Comments by Dianelos Georgoudis
101. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #87158 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 11, 2007 at 11:11 am
Epeeist (post 126 or #86866):
How does my proposition above depend on idealism?It's true you can corroborate (most) proofs, but proofs are only formal production systems.This surely depends on whether you are an idealist or not.
Ah, that's a key question, isn't it? Maybe the key question; after all it makes little sense to debate whether a proposition is true or not without being clear what "truth" means. My understanding of truth is completely pragmatical. Let me think a little how to put in writing what I think about this important issue. Meanwhile, if you wish, it would be interesting if you explained what you mean by "truth".But you can't corroborate what counts which is the truthBesides all the other things you have been asked, and for which you have provided no evidence, could you also tell us what you mean by "truth"?
102. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #87153 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 11, 2007 at 10:58 am
Steve99 ( post 125 or #86857):
Well, the fact that scientific research today has become much more complex than it was even in the recent past, and that (on average) in order to excel today scientists must single-mindedly work their craft is I think common knowledge. Scientists' general disdain for philosophy is also well-known I think. Dawkins in his TGD couldn't help evidencing that when in some place he spoke of a "philosophical chestnut" (if I remember correctly).The greater the scientist today the more overspecialized they are, and therefore the more naive their understanding of the broader issues of philosophy is.This is a very big claim. Please provide evidence.
And you will find plenty of atheist modern philosophers, so that argument doesn't work either.You're making a good point there. I am not sure how to explain this phenomenon, but I think that philosophy, not being a hard science as it were, is more dependent on fashion than philosophers themselves recognize or like to concede – and most modern philosophers do appear to be awestruck by, not to mention infatuated (and maybe a little jealous) with science's success. In a book I am now reading a philosopher writes how it has become customary for philosophical papers to somewhere mention that their position is "naturalistic" as if to preclude any criticisms on this point. Indeed only a few decades ago you'd hardly find theistic philosophers in Western academia including in the US, but the tide appears to be already turning. One way or the other, there is clearly much noise in philosophy, but the better philosophical ideas will survive. Now my claim is that the existence of God is the better explanation for the whole of our experience of life, and therefore I predict that humanity as a whole will move towards that realization in the future. I think the modern atheist phenomenon will in the future be understood as a temporary reaction against religion's superstitious past and dogmatic nature. Indeed I find it probable that modern atheism will play a positive role by helping bring religion's many flaws to the surface which will force religious people to deal with them and clean up their house as it were. And new atheism's visibility will motivate scientific research about and I think falsification of some of its principal claims, namely that religious belief is conducive to immoral behavior and/or that atheism is conducive to moral behavior. We shall to wait and see.
103. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #87123 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 11, 2007 at 9:03 am
Dr Benway (post 122 or #86819):
Dianelos, you're too hung up on the distinction between phenomenal world and objective reality.Well, the distinction between phenomenal and objective reality is really basic in ontology. In the context of discussing ontology you telling me that I am too hung up on that distinction, is like telling a mathematician that they are too hung up on logic, or telling a physicist that they are too hung up on mathematics.
Try this: pretend that we're all talking about the phenomenal world. :-) It's kind of difficult to pretend that. After all when Dawkins in TGD claims that there is no God he is not making a claim about phenomenal reality, but about reality – which of course includes objective reality. Atheism is defined by an ontological belief, namely the belief that the objective reality that produces all phenomena in our experience does not contain a being with the properties of God.
We're all judging hypotheses by virtue of how well they explain phenomena.In the context of explaining physical phenomena I am a naturalist too.
You are closer to atheism than theism, with respect to explanations for phenomena.I am fully an atheist with respect to explanations for physical phenomena. I suppose any educated person today knows that there is no reason to doubt that all physical phenomena (including two of the remaining big problems of science, namely the origin of life and the origin of human intelligence) can be explained on purely physical/mechanical grounds.
But I am curious about how the objective reality which by definition produces these phenomena might be. And the hypothesis that objective reality too can be described on purely physical/mechanical grounds (namely the hypothesis of naturalism) turns out to be very problematic, which is a rather surprising and paradoxical turn of events. That's not just my opinion: several naturalist philosophers working today not only have written about these problems but are so convinced that these problems are unsolvable that they are already suggesting a change away from orthodox naturalism into some kind of more "pluralistic" naturalism, or, as in the case of David Chalmers a change into some kind of dualistic understanding of reality.
Trust me, we're more simpatico than those Christian Embassy blokes.Well, probably most of my friends are atheists. But here I am not looking for groovy intellectual team mates. Rather I find it instructive to discuss with atheists in order to better understand how they think, and to check and put my own thoughts in order.
Thanks for the link. "Christian supremacist warrior" is about as incongruous an expression as any I can think of.
104. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #87096 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 11, 2007 at 7:48 am
Steve99 (post 121 or #86776):
Mathematics is objective, but abstract. It does not require any substance for its existence, either physical or supernatural.So, if I understand you correctly, you believe that mathematical objects (such as numbers) exist objectively, but without any substance (either physical or supernatural). So, I wonder, where exactly in the universe are these objects?
Further, some mathematical objects are very complex, and according to Dawkins in TGD it's not good enough to say "they just are"; rather one must give a simple explanation for them. So how were they formed? Where to they come from?
105. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #87025 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 11, 2007 at 3:07 am
Steve99 (post 119 or #86731):
I am not sure what your prediction actually predicts, but no matter, let me give you the corresponding "prediction" of idealistic theism:And I would love to see any experimental predictions of scientific naturalism. Tell you what: For each experimental prediction of scientific naturalism you give me, I'll give you one experimental prediction of idealistic theism :-)OK, here is one: The orbit of planets around other suns can be explained entirely by theories of gravity. No pushing by angels required.
The orbits of the planets around the sun which are present in our conscious experience can be explained entirely by theories of gravity. No pushing of objectively existing planets by an objectively existing gravity required. And no explanation about how an objectively existing gravity actually manages to push these objectively existing planets around. You may ask: What then pushes the planets? The answer is: The movement of the planets as observed in our conscious experience is directly caused by God. You may further ask: How does God manage to push our conscious experience in this way? The answer is: Roughly in the same way that physical gravity manages to push physical planets around :-)
106. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #87023 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 11, 2007 at 2:53 am
BMMcArdle (post 117 or #86727):
Time permitting, will you answer the three yes-or-no questions I submitted?OK, here you go:
Were you Baptised?Yes (even though I don't understand your capital "B" :-)
Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?I know that wording is a big deal in some Evangelical circles but I have no idea what it actually means. Let me rephrase it the closest I think I can come to that question: Do you believe that the second hypostasis of God (which Christians call "Jesus Christ") is the path towards God (which path Christians call "salvation")? Yes.
Do you believe in The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost?Yes.
107. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #87018 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 11, 2007 at 2:24 am
Steve99 ( post 115 or #86720
First of all I see now my wording above is ambiguous. I meant : "What we are discussing is scientific naturalism's growing pains for accounting for the objective reality that produces the phenomenal reality that science is so well mapping." I will edit the original post. As for me inventing problems I don't think that's true; after all I learned about scientific naturalism's problems by reading books written by scientific naturalists: mainly scientists discussing what scientific knowledge implies about objective reality. As for idealistic theism having the same problems, we've been over that already: A worldview that posits that fundamentally reality is physical has to explain how a physical system produces consciousness; but obviously a worldview that posits that fundamentally reality is conscious does not have this particular problem. I am not sure why you have trouble understanding this, and I don't know how better to explain it.What we are discussing is scientific naturalism's growing pains for accounting for the phenomenal reality that science is so well mapping. Which, incidentally, is not even the primary problem of scientific naturalism; its primary problem is the transcendental argument we have been discussing in this thread.No, the primary problem is that you are inventing problems as an excuse for supernaturalism. And, the problems you invent are still there in supernaturalism.
I was not discussing the holes of science but the holes of scientific naturalism. Steve feel free to keep conflating science with scientific naturalism, but the fact that I, being an idealistic theist, can agree with every single sentence written in a scientific or technological book, not to mention that theists are winning today the Nobel price in physics, belies your belief that science and scientific naturalism are the same thing or that the former implies the latter.Oh I see: The more holes and paradoxes the better, eh?Absolutely! That is what is such fun about science! We aren't going to sit around all smug like you with the 'God did it' answer for everything.
We are talking about the positive existence of something objective. If something actually exists, and is objective, you should be able to prove its existence.Prove then the objective existence of the moon. Or of the Statue of Liberty if you prefer.
108. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #87013 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 11, 2007 at 2:00 am
Epeeist (post 114 or #86718
The great physical theories of the 20th century (GR, QM and QFT) provide a convincing view of reality though it is obvious that they are not complete.What you write here is factually true if by "reality" you mean "phenomenal reality", but is factually false if by "reality" you mean "objective reality". As far as objective reality goes the great physical theories of the 20th century have falsified many of the previous intuitions of how physical reality is and have left scientific naturalists more perplexed not to mention more in mutual disagreement than in any other time in history. It's a deeply paradoxical situation: One would have expected the opposite, namely that the better we understand the mechanical nature of physical phenomena the more unequivocal and objective our knowledge about the underlying physical reality would become. But it has not played out this way and right now scientific naturalists cannot even agree whether the visible universe is the only one or if there are 10^100+ other universes, or whether physical reality is deterministic or not, etc. And I haven't even mentioned the mind-body problem. Of course a scientific naturalist may hope that the situation will somehow change in the future, but there is no sign of that happening, and there are good philosophical reasons why such hope is doomed.
If you wish to counter this with another theory then the burden of proof is on you to show where the failures are and what your theory can do that is better. None of this you have done (or even got close to).But I have done that in the McGrath thread: I offered idealistic theism as a much more successful ontological theory than scientific naturalism.
Similarly with your claim for "objective morality". You have been shown that different cultures and different times have different sets of behaviours. You claim that the "moral zeitgeist is improving" but offer no evidence that this is because of the existence of objective morality.That the moral Zeitgeist is improving is not specifically my claim; it is one of the basic claims of New Atheism with which I happen to agree.
You offer no way that objective morality could be recognised. You haven't even managed to show that even if it existed objective morality would have a religious basis.I disagree. If one accepts that objective reality is intrinsically ethical it is tantamount to adopting a religious ontology. Even more I think one adopts a theistic worldview, because the concept of ethics makes no sense at the absence of conscious subject, and therefore ethics as an intrinsic aspect of the whole of reality makes no sense without a conscious subject as an intrinsic aspect of the whole of reality.
109. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86852 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 10, 2007 at 10:11 am
Dr Benway (post 111 or #86599)
Just to riff on your point: "objective" being operationally defined as "that which can be corroborated." Mathematical proofs can be corroborated just as physical events can be corroborated.Doesn't work I think. It's true you can corroborate (most) proofs, but proofs are only formal production systems. But you can't corroborate what counts which is the truth of some mathematical propositions, for example that there is no greatest prime number, nor that (10^1000)*(10^1000)=10^2000. Neither can you corroborate physical events such as the Big Bang or macroevolution. Neither can you corroborate scientific propositions such as that all metals melt at some temperature. Our path to knowledge is much more complex (and indirect) than "corroboration".
I think that you as well as Dawkins display the kind of thinking illustrated by the saying "to a hammer everything looks like a nail". You are a doctor and just because in medicine all claims can be corroborated you imagine that this is a general principle. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and just because Darwinism explains organized complexity based on a simple principle he imagines that all explanations must be like that. In general I think this kind of attitude nicely explains the modern phenomenon that the greater the scientist the less probably they believe in God: The greater the scientist today the more overspecialized they are, and therefore the more naive their understanding of the broader issues of philosophy is.
We don't need to take a metaphysical stand regarding the ultimate nature of reality in order to corroborate evidence. The world may be "physical" or it may behave as if it were physical. No matter.True, in the sense that you don't need any methaphysics in order to cure a patient or build an airplane, or in order to explain the organized complexity of the species or why the sky is blue. On the other hand we all do methaphysics in the sense that we all have some beliefs about how objective reality is, even though, as you say, whatever these beliefs may be does not matter at all in many contexts. On the other hand they do matter in how we think about ourselves, and indeed in how we decide to live our lives – which of course affects not only us but other people and nature in general too. How much these beliefs affect us and our environment is debatable, but I tend to agree with Sam Harris that the influence of our ontological beliefs is not insignificant.
110. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86763 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 10, 2007 at 5:35 am
Apaeter (post 109 or #86407)
The thing is, you are actually asserting the existence of a supernatural, universal reality on which human knowledge is contingent, and the supernatural part is just gratuitous.I have not used the term "supernatural" in the post you are responding to, so I wonder what do you mean when you say "supernatural"?
Perhaps we can understand supernaturalism by contrasting it to naturalism. Now naturalism itself is a somehow vague concept. In general naturalism is understood as the claim that the various concepts used by the natural sciences (such as electrons, spacetime being curved by mass, natural evolution, etc) not only refer to parts of reality (both objective and phenomenal) but also exhaust it, i.e. that all parts of reality are now or can in principle be described but concepts of the natural sciences. (Which, incidentally, entails that knowledge about them is to be gained by using the scientific method). An even stronger version of naturalism claims that all meaningful propositions are or can be reduced to propositions of natural science. All versions of naturalism are contingent on the natural sciences, and hence one often speaks of "scientific naturalism". Supernaturalism then can be understood as the negation of naturalism, namely as the weaker claim that there are meaningful propositions that cannot be reduced to propositions of natural science, or the stronger claim that there are parts of objective reality that cannot be described by the concepts of the natural sciences.
As I have long here argued (with little apparent success it seems) all forms of scientific naturalism are deeply problematic. For example how the color green looks like is part of reality, but the natural sciences have no way to describe or investigate it, simply because the natural sciences are circumscribed by the scientific method which only uses objective observations, and how the color green looks like is subjective. Or, to mention another example, the stronger version of scientific naturalism would render even mathematical propositions meaningless, and the weaker version would place mathematical objects and laws in the realm of the non-objective opposing the deepest intuitions of the mathematicians.
Finally I would like to mention a popular understanding of naturalism as the claim that all physical phenomena that can be investigated scientifically can also (at least in principle) be explained by the natural sciences. This claim is about phenomenal reality only, and as such can easily be accepted by theists also. In my mind it's a pretty incontrovertible claim; under that latter definition I am a naturalist also.
it seems to me that things like a changing zeitgeist, changing physical models, the waning and waxing of compassion or hate in our societies, and so on, against the backdrop of "the universe" seem to lend more support to the notion of human constructs.I am not sure how you mean that, as all knowledge (or to be precise knowledge-claims) are "human constructs". The question at hand is whether ethical claims (which are all human constructs) should be understood as subjective or objective, i.e. referring only to a state of human minds or to also refer to some part of reality that is independent of human minds.
[Love] just doesn't make any sense outside of human interaction.I am afraid you are begging the question here, as you assume the truth of scientific naturalism. If scientific naturalism is false and theism is true then love makes eminent sense outside of human interaction.
The whole argument against scientific naturalism reminds me of a teenager who just saw The Matrix for the first time, or a student who heard his first philo 101 lecture. "Hey dude, did you know that nothing is real?! It's all an illusion."Actually the Matrix movie is very useful because it helps people visualize the difference between phenomenal and objective reality (which in the movie are called the "matrix" and the "real world" respectively). Now that distinction was well known and well understood by philosophers from Plato to Russell. What impresses me is that even after that movie, and after all my arguments in this forum, people still reject my obvious claim that "strictly speaking science only models physical phenomena". But of course the scientists in the Matrix are not investigating the real world. Now at this juncture somebody might argue that the Matrix movie is science fiction and that reality is not like that movie describes – but that argument misses the point.
The point is this: If scientific naturalism is true then consciousness can be produced by some physical system. But then it is possible (with some finite probability) that our consciousness is produced by an objective reality (the Matrix, a computer simulation, whatever) which is entirely different from the phenomenal world we in fact observe around us, (i.e. that all we observe around as is an illusion as you put it). But if the phenomenal world that science studies is entirely different from objective reality then scientific naturalism is false. So in short, the premise that scientific naturalism is true implies that scientific naturalism may be false. Which is yet another way to point out the intrinsic incoherence of scientific naturalism: it's kind of self-negating.
111. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86729 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 10, 2007 at 3:12 am
Steve99 (post 101 or #86318)
I would love to see any experimental predictions of idealistic theism.And I would love to see any experimental predictions of scientific naturalism. Tell you what: For each experimental prediction of scientific naturalism you give me, I'll give you one experimental prediction of idealistic theism :-)
112. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86723 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 10, 2007 at 2:59 am
Goldy (post 95 or #86233
DG, do you not answer some questions because they are too hard for you or do you just ignore persistent people who ask awkward questions?Neither. Time permitting I try to comment on posts I find interesting.
113. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86711 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 10, 2007 at 2:36 am
Steve99 (post 75, or #86169):
Indeed our knowledge of the phenomenal reality that science studies has vastly increased, and one would expect that therefore our knowledge about the objective reality that produces phenomenal reality would become more sharp and unequivocal. But for those who believe in scientific naturalism exactly the opposite has happened: the more we learn about phenomenal reality the less unequivocal and the more shaky their understanding of objective reality has become. Indeed, as we saw, the number and size of holes is increasing. So what's factually happening is the opposite of what one would expect if scientific naturalism were true.And what's worse it's also a fact that both the number and the size of the holes is growing; at the beginning of the 20th century when science was still classical the situation was much better than now, but since then scientific discoveries have pushed scientific naturalism into an ever shaky place - which is a problem for scientific naturalism but not for science of course which is doing just splendidly. So scientific naturalism does not look good at all right now.Nonsense. The reason why there is more unexplained (like fine tuning) is that the area that science is studying has vastly increased.
Your argument is like suggesting we abandon the use of maps because we don't have any knowledge of the geography of newly discovered planet Gliese 581.Perhaps you are suggesting a good analogy here: Phenomenal reality is like the surface of a planet, which science maps. Objective reality is like the not directly visible underground of that planet which accounts for that planet's surface and which ontology tries to map. Now there is school of ontology called X such that the more unequivocal the scientific maps of that planet's surface become the less unequivocal its maps for that planets underground become. I am saying this fact is reason to doubt that X is true; but you say that what's happening is on the contrary what one should expect. So, tell me, if science in the future keeps producing more and more unequivocal maps of phenomenal reality, do you expect scientific naturalism to keep producing less and less unequivocal maps of objective reality?
I am afraid science isn't going to stand still, and restrict its areas of study until you are happy that there are no gaps left in our understanding!It's interesting to observe how you keep trying to toss scientific naturalism's problems onto science's lap. We are not discussing any problems of science here; very obviously science is doing splendidly well. What we are discussing is scientific naturalism's growing pains for accounting for the objective reality that produces the phenomenal reality that science is so well mapping. Which, incidentally, is not even the primary problem of scientific naturalism; its primary problem is the transcendental argument we have been discussing in this thread.
What is happening is simply splendid for scientific naturalism - it has opened up whole new vistas of areas for exploration.Oh I see: The more holes and paradoxes the better, eh? I think there is this fable by Aesop of the cat that lost its tail in an accident, and then went around claiming that lacking a tail is the pinnacle of elegance.
I hope you are joking. I find the trick of pushing the burden the proof around to be shameful, because reason requires one justify all claims no matter their form (and I approvingly notice that Dawkins in his TGD at least did not shy away from trying to justify his belief in the non-existence of a creator God). But let me play this childish game and change my claim into: "No subjective ethical concepts exist". That's a negative existential claim and I don't need to justify it, correct? And if you disagree with it and claim that subjective ethical concepts exist it's you who have the "burden of proof".As I said, that's perfectly fine. But what happens in our discussion is significantly different, for it goes like this:Tsk. Epeeist has told you off about this before. You are the one claiming something positively exists, not me. I want evidence for your positive assertion that ethical precepts are objective. You are asserting the existence of something. Prove it.
Dianelos: "Some ethical precepts at least are objective – it's obvious".
Steve: "Sorry, no ethical precepts are objective".
Dianelos: "So, where's the evidence for that?" (see my post #85462 above)
Steve: "--"
114. Christopher Hitchens at AAI 07
Comment #86414 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 9, 2007 at 7:12 am
Philip1978 (post 229, or #86047):
You object to my claim "Also, contrary to what most people think, there is no reason to believe that consciousness itself is produced by the brain", but I didn't just claim that: In post 226 (or #86033) I justified that claim giving a specific argument. Is there anything in that argument you disagree with or don't understand? Or you agree with it but would rather trust the "cleverest brain specialists on this earth" as you write?
Incidentally it's not true that the cleverest people who are studying consciousness are certain that consciousness is produced by the brain. What is rather happening is that the state of the art knowledge about these matters has not found its way to popular understanding. That's why I have so often insisted that people should study the issues, rather than follow Dawkins into the delusion that everything is basically neat and clear and that only a moron would believe that reality is not as scientific naturalism paints it. (Scientific naturalism is the belief that science not only describes physical phenomena but also the whole of objective reality.) Well, it's really not that simple.
So here is my evidence about what the cleverest brain specialists believe: Susan Blackmore has written a book about her interviews with some 20 of the most knowledgeable people who have studied consciousness - to my knowledge all of them atheists by the way. The book is appropriately titled "Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What it Means to Be Human". One question she asked everyone is what they believe happens to consciousness after death. Now if somebody believes that the brain produces consciousness then the only possible answer is that consciousness is destroyed after death simply because after death one's brain is destroyed. Well, it turns out that about half of the people she asked did not answer this, but rather expressed agnosticism about what happens to our consciousness after death. Sam Harris in his "The End of Faith" is quite concise and writes: "The idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present, and there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient to either prove or disprove it".
So if it's more or less well known that the belief that the brain produces consciousness is not based on anything very solid, your challenge for me to write a peer reviewed thesis about this makes little sense. It's not like I am claiming something new.
115. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #86385 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 9, 2007 at 5:56 am
BMMcArdle (post 223, or #85965):
Is the Bible the basis for your Christian worldview?No. The human condition, or in other words how it is like to be a human being, is the basis for my theistic worldview. Which worldview, incidentally, I also call Christian mainly because its ethics is Christian. The specific ontological claims about the nature of Jesus of Nazareth are secondary for me.
116. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #86381 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 9, 2007 at 5:46 am
Dr Benway (post 222, or #85784):
Back to #1: Negotiation works like this: I say what I want, you say what you want. Where we're in conflict, we look for compromises. "Might make right" means you do what I say. No negotiation necessary.I think you are imagining some ideal world, but not the world in which live. Reality is that in many cases one party does have the might over the other. So should that party negotiate with the weaker party and take into account its wishes or not? If not then it's about might and not about right, so we don't have any ethics. But if you think that the strong party ought to negotiate with the weaker party even though it doesn't need to, then on what standards do you base this ethical precept?
117. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #86378 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 9, 2007 at 5:38 am
Clodhopper (post 220, or #85763):
So morality is independent of God and he is bound by it, or morality is intrinsic to God's nature. From whence comes this knowledge about the nature of God?See post 230, or #86373 in this very page.
118. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #86375 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 9, 2007 at 5:36 am
Timnea (post 216, or #85747):
If you don't stone adulterers you've transcended gods command. How did you do it?That's a strange question to ask a Christian. After all there is in the gospels the story with the adulteress whose stoning was stopped by Jesus who pointed out that we should not punish people for their errors, and, of course, at the same time made clear that we should not follow the Old Testament's commands just because they are written there.
Also, as far as I am concerned, there is no such thing as "God's commands", see about this post 212 or #85738 in this very page.
119. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #86373 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 9, 2007 at 5:22 am
Goldy (post 208, or #85728):
What does God say about the treatment of animals? Or indeed natureAs far as ethics is concerned this is not the right question. Why not? Because, to put it mildly, the vast majority of people do not hear God speak, so the vast majority of people must find a different way to know what the right thing to do is. The right question then is: What behavior towards animals and towards nature would bring me closer to God, in the sense of changing my character to be more similar to God's character? This process of interior improvement (which Christians call "salvation" and Buddhists "illumination") is the very meaning of life. But the question remains: How do we know what kind of actions make our character more similar to God's? Well the answer is this: We are all, theists and non-theists alike, made in the image of God. In the same way that a seed is similar to the tree it can grow to be. We are meant to grow towards God, it's in the very structure of our human condition. So the answer to that question is: by studying ourselves, by studying how we are built, by studying our humanity. (So ultimately there is not really any difference between religious and humanist ethics.)
Now in history there were people who managed to do this much better than others around them, and taught some basic principles of ethics. These are people like Socrates, or Buddha, or Jesus. And how do we know that what they taught was right? Because it kind of resonates with how we ourselves are built. So even though we have some trouble hearing the music inside (what Quakers call the small still voice), when we listen to others playing the right music we recognize it. Reading for example the ethics of Jesus one can't help recognizing its truth; even Dawkins in his article "Atheists for Jesus" evidences that common experience. So, we are not completely alone in our discovery of objective ethics, but can count on the help of the insight of other people. Which is good: the road to salvation need not be a solitary one.
Having clarified how I think about all that, what is the best answer I can specifically give to your question? Well, the right way to behave towards animals and towards nature in general is one of respect, for they are all part of God's creation. Very certainly they are not to be exploited. I personally think that to eat animals (especially mammals) is wrong, as it is to exploit nature purely for our own comfort marring the beauty of the Earth in the process. Nature can be used but is not to be violated. I think one thing we should definitely be doing is to limit our numbers and leave space for other species to thrive. I don't think Earth's ecosystem can support more than about one billion humans, and we are already seven.
