God

I’m with Ophelia on this one. I think that argument is sort of a platitude.

It’s not at all clear to me that physics concerns that which is “contingent” or, for that matter, that a God is not.

Not only that, but I’m curious about the assertion that science doesn’t ask “ultimate questions”.

Seems to me that this is an example of an artificial conceptual wall designed to help lots of people avoid cognitive dissonance.

An argument like Ruse’s was given previously by Stephen Jay Gould, in his book “Rocks of Ages.”

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345430093/103-9293273-3133407

It was reviewed by H. Allen Orr in the Boston Review:

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR24.5/orr.html

Orr makes some Opheliaesque points.

I’d still like to know by what criteria theists think it’s okay to believe in necessary beings. I mean if they aren’t open to empirical inspection we’re back to using reason and consequently, all of the most tedious arguments in the History of Western Philosophy.

“If you posit something as beyond the natural world…“—Sebastian

I just don’t what that could be. Those words don’t make sense to me.

Richard Dawkins had a great article a while back in Forbes magazine about this issue. An excerpt:

I once asked a distinguished astronomer, a fellow of my college, to explain the big bang theory to me. He did so to the best of his (and my) ability, and I then asked what it was about the fundamental laws of physics that made the spontaneous origin of space and time possible. “Ah,” he smiled, “now we move beyond the realm of science. This is where I have to hand you over to our good friend, the chaplain.” But why the chaplain? Why not the gardener or the chef? Of course chaplains, unlike chefs and gardeners, claim to have some insight into ultimate questions. But what reason have we ever been given for taking their claims seriously? Once again, I suspect that my friend, the professor of astronomy, was using the Einstein/Hawking trick of letting “God” stand for “That which we don’t understand.” It would be a harmless trick if it were not continually misunderstood by those hungry to misunderstand it. In any case, optimists among scientists, of whom I am one, will insist, “That which we don’t understand” means only “That which we don’t yet understand.” Science is still working on the problem. We don’t know where, or even whether, we ultimately shall be brought up short…

In any case, the belief that religion and science occupy separate magisteria is dishonest. It founders on the undeniable fact that religions still make claims about the world that on analysis turn out to be scientific claims. Moreover, religious apologists try to have it both ways. When talking to intellectuals, they carefully keep off science’s turf, safe inside the separate and invulnerable religious magisterium. But when talking to a nonintellectual mass audience, they make wanton use of miracle stories–which are blatant intrusions into scientific territory.

The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children. Every one of these miracles amounts to a violation of the normal running of the natural world. Theologians should make a choice. You can claim your own magisterium, separate from science’s but still deserving of respect. But in that case, you must renounce miracles. Or you can keep your Lourdes and your miracles and enjoy their huge recruiting potential among the uneducated. But then you must kiss goodbye to separate magisteria and your high-minded aspiration to converge with science.

Can’t say I disagree with Dawkins here. Or, really, anywhere. But one should also read the Orr article linked above, for a similar but different criticism.

Yes, exactly, that Dawkins article Micha linked to. I’ve quoted from that article more than once on this topic – which as Chris says has been on and off at B&W for some time. And specifically from that passage. We just assume the bishops and chaplains have this expertise – but do they? We forget to ask.

“The problem Ophelia is having in the debate is that she denies the existance of anything outside of nature.”

No I don’t. I don’t know what’s outside of nature. I just refuse to take other humans’ word for anything and everything they happen to assert exists outside of nature. How would they know? Any more than I would? They wouldn’t. So why should I believe them? So I don’t.

“If someone makes a logical argument, and then tries to extend that argument beyond it’s limits, continuing to do so even after the effort is shown to be mistaken, is he not acting in service only to his faith?.”
The answer is ‘yes.’

Plenty of scientists will defend their positions long after they should give up. This desire by any other name. is faith. Gould et al. are silly. Dawkins is illogical.

Frankly, I don’t quite get the concept of a ‘supernatural’. If it exists, it would be a part of nature, no? And science should make some attempt to explain it, yes?

I don’t believe in creation. Far, far from it. I don’t believe in a Lord God, The Creator. But my friendship with Gus diZerega has given me some respect for personal spiritual experiences. I’m still a little sceptical, but I’m a lot more open-minded.

Ophelia says:
_”Religious people do in fact believe in the existence – the real existence, not some fuzzy metaphoric existence – of this supernatural being.”_

Gus, who, for most of his life was a sceptic and is someone whose judgement I respect greatly, had some deep spiritual experiences quite some years back that has made him a follower of a form of Paganism.

And the basis of his Neopaganism is a pretty physical experience of a world of spirits (both, good and bad, he says).

He doesn’t believe in creation and believes completely in modern science and evolutionary theory.

But the only thing that I think enables him to make sense of and deal (even manipulate — he’s a trained healer) with his experiences is the Neopagan faith.

Re Matthew’s statement, “Einstein thought religion and science perfectly compatible,” along with the idea that he considered religion “as some rather harmless deism with added ethics”:

To a Baptist pastor asking Einstein whether he had considered the relationship of his immortal soul to its Creator:

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

To a correspondent citing an article about Einstein’s religious beliefs:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

To a Chicago rabbi preparing a lecture on “The Religious Implications of the Theory of Relativity”:

The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelationships is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image–a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being. For this reason, people of our type see in morality a purely human matter, albeit the most important in the human sphere.

Excerpts from “Albert Einstein: The Human Side,” a collection of letters chosen in part by his long-time secretary, Helen Dukas.

“However, every competent scientist and philosopher knows that there are claims that can be made by theology that science and philosophy cannot and may never say anything about.”

Of course, claims can be made. No question. But are they true?

“If you don’t have faith in any of these texts, go away. I make no claims that you should change your beliefs.”

Well, that depends on how you define ‘theologian.’ But there are religious people, and lots of them, who do indeed claim that the rest of us should change our beliefs – and sharpish, too.

“Theologians are only arguing to people who already have faith in a text.”

But they’re not. They’re treated as general, public experts. There were ‘religious leaders’ at that Davos conference, for example. Well, why? Why were there religious ‘leaders’ and not, say, philosophers? Why do religious spokespeople – bishops for short – go on tv and radio when ethical issues are under discussion? They’re talking to the audience in general, not a congregation. But why?

But theology doesn’t explain anything, it only claims to. There is such a big difference between claiming to explain something and actually doing it – one that people love to elide.

Remember what Hotspur said of Owen Glendower’s claim that he could summon spirits from the vasty deep – ‘Why so can I, so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?’

Ophelia, thanks for the response.

“Of course, claims can be made [on purely theological grounds]. No question. But are they true?”

If you have faith in the text the claims are based on, then you can judge claims to be true or false interpretations of the text (Note: I’m sure lit crit people have much more to say about this). If you don’t have faith in the text, they simply aren’t talking to you (and if they are, you have no reason to listen).

“But there are religious people, and lots of them, who do indeed claim that the rest of us should change our beliefs – and sharpish, too.”

And they have no intellectual effect on you, right? And they shouldn’t, right?

So, pragmatically, you shouldn’t use theological arguments on people without faith. Perhaps we should chalk this up to “People do dumb things all the time”?

I am saying that theological “arguments” aren’t even meant to be used on people without faith. It’s no wonder they don’t work.

“Why do religious spokespeople – bishops for short – go on tv and radio when ethical issues are under discussion?”

Well, I can put out cynical hypotheses: producers (and most people) don’t understand the difference between religion and ethics, priests are better speakers than philosophers are, a priest has a built in audience, etc.

A person can have faith in a text, but limit themselves to philosophical arguments only. For example, there were priests on the panel of the Fred Friendly “Ethics in America” seminars, and they confined themselves to philosophical positions rather than theological ones.

Perhaps people who study theology also study a lot of ethics? So experts on one tend to be experts on the other. I haven’t seen too many priests on TV or radio discussing ethics, so I can’t tell if they are generally competent in the area of ethics minus faith.

It might be tempting to start into the theological arguments, as you can “prove” much more with them than with philosophy. But as I said before, it is illusory; you can only “prove” to people who already have faith in your text.

A priest might also be at a conference as a representative of people of his/her faith. In other words, “Many people share my faith, and will therefore have this position.” What weight should this have? I’m not sure, but in a “one person, one vote” situation, it might be quite important to hear what positions people with different faiths will have.

