your time looking more deeply into it.
I think I've been failing to express my biggest issue - entirely my fault. Trying to squeeze my problem into "it doesn't seem to address the human condition" really breaks down, because as you describe above, Christianity does have an answer for this.
As for the issue of spiritual exegesis in Christianity, I'm certainly aware that it exists, and a lack of it also isn't my real issue. I guess my problem, in short, is that the central theology of the death and resurrection of Jesus doesn't seem to ... add up for me, for lack of a better way to put it. I'm sorry in advance, because this is going to feel like a move of the goalposts from my first posts.
I am once again going to struggle to express this clearly, especially in the context of an HN post, so fair warning, but here's my best shot:
God - a being/intelligence/force with the capability of creating a universe - sacrificed his son / himself to himself in order to wipe clean the cosmic debt of sin of humanity. This was done as a gift to humanity, because without this sacrifice, humans could never attain salvation - which, in short, means the ability to become our true, ideal selves - to have a relationship with God, to reach a oneness with him.
It just feels so ... small, in a sense. That the whole point of Jesus was to thread some cosmic loophole in the rules that gave humanity a clean slate in terms of sin. Surely there has to be some bigger explanation? surely knowing everything we know about what it took for conscious humans to exist on this planet - how can I be satisfied with this explanation that the cosmic currency of the universe and God and conscious beings is sin and sacrifice?
Now - with all that said - clearly there's room for exegesis and interpretation here. I can start to wind together explanations - maybe the whole notion of the "sacrifice" is not the full picture. Perhaps the life and death of Jesus was less about paying off some cosmic debt, but more about some sort of change in consciousness of humanity. Without that story and the culture / religion that spun out of it, maybe we never could have reached that understanding of the divine that would let us have that full relationship with God. I can play the game of rationalization all day and come to conclusions that feel more satisfactory to me - but it all feels like "theory building" and I don't see the same urge to that kind of thing in the average churchgoer.
But as soon as I have to start playing these games, it seems to call into question the whole central notion of the theology, and I'm left scratching my head, wondering what I'm missing. Either way, as much as I'm open to the ideas and the sort of "secularly obvious benefits of religion," I'm still left in a place where I certainly don't feel comfortable saying the Creed every Sunday. (And this discussion doesn't even begin to get into other ideas of Christianity/Catholicism, like the Eucharist, or problems inherent to any theism like the so called "trilemma").
I'm not sure if all that will make sense, it's a difficult feeling to express.
Anyway, I've enjoyed the discussion. Since HN isn't the best platform for these sorts of long running threads, if you feel like continuing the conversation, feel free to find my email in my profile. I am fascinated by these sorts of debates and always enjoy finding someone to have them with in good faith. If not, that's ok too, either way, thanks for the chat!
This is the tired kind of equivocating that's used by lazy Christians to claim atheism is a discrete and well-formed ideology. Atheism is just that, a-theism, a rejection of the notion of a supernatural dimension occupied by 'personal' god(s).
What evidence (or counter-evidence) do you suggest I present to show that my disbelief in Thor or Odin is wrong?
"Unicorns exist" and "unicorns don't exist" are both factual statements of which one can have a belief. Right now you probably hold one or the other. Sure, if you'd never heard of unicorns, such a thing wouldn't enter your head; but you have heard of unicorns, and thus you do have an opinion on their existence.
Similarly, if one lived all one's life in a rationalist bubble, and never even heard the mention of God or gods or religion or the supernatural, then perhaps one could not have an opinion on whether God exists. But that applies neither to you nor to Dennet.
How would I know that my disbelief in Thor is wrong? At a first cut, I'd need to have someone propose a more concrete proposition to evaluate; then I could try to evaluate it. But whatever that proposition is, it would need to be able to accommodate all that we've learned about the world and about science; it would need to be falsifiable; and it would need to explain the world in a more satisfactory manner than the alternative worldviews.