What sort of people do you hang around with?Mostly atheists I think. I am not a "religious" religious person in the sense of regularly going to church, keeping all the rules (fasting etc), preach to others trying to save their souls, and so on, so many of my acquaintances are not aware how deeply religious I am. And it's sometimes funny how embarrassed they get (for my sake) when I happen to mention that I believe in God. But I am really interested in understanding the mindset of the convinced atheist, and I find that discussing with acquaintances about religion is far less efficient for that than participating in a forum like this one.
I ask this only because you appear to equate atheism with blind indifference, with automation, with a mindless stimulus/response behaviour.No, and I hope I have never given that impression. I only argued that atheism when allowed to dominate one's ethical reasoning will tend to push people towards indifference for others. In the vast majority of cases though I think atheists allow their ethical intuitions (or feelings if you like) to dominate their ethical reasoning. Sometimes though, as in the case of Hitchens, I think atheism's ethical logic raises its ugly head and comes to the surface. I have found it painful to watch how he apparently feels the need to justify why he donates blood, pointing out that it makes him feel good and that furthermore he is not really losing anything because the donated blood is quickly replenished.
Which is not to say that there isn't some ugly theistic ethical logic too. I was flabbergasted to recently read an article by well-known apologist William Craig where he tries to justify God's supposed command to kill all Canaanites arguing thus: "So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged?".
(see http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5767 )
120. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86231 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Dr Benway (post 82, or #86200):
Your hunt for "objective morality" is akin to treating me like a rock. "Objective morality" is your effort to moot my subjectivity.Now that I know you are a gal I understand your sentiment there very well. I have read "Man are from Mars, Women are from Venus" and I know that a typical male mistake is to question a woman's feelings. And, being an idealist, I have absolutely no problem with that: feelings, after all, lie for me at the very foundation of objective reality :-)
But to answer your argument: People are clearly part of reality [1]. To consider that morality is objective does not imply to overlook other peoples' feelings or wishes or well-being by blindly following some absolute ethical rule. Quite the contrary: Objective ethics implies that there is an objective relation between what is (e.g. people) and what I should do (that can affect other people, myself included), an objective relation that I must try to discover and which is not just a matter of personal taste or else of social conditioning I might decide is not to my taste also. So, my belief in objective ethics forces me to be much more respectful of other persons and careful about ethics. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding here: The premise that ethics is objective does not in any way imply that there are absolute ethical rules. It implies that what is ethical is not ultimately only a matter of personal opinion, but is contingent on something that is objectively real out there and which one must then take into account. It implies that there is after all a way to go from is to ought.
[1] In fact for a theist all persons are the very crown of creation, they are intrinsic and foundational parts of objective reality (and I am not saying this just as an idealist).
121. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86227 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Bonzai (post 76, or #86174):
[You] keep saying science doesn't explain this or that.I have never said that. Actually just after the bit you quoted I wrote: "but since then scientific discoveries have pushed scientific naturalism into an ever shaky place - which is a problem for scientific naturalism but not for science of course which is doing just splendidly." I am getting used to being misread :-( But you know, I think it makes little sense responding to posts that are the result of not actually trying to understand what the other person is thinking.
For others who may be reading this, I apologize for the bolds, I was just so angry reading this guy's smug, endless drivels that I almost lost it.Well, if you feel that way that's one more reason it probably makes little sense responding to your posts.
122. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86221 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 6:41 pm
BaronOchs (post 73, or #86164):
Does it basically boil down to we have to accept theism (actually it would be deism) or epistemological relativism, if we failed to refute the transcendental argument? Of course epistemological relativism may be the correct way to go in this case, it would avoid several problems we would still face in accepting deism.I am not sure about epistemological relativism; it seems to me that it only says that - very strictly speaking - all beliefs are subjective. On the other hand let's be pragmatical: clearly some ideas work and some don't. To answer your question I think that if scientific naturalism fails to refute the transcendental argument then reason will require a shift of paradigm, a shift not necessarily to theism but certainly to a less closed ontology. Which I think is a good thing: Scientific naturalism is just too limited and works as a mental straightjacket. Whether theism is true or not, I think by now is quite clear that reality is more interesting than how scientific naturalism paints it. I think the movement away from scientific naturalism would be faster if it weren't for the general infatuation with science and the fear of saying something that could be construed as being unscientific. But in fact scientific realism is not scientific – on the contrary I think it's a misapplication of science.
123. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86217 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Dr Benway (post 69, or #86140):
Some theists believe in god(s) that exist in the material world - e.g., Jesus, Elvis, Cesaer, Kim Jong il.Leaving the nonsense cases out I would like to comment that some Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the incarnation of God, which is of course quite different than saying that God exists in the material world.
Some theists are materialists.Hardly. Materialism postulates that only material things exist and no theist would say that God is a material thing. I suppose the vast majority of theists are dualists, believing in the objective existence of both matter and spirit. A small sprinkling are idealists ;-)
124. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86214 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Bonzai (post 68, or #86138):
I didn't assume anything, just stating the fact that humans and human civilization emerged as a result of a long chain of apparently accidental events.And that's exactly the assumption you are making. For theism humans and human civilization have emerged as a result of personal will – there is nothing accidental, apparent or not, in that process. The physical universe is at best the substrate in which such personal will has acted, and physical events are at best the objectively observable results of such personal will.
I know that the theistic worldview is not easy to understand; I am fully aware of how deep and intuitive the roots of a mechanical understanding of reality are, especially in our time and age and especially among educated people.
If it weren't for the meteorites that killed the dinosaurs and the various geological and climate changes and accompanied mass extinctions that permitted the evolution of homo-sapients and their rise through the food chain there wouldn't be any human civilization. This is fact.This is a corollary of scientific naturalism, but this does not make it a fact you know. Hmm, I think I see the problem, so let me try to clarify what I mean:
Strictly speaking science only models physical phenomena. But up to the beginning of the 20th century and while physics was classical it was reasonable to believe that science also models reality, in other words it was reasonable to conflate the modeling of phenomena with the modeling of reality. So, for example, when Newton developed his mechanics, gravitational force fields were understood both as a model that describes gravitational phenomena and as a model that describes reality: people believed that gravitational force fields form part of objective reality. All that changed with non-classical physics which has forced us to realize that modeling phenomena and modeling reality are two very different projects, the former being scientific and the latter ontological. So today we have one scientific model of quantum phenomena, namely quantum mechanics, but a whole series of mutually contradictory models of a physical reality that could produce these phenomena, namely the various so-called interpretations of quantum mechanics. Still, what is by now rather obvious to a physicist, namely that models of phenomena and models of reality are two completely different things, is not a realization that has reached the typical evolutionary biologists. So the evolutionary biologist still conflates scientific models with ontological models, and believes that the models which we have constructed for describing the order that is objectively there in the physical phenomena we observe (in this case the organized complexity of the species), also model objective reality. So the typical evolutionary biologist believes that natural evolution not only successfully models the evolution of the organized complexity of the species, but also describes how the organized complexity of the species actually came to be in objective reality.
So what is scientific naturalism? It is the idea that we actually should conflate scientific models with ontological models. In other words, scientific naturalism is the hypothesis that objective reality is such that science's models of physical phenomena also model the objective reality that produces these phenomena. When confronted with the fact that there is an actually growing number of deeply contradictory models of quantum reality the scientific naturalist simply responds that one of them will in the end be shown to be the correct one. But neither scientific naturalism is a fact, nor its implications are facts, as it seems you believe. Indeed scientific naturalism, which until a few decades ago enjoyed complete dominance among atheist philosophers, is now seen as rather shaky and some are already distancing themselves from it.
125. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86197 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Apaeter (post 66, or #86118):
It seems to me like you are saying (1) that because things like logic, morality, maths, science, etc. are human constructs, they can give no valid contributions to the question of what "reality" (really) is?No, that's definitely not what I am saying. I believe that logic, math, science, and indeed morality too, are all objective, and hence are not human constructs. We discover true logical, mathematical, scientific, and moral propositions; sometimes it's difficult, there is some disagreement, it's a work in progress, but there is something objective out there that these true propositions refer to.
That they have no ontological value.On the contrary, I think they do have ontological value; when true they represent facts about objective reality.
126. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86194 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Peacebeuponme (post 65, or #86093):
I don't think so. You see the criterion you suggest is utilitarianism (i.e. to increase the overall happiness), but utilitarianism does not work: To kill a terminally ill patient in order to harvest her organs and save the life of five people does clearly increase overall happiness but is clearly not better than not killing her.What I am saying is that it is overwhelmingly obvious to me that to help somebody in need is better than to instead torture them for fun, and that this is true not because of personal opinion or social convention (and hence is objectively true).Better how? Against what criteria? Better for them because they don't get tortured. Better for you because of the warm feelings you get from helping them. That's it.
So, better how? Against what criterion? My answer will not make much sense to a non-theist I am afraid, but here it is anyway: Actions change the person who makes them: good actions make them better and bad actions make them worse. So the criterion of moral act is how it changes the person who makes it. But against what criterion does a person become a better person? The criterion here is how that change brings a person's character closer to God's character.
127. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86182 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Dr Benway (post 63, or #86068):
Well, Harris and Dawkins agree with me. Do you really think that the moral Zeitgeist is not improving?Dianelos: The moral Zeitgeist is clearly improving.Those who agree with you would agree with you.
The statements above, including yours, are objective facts about the speakers. They are not objective facts concerning the moral zeitgeist,I understand what you are saying. But at least I believe that the moral Zeitgeist is objectively improving, i.e. that there is an improvement there whatever I may think about it. For me it's not a matter of personal taste like saying I like this type of coffee more than another. This is not a trivial difference: Should you answer my question above saying that you think the moral Zeitgeist is not improving I would seriously worry about your cognitive faculties. But should you claim that flavored coffee tastes better to you than a well roasted Columbian coffee I would only think that we have very different taste in coffee.
128. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86166 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Shuggy (post62, or #86043):
You posit a universe in which some theical being (an expression I just made up, for the sake of all the transcendental theists who aren't christian and won't call it "God"), some theical being is intrinsic, part of the structure, and therefore doesn't require proving.Two comments: First of all feel free to call God "God" when writing in English. Monotheists may disagree about some of the properties of God, but what name one uses is entirely immaterial. Actually "Allah" is the name of God in Arabic, the same way that "Gott" is God's name in German, "Theos" in Greek, "Yahweh" in Hebrew, and so on. Secondly, that God is the deepest structure of objective reality does not imply that God does not require proving; quite the contrary in fact. If it's true that God is the deepest structure of objective reality then all sentient beings of sufficient intelligence (whose experience is by definition produced by that reality) should be able to discover this deepest structure of reality in their experience. Being the deepest structure God is not as obvious as most superficial structures present in our experience, e.g. apples or physical laws, but if God is there then His/er presence should be reachable by thinking about the whole of our experience.
Einsteinians/deists do much the same but they don't call it theism. The problem is that such a being can't do anything or it becomes part of the naturalistic universe and its existence may be called into question.You have no idea how strange that sounds in my ears. God is supposed to have created us and the whole of our experiential environment, including our observation of the physical universe and all its orderly behavior, and to sustain all of that every single instance of our lives – and you call that God not "doing" anything :-)
Perhaps you mean that God does not interfere with the physical order (which is true; at the very least it's clear that God does not interfere with the natural order in any regular way that we can objectively detect). But then why exactly should God regularly interfere with the order God Him/Herself has created and continuously sustains? Isn't it reasonable to think that God has created and sustains that order for some good reason? But if there is a good reason for that order, why exactly should God be breaking that order all the time?
So am I saying that God does not interact with us in any way at all? That God is an absentee landlord (as deism has it)? Not at all. You see our objective observations of the physical universe around us represent only part of our experience of life. Another part, indeed the specifically human part, is our subjective experience of life: how it is like to be a human being. It is in that part of our experience of life where our discourse with God takes place.
129. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86157 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Steve99 (post 60, or #85768):
No, scientific naturalism is full of holes as a matter of fact: it cannot account for the apparent fine-tuning of the fundamental constants, it cannot account for free will, it cannot account for consciousness, it cannot account for objective ethics, it cannot account for intentionality (in the philosophical sense), and, what's amazing, it cannot even produce a converging description of how objective reality is (scientific naturalists cannot even agree whether there is one or many physical universes, whether physical reality is deterministic or not, whether the wavefunction is real or not, whether an electron moving from point A to B in between passes through all points in the universe or not, and so and so forth; arguably it cannot even produce a logically coherent description of reality). These are facts. And what's worse it's also a fact that both the number and the size of the holes is growing; at the beginning of the 20th century when science was still classical the situation was much better than now, but since then scientific discoveries have pushed scientific naturalism into an ever shaky place - which is a problem for scientific naturalism but not for science of course which is doing just splendidly. So scientific naturalism does not look good at all right now. But of course a scientific naturalist may hope that somehow some day all these holes will be closed. To me this looks like wishful thinking. But we have time, we shall see.Scientific naturalism is so full of paradoxes and holes that even atheist philosophers are deserting itNo, let's get this right. You personally want and believe that it is full of holes,
I did not say that all atheist philosophers now think that scientific naturalism is wrong, so you are rejecting something I did not claim. As for David Chalmers he has already walked away from scientific naturalism as we know it; he now argues that we must transform science to accept subjective evidence as scientific evidence too. I agree with his project, but think that this new epistemology should not be called science, for it seems to me that the concept of science entails objectivity.so why exactly should I care to renounce beliefs I find completely obvious just in order to maintain the viability of an ontology that even knowledgeable atheists think is wrong?Firstly, "atheists philosophers" aren't deserting it. Such a general statement is clearly rubbish. Daniel Dennett is an atheist philosopher, and he is not deserting scientific naturalism. David Chalmers is an atheistic philosopher and he is not deserting scientific naturalism. Just because you can find some who are, does not mean this is general.
Let's imagine someone, call them Danny, who starts off with the idea that what is obvious is a guide to what is true:As I said, that's perfectly fine. But what happens in our discussion is significantly different, for it goes like this:
Danny: "The Earth is flat - obvious"
Geographer: "Sorry round - here is the evidence"
Dianelos: "Some ethical precepts at least are objective – it's obvious".
Steve: "Sorry, no ethical precepts are objective".
Dianelos: "So, where's the evidence for that?" (see my post #85462 above)
Steve: "--"
It's an appeal to numbers for justifying that a belief is "huge" not that a belief is "true". Perhaps you wish retract your claim that I believe that something is true because many people believe in it.I never claimed that something is true because so many people believe in it, and I defy you to find one quote of mine which says that, or can be construed as saying that.Here you go:
"To claim that no objective morality exists, against what appears to be absolutely obvious to virtually everybody, is the huge claim."
That is an appeal to numbers.
What I actually wrote is this: "as Nick Herbert says: 'One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality'". I have no idea how you could construe this as saying that Nick Herbert does not believe in objective reality.I too believe in an objective world, and I am surprised you write that only "most" modern physicists believe in it. Can you tell me of one modern physicist who does not believe in an objective reality?But hold on a minute. Didn't you mention someone? Ah yes - Nick Herbert.
Steve it's very difficult to have a meaningful discussion with somebody who consistently misreads what one writes: "true" is different from "huge"; "to lose grip of X" is different from "to believe X does not exist"; "even atheist philosophers" is different from "all atheist philosophers", "you can't falsify that black holes exist" is different from "you can't falsify that black holes do not exist".
130. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #86041 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 8, 2007 at 12:22 am
Epeeist (post 57, or #85474):
No, I can't, my cryptic friend.Well, it seems that even though it sounds very good in theory it does not work in the practice of real world science, because in many cases whether a particular objective observation does or does not falsify a particular theory depends on a series of assumptions which themselves are not experimentally verifiable.Can you not see the glaring hole in this?
Sure, so? Do you object to either of them being scientific? Do you see any way that either of them can be falsified?Also, valid scientific statements such as "black holes exist" or "all metals melt at some temperature" cannot be falsified.These are two different types of statement.
Back to logic 101Speaking in riddles again. I don't mind you pointing out some logical mistake I committed (God knows I am not infallible :-) but to just claim I committed a logical mistake is worthless.
Finally - on objective morality. Given the changing ethos of individual societies (we no longer consider slavery or ritual murder and cannibalism acceptable) and the differences between societies (in the UK women are accepted as the equals of men, in other societies they are only worth half a man) then we are justified in contingently assuming that there is no such thing as objective morality.First of all, we not only observe a changing of the moral Zeitgeist, but an overall changing towards a better state. I assume you are saying that the UK is morally better now than other countries as far as the rights of women go, and that you agree that the UK is morally better now than it was 100 years ago before the emancipation of British women. The moral Zeitgeist is clearly improving; Dawkins in his TGD makes a big deal of that. Now consider a case where you and I agree that objectivity exists: physics. We agree that physical laws are there whether we have discovered them or not, so they are objective. And the state of our knowledge of physics shows a constant improvement towards a (perhaps unreachable) state of perfection. So the fact that the moral Zeitgeist is clearly improving too, far from evidencing that morality is not objective, evidences that it is.