Blueshoe, great Einstein quotations. I thought when I read that Einstein reference, ‘Hm, that’s a canard, he wasn’t religious in the way he’s often portrayed as being.’ But didn’t have time to look for quotations – also don’t remember where I’ve seen them, though I know I have.

Bill,

“Well, I can put out cynical hypotheses: producers (and most people) don’t understand the difference between religion and ethics, priests are better speakers than philosophers are, a priest has a built in audience, etc.”

Right. So that’s why it’s worth pointing out the misconception, isn’t it? I think so anyway.

The problem *everybody* is having in these debates is that this question has been debated endlessly with no agreement and this debate is as pointless as all the others.
Let people believe whatever their silly minds lead them to believe. The only issue is whether one side attempts to impose its belief on another (‘intelligent design’ in public schools) or dismisses the view of the other side because it doesn’t meet their particular standard for falsifibility. Disagreements over values are are a major source of the world’s problems because everyone’s ego insists on being ‘right.’ Could it be possible for us to admit that none of us can really be sure of half of what we believe so that we may graciously retire to cultivate our own gardens?

“But theology doesn’t explain anything, it only claims to.”

Hmmmm….

How about this:

“If you believe there is an elephant outside the door, then you should believe there is an elephant’s trunk outside the door.”

True? You could argue about what “elephant” really meant

“If you believe text A represents a source of truth, then you should believe X, since X is an interpretation of part of text A.”

True? You could argue about what that part of text A really meant.

I think it is in this form that theology attempts to “explain things” or change someone’s belief.

I agree, theologians cannot explain anything to one who doesn’t share their faith. “Real” theologians :-) don’t even try, as they understand exactly the kinds of claims they make.

I have no faith, and I’m not sure anyone should. But I’m also not sure that everyone shouldn’t.

And again, remember that theological interpretation has no power against empirical observation or philosophical argument, so theologians can’t just say whatever they want.

I think Ophelia is right. The key phrase is “in charge.” Which means affecting the world. The moslem says “it’s God’s will.” The christian prays for intercession. I don’t believe there’s a religious person who believes in an impotent god (however they may try to phrase it).

Outside of modern society, where it’s is little more than a hobby, religion is used as a guide for understanding the world and position in it. Gould’s defense succeeds only in emasculating it. It would help here, as usual on CT, to have the input of a historian or two.

That said, the important question is not whether or not religion is right or wrong- it’s not worth arguing with believers- but whether or not religious thought can be elinated. As I argued in my comment on Dawkins (above) it can’t. People, scientists included, tend towards belief.
What I find more dangerous than expressions of honest faith, are purblind condemnations of faith by those who refuse to recognize their own.
I’ll say it again: Scientists who conflate themselves and their position with ‘science’ are the same as cops who conflate themselves with ‘law.’
Dawkins is not science, he’s an arrogant son of a bitch who believes his own ‘logic’ no matter what. History will decide how much of his work is valid or valuable as science and how much of it is simply the result of his taste for cheap determinism.

“What I find more dangerous than expressions of honest faith, are purblind condemnations of faith by those who refuse to recognize their own.”

I find this argument a little cheap. It is not correct to argue that everyone has faith in something in the same way that the religious have faith in God. People may believe things they have no justification to believe and Dawkins may be among them, but I am certain that if you pointed out his mistake he would rectify his belief system.

Damn you Fyreflye, sensibility has no place in the turgid, never-ending debate between materialism (or physicalism) and dualism!

And woe be unto he that brings up quantum non-locality for he has surely shit in both camps’ messkits.

Robbo,

I don’t know of many scientists who claim to know exactly how our world came about. As Dawkins said in the excerpt I quoted earlier in this thread, there is nothing wrong with filing certain issues under the category of “That which we don’t yet understand.”

I defy anyone to refute my fall-back position: “Whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right.”

The Victorian mathematician W.K. Clifford made a pretty good argument against this way of thinking:

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.

Fyreflye,

The problem is that teaching intelligent design in public schools is not the only example of one side attempting to impose its beliefs on another. For the religious person, teaching evolution and not teaching intelligent design in schools which we are all forced to pay for is also an example of one side attempting to impose its belief on another. As long as public schools exist (and I don’t think they should), we will have different groups trying to impose their beliefs on all the others. This is one reason why vouchers are a good idea.

“while the number of people who seriously look to philosophers for guidance in these matters is exceptionally small”

Yes, I know, but I’m an elitist, so I don’t think that’s a drawback.

Ms Benson: “I wouldn’t be so noisy about all this if the faith-based types weren’t so bossy about their belief system.”

Reason-based types are equally bossy about their belief system. Guess who I’m thinking of…

Faith-based propagandists hide their egoistic intellectual arrogance behind the excuse that they’re only trying to save our souls. Reason-based proagandists hide their egoistic spiritual arrogance behind the claim that they’re only trying to save our minds.

Personally, I’m sick of both.

Religion is bunk, but possibly useful bunk.

Misha Gertner: “As long as public schools exist (and I don’t think they should), we will have different groups trying to impose their beliefs on all the others. This is one reason why vouchers are a good idea.”

So once we abolish public schools and institute a voucher system different groups will stop trying to impose their beliefs on all the others. The wonders of utopian thinking never cease to amaze me. As long as belief systems act to buttress ego gratification people who think they are ‘right’ will attempt to impose ther beliefs on all the others who are’wrong.’ Guess who I’m thinking of…

So once we abolish public schools and institute a voucher system different groups will stop trying to impose their beliefs on all the others.

There will be one less source of conflict. Consider: if there was one official state church, we would expect various groups to use their political power to control the church. With a separation of church and state, we avoid this issue. So too with a separation of state and education.

As long as belief systems act to buttress ego gratification people who think they are ‘right’ will attempt to impose ther beliefs on all the others who are’wrong.’

Which is exactly why free markets are superior to government control: politics is a zero-sum game, whereas private trade is a positive-sum game.

Damn, why am I bothering to add anything to this tremendous scroll of comments?

But I just wanted to mention that Chris’s argument is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s at the end of the Tractatus: any “meaning” of this world must be outside the world. (What Derrida calls “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”) Somehow, I don’t have my copy here at the law office, or I would gladly quote the passage.

sd,

“Now, you might argue that my heart is an unreliable source of information. True enough. That’s why I’ll doubt what my heart says, if my head offers a good case to the contrary. But I see no such good case, either now or in the forseeable future.”

Many people believe that Al-Mumit gave all of Palestine to the Muslims. Many people believe that Ha Shem gave all of Eretz Israel to the Jews. Should they both hang on to that belief until it can be falsified?

Domestically, many people think that YHVH is against homosexuality and their belief influences their votes which in turn influences laws. What are we to do in debates until we find evidence that YHVH doesn’t have something against homosexuality?

If you are saying that it’s okay to believe something because the heart says so but that when it comes to actions, reason is required, okely-dokely, as my favourite Christian might say.

But acknowledging that there may well be (certainly is, in fact) more than we understand is one thing, and telling everyone what that More is is quite another. Religions don’t just gesture vaguely and say there’s More, and they certainly don’t say they don’t know. Not the religions I’m talking about at least, which are the traditional ones we’re all familiar with – theistic religions. They say specifically and explicitly what there is. There is a god, with a certain nature and attributes. That’s what I challenge the basis for asserting.

“What’s being debated is whether or not we can throw out those truth claims because they’re not “scientific,” where science is conveniently defined as not only what we can prove, but also what we cannot prove but what nonetheless rubs us the wrong way.”

No it’s not. That’s not what I said. Not at all. People always do read these things so carelessly – and they invariably talk about proof when I’ve never so much as mentioned proof. But I didn’t say any of that lot. It’s a waste of time to dispute what no one said.

Here’s a definition that I’ve always liked: God is a set of symbols that define a culture.

Ms Benson says: “But what’s your point? That no one should ever make an argument for a truth claim? That no one should ever disagree with anyone about anything? That would be a bit of a problem for universities, for example. Not to mention industrial research, research in general, detective work – any arena where people disagree.”

Of course that’s not my point except in the minds of those more interested in ‘winning’ arguments than considering what those who disagree with them actually say. The fields of research, detective work, etc. all have agreed upon methods of settling disagreements within the field. Universities of course find their life and breath in sophistic argumentation designed to advance the reputation of one proponent over the other. The ever-popular field of disagreement about the scope of science vs. religion has no common method – that’s why the argument has gone on futilely and pointlessly for hundreds of years and remains futilely pointless to this very day.