"Unicorns exist" and "unicorns don't exist" are not factual statements, they are premises. Establishing the truth or falsehood of either has nothing to do with my opinion of the existence of unicorns--unicorns would not exist in spite of my fervent desire for them to be real, or if I just happened to think they were really cool.
Assuming that you believe in the miracles of the old and new testaments, how would such things be proven false? For them to be positive evidence for the existence of God, we should at least be able to imagine how we'd go about refuting them.
No, right now you probably have no opinion on the subject. And depending on context are perfectly willing to entertain either or neither. The world will be a much better place when people stop having opinions on things just because someone asked them to pick a team.
A reasonably mature thinker holds beliefs in terms of Bayesian estimates, and as Dennet says, one should always be willing to entertain evidence that contradicts your current Bayesian estimates. That doesn't mean you don't have beliefs.
When you read a fantasy story you don't really think about whether it is true or not, if someone asked you then you would say it isn't true, but you never thought about it before prompted.
So for me the first time I really thought about whether god existed was in internet discussions. When I learned about the religions in school it was just a bunch of cool stories and cultural things, there was no need to think whether any of that was real or not. And when I got into internet discussions and first encountered religious people I wondered why they thought a fantasy story was real, but apparently you can't ask them that.
Maybe there are some people you can't ask that, but of course, many are happy to deal with the question. And indeed, historically, theists have long engaged with questions about why their religion is true.
Anyway, unlike fantasy stories, religious people are led into belief due to things like people insisting that a religion is true, arguments that suggest that God exist, and spiritual experiences. Maybe this isn't convincing to you, but it's markedly different from a fairy tale.
> people insisting that a religion is true, arguments that suggest that God exist, and spiritual experiences
I just never met such people irl so I have no idea what that is like. Like, having a bunch of people trying to gaslight you into believing in these stories feels like a nightmare to me, I can see why you would say you believe just to make the nightmare end.
The only very religious person I talked to about these things irl said that belief is a very personal thing and he didn't care about what others thinks or doesn't think. I think that is much healthier, and with such an approach you get almost no believers since there is no longer any pressure to believe things we wouldn't naturally believe in.
I don't know what in my comment provoked such a negative reaction from you - maybe the word "insisting" came off as too strong? I really just meant to say that there are many people who seriously believe in religion, and you can't say the same for fantasy stories. If you're not interested, that's fine.
Anyway, they're not really "gaslight[ing] you into believing in these stories" any more than a climate change activist is doing that. They believe their stories are true and that it would have a positive effect on you and the world if you too were to believe in it.
> What evidence (or counter-evidence) do you suggest I present to show that my disbelief in Thor or Odin is wrong?
There are no attempts at proof (that I'm aware of) for the existence of these mythical deities. There are several for the existence of the God of monotheism, which I believe to be sound, but will struggle to fit into a combox.
Further, the thing we imagine them to be is different in kind from the God of monotheism. There are sound explanations of why this is so, but (again) they won't fit into a combox.
See Edward Feser's Five Proofs for the Existence of God, and some of his other works, if you care to explore this further. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and the like ignore, or grossly straw-man, these arguments.
Personally, if there was an easily verifiable, continuous example of a phenomena that violated basic physics and it was arranged in such a way that it sent a clear message confirming the existence of a deity, then I’m easily done with atheism.
Like if the gases of a nebula got rearranged to spell out “God is real”, then sure yeah I guess they are real.
I used to define myself as "agnostic", as in "well I don't know, right now I don't have any reason to believe in <choose your God here>, but if you could prove it I would obviously change my mind".
But then I changed my mind: now I believe that agnosticism is just a "shy" way of being atheist, somehow trying to say "I don't believe in a particular deity, but I can't commit to saying that I believe there is no deity". But that's the whole point of a belief: I could be wrong, and it would be okay to change my mind. A belief is not a proven fact.
So I am an atheist: I don't believe in any particular deity, and in fact I do believe that there is no such thing. But obviously if you proved my belief wrong, then I would change my belief :-).