But that's not my point really. What I am saying is that it is overwhelmingly obvious to me that to help somebody in need is better than to instead torture them for fun, and that this is true not because of personal opinion or social convention (and hence is objectively true). Now, as Steve insists, no matter how obvious something may seem, we must always be prepared to change a belief if sufficient contrary evidence is found. Further we all agree that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and to claim that to help somebody in need is not necessarily better than to torture them but is just a matter of opinion - this is certainly a very extraordinary claim. So, where's the extraordinary evidence that would move me to change my belief that this ethical precept is objective? But if not sufficient contrary evidence is forthcoming - indeed if no evidence at all is forthcoming (except that this is entailed in an ontology I anyway think is false) - then reason requires me to believe in what seems to me to be overwhelmingly obvious, don't you agree?
Here is an analogy: You, Steve, and I find it overwhelmingly obvious that there is an objective reality out there (we only disagree about how that reality actually is). Now suppose a solipsist would join our discussion and argue that we shouldn't believe there is an objective reality out there just because it seems to be obviously true, and point out the many cases where obvious beliefs were proven wrong. So, we would ask the solipsist to give us one good reason why we should desert our belief that objective reality exists, to which the solipsist would point out that his or her ontology (an ontology we anyway think is false) entails the non-existence of objective reality. Would that make any sense? It wouldn't. So, similarly, unless a scientific naturalist can come up with a valid reason (i.e. one which does not presuppose the truth of scientific naturalism) why no objective morality exists then it's perfectly reasonable for all non-naturalists to believe that at least some ethical precepts are objective, as is indeed overwhelmingly obvious to any non-psychopath. And if that's bad news for scientific naturalism so much the worse for it. As some naturalist philosophers are already finding out scientific naturalism cannot be a viable description of objective reality, and not just for the reason I explained above. Which I think will slowly become common knowledge and will move people to distance themselves from scientific naturalism. And why not? To try to apply science beyond its natural field of studying physical phenomena has proven to be an unreasonable enterprise in more ways than one.
131. Christopher Hitchens at AAI 07
Comment #86033 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 7, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Bonzai and Denoir,
I missed your interesting discussion, but would like to suggest that there are two very different problems: intelligence and consciousness.
I agree with Denoir that as far as intelligent behavior is concerned there can't be any mystery in how the brain produces it – at least there is no reason to doubt that science's demonstrable capacity to explain objective observations will stop at brain research. At least in principle; it may turn out that to scientifically find out how the brain produces intelligent behavior will prove to be intractable, or at the very least inefficient: My own guess is that the best way to create artificial intelligence will not be via the study of the brain, the same way that we did not build flying machines by studying how birds manage to fly, but through basic research into aerodynamics etc. (The birds only demonstrated that heavier than air flying is physically possible.)
Consciousness is an entirely different issue. As far as I am concerned consciousness is not a scientific problem because one does not need the consciousness hypothesis to explain any objectively observable phenomenon (including the phenomenon of human intelligent behavior). Also, contrary to what most people think, there is no reason to believe that consciousness itself is produced by the brain: it's reasonable to say that the brain produces conscious experience including the experience of thought and of will once consciousness is given. The strongest argument I know about this is philosophical (and when one deals with a concept that is clearly meaningful but which does not refer to something that is objectively observable and neither is needed to explain anything that is objectively observable then we only have philosophy to turn to): Suppose that a physical system (e.g. the human brain) can produce consciousness, i.e. can produce the capacity of having experiences. Then it's logically possible that it's not our brain that produces our consciousness but some other machinery in which we exist and which simulates the world we observe around us (see "computer simulation argument"). Now once one has established this as a logical possibility, it turns out it is very difficult to estimate probabilities. Actually it's very difficult to imagine what kind of argument or observation would move us to increase our probability estimate that it's our brain that produces consciousness, precisely because we can't really imagine how any physical system could become conscious. And for the same reason one could argue for an increase of our probability estimate that we all live within a computer simulation: the hypothesis that we live within a computer simulation explains why the problem of consciousness is so hard, namely that the physics in our simulated world is not the kind of physics you need to produce consciousness.
The above paragraph turns on my claim that you don't need consciousness to explain any objectively observable phenomenon. How can I be so sure? Because, similarly to Denoir, I see no reason why one should not be able to simulate a human brain to an arbitrary level of precision using a digital computer, which would then produce all the relevant intelligent behavior the brain is capable of. And to do that we could in principle simulate the brain down to the level of individual cells, or individual atoms, or individual elementary particles even – without anywhere using the hypothesis that consciousness exists. But if we can produce intelligent behavior without assuming that consciousness exists then we have indeed explained anything objectively observable without assuming that consciousness exists.
A philosophically valid question in this context is this: Once we have created our first intelligent computer (i.e. one capable of passing the Turing test) will that computer be conscious? Of course it will. Why? Because any the alternative belief would be irrational. Indeed the believe that an intelligent computer is conscious is not based on scientific knowledge, but we all already believe that people around us are conscious beings without the benefit of science anyway.
132. Christopher Hitchens at AAI 07
Comment #86027 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 7, 2007 at 11:01 pm
At about the 6th minute of the first video, and for the umpteenth time, Hitchens with much fanfare mentions his famous challenge to theists: "Name a moral action performed or a moral statement made by a believer that could not be made or performed by a non-believer". Then he explains how for months now he did not receive one reply except for the injunction to love your enemies which he does not think is a moral one. But didn't he just actually change his challenge into: "Name a moral statement an atheist agrees with and which could not be made by the same atheist"? How pathetic. And how intellectually dishonest. And how disappointing that the audience at the meeting actually approved of the charade. I mean the revised challenge is like me defying somebody to present to me a math problem I cannot solve as long as it belongs to the set of math problems in my textbook.
133. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #85766 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 7, 2007 at 3:18 am
Bonzai (post 55, or #85466):
Did dinosaurs have absolute morality? How about amoebas?Neither amoebas have, nor almost certainly dinosaurs have had, the cognitive capacity for moral thought. But surely you knew that.
As for the rest of your post, you once again commit the typical atheist error which is to first imagine objective reality according to scientific naturalism and then to consider whether it makes sense to add God to it. It doesn't. And it's irrelevant anyway. Theists posit an alternative understanding of reality, not reality as atheists understand it plus a supernatural being.
134. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #85762 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 7, 2007 at 3:08 am
Steve99 (post 54 or #85462):
We have millenia of experience that what people consider to be absurd is a very poor guide to what is false.Right.
The fact that you persist in this just makes you look silly.I persist in what? Give me good reasons and I am prepared to abandon any previously held belief, including those that appear obvious to me. Actually, give me just one reason for abandoning the belief that some moral precepts are objective, except that scientific naturalism cannot account for objective ethics. Scientific naturalism is so full of paradoxes and holes that even atheist philosophers are deserting it; so why exactly should I care to renounce beliefs I find completely obvious just in order to maintain the viability of an ontology that even knowledgeable atheists think is wrong?
Yes, I see the parallel. Those who first realized that the Earth, contrary to what appeared obvious, is not flat had to show the evidence why the Earth is round. So in our parallel case it's you who are claiming the non-obvious, so it's you who have to give evidence why morality is not objective. But you haven't given any such evidence. Nobody has, beyond pointing out that that's what is required if you believe in scientific naturalism.To claim that no objective morality exists, against what appears to be absolutely obvious to virtually everybody, is the huge claim.To claim that the earth is round, against what appears to be absolutely obvious to virtually everybody is the huge claim. See the parallel?
You need to claim backing for the absurd opinion that what people believe about this is true, because so many people believe it.I never claimed that something is true because so many people believe in it, and I defy you to find one quote of mine which says that, or can be construed as saying that.
What I have said is this: 1) I personally find the implications of scientific naturalism absurd, and this is one of the reasons I think that scientific naturalism is a false description of objective reality. 2) That if people understood what scientific naturalism implies and also realized that one can accept all of science (both its method and its results) without accepting scientific naturalism then very few would believe in it.