All this talk about proving negatives seems a little odd. Its very easy to make a statement for which (almost by definition) there can be no evidence supporting or undermining it and “challenging” people to disprove it.

If you take this approach, you essentially adopt the position that every crazy theory is equally valid.

“Bush has been sent by Satan to exact his EVIL on the world.”

I suppose this is fair enough in some sense, although I’d note that people don’t treat truth claims like this most of the time. And it a curious inversion of the word “Faith” to use it to apply to beliefs that reject fantastical notions – I’m personally a member of that body of FAITH that disbelieves that pink, invisible unicorns assasinated JFK.

Ultimately, one justifies the broad and political influence of religious figures by their popularity. Epìstemelogically this is rather weak but politically it couldn’t be more valid. A group of people get together and try to influence the world through shared beliefs.

I don’t think you can dismiss this without being elitist and essentially saying that one should favour arguments from authority. And that really doesn’t seem any better to me than having a faith position.

So, as an atheist, I can and do argue against religion. I have a lot of time for Dawkins. But, ultimately, people have the right to be irrational. Many have subjectively good reasons for doing so.

I think of the religious as sometimes political (and philosophical) opponents in much the same way as I think of Conservatives. Wrong, in my opinion, but impossible and undesirable to completely dismiss.

There is a fundamental difference between norms of truth and norms of rightness or justice. They operate in different dimensions and are not reducible to one another, though they are cross-implicated. (In a criminal trial, of course, one wants sufficient factual evidence to reach a verdict, but what constitues a crime is not determined by the evidence, but by the determination of legal norms.) And, yes, truth, cognitive validity, does require sustaining norms and is not simply a matter of asserting the facts of material existence, since not only are generalizations involved beyond the ascertainment of particulars, but the coherence of world-interpretation with respect to different domains of being is also at stake, which science attempts to serially systematize. (The singular “unity of science” is a positivist fiction, oddly enough, a hang-over from traditional metaphysics.) But science is specialized to concern itself with cognitive claims about the natural world and is specifically not equipped to argue or adjudicate claims about normative rightness or justice. (Nor is science merely “action-guiding, as one commenter claimed above. Its claims are meant as “objectively” true; the coherence of its family of theories within an “economy” of being counts as much as its efficacy in technical action; otherwise put, our orientation in and toward the world and not simply our technical mastery of it are at stake in the scientific enterprise of furnishing causal explanations of natural processes.)The normative nature of cogitive truth claims is evinced in the way that criteria for theory formation and evidence change as science “progresses” and is particularly shown forth in disputes between different scientific paradigms, wherein it is not just different interpretations of the facts and different theoretical concepts that are at issue, but meta-theoretical norms as to what constitutes a proper scientific explanation in the relevant domain, such that such disputes, since they reach into the normative basis of the participants’ beliefs- (and beliefs are basically normative commitments rather than merely a deficient, since insufficiently certain, form of knowledge)-, which have been incorporated as an aspect of their identity, take on a peculiarly bitter, polemical, indeed, existential cast.

Now religion- (and I will confine myself to the Judeo-Christian tradition, since, however dimly familiar I am with it, I am completely ignorant of other traditions)- is a much different orientation to the world than science, and I do not dispute that it can and does come into conflict with the scientific world-view. But religion primarily takes place in the (ethical) dimension of norms of rightness or justice rather than that of cognitive claims to truth. (If G-d is absolute and inconceivable justice, then, of course He does not exist, since justice is inherently a counterfactual. But the “existence” of G-d is only a meaningful notion within the attempt to assimilate religion to metaphysics, which certainly plays a large doctrinal role in the inherited tradition, but is not necessarily definitive of religious conceptions.) What is revealed in revealed religion are the commandments; the rest, in Genesis and Exodus, is back-story, though “designed” in accordance with the ethical conception of the commandments. What is at stake is the repudiation of pagan idolatry, wherein the devotee sacrifices himself in mimetic accordance with the mythically deified powers and cycles of nature, whereby the devotee at once propitiates and gains access to such powers, a devotion at once slavish and self-aggrandizing, in favour of an recognition of the primacy of the ethical relation to the other, vouchsafed by a transcendent deity. This opting for the primacy of the ethical amounts to an estrangement from adherence to a merely given natural order, with all its brutalities, and an acceptance of the strangeness of the other. To say that G-d created the world from nothingness, i.e. commanded it into being, is another way of re-enforcing the point. (That man was created in G-d’s image is precisely to the point, since G-d does not have an image; there is an absolute disjunction between the mythical/idolatrous image and the revealing word.) To view the world as G-d’s creation is to view oneself as a finite creature who exists in a world that precedes and far transcends oneself, in which its beings have a complexion independent from one’s wishes or desires, in which one encounters others, similarly situated, whom one, through the overweening tendencies of ones’s nature, inevitably violates in their vulnerability and thus falls into sin, and thus creation becomes a fallen nature, even as it retains the integrity of its created origin, and thus, in the insufficiency of one’s nature and before the injunction to honor the ethical integrity of the other, one stands in need of redemption. The point I am trying to make is that such a view is not simply true or false, rational or irrational; it amounts to a spiritual attitude toward the world and one’s existence in it that one may choose to adopt or not. It is not simply a matter of a derelict form of explanatory schema that necessarily requires the metaphysical postulation of supernatural entities that violate a materialist rigor. Such an account is a misrecognition based on a category mistake. To claim that “faith is the evidence of things unseen and the substance of things hoped for” is to speak in paradoxes and to thereby make the point that faith is precisely not a form of knowledge, with its supposed criterion of self-sufficient certainty. Rather than being an inferior substitute for knowledge, such faith is more like a radical anxiety ventured amongst the moral hazards of this world. (With respect to “creationist science”, the usual reposte is that it is not so much bad science, as not science at all, completely failing to grasp the nature and purpose of scientific explanation, and proffering a mixture of ad hoc scepticism and utter absurdity in its place, for purely dogmatic/apologetic reasons. This is a valid response. Unfortunately, the still stronger reposte is thereby elided: that it is bad theology, treating the biblical account of creation as if it were a species of causal explanation, for purposes of authoritarian/dogmatic self-enclosure, and thereby reverting to the very mythological conception from which it sought to break free, in effect, converting Christianity itself into a form of idolatry.)

I need to get to bed now so I’ll wrap this up without hitting all the points. But I am writing this from the perspective of an atheist, though of a non-dogmatic sort, an indifferentist, if you will- (the world and the dilemmas and impassibilities of human existence in the world are the same for believers and unbelievers alike). The dispute between religious fundamentalism and scientistic fundamentalism I find tedious and of little interest. What interests me in these matters is that, philosophically, I do not believe in a formalist ethics, nor in one that is cognitively grounded. Rather I take the hermeneutic view that our ethical intuitions are dependent upon and drawn from our inherited tradition, which includes, in large measure, religious traditions now long since grown weak in binding force. If one declares oneself a socialist or a radically democratic egalitarian, for example, how much of this is owed to a now disabused Judeo-Christian heritage, rather than from some sort of “mathematical” calculus or a theory of society?

““If you do not have faith in this text, then I make no claim whatsoever that you should change your beliefs.””

But 1. I’m not sure it’s true that all theologians do say that, and 2. I’m not particularly talking about theologians. I’m talking about religion, and the social pressure (especially in the US) to believe in it, as well as the social pressure to refrain from criticizing it, or contradicting its claims, or pointing out that its claims are not based on much of anything other than wishes. I’m talking about its weird epistemological status, its weird protected status, its privileged realm where it gets to assert anything and everything and then say ‘Oh but this isn’t a scientific claim, this is a claim in that other, special, non-empirical, non-scientific, infinitely flexible and adaptable realm where we get to claim anything we want to and nobody can contradict us on any grounds whatsoever because we’re in that Special Realm, so anything goes, so there.’

That’s what I’m talking about.

“Well, for one thing you’re not the only one being debated on this thread.”

That’s true. I thought of that after I posted. Oh well.

“And I suppose I agree, assuming that we recognize when it is and is not possible to subject the truth claims of faith to rigorous examination.”

But if truth claims just have a standing exemption from examination, rigorous or even semi-rigorous – from, let’s be honest, any examination at all – then anything goes. Anyone can claim anything. And anyone does. Now, I think that’s a bad situtation, and one that’s worth pointing out and opposing. You’ll notice I’m not advocating arresting anyone, or passing any laws. I’m just doing some examining. I simply fail to see why religion should have this standing exemption.