I think the very definition of Christianity is that you are accepting the creed on faith. There really aren’t any claims you can verify or falsify until after you die (or during the special time of the Rapture).
This is false. There are thorough proofs (or, to avoid the success-word, attempts at proof) for God's existence. They are ignored or misunderstood by the popular atheists like Dawkins and Dennett. They are impossible to summarise in a combox or pithy comment but the information is out there if you care to look. [0]
There are also miracles with thousands of witnesses, most notably that at Fatima. The witnesses included not just Catholics, but also Protestants, atheists and those of other religions. https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/Meet_the_Witnesses.pdf
Personal revelation requires no faith. Such evidence might then rationally lead to belief, like any other anecdotal conviction. That it provides little external evidence is just unfortunate for the rest of us.
That's not the definition of Christianity. Catholicism has a long philosophical tradition discussing the existence of God, and that tradition is far from refuted.
Mathematical proofs need no physical evidence. They're saying something similar is accepted by some Christians. That's an internally consistent viewpoint. Us skeptics simply misunderstand their irrefutable logical proof.
You appear to be shadowboxing an argument where no arguments were made. If anything in my observational comment strikes you as remotely controversial or contradictory to yours, something has gone awry.
Well, there are some atheists that argue that God's omnibenevolence is incompatible with the evils in the world, meaning God cannot exist (or at least, is either not omnibenevolent or not omnipotent, and if these are part of the definition of God, then God insofar as the term refers to something with at least these two properties, does not exist). Theists have responses to this argument, but the point is that the subject matter is something that can be rationally discussed.
Sure, I've engaged in similar discussions in philosophy classes, but this was always about whether a specific definition of "god" could exist and lead to discussion like "can God make a rock so heavy even they can't lift it".
It never has lead to a point that proves God exists or not. Unless philosophy has moved way beyond my readings and I missed it.
> I'd be interested in what kind of evidence Dennet would accept to show him that his atheism was wrong.
Not sure what you mean, any clear sign from a god would apply here. You seem to believe that such a thing isn't possible making their position irrational, but then I wonder how you can still say you believe in a god? Do you believe that God can't intervene in this world?
But for example, if God manifested giant talking heads all over the world I am pretty sure atheism would disappear very quickly.
I'm not sure what Daniel Dennett's current position is on action without free will, but assuming it's something reasonable, I'd consider it plausibly wrong if gassing hell and nuking heaven failed to produce the desired effect in a way that's almost impossible to fake.
Christianity is faith, not a model of reality, so it can't be "wrong" but nor does it purport to be "right". It comes down to whether or not you continue to believe in its tenets.
You have 0 evidence that Christianity is "right", whatever that even means. Provide just a tiny shred of evidence, and Dennet, along with the rest of us, will reconsider the position.
No, you. I was neither mean nor confrontational, I merely expressed my personal skepticism. I could have gone into detail as to why his statement is implausible, but that would have been mean.
So as to minimize confrontation, I won't respond to any further provocation.
I will also note that religion is off-topic at HN, for obvious reasons.
> They will eventually discover that they’re wrong, and we will have yet further examples of evolution’s devious paths. In my terminology, their dogged search for skyhooks will uncover heretofore unimagined cranes. And precisely because their conclusions will be the opposite of what they hoped to discover, we will take them seriously.
An important part of being able to truly ask oneself if they are wrong is the humility to seriously consider an alternative. The author's treating of ID research as a foregone conclusion, even with his acknowledgment that we could be wrong in the next paragraph, seems rather ironic. Isn't it this kind of hubris that he is precisely calling out?
No it isn't. Because there is precisely no evidence for, or coherent argue in favour of, ID. If you imagine ID is an alternative to evolution then that is to misunderstand the concept of evolution which is, at least in its fundamental form, inherently true. It's mathematically true. It has demonstrably happened and is demonstrably happening. ID is purely conjecture that is only contradicted by evidence.