Once again you are not actually reading what the other person is writing. I did not say that the statement "black holes do not exist" cannot be falsified, of course it can: suffice to find a black hole. I claimed that the statement "black holes exist" cannot be falsified, as should be obvious if you take a few seconds to think about it. After all, even should we fail to find any black holes where we would expect to find them, and even if we should discover grave errors in general relativity and the rest of physics that predicts their existence, we wouldn't falsify that statement. Why not? Because maybe there is some physics we haven't yet discovered and which would explain why we haven't found black holes where we expected to find them.Also, valid scientific statements such as "black holes exist" or "all metals melt at some temperature" cannot be falsified.Yes, they can. I am responding to this as one of these statements is particularly interesting to me. Telescopes are soon to be constructed which should actually allow observations of the accretion disks of large (or close) black holes. That will allow us to begin to distingish between different models of condensed stars (such as classical black holes, black suns and gravastars). So that one should start to be sorted out soon. Personally, I favour Lawrence Krauss' model in which event horizons never form.
Einstein certainly believed in an objective world, and so do most modern physicists.I too believe in an objective world, and I am surprised you write that only "most" modern physicists believe in it. Can you tell me of one modern physicist who does not believe in an objective reality?
As for Einstein, some of his most deeply felt beliefs about how the objective reality is have been proven wrong by experiment. Physicists have been so often and so radically wrong in their ontological beliefs, that the remnant of a physical objective reality that is still viable is like that thing that was found not to look like a duck, not to walk like a duck, and not to quack like a duck, but which "scientific duckists" insist is nevertheless a duck.
Also, many of those do indeed believe in physical reality, even if they assume a rather strange relationship with our minds.A physical reality that is created by our consciousness can hardly be called objective it seems to me.
135. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #85746 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 7, 2007 at 2:06 am
BMMcArdle (post 201, or #85654)
[God] lays down numerous often primitive and arbitrary moral and ceremonial laws, then gets involved in inner tribal politics and land disputes, inciting acts of brutality, war crimes, genocide, and rape along the way.:-P
Do you really think I believe that? In fact do you really think you would find one Christian who would agree with what you write above?
This reminds me of something that Lennox told Dawkins in their recent debate: That atheists get all annoyed when a theist tells them that he or she too does not believe in the kind of god that they don't believe.
136. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #85745 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 7, 2007 at 2:05 am
Timnea (post 185, or #85551)
Are you suggesting the bible (gods word), is the moral compass that led us to today's ethical values. Better read the bible again Dianelos because it looks more like a moral "hand break" than a compass. I think its clear we have our morality today despite of the bible, and religion in general, not because of it.I agree that we don't get our morality from the Bible because, obviously, we are able to distinguish the good bits in the Bible from the bad ones. I completely agree with Dawkins on this point. On the other hand some people argue that the Bible played an important role in guiding the evolution the moral Zeitgeist, and I find this plausible too. Whatever the place is we take morality from, it's clear that it's not easy to find. I suppose some people in history were better able to reach that place, and what they taught found its way to the written records of the great religions (as well as of some philosophers; the "do not return evil" is found in Plato). It's important to understand that scripture has evolved too; the primitive "one eye for an eye" we find in the Old Testament was actually an improvement over the moral Zeitgeist in which it was written. And, arguably, nobody has written a more splendid moral code than Christian ethics as recorded in the Gospels two thousand years ago, and I think today's moral Zeitgeist is still catching up.
There are some pretty low ethical standards required by god in the bible. (I'm being kind there). Assuming, and hopefully, your moral values are better than those, how do you manage to transcend them?I am not sure how you mean this question. The Bible is a sprawling collection of texts, some sublime, some mythological, some absurd. Like it's the case with all books one should read the Bible critically too. As for me managing to transcend the ethics as recorded in the Bible, I must say that far from transcending I don't even come close to realizing the most developed version of it, namely Christian ethics. I even have trouble imagining myself seriously thinking about the possibility of realizing that kind of ethics in my life :-(
137. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #85738 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 7, 2007 at 1:12 am
Clodhopper (post 184, or #85549)
will you please answer the old Euthyphro dilemma: Is what is commanded by God moral because it is commanded by God, or is it commanded by God because it is moral?It is commanded by God because it's moral. Obviously.
Incidentally, it's actually misguiding to think that God "commands" us to be moral, and it's unfortunate that the naive paradigm of God as a King who wishes allegiance, commands this and that, punishes those who disobey etc, has survived up to the Gospels not to mention much of Christian discourse today. I think the right way to think about ethics is this: Objective reality is at its most fundamental perfectly good, and we, who are part of objective reality, live in an experiential environment which contains a pointer towards that perfect goodness. So it's in our very nature to become better persons. (According to theism objective goodness is realized in God's character, i.e. is how God is, and we are meant to become better persons and hence come closer to God because we are created in God's image - but that knowledge is not necessary for coherent ethical thought.[1]) Now we are free of course not to move along that pointer towards goodness; on the other hand to act in ways that do not improve oneself is not particularly smart, to put it mildly. All of this has nothing to do with commands and punishments, it's just a matter of recognizing how reality is. And of course, one freedom we don't have is to change the fundamental structure of reality :-) So it's in that sense, and in that sense alone, that to say we are "commanded" to be good makes any sense.
[1] So it's not strictly speaking correct to say that atheism renders morality incoherent, but rather that scientific naturalism renders morality incoherent. In this thread I am using "atheism" and "scientific naturalism" interchangeably, because most self-declared atheists in the West are in fact scientific naturalists (certainly Dawkins is) – not to mention because a certain member of this forum gets annoyed when I use the more precise "naturalist" instead of "atheist".
138. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #85725 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 7, 2007 at 12:25 am
Dr Benway (post 183, or #85540)
I see two problems with what you say: 1) Even in order to negotiate one needs some a priori standards, unless it's the type of negotiation governed by "might makes right" kind of maxim, which is probably the very antithesis of morality. 2) Many if not most ethical questions are not related to behavior towards other humans. For example how one should behave towards animals, or towards nature, or, most importantly, towards oneself. Come to think of it, even when the question is how one should behave towards other people the moral behavior is one of self-transcendence, of going beyond what may be previously negotiated.This sounds fine, but it seems atheism does not offer any standards for deciding which way is up in the first place.No a priori standards doesn't mean no standards at all. Humans still can negotiate behavioral standards and can set mutual goals for the future.
139. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #85700 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 6, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Epeeist (post 170, or #85505)
In post 168, or #85501) I wrote:
Any way you look at it atheism renders morality arbitrary, and indeed renders all evaluative or normative thought incoherent.to which you now respond:
So tell us whether allowing the mother of a pair of new born twins to die because she refuses blood is coherent, tell us whether valuing a woman as only of the worth of half a man is coherent.It's not. I claimed that atheism does not allow for a coherent ethical thought, and implied that theism does allow it. But this claim does not imply that every single theist's ethical thought is coherent, or correct, o reasonable, or whatever.
Tell us why slavery was proclaimed as god given by the ChristiansThat's a question for sociobiology to answer. I suppose many bad things were claimed to be God-given or God-approved precisely in order to numb peoples' moral sense.
Tell us why making assertions time after time after time without any observational evidence is coherent.To do so is coherent when one discusses aspects of the human condition that are not amenable to objective evidence, such as when one discusses how it is like to be human. I dare say by far the most important and relevant aspects of the human condition are not amenable to observational evidence. On the other hand ontological beliefs clearly do affect objectively observed behavior, the latter is amenable to objective observations, and, as I have pointed out to you in this post, there is already significant (if not necessarily conclusive) objective evidence that religious worldviews are more conducive to moral behavior than non-religious worldviews. Certainly more scientific research is needed in the area.
Give us some evidence for your "objective morality" and how we would recognise it.If by "evidence" you mean "argument" then this is a very broad question that can only be answered within the context of showing why theism (which entails objective morality) works better than naturalism when compared one to one under all criteria one can think of, an argument I made in the very long McGrath thread and which I am sure nobody wishes me to repeat here. If by "evidence" you mean "objective evidence" then I would say that the fact that the moral Zeitgeist is improving evidences that there is an objective standard towards which it is moving, or which it is approximating.
Give us some evidence that your idealistic theism provides better (whatever that means) morality than that put forward by the likes of Aristotle or Spinoza.Neither Aristotle nor Spinoza were atheists so I don't quite see the relevance of this question to my claim that atheism renders moral thought incoherent. But I found the wording of your question interesting: you had to insert the "whatever that means" clause. But I think you do know what "better morality" means, all normal humans know that. The problem for atheism is that that knowledge cannot be grounded in a naturalistic worldview. As Dawkins wrote in his "River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life", there is no good and evil. But if there is no good and evil, how can one decide or even discuss that to let that mother die was evil? You see? It's incoherent.
140. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #85503 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 6, 2007 at 3:17 am
Cowalker (post 133 or #85237):
I don't disagree with anything in particular you write, but it seems to me you misunderstood the question in my post 92 or #85131. In your post you describe how moral behavior and moral beliefs have evolved through time; but the question is on what grounds can an atheist judge that that change was positive. What standards can an atheist appeal to for making that judgment?
141. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #85501 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 6, 2007 at 3:09 am
Thanks Epeeist, Steve99, Phil Rimmer, and Timnea for your comments to my post 92 or #85131. I think the consensus is that there is no good answer to the question on what ethical standards can an atheist appeal to. Now I wonder if it is clear what the implications of this are. After all moral thought plays a huge role in human discourse, and indeed without such standards much of what atheists say about morality is rendered incoherent. For example Dawkins in his debate with Lennox (as well as in TGD) approvingly points out the evolution of the moral Zeitgeist, but actually he lacks the standards on which to base the claim that the moral Zeitgeist has in fact improved. In the same debate he says that if reality as described by atheism is hideous it gives us something to rise above. This sounds fine, but it seems atheism does not offer any standards for deciding which way is up in the first place. Indeed atheism does not even offer grounds for judging that atheist reality is hideous. Any way you look at it atheism renders morality arbitrary, and indeed renders all evaluative or normative thought incoherent.
Now, again, an atheist may claim that that's how reality is, and if we don't like it then too bad. But the point is that atheism's implications render it a much less attractive and indeed a much more dangerous worldview.
142. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #85459 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 6, 2007 at 12:51 am
Sure: I find absurd the idea that I do not possess libertarian free will, or that it's not objectively better to help somebody in need rather than to torture them, to mention just two implications of scientific naturalism. Indeed scientific naturalism's absurd implications is one of the reasons why I find it untenable. I think that if people really understood what scientific naturalism implies and also realized that one can accept all of science (both its method and its results) without accepting scientific naturalism then very few would believe in it.It seems to me that the evidence against metaphysical naturalism at least is overwhelming.No, it isn't. You only claim this because you personally have difficulty with the consequences of a naturalist view of the world.
Scientific naturalism is an ontological theory. Now most scientists do not care about ontological issues one way or the other, but those who do manage to produce some useful work, if only to show how little objectivity there is in scientific naturalism, and also to falsify many of naturalists' most strongly felt intuitions. But those scientists and scientifically minded philosophers who tried to show how concepts such as justification and knowledge, intentionality (in the philosophical sense), consciousness, free will, and moral responsibility are to be reduced to naturalism (or be "naturalized") – all of them met with failure. As Putnam dryly put it in 2004: "none of these ontological reductions gets believed by anyone except the proponent of the account and one or two of his friends and/or students." Scientific naturalism is as close to a failure as any philosophical idea can reasonably be expected to come, so modern philosophers are now suggesting the need to go beyond scientific naturalism and just "accept as true everything we find we have to accept in order to make sense of everything that we think is part of the world" (Barry Stroud in his American Philosophical Association presidential address of 1996 "The Charm of Naturalism"; you can read more about these issues here:
http://www.rescogitans.it/main.php?articleid=132 ).
Actually it's the other way around: To claim that no objective morality exists, against what appears to be absolutely obvious to virtually everybody, is the huge claim. So what backing do you offer for it, except that to believe in it is necessary in order to maintain the viability of scientific naturalism?But at least equally reasonably one can affirm the existence of these and therefore deny the viability of scientific realism.No, you can't reasonably affirm the existence of objective morality. It is a HUGE claim, and needs a lot of backing.
I find that the distance between popular understanding and the forefronts of philosophy are impressively large. For example we have all heard about Karl Popper's theory of falsificationism, and how it is the golden standard in the scientific method. Well, it seems that even though it sounds very good in theory it does not work in the practice of real world science, because in many cases whether a particular objective observation does or does not falsify a particular theory depends on a series of assumptions which themselves are not experimentally verifiable. Also, valid scientific statements such as "black holes exist" or "all metals melt at some temperature" cannot be falsified. So, as John Dupre writes in his "The Miracle of Monism" for some 30 years now "among philosophers of science Popper's view of science has been largely rejected". The issue is not whether demonstrating a contradiction is not epistemically significant: of course it is, and "reduction ad absurdum" is one of the oldest tools of reason. The issue is that scientific methodology as it in fact takes place cannot really be neatly nailed down. As Popper's student Paul Feyerabend (whose 1975 "Against Method" went a long way showing how shaky Popper's ideas really are) said, the only universal method that characterizes scientific progress is that anything goes.
Nick Herbert is a physicist. Now I don't know about physicists "in general", but some of the greatest physicists who actually thought about the ontological implications of modern physics are on record on this issue and what they say does not square with scientific naturalism (see some of their quotes here). It seems to me then that scientific naturalism is inspired by a certain naivete about, as well as infatuation with, science.Or for the insight that the hard sciences have lost sight of objective reality (or as Nick Herbert says: "One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality").The best people to judge that are the physicists themselves, who, in general, just don't believe that at all.
143. I didn't know the FLEA CIRCUS was back in town!
Comment #85131 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 5, 2007 at 4:27 am
Phil Rimmer (post 88, or #85125):
Sadly [CIA's] "Dianelos Reloaded" Program seems to be stuck in a loop at present...LOL. On the other hand I must say I have learned a lot in this site, and keep learning new stuff. For example I hadn't thought that atheism too can be construed as wishful thinking as Lennox argued in his debate with Dawkins. And I found very interesting the phrasing of the question put by somebody of the audience to Hitchens in his debate with D'Souza, a question he completely avoided discussing by the way, namely that if our ethical beliefs have merely evolved anthropologically and one can therefore transcend their current state then on what standard can one appeal to when transcending them. I wonder how an atheist not stuck in a loop might answer this question.
144. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #85126 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 5, 2007 at 3:56 am
35bluejacket (post 39, or #85037):
Is there someone out there who can help me with the answer of this simple question: Are the laws of physics independent of man?Depends on how you mean the question. The laws of physics are discovered by humans (men as well as women :-) and in that sense they are not independent. But probably you are asking whether the laws of physics apply whether humans have discovered them or not. If so, yes, they do.
145. The Transcendental Argument for God
Comment #85124 by Dianelos Georgoudis on November 5, 2007 at 3:44 am
Russell Blackford (post 38, or #85033):
Often X turns out to be something rather dubious - to say the least, in some cases. For example, it strikes me as wildly unlikely that free will exists in the sense that must be meant, or that morality is objective in the requisite sense. Admittedly, these are things that we are inclined to say, pre-theoretically, but once we think about them it is hard to pin down how they can even be coherent claims, much less claims that we know to be true. If they are true at all, it is likely to be in some very modest sense (as with compatibilist accounts of free will or virtue ethics accounts of morality).I am not sure about objective morality but I think I can show you are factually wrong when you claim that the more one thinks about the libertarian sense of free will the less viable it becomes: About half the well-known specialist philosophers and scientists (atheists all) that Susan Blackmore interviewed said they did believe in libertarian free will (see her "Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human"). I personally cannot even imagine how it would be like for me to doubt my having libertarian free will. As for the issue of objective morality atheism is a little schizophrenic: On the one hand atheists argue that there is no objective morality, and on the other hand they insist on the "argument from evil" against the existence of God, a premise of which is that some evils at least are obviously objective. My claim is that the more one studies the best that metaphysical naturalism and theism have to offer the less impressive the intellectual underpinning of the former looks. In fact I think that the best explanation for the recent popularity of atheism is the widespread (as well as illusory) perception that atheism is intellectually superior, a perception believed on faith by most atheists. People do not understand the issues one way or the other but they wish to belong to the group of people who are perceived to be smarter. I wish people (theists and atheists alike) would study more and be less tribal.
The interesting claims are that deductive logic works and that the universe exhibits regularity over time.Perhaps you are thinking of Mark Steiner's ideas, see http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/STEAPP.html So we have another possible X for a transcendental argument, namely X="math works for understanding nature". There are several others, including for example X="colored objects exist". It seems to me that the evidence against metaphysical naturalism at least is overwhelming. I wonder how long it will take for this insight to filter down, but it will in the end. Or for the insight that the hard sciences have lost sight of objective reality (or as Nick Herbert says: "One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have lost their grip on reality").
That kind of explanation is one that people may think they understand, since agency seems very familiar to them, but I doubt that anyone does understand it once we are talking about some kind of infinite, timeless agency and how it is supposed to affect things like logic. It is clearly something that many people find psychologically attractive and are inclined to say.Of course if God does exist then w