“Am I the only one who feels the atheism represented on B&W is as reductionistic as fundamentalism?”

No, you’re not; that’s quite a popular view. Mistaken of course, but quite popular.

“I simply fail to see why religion should have this standing exemption.—Ophelia

Yeah, but it’s not gonna change anytime soon. There’s a whole host of other silly things people commonly believe that are far more amenable to correction than theism. I concentrate my efforts on them.

“Yeah, but it’s not gonna change anytime soon.”

Well, it’s certainly not if no one ever talks back. I don’t think we can be certain of what will change and what won’t, of what effect argument will have and what it won’t, of whether it will spread or whether it won’t. I don’t see much reason to just abandon the field.

“On Wittgenstein – I think I’m right in saying that this all comes from Schopenhauer (and, in a sense, from Kant). But my history of German idealism is shakier than it should be.”

Although I am sure Wittgenstein was to some degree familiar with German Idealism, as far as I remember, closer sources are Frege and the Philosophy of Mathematics, and Russell/Whitehead Principles of Logic

Ophelia wrote:

“But if truth claims just have a standing exemption from examination, rigorous or even semi-rigorous – from, let’s be honest, any examination at all – then anything goes. Anyone can claim anything. And anyone does. Now, I think that’s a bad situtation, and one that’s worth pointing out and opposing. You’ll notice I’m not advocating arresting anyone, or passing any laws. I’m just doing some examining. I simply fail to see why religion should have this standing exemption.”

I’m not suggesting that religious truth claims be exempt from whatever scrutiny can be effectively brought to bear against them. If I claim that prayer is a more effective means of warding off disease than taking antibiotics then my claim can be subjected to disciplined scrutiny with a reasonable hope of coming to an answer, yea or nea, on its validity.

But if I claim that the universe was created by an intelligent and beneficient deity who later took human form in the person of the Son, then, while you might find the claim outlandish, you certainly can’t disprove it. The analytical toolkit that we use to prove that the earth is very old, or that antibiotics are more effective against strep throat than prayer, depends on on our ability to collect evidence in a methodical way. No evidence can be collected about God (If He exists), nor about whether or not Jesus rose from the dead 2000 years ago.

And I suppose my point then is that we must choose what we will believe about these things without hope of ever “settling” the question. You can subject my truth claims to all the scrutiny you want, but you’re very unlikely to convince me that I’m wrong if you have no evidence backing you up.

Now, perhaps in the absence of strong scientific data we can still be good skeptics and subject religious truth claims to scrutiny of a more inductive or intuitive manner. You might argue that, given everything else we know about the universe, it is extremely unlikely that Jesus was a deity and that He rose from the dead and so forth and so on. Fair enough, though again I would argue that you’re making value judgements of your own.

But I could equally argue that, given everything else we know about the universe, it is extremely unlikely that the world was not “created” in some sense by an intelligent, trans-material entity. I have no proof of this, though I think its an entirely defensible position.

“But then it’s just Socrates’ point too – the Delphic Oracle, wisest man thing. He was the wisest man in Athens because he was the only one who knew he didn’t know.“

What is really, really interesting to me about Socrates is that he quite clearly believed he knew things. But he was extremely rigorous about what he could reason about and what he could not. And the latter wasn’t some wussy sort of “I’m going to make an argument about something which cannot be argued” which is what so many people do. No, he’d just slyly mention something he heard some mystic say. This is what he does in Symposium.

This is what I liked most about Socrates (and I am one of those naive readers who believes he can distinguish between Plato speaking through Socrates and Plato recollecting—ha!—Socrates). He quite simply had no patience with talking about things that couldn’t be talked about. He didn’t necessarily say that those things didn’t exist, he just didn’t try to be rational about them. This is what most bothers the people, I think, that really found they wanted to hit Socrates with a baseball bat when they read Plato.

To them, he seemed coy and a smart-ass. Oh, sure, he said he didn’t know anything; but he sure as well acted like he knew more than anyone. This is a sort of misunderstanding on their part, I think. Socrates did think he “knew” things, because, frankly, it’s impossible to live as if one knows nothing. But he had the intellectual rigor to be very, very careful about how he talked about what is known and knowable.

This differs from the two spheres doctrine in that when it talks about the sphere of religion, it implicitly is rationalizing it and bringing it within the domain of the sphere of science. It talks about that sphere as if it were part of the universe. But it either is, or isn’t. If it is, science can talk about it. If it isn’t, then not only cannot science talk about it, neither can we. Socrates quite rightly deals with this by not attempting to directly talk about it. He doesn’t assert a truth value. He says, “I heard this story…”. People think that Christ’s parables are analogies, but a parable isn’t necessarily an analogy. It’s talking around something, and Socrates did it, too.

“No evidence can be collected about God (If He exists), nor about whether or not Jesus rose from the dead 2000 years ago.“—SD

Why the heck not? Isn’t this a pretty bizarre—and suspiciously convenient—thing to assert? Strong agnosticism, though an ancient idea, has never been a majority opinion among theists. I find strong agnosticism to be second in absurdity only to strong atheism (that “certainty” thing). Strong theism, in contrast, seems rather sensible to me.

SD,

You say one could convince another individual that faith positions shouldn’t be included in the public debate but then take the example of MLK, so you seem to agree that faith positions should be included in the public debate. How do you apply this to the “Allah gave us this land” and “Ha Shem gave us this land” problem?

Some Creationnists say that the earth is 6000 years old but that it was made to look older, thereby taking the claim of the age of the earth out of the scientific realm. According to your premisses, isn’t your position that the year isn’t 6000 years old equally based on faith then?

Mario

“A lot of people would claim personal experience as the reason that they believe in God. Their experience is no reason for you to believe, but is it irrational for one to trust their own experiences?

If, for instance, I told you that there is a yellow dragon living in my backyard and eating the neighborhood pets, you would be under no obligation to believe me. However, if this is something I have seen, or at least believe that I have seen, aren’t I obligated to believe?”

Obligated? No. Inclined, yes, of course; and you might be right. You might be the first person ever to see such a thing. Gorillas, for example, were only really properly seen in the 19th century – before that they might have been real or they might not.

But you also might not be the first person to see such a thing; you might have had a hallucination. Given that we know hallucinations do happen, that is a possibility that has to be taken into account, it seems to me. Especially when what it is we have seen or heard or felt (or most of all ‘sensed’) is something extraordinary. Remember Hume on miracles. If you’ve seen a dog, no big deal. If you’ve seen a dragon or a unicorn – that’s another matter. Especially if you’re the only one who has seen it.

So, that’s the problem with the personal experience argument, I think. Yes, one can have a powerful experience of that kind. I certainly never have, but so what – many other people have. But the human brain can do a lot of odd things, so that by itself, while it may well be convincing (and often consoling, though also often terrifying), is not really good evidence of the existence of something in the external world. Evidence of that kind has to be universally shareable, has to be capable of being duplicated.

That’s not to say it’s not reasonable to believe one’s own experiences though. I’m not really sure what I think about that. I go back and forth on it. But I do think that even if one does believe them and is reasonable to do so – they have force only for the person who has them. Something Tom Paine pointed out in The Age of Reason.

“these folks are part of a significant community of people that report having the same experiences. That’s not an unreasonable foundation for a belief.”

Yes – there’s a lot in that. That’s one of the few arguments I do find persuasive. Not so much of the reality of – how shall I say – a correspondence between their experience and anything external – but of the reasonableness of the belief. The combination of the mutual experience and the community of believers – that does make a kind of sense.

Then again it’s not a universal phenomenon – it has a very strong cultural component. So I suppose that means it’s more reasonable in some cultures than others.

But if the people who had that shared belief would simply have less missionary zeal about it – would not reproach the rest of us – then I might have less missionary zeal myself.

(Or I might not. Not sure.)

“But if the people who had that shared belief would simply have less missionary zeal about it – would not reproach the rest of us – then I might have less missionary zeal myself.—Ophelia

But I think the situation is asymmetric. From their standpoint, they are attempting to help me have eternal salvation instead of eternal damnation. My atheism has no comparable benefit. The stakes just aren’t nearly as high with my worldview as it is with theirs. Their missionary zeal is completely consistent with their belief system.