I do think Dennett is being rather sneering in his inclusion of ID in the essay at all. But he's not wrong that good work can be funded, and genuinely useful, and appreciated without malice, for misguided reasons.
I think he’s simultaneously acknowledging the wild unlikelihood of creationism, while also poking a little fun at himself with the irony of “of course I’m not wrong about this.”
"An important part of being able to truly ask oneself if they are wrong is the humility to seriously consider an alternative."
Which he did, at length.
"The author's treating of ID research as a foregone conclusion"
No, it's a consequence of massive amounts of evidence, not just of evolution, but of the character of the sort of people who work at the Discovery Institute.
I live by a life philosophy that tells me to own my defects and shortcomings, and promptly admit them.
I remember being told once, "Congratulations! It's your fault!". The thinking is that, if it's some[one|thing] else's fault, there's nothing I can do to change it, but if it's my fault, then I have the power to amend the situation.
In every conflict in my life; even when I am clearly in the right, and the other party is clearly in the wrong, I always have something to address, on my end. Sometimes, I may even need to apologize for it; which can really suck.
In my coding, I have found that writing unit tests always finds bugs. Happened to me yesterday, in fact. Since the test ran through 35,000 records, and took almost an hour, it was painful. I can't remember the last time that I wrote unit tests that didn't find bugs in the CuT.
But I am now satisfied that the code I wrote is top-shelf.
Having spent months trying to track down bugs that turned out to be due to occasional timing errors in esoteric mechanical devices, it is indeed a relief when I discover that a bug is due to something I did wrong and am able to fix.
So, everyone in the world knows what a circle is, or has a basic idea of a circle: you won't find a person who doesn't recognize one, right? But, there are no circles in the world, empirically--every circle you've ever thought you've seen is actually an ellipse, even the earth itself is oblong, just like all the stars and planetary bodies.
Well, would we call it a mistake if someone described what, empirically, was an ellipse, as a circle? The question itself "What if I'm wrong?" is flawed: we are always already wrong. But it is the wrongness which makes the world, for us; and to the extent our creations are false, to that same extent they are true. So why concern yourself with questions of true or false, right or wrong, Good and Evil? Go out, create your own truth, make the world anew...leave behind all this worrying over nothing.
I would argue we utilize symmetry of rotation and balance along with holding a blade at a fixed point (laythe) or rolling hot metal between two bodies (ball bearings), the avantage / creation of that was one of the crucial advances of humanity (being able to make actual circles / cylinders / spheres, since most objects you mentioned are also 3d)
What makes the circle unique (or a copy / scaling of the unit circle) is that it exists defined by a relationship that is true on the euclidean plane, something itself which is ideal, and only exists in our imaginations.
With mater being quantized at some level, we are always approximating, and for my car's sake, things rolling at several thousand rpms, we have some pretty circular things.
> But, there are no circles in the world, empirically
Only if you have an overly strict definition of circle. I don't think it is wrong to call the outline of a ball a circle, or the shape you do if you take an Y shaped object and rotate it along one of those branches, it isn't a perfect circle but it is still a circle.
And crucially, lots of things like the ones you mentioned are often not better approximated by an ellipse than a circle(I realise circles are just a subset of ellipses).
You can't just decide that the circle is contained in the set of all ellipses. Anyway its a philosophical argument, you can't "prove" mathematically that circles are ellipses or vica versa.
Why do circles need to be ellipses anyway, why can't they be absolutely different? If they were absolutely different, then circles would be purely ideal, and yet an organizing principle (or as the say in Greek, an ἀρχιτεκτονική, from when we receive the word architecture). The only way to understand this, ontologically, is if we take the world to be in a constant tension with the "earth," as Heidegger puts it (cf. The Origin of the Work of Art), the thing in which the "rifts," which is the actual discourse of idealism, come about.
You know, I thought about it for a moment, and I don't think the visual circle is even universal. The schema of the circle may be, but the circle itself never appears. See this article below[0].