As I’ve said, my sister is a minister and a missionary. Our father is agnostic or non-practicing Christian. Or something. Anyway, he really has a big problem with Karli’s missionary work. He thinks that people should believe what they want and keep those beliefs to themselves. I, the atheist, have no problem with her missionary work.

And, anyway, she does it in the right spirit. I don’t know if I told this story here, but last year she went to work in Slovakia in a very poor gypsy village. They did lots of practical things to help them, which is a big deal to my sister. But they also “preached” to the people that wanted to come listen. Karli said that as she was listening to the woman who spoke before her, she watched the crowd and realized that although the woman meant well, her sermon about submitting to God and some other stuff had no real meaning to their lives. When the first woman finished speaking, she asked if there were questions and their were none. Karli could tell that they were just mostly listening politely to this somewhat off-putting American woman. So, she threw out the sermon she was going to give and, instead, talked to them simply about Christ’s love for every human being, rich or poor, saint or sinner, of every nation and every age. She said that the translater began crying, then some of the crowd did, too. And they had many, many questions when she was done.

This story brought tears to my eyes and made me extremely proud of my sister. She’s a theist I can be very proud to know. And, if she’s right, she’s helping to save people’s souls. That’s wonderful.

Well, it’s simple. The person who asserts that something exists is the one who has the burden of proof, not the one who declines to accept the assertion.

“Says who? Have you even read any theology?—Chutnet

It was Bill Carone you quoted (it took me a while to find it). Anyway, he’s right that many theologians now make this sort of argument. Also, it’s not a new argument. But, historically, it’s distinctly a minority viewpoint.

That’s part of the problem with this whole thing: this “unknowability” of the objects of religious beliefs is, for the most part, contemporary. And, anyway, it’s not even what most contemporary theists themselves believe.

Jeremy: no, I don’t think that Ophelia needs to elaborate. Existence versus non-existence is asymmetrical. Any given thing is far more likely to be non-existent than existent. The burden of proof necessarily is on the claim for existence.

This is how we freakin’ live our lives.

Ophelia wrote:

“Well, it’s simple. The person who asserts that something exists is the one who has the burden of proof, not the one who declines to accept the assertion.”

I’m not sure why this need be the case. If I hit you over the head with a wooden plank, and you ask me not to do so again, and I reply that in fact I have no wooden plank in my hands, in spite of the fact that you can see the plank and feel a big whelt developing on your head, then is the burden of proof on you?

Or perhaps this example is muddied by the fact that there are only two actors. Say instead that I walk into the room and you’re lying on the floor with a big whelt on your head and you say that someone has just come by and hit you on the head with a wooden plank. And I reply that I don’t think that’s true, that in fact you have been alone the whole time and there is no planksman roaming the building (after all, it seems more likely that you are self-deluded than that random men wielding random planks go around hitting people on the head). It seems to me that neither one of us has an a priori burden of proof. One of us has claimed to have an experience. The other has no evidence to the contrary, but finds it unlikely that this experience is real since it is not a customary experience, given a certain amount of information about the world and how it works.

Now, getting hit on the head by a wooden plank is certainly a rare experience, but not implausibly so. So lets see what happens when we tweak the experience in question. Say instead that you claimed to have been given a hickey by the restless ghost of Lorne Green. This seems pretty silly. You and I would probably agree that the skeptic is right in this case to disbelieve the claim. Say instead that you claim to have been mugged by a passing thug. This seems plausible, and we would probably agree that the skeptic is the one being silly – that without any good reason to doubt the claim, it should probably be accepted as fact if reported.

So what then of religious truth claims? Person A claims to have felt a very real and direct presence of the Almighty. Person B disbelieves. Is this case more like the former or the latter example? It resembles the former in that it relies on some sort of super-natural (or super-material, if you prefer) explanation for the perceived mental picture to be accurate. We know that the world seems to work according to orderly and predictable natural laws, so perhaps its prudent to disbeleieve.

But it resembles the latter in that it is a quite common experience that doesn’t happen to everybody but that does happen to a sufficiently large number of people who are otherwise (seemingly, at least) quite sane and balanced. We know that when we get independent corroboration of something from multiple sources that its probably true. Perhaps then its prudent to believe.

I just don’t see how one side or the other has a natural burden of proof. Its more convenient for your argument if that’s the case, but I see no justification for accepting it as a neccessary premise.

Or do you mean that if I’m trying to convince you to think the way that I think then I need to make the case to you, rather than you needing to make the negative case to me? If so, then as a practical matter I’d say yes that’s true. Though I’m not sure how that matters in the discussion at hand. If anything it seems to suggest that folks in the minority on a particulalr issue have, in the aggregate, more of a burden of proof.

Hey, one reason I don’t consider internal experience good evidence of anything external is that I know perfectly well I am subject to delusion. It’s been my experience that it’s people who do believe in religion who think their inner experience is evidence rather than those who don’t.

“This doesn’t change the basic idea of theology, which is: alongside observation and reason, there is at least one other source of truth, and that is revelation.”

I’m not sure I understand the point of all this. It’s widely understood that religions (and hence theology) rely on what they call revelation. But then what? Non-theists don’t consider revelation a valid form of knowledge.

Your quote:

‘If such a being exists, then presumably he, she or it exists necessarily, whereas the subject matter of the physical sciences is the contingent features of the world. (And insofar as she, he or it causes the world to exist then she, he or it is something external to and not a part of the world.)’

Now, how do you define existence again? I can’t for the life of me imagine something that exists outside our universe (or any other of the universes that might be part of the hypothetical multiverse envisioned by some physicists). Not that there is anybody alive who can with any certainty say that they’ve experienced such a thing.
Existence as an idea is so dependent, so indissolubly linked to concepts of time and space as to render it impossible, in my opinion, to talk with any validity about something that “exists” outside of any physical dimensions.

Moreover, how do you know that physics concerns only what is ‘contingent’?

I read and studied Summa Theologica in college. But it was a long time ago and I’ve blocked most of it from my mind. I really found Aquinas alternately exasperating and boring. Some people really, really dug him. One guy truly came to life for the first in the Aquinas seminars. It freaked me out a little bit.

But the same year I loved Ptolemaic astronomy, so I have no room to make fun of anyone.

On “the burden of proof.”

You remember the scientist who, when asked how the universe began, said “That’s not my department, go ask the chaplain”? (I don’t particularly buy this, but take it for what its worth).

Well, a theologian who is asked to prove that his revelation is true should say “That’s not my department, go see a philosopher or scientist.”

Non-overreaching theologians cannot, do not, and should not prove that their text is true; they start with the idea that it is revealed to be true and interpret it.

Now philosophers might figure out arguments for God. Scientists or historians might find physical evidence of God. But that’s not what theology is about.

People without faith have will be given no _reason_ to change their beliefs by theology; theology isn’t about reason, it is about revelation.

I have images in my head of “hard-headed scientists.” These people, usually portrayed as rather grumpy, not only know exactly the limits of their own knowledge, but also know the limits of what science will ever be able to say. They say things like “Don’t ask me about right and wrong or God or angels. It’s a waste of my time; I have no answers.”

Most people think of religious people as vague and hand-wavy, talking about “unknowable truths,” etc. And maybe most religious people are like that. But, just as you shouldn’t judge science based on popular notions of science, you shouldn’t judge religion based on popular notions of religion.

I wonder what a “hard-headed” theologian might be like…

Person 1: “I don’t believe the Bible is a source of truth.”

Theologian: “Uh huh.”

Person 1: (pause) “But you don’t understand; I’m telling you that I have no reason to believe that the Bible is a source of truth.”

Theologian: “No sh*t. I have no _reason_ to believe that either.”

Person 1: “But you believe it is a source of truth?”

Theologian: “Yes.”

Person 1: “Wait a second. (pause) I mean, I could learn from the Bible as literature; it teaches me things the same way, say, reading Dickens does. But it isn’t it’s own source of truth, independent of science and philosophy.”

Theologian: “Go away; you are wasting your time and mine. I have nothing to tell you that should cause you to rationally change your beliefs. I might be able to change your beliefs anyway, using my considerable rhetorical skills, but you aren’t really interested in that, right?”

“Perhaps you might go talk to my friend the Philosopher over there. I warn you, though, you probably won’t get what you want from him. His arguments about God really don’t address the existence of my God, or the truth of the Bible.”

Person 1: “So. I’m leaving now. Without believing in the Bible. Bye. See ya. I’m going …”

Theologian: “Don’t let the door hit your *ss on the way out.”

Person 2: “I do believe the Bible is a source of truth.”

Theologian: “Okay, now we’re talking! Is there something you don’t know based on observation or reason that you think the Bible might help you with? I might be able to provide some information about what truth the Bible gives us.

“For example, let me offer an interpretation of …”

“I’m not sure I understand the point of all this.”

Maybe I’m missing the point; I often do :-)

“It’s widely understood that religions (and hence theology) rely on what they call revelation. But then what? Non-theists don’t consider revelation a valid form of knowledge.”

Theological “arguments” are always of the form “_If and only if you have faith in the truth of this text_, then here is what you should believe.” This statement can be a valid or invalid, even by people who don’t have faith, no?

Science isn’t used to convince people who reject science to believe in science, but it can resolve disagreements between people who accept science.

Theology isn’t here to convince the non-faithful to believe, but it can resolve disagreements among the faithful.

(Note: I am not saying that the belief in science is equivalent to faith, just that there are people who reject faith and people who reject science, and neither theology nor science repectively is trying to convince these people otherwise).

Jeremy:

I am not talking about subjective experiences. My subjective experiences exist for me too but I cannot pretend them to exist for you or any of the people who post in this blog. It seems clear to me that if you reduce God to the category of a subjective experience then we’re comparing apples and oranges. We are specifically referring to something that amounts to more than a simple “subjective experience”. As in something everybody can eventually have access to (in Heaven if you like).
Or perhaps this is exactly how we should be defining God: Nothing more than a subjective experience that has no real relevance to anybody else but to those who experience it. But this would probably be much less than the notion of “existence” than theists would settle for.

In which case it seems like something utterly pointless to discuss.

José: saying that one person’s subjective experience has no relevance for the rest of humanity goes a long way towards dismissing the value of all artistic endeavor.

Bill: yes, speaking for myself, I understand exactly what you’re trying to get across. But I think that:

* Most theists don’t understand their belief to be this; and,

* The reason they don’t is that such is a very impoverished theology.

…so much so that I think a strong argument can be made, as Orr does, that this position cedes so much to science that there’s really, when you look closely, not much left for religion. And for this reason—that it’s such an impoverished, ineffectual view of religion—I think the only people who are eager to embrace it are those who want their cakes and to eat them, too.

Jeremy:
Picasso’s art was the product of his own subjectivity, but that is not what I value about his art. What I value is my own subjective experience when I look at it. As I would assume you do too.

As a painter myself, I strive to place my own subjectivity behind my work, ignoring as much as I can the subjective experience others can have of it. Otherwise I am just a crowd-pleaser.(Up to a certain point, of course, as we are social animals that long for recognition).

In any case the value of artistic endeavor for me(apart from its possible evolutionary relevance)has to do with the desire to create something meaningful mostly to me… and also to others when I am gone -but this is secondary. In any case, I’m not saying that I want them to relive my own subjective experience: I want them to create theirs.

So for me the value of a work of art depends only in my own experience of it. Not on yours, or anybody else’s. It’s this way how I can dismiss something as dreadful as say, Norman Rockwell and celebrate the work of Wayne Thibaud, for instance.

But really, I’m not dismissing all subjective experience when I say it is only relevant to those who have it. If the subjectivity can be channeled into art, then I definitely consider it important for humankind (although not all of it, as I pointed out). But again, that implies the conversion of subjective experience into something that belongs to the realm of the material universe (a novel, a concert, a painting with x,y,z and t coordinates).

Bill Carone,

“Note: I am not saying that the belief in science is equivalent to faith”
In what way(s) is it not equivalent?

“The truth that scientists and philosophers give will apply to everyone, as it is based on truths everyone must accept. Our arguments will only have force with people who start with our revealed truths. No one else will listen to us, nor should they.”

Ideally, yes, but is this the habitual way in which religious organisations have functionned and now function? The BJP, most Muslim majority countries, the Orthodox rabbinate, the RCC as well as many Protestant ( especially Evangelical ) organisations want to enshrine their revealed truths into laws that will affect people who believe something else. What about those?

Any idea as to why some people prefer some revealed truths to other revealed truths?

““Note: I am not saying that the belief in science is equivalent to faith”
In what way(s) is it not equivalent?”

I don’t know; I just didn’t want to get pummelled by people who believe otherwise :-) I’m not prepared to argue either way right now.

“Any idea as to why some people prefer some revealed truths to other revealed truths?”

I don’t know why anyone should believe any revealed truths. I have not been given faith.

“want to enshrine their revealed truths into laws that will affect people who believe something else. What about those?”

I don’t like it, but I don’t like democracy much as a way of making laws either :-)

One thing I tried to do in my argument was to separate theology, or the study of revealed truth, from the religious organizations that might do things I don’t like.

Tillich’s “Dynamics of Faith” is an excellent place to start with modern theology. It’s widely acclaimed by scholars and laypeople of many faiths. An excellent historical overview is Karen Armstrong’s “History of God.”

I was trying to disagree with your def of theology. At its simplest, theology is just “god-talk.” At the academic level, much of the debate revolves around what constitutes the best sources of theological knowledge and theological method. Questions asked include: what counts as truth? and, who does theology serve? Questions of content are only asked much, much later, in contrast to earlier, more orthodox theologies. It’s a trend seen in other disciplines of the humanities.

My apologies if I’ve been “wrathful.” I accept the distinctions as you’ve remade them.

I am not a theist or atheist, so the revelation vs. reason debate is a sideline issue for me. (My own position comes closest to panentheism, which is also advocated by contemporary theologian Jurgen Moltmann, for another good author.) My “beef” has been what I saw as the misrepresentation of the academic discipline of theology as something that would more accurately characterize fundamentalist or evangelical apologetics, at most a minor branch of theology.

The line between theology and philosophy is sometimes porous, but, yes, there is a great difference between the God of classical philosophy and the God of orthodox Christianity. I’m more interested myself in the problems of philosophy of religion (particularly evil) and the new field of “practical theology.” It is, as you say, correct to draw a distinction between philosophy of religion and more traditional philosophy. But contemporary theology is often not traditionally theistic and is often in deep dialogue with the philosophy of religion, so the distinction can be difficult to make. (You know you’re in trouble when a major contemporary work is called “A/theology.”)

When you’re in neither the theistic or atheistic camp, the reason vs. revelation debate gets old quickly. From where I sit, only rationalists and theists have this debate.

“Woran man nicht sprechen kann, muess man schweigen.” Ophelia Benson takes this in a strongly authoritarian direction, (probably much more so than the original quote intended), all the while, protesting against the authoritarianism of institutionalized religion. I will grant the point about organized religion, the authoritarian tendencies of which I equally deplore and I will grant, as well, that religious beliefs can come into conflict with well-established scientific truths , (though do not necessarily do so.) But my basic objection to her diatribe, (and a forteriori to that of Richard Dawkins, which stands behind it), is that it fails to make any effort to understand the nature and status of that which is the object of its criticism, viz. religious belief, and, though there is a long history and large area of argument on this matter from any number of positions or points of view, sets up a straw man argument, which presumes at once to know and dismiss out of hand the content and status of such beliefs. Yes, indeed, clearly the “truth” claim of such beliefs must be that of cognitive assertions of referential import, as if any utterance or expression taking the syntactical form of a statement must necessarily be interpreted in such a fashion! No, this is an utterly naive or unsophisticated view of the nature of language and meaning and the sorts of claims that can be raised therein. And it is used to authorize what amounts to a positivist metaphysics, (rather than a proper consideration of the nature, operation and limits of scientific knowledge), which imputes that “G-d” “must” be some sort of external entity which, in turn, grounds the causal order of the world. Whereas such a metaphysical conception of G-d has been influential in the inherited tradition, perhaps unfortunately so, it by no means exhausts that tradition, nor does it necessarily define the content of religious beliefs for believers. And the claim that everything can be explained does not amount to an explanation; to the contrary, anything that purports to explain everything, by virtue of that fact, explains nothing- this is one of the main points of the progressive critique of metaphysics, a philosophical project and tradition by now more than 2 centuries old. Explanation is a human activity, something human beings do for purposes of their own, and it is intricated with other human activities and purposes. The operations of the principle of causality, which have mutated considerably since the time of Newton and Kant, do not admit of a totalization, nor are they adequate to address, let alone answer, every rational or reasonable question. That we live in an open universe and that this is entirely in accord with the project of modern science was one of the principle thrusts of Whitehead’s philosophical work.