I'm not who you replied to, but the reason circles are ellipses is because the definition of a circle is equivalent to the case of an ellipse where both foci have the same x, y coordinates. You can read about all the definitions of an ellipse on Wikipedia.
Functionally, they might not be the same if you're programming them. For example, if you have a circle class with members detailing its center and its radius, it might be more efficient to draw an instance of it than an instance of an ellipse class that has two foci members that just happen to have the same values.
Also, that definition of a circle as an ellipse via locus points (which you mentioned) still requires defining ellipses by an imaginary, ideal circle--even if transcendental (and I've mentioned elsewhere, the circle never appears). The circle that appears is always already an ellipse, empirically, so in pure mathematical terms as I've said the ellipse is actually absolutely different from the circle, which always exceeds it. In order for the circle and ellipse to be set in relation one must be forced to be analytically composed under the other.
Edit: Its clear that phenomenology was the most important philosophical influence on the modern theory of computation, but its curious to me that those that study pure math and physics haven't, for the most part, realized that yet, even as they employ computers to do so much of their work.
> Also, that definition of a circle as an ellipse via locus points (which you mentioned) still requires defining ellipses by an imaginary, ideal circle--even if transcendental (and I've mentioned elsewhere, the circle never appears).
How so? I don't understand. It seems like the opposite to me: because a circle can be defined as a special case of an ellipse, then a circle is defined in terms of ellipses, not the other way around. The definition of an ellipse is a generalization of the definition of a circle.
Its quite a difficult problem...but also one I am actually currently working on, so I should probably put some effort into thinking about it. Give me some time and I'll get back to you. If only there was some way to do private messages on here.
If there were two circles, the second would be isomorphic to the first, therefore, in pure geometry there is only one circle. I suppose by some sort of empirical measure, there would be circles of different sizes, but as we already stated, empirically observed circles are actually ellipses, so in fact there is actually only one circle.
Did anyone else read "Minds I"? I loved that book, and come to think
of it the 'soul searching' comments always had that note of humble
fallibilism in there.
> This inspired me to adopt the same strategy with my books: I invite Tufts students to help me write my books by sharing the penultimate draft with them in a seminar, where they are all encouraged to point out errors, challenge arguments, demand more clarity, and in general complain about anything that strikes them as amiss.
Two professors from whom I was fortunate to learn, who did something like this in classes:
* Marvin Minsky (MIT) -- While he was researching The Emotion Machine, class sessions would often be him talking about whatever he'd been working on earlier that day, and related thoughts from his formidable knowledge, and people would ask questions and share information. For example, one day, general anesthesia came up, and a physician/surgeon who was sitting in on class that day added to that (something about, in some cases, the patient is conscious but doesn't remember after, which was a memorable idea to hear).
* Peter Wegner (Brown U.) -- He was working on theory of interactive models of computation (e.g., whether interacting objects were reducible to Turing Machines), and some days would put up drafts of a paper on a projector, for class discussion around them. IIRC, he'd first read sections of the paper, and then ask questions of the class around that. Of course, we learned more than he did, but perhaps we were also a helpful rubber duck on some ideas he was thinking through.
Also, drafts of textbooks are a thing: Leslie Kaelbling (then Brown U.) arranged to use draft copies of Norvig & Russell's intro AI book, which were two comb-bound volumes with unfinished bits, and IIRC we could feed back comments.
Which reminds me of the time I was taking classes at the community college, and the author of one of the textbooks was in the department (though not my instructor), so I wrote down some comments as I worked though the book. The author seemed kind and delighted to be getting book feedback from a student, even though I assume now that my comments weren't of any help.
While I probably would be happy to be in Daniel Dennett's class and engage seriously with his unfinished manuscript, I actually had a philosophy (of mind, as well) professor like this in my own university, and it was a lot less fun. Probably because this professor was no Daniel Dennett, and so his ideas were really just rehashings of other people's ideas – a primer, really, on work on consciousness.
I just felt like we were being kind of used as free editors, rather than peers to engage with the intellectual ideas.