What is at stake here is whether religious beliefs are at all comprehensible or understandable and whether they can rationally be construed as making some sort of claim to “truth” or just what sort of validity-claim they make. In my view, religious beliefs are neither rational, nor irrational, but simply nonrational. Religious ideas generally contain a normative core of an ethical conception of life inextricably intricated with a surplus of ideas that may well be unconstruable or impassible, though usually tied to ritual or symbolic contents. Wittgenstein compares such impassible contents to analogies or metaphors that can not be fully construed or fulfilled. At one point, he says something to the effect that it is perfectly fine to regard bees as kindly creatures who provide us with honey, but it is a mistake to actually take them that way, else one will probably be stung. To be sure, one can subject such impassible notions to an anthropoligizing, ad hominem criticism as compensatory illusions and substitute gratifications- and I personally think one can go quite far with this procedure, though it would be both cruel and obtuse to ignore the actual sufferings and corruptions of this world, in doing so. But it is by no means vouchsafed that such criticism can entirely reduce the religious point of view to its terms and banish thereby its claims to transcendence. And, of course, something of these impassible religious ideas may make some sense by another route, as goads to the impetus toward transcendence in the practices of believers. But what then of the supposed “truth” content of religious beliefs, if they can neither be rationally construed, nor evaluated? In my view, the only reasonable criterion one can apply to religious beliefs is how they are lived out, which is not a matter of cognitive truth, but rather of their (ethical) authenticity in lived experience. (And such a quasi-behavioral account would also apply, mutatis mutandis, to cognitive truth claims.) To repeat from my prior post on this thread, religion is a matter of adopting a certain spiritual attitude to the world and one’s existence in it, which one can choose to do or not. (“Religion is how a man deals with his privacy”, said Whitehead, which is often misconstrued to mean that religion is a shameful private matter, not fit for public discussion. But, of course, Whitehead was using the word “privacy” in its British sense; the synomyn in American English would be “solitude”.) Of course, one can always take ethical objection to the conduct of another, though the responsibility for doing so falls entirely upon one’s own head, and a cognitive objection to religious belief as simply being untrue really amounts to an ethical objection against religious believers as being untruthful: it amounts to an accusation of bad faith, which can just as easily be reversed, insofar as one fails to attend to the actual nature of the matter and what is at stake in it. On the other hand, as I was at pains to make clear in my previous post, religious beliefs also contain intuitions about ethical norms, which are at least rationally construable and arguable. And, as I argued there, since science is itself dependent on norms for rational cognition that it can not self-sufficiently provide for itself, while it lacks the capacity and authority to provide for ethical norms, the rational recuperation of ethical intuitions from inherited traditions, especially religious ones, is by no means a trivial or dispensable exercise and this point does strongly legitimize the notion of the “two spheres”. In particular, I pointed to the Judaic critique of pagan idolatry in favour of the ethical injunction to justice, which can not be provided for by mere adherence to a pre-given natural order. Would one really want to dispense with the legacy of this critique for rational and critical thought and action in our now largely secularized world? To me, such an option would be the equivalent of joining the flat earth society, for such a rational transcendence of the given, while not reducible, nor subsumable by the scientific spirit, is not with out homology to it. Finally, as a parting shot, I will add that the Judeo-Christian conception of sin, in its relation to the notions of atonement, resposibility and redemption, is a much suppler and subtler ethical conception that anything derivable from formalist or utilitarian ethics, let alone the palaverings of modern-day psychologism.

Right, Ophelia. What questions of meaning, purpose, values, etc. has religion answered? What knowledge has it given us? When two religions give two conflicting answers to the same question, how may we tell which, if either, is correct?

I find chutney’s and John Halasz’s recent posts so mannered and opaque as to be virtually incomprehensible. “Pscyhomystical personal exploration” calling on “Jungian archetypes” as an explanation of God. What’s that when it’s at home?

Tillich seems to me the epitome of postmodern theology, the Derrida of Christianity. His version of Christianity is so vacuous and drained of substance as to be essentially meaningless. I can only agree with Martin Gardner:

“Tillich defended his metaphysics with such infuriating vagueness that it is often inpossible to know exactly what he meant, but I side with those who find it hard to distinguish Tillich’s God from what atheists mean when they talk about all that is. It sounds as if Tillich is saying something deep when he speaks of the “ground of being,” “being-as-such,” and the “transcendant unconditioned,” but what these terms finally come down to mean is simply that which is, taken in its incomprehensible totality. … It is not Tillich’s pantheism that puts me off–after all, it is a respectable metaphysical way to look at things. I am put off by the hypocrisy of parading of such pantheism as the culmination of Protestant theology. There is a point beyond which it seems unfair to go in trying to reform a religious tradition. Better abandon it altogether than struggle to change it so radically that its founders would no longer recognize it as their own. Can you imagine the reaction of Luther or Calvin (or Jesus!) to a concept of God so lacking in the attributes of a person as to be almost identical with Brahman, or the Tao, or the All of Buddhism, or the Absolute of Hegel and the post Hegelian pantheists … If God is merely another name for Being, or an impersonal gound of being, then only terminology distinguishes pantheism from atheism.”

don p,

Mother will be happy to hear that I’m mannered.

I’m not a neopagan and I don’t pretend to defend neopaganism. However, this is how they seem to understand themselves, which seems a fair starting point for any evaluation. I’m merely suggesting that it’s best to understand the basics of neopaganism before attacking it for its “supernaturalism” and belief in “God”–two beliefs it expressly doesn’t have.

I’m not a Tillichian and find his metaphysics unsatisfying too, and I’ve abandoned Christianity myself. But his academic reputation is unquestioned. At the last meeting of the American Academy of Religion, there seemed to be more sessions on him than any other topic, and this some four decades after his death, not an honor academic usually accord to the “vague.”

chutney:

Well, I lied. My interest in Neopaganism is not completely exhausted. I couldn’t resist looking up the Neopaganism entry in Wikipedia, which informs me that Neopagans generally worship one or more of a variety of “Divinities” that are “far beyond our human abilities to see, know, or understand,” which would seem to suggest that they do in fact believe in some kinds of supernatural entity. I didn’t see anything about Jung or “psychomysticism.”

“…is better equipped to tell us the meaning of life…”

Better-equipped meaning more likely to be right, or more likely to tell us something we can use?
There’s a tradition that the unprepared who enter the presence of the Most High get vaporized.
Being told about something is not the same as learning it, understanding it.
In that sense “telling us” has a more complete, a fuller meaning; it’s a transitive action.
–
“What questions of meaning, purpose, values, etc. has religion answered? What knowledge has it given us?”

This is risky and completely conjectural, but religion may exist, may be still with us, not at all because of the reasons it gives for its own existence. But like schizophrenia and other seemingly counter-productive and illogical human manifestations, it may periodically be all that gets us through some dark horror. My own family witnessed this, in the adoption of severe religious practice by someone whose personality was essentially deconstructed by intense personal loss of an immediate and violently intense nature. The choice seemed to be religious illogic with a daily ritual of affirmation and communion, or stark raving unbearable anguish and soul-destroying grief.
–
“… in favour of the ethical injunction to justice, which can not be provided for by mere adherence to a pre-given natural order…”

The complete absence in the debate of any in locus members of societies living in “adherence to a pre-given natural order” makes it pretty easy to dismiss as an ethical path. However, when you look at all this ethical debate and conflict as biological competition, rather than as a battle for truth and pan-human transcendence; when you see it as self-perpetuating systems that mask themselves as universal and moral, it makes a little more sense. It’s absolutely essential to view the already slaughtered “natural” savages as less ethical; certainly to consider that they might have been more moral, or more accurately moral, would be suicidal.
Judeo-Christian morality, whatever its origins, and however well-intentioned its long tradition of adherence, exists exclusively for the benefit of Judeo-Christians. That the welcome mat is always out, and all are welcome to join, doesn’t change the consistently emphasized and repeatedly documented tenet, that only the elect will be “saved”.
As far as “…the Judeo-Christian conception of sin, in its relation to the notions of atonement, resposibility and redemption…” goes, I have to insist that there has been, over the centuries far too much “sin” with no consequent “atonement” or acknowledgement of “responsibility”, while a concurrent insistence on expected and earned “redemption” contributes to a smug arrogance on the part of adherents whatever their particular denomination.
–
“…common or garden religion …that’s just a smoke screen. Naturally, it claims to be all that, but then it would, wouldn’t it.”