There are even more ways to benefit your work from other more mundane activities.
It helps a lot to find a day job where you can learn a skill that will help on one independent project you will tackle. It's a great idea as well to test ideas and arguments when having a casual conversation with someone: it both deepens the conversation and you have a better feel about how your opinion will be received.
> Take courage and set out to write up the Great Discovery; if after many hours of red- hot thinking and writing you discover to your dismay a fatal flaw ... all is not lost. Go back to the first paragraph and write something along the lines of “It is tempting to think that ...”
I love this.
I go through similar experiences with software engineering. I notice some area of the field that appears overly complicated (build systems, CI/CD, version control, web frameworks, so on and so on) and start thinking to myself "Why all the complexity? Surely we could just-" and then I'm down a rabbit hole for weeks. The usual end result being I learn a lot of new things and discover for myself what all the complexity was for.
But hey, occasionally maybe I really do come up with a Next Big Thing.
I applaud the author and thinker for taking on this timely and hard topic.
I struggle with this question in the same way I think as the author, but in technology we are afforded less time to ponder if we are wrong and more time to test if we are wrong.
However the author points out, even in testing as he does with his students, we can be wrong in a fundamental way that all the branches of my iterations stem from the wrong source.
So I’m left with: who thinks I’m wrong and why does that matter.
I’m finding that outside of reddit, very very few people will tell me im wrong and this is deeply frustrating. Really only my wife who is tired of my pondering fully engages in what might be wrong with what I’m working on and I’m thankful for that.
But I wish more people would help me be “constructively wrong” which means they understand the goal but want to correct the approach.
Most online merely want to point out irrelevant wrongness for sport.
> I wish more people would help me be “constructively wrong”
What's the value proposition? As you noted, not even your own wife will help you until she sees some kind of return for herself (abating her tiredness). Online actors pointing out irrelevant wrongness get to laugh at the meltdown of the maladjusted "intellectual" that usually follows.
This is what consultancy is for. You pay someone to look at what you are doing and tell you where you are going wrong. The pay offers the incentive. Most people are quite happy to offer consultant services for pay. But presumably you are having this wish because you want it for free?
I get your point, but to be genuine with you I have paid.
Very very few people you are paying with genuinely critique or disagree with you for very obvious reasons.
However I can’t help but point out that you’re being exactly as I’ve described redditors…argue an adjacent point to just say the original point is ‘stupid’. It’s a waste of good brain cells.
It seems you haven't. Apparently you've exchanged money for something, but apparently not what you were actually looking for. It seems, based on the description provided, that you just wanted to give away free money to whomever was willing to take it. What value proposition have you offered to get someone to actually point out where you are wrong?
> I think you’re a troll
I cannot be a troll. If I were, you would not feed me. It is likely I am disingenuous – but that's the whole charm here. One comes here because they want to interact with screen names, not people. A screen name implies nothing of what lies behind it. It could be an LLM for all anyone cares. Decidedly, it is not intended to be a real person. If a real person is pulling the knobs and levers behind the scenes, that's merely an implementation detail of the software.
> and looking at your comments
Well now I wonder what I wrote that made you think my other comments would be something worth reading?
Which is why we need chatgpt as a thought buddy! Chatgpt can route insights it gained from one chat and insert into another chat with a different person. That is learning afterall. Most of insights are memoized in some sense, we don't derive them from first principles again and again.
What is his life's work / major insight that he's referring to here?
> I had found— and partly invented— a prodigious explanation- device that reliably devoured difficulties, day after day. The insights (if that is what they were) that I had struggled so hard to capture in my dissertation and my first book have matured and multiplied, generating answers to questions, solutions to problems, rebuttals to objections, and— most important— suggestions for further questions to ask with gratifying consilience. I just turn the crank and out they pour, falling into place like the last pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps my whole perspective is a colossal mistake— some of my critics think so— and perhaps its abundant fruits are chimeras.
Plausibly that described in the previous paragraph under distributed understanding, where he takes the consensus of some nominally informed group to be truth. See "Reddit as reality" for the failure mode of that strategy.
I don't think so -- as he tells it, the "distributed understanding" is a shortcut he's using in his later life (if something is important someone will tell/explain it to him), which he contrasts with the diligence/conscientiousness he had earlier. The distributed understanding is a working style, orthogonal to the insight/program he's talking about.
Have you considered the possibility that you're wrong? Because that's definitely not it. Consider that, as you acknowledged, you don't even know who he is, so you certainly aren't familiar with his work.
I think, broadly, it's that a theory of mind should be informed by empirical evidence, by scientific research, and that liberal doses of the those will dissolve away many of the classic problems in philosophy of mind.
I never got to ask this as an interview question, but I always thought it would be interesting to ask - 'if you were wrong, would you want to know?' Not on any particular topic but in general. When I asked this in casual settings, I thought it was illuminating that no one gave a simple 'yes' as an answer.
That's so alien to me, because my answer to your question is an enthusiastic "Yes!!".
On further thought, I think the only humane objection is whether truth can ever really be separated from judgment. People don't like being judged and especially not judged unfairly, and true propositions can nevertheless connote judgment by contextual salience of the particular thing we tell someone that they're wrong about and why they're wrong, etc.
I would definitely think this would be very topic-dependent.
Perhaps the flip side to this is to consider when (if ever) lies or mistruths are allowable. After all, a lie, believed sincerely, makes the believer 'wrong' about something. I can certainly think of things told to me by people I care about, that if they turned out to be lies, I wouldn't gain any utility or value from their revelation.
> Take courage and set out to write up the Great Discovery; if after many hours of red- hot thinking and writing you discover to your dismay a fatal flaw . . . all is not lost. Go back to the first paragraph and write something along the lines of “It is tempting to think that . . . ”
There was a nice thread on why Yann has put forward his theory of Autonomous AI. Somebody commented this is infact nice that now we have something concrete to work with, either to add, modify, delete elements from the theory. This is similar to Newton's method of approximation in numerical analysis. You start with initial guess (initial research paper) and then modify the original guess based on what worked and what didn't. Descartes got his original theory so wrong but Newton corrected it.
> if this novelty is worth understanding, somebody I trust will soon explain it to me in terms I can readily digest
That's unsound. It prevents learning anything which is not widely known and simply explained.
I don't know the author. All the context I have is the article up to that point where I lost interest. However yes, if all you try to learn are the trivial things everyone agrees on, for some circular definition of "wrong", you won't be wrong.
Bad strategy. High value are things few people know. Highest value are things people know to be true that are not so.
You've mistaken a heuristic for a formal argument, making your disinterest is a self-inflicted wound. Everyone uses heuristics to manage their precious, finite time. Sifting through ideas via academic prescreening and the clarity of their expression are excellent heuristics -- especially for a famous philosopher.
What value is something that only you know? The moment you act on these hidden bits of information you start leaking entropy that points back to the knowledge you keep.
Have you considered the possibility that you're wrong? Dan Dennett is one of the world's most renowned thinkers, and you would do well to take the broader lesson of his article to heart. Also look into Dunning and Kruger.
It is hysterical to me that there is this online "go to Dunning and Kruger in the total wrong context" heuristic that people who don't know anything about the subject spit out.
If you understood Dunning and Kruger you would not post this not to mention make a Daniel Dennett appeal to authority case.
What I notice more and more, is the "you're wrong" is used to buttress opinion masquerading as fact. If you preface "I think that.." to asserts it doesn't stop the "you're wrong" but it at least puts the discussion into the realms of conjecture about things, including facts, rather than simple asserts of facts which are often not as factual as they seem.
I also notice that argument by analogy is being over-used. Because you want to compare your large single CPU to a multi CPU doesn't mean it actually is a Bull compared to a herd of chickens. Or that cat-herding is actually much harder than it looks: you need the right kind of cream. Wait.. that analogy might not work here..