The same hiding-behind takes place with science. We want religion to answer for the errors of all religionists, or at least to bear the weight of their wrongs, but when science gets accused then, that’s not science, that’s applied discovery, or unethical research, or some other redefining of what’s essentially the same flawed human incompetence, moral, ethical, and ultimately, animal, that’s mucked up both science and religion.
You can talk about the high aims and the pure intentions of science, but you’ll have to find some way to disavow Joseph Mengele and his legion of anonymous heirs. Heartless science has done more damage than we know, we haven’t seen its totality yet.
By heartless I don’t mean cruel, taking pleasure in causing pain, I mean unfeeling, highly rational, virtually autistic disregard of commonality, whether with the other as race, or as species.

“But I hardly think that such political dangers are to be fruitfully addressed, let alone remedied, by dismissing the perspective of religious believers as so much superstitious nonsense”

One, I never used the words “so much superstitious nonsense” so I’m not sure what the relevance is of saying that. Two, I’m not (in this particular discussion) talking solely or even mainly about the political aspect. That is important, but it’s not all there is to the subject. I’m primarily talking about epistemology.

“without at all adequately differentiating and delimiting different types of validity claims and the “spheres” in which they are properly and plausibly addressed”

One, I think I did “differentiate and delimit” those claims and spheres. Naturally I think I did it adequately for my purpose. Two – properly and plausibly? What does that mean? I’m not talking about propriety, and as for plausibility – that’s the whole problem, isn’t it, confusing putative plausibility with truth. Mind you, I don’t find all the guff about separate spheres a bit plausible, but I realize some people do. But that’s not the question I’m asking; I’m asking whether the guff about separate spheres is accurate and truthful or not. I maintain that in many ways it’s not, and I have in fact said why. Briefly, to be sure, but I think clearly. Brevity sometimes aids clarity.

“all on the basis of an equally arbitrary assertion of the omnicompetence of science”

Again – that’s not what I’ve said. I’ve been talking about evidence. I nowhere said that science is omnicompetent.

“At any rate unlike Ophelia Benson, I am not a self-satisfied elitist”

One, I’m not so sure about that. Two, you did realize the elitist thing was a joke, right?

Etc.

“What questions of meaning, purpose, values, etc. has religion answered? What knowledge has it given us?”

What has revelation taught us?

The “us” that lack faith, nothing. Nor is it trying to tell “us” anything.

The “us” that have faith? Well, for example, once you believe that the Bible reveals the truth, then you get all sorts of knowledge:
– Murder is wrong
– Stealing is wrong
– Lying is wrong

and about seven more come to mind :-)

The knowledge that revelation gives to the faithful is much more (and more complicated) than this, and covers all the areas you mention (physical reality, non-physical reality, ethics, politics, etc.), but I am not a theologian, so I don’t have much useful to say about it.

I suspect you know the three things above, for different reasons. The faithful get it “free” with their faith.

As I have said, I have absolutely no idea how someone gets faith; some theologians I have read say that it is God-given, and so I shouldn’t worry too much about it :-) I know of no arguments or observations that would lead anyone to believe the Bible is a source of revealed truth.

However, if you do, there is tons of real knowledge in there. Some is hard to understand, hard to extract, but that is what the revelation-experts do; they interpret.

“As for epistemology, I had thought that that was no longer a going philosophical concern, having been definitively critiqued and refuted a while ago,”

Eh? Epistemology has been refuted? I don’t even know what that means – and I certainly don’t think it’s true.

“You confined the conception of G-d to that of an external entity that “supernaturally” intervenes in causal processes- (and, yes, that is, indeed, superstitious nonsense.)”

Where did I say that?

“Well, I doubt that there are many religious sophisticates left that believe in or conceive of G-d as an entity.”

As I’ve said many times, I’m not talking about ‘religious sophisticates.’ I don’t find the term awfully meaningful, but in any case I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about common or garden religion, the kind people talk about on the campaign trail, the kind The New Republic urges candidates to have and to talk noisily about. The kind that is always being urged on us (always stipulating the US here) by various pundits and opinion-makers. If you think those people are not talking about an ‘entity’ – about a deity that is a person and intervenes – well then I beg to differ, that’s all. That’s exactly what they’re talking about. It’s also what I’m talking about.

I did, didn’t I. It’s been a long day. It’s a fair cop.

I think I stuck that ‘and intervenes’ bit in because it was still in my head from just having quoted it. When I asked John where I said it (mind you, I didn’t deny having said it, she added casuistically) I didn’t remember having been that specific. And I don’t think I had been, yet (she added casuistically).

Long day, as I said.

Well, sorry, Jeremy, but 1. I don’t have infinite time. In fact I have very little, I have an ever-lengthening list of things to do on my own site, and I also have an entire magazine to proofread at the moment. 2. All three of the people you mention write at vast length. I’m sorry but even if I had time I wouldn’t have the inclination to read that much on the subject; not for a blog discussion. I’m a great believer in concision. 3. I don’t find their arguments as well thought out as you do – so I don’t feel much obligation to answer them in detail. 4. I don’t actually have to answer at all, you know. This isn’t my site. I enjoy the discussion, and I do think I’m obliged to be civil, etc, but answer every word of every post, simply because it was a discussion of mine on my (and my colleague’s) site that prompted Chris’ post and this thread? No. 5. Implications. Hmm. Well, maybe. But I do keep feeling that I’m simply being misread, as opposed to having implications drawn out. I could be wrong, of course, but that’s how it strikes me.

Yes, that’s a fair point. But I think it’s also only one way to look at it. Another way is that it’s reasonable to skim, answer salient points, etc. Blogs and especially comments on blogs are inherently informal, for one thing. If my name catches my eye and I think what I say is being misrepresented – well, I feel like pointing that out. I think that’s permissable.

That plank analogy and the burden of proof:

It’s a poor analogy because what’s at isue is whether gods exist, not an allegation about what a god did. So the correct analogy is, “Suppose I claimed that planks exist, then would the burden of proof be on me to show that planks exist?” The answer is, yes, of course, if anyone were to question that planks exist. Fortunately, planks do exist, and you can prove that fact to a sane person by pointing to one.

The plank analogy as given, that someone attacked Ophelia with one, is of course a hostile and slightly creepy form of rhetoric, and Ophelia was generous to let that aspect pass unchallenged. But in its logical form it’s not analogous to a claim that one or more gods exist but instead to a claim that, for example, a god visited me last night and did something, like putting my glass of water on top of the wardrobe _out of my reach_, or told me to go and kill abortionists, or whatever it is that I claim that this god did.

In that case, as with the claim that one was assaulted by a person with a plank, the onus of proof is on the person making that claim. With the plank claim we have quite a well worked out system for testing such claims, in which the accused is given the benefit of the doubt (that is, the person making the claim must prove it beyond reasonable doubt.) Nevertheless, because plank assaults are part of the real world, they are often proved and convictions often occur.

But in the claim that a god did or said some specific thing, the onus of proof is still on the person making the claim, and I’m not aware of such proofs ever having occured.

As a result, it is in general reasonable to take claims about plank assaults more seriously than claims that a god turned up the other day and did or said something.

Cheers!

Laon

A third point. (Looks like I’ve arrived rather late to this argument, and perhaps it’s all over.)

Jeremy said:
“I’ve been getting a bit irritated by your refusal, on this thread, to engage any of several very well thought out challenges to your original post; I am thinking specifically of sd’s, Bill Carone’s, and John Halasz’s posts.”

I’ve read John Halasz’s posts three times over. For all I know there may be coherent ideas under the thicket of words. But clarity is good, especially in argument. It’s my fault, of course, but I’ve failed, miserably, to work out precisely what John H might be saying, or whether he advanced any arguments in favour of whatever it is he said.

My three guesses as to John’s meaning are:
(1) Gods neither exist nor don’t exist. I’m afraid that isn’t logically one of the options. If John means that gods are an idea that some people have, and so they exist as an idea, then I don’t see why an atheist _would_ argue with that.
(2) The truth of a religion is demonstrated in the lives of the people who believe in that religion. That may pass as rhetoric, but as a claim about truth it’s self-evidently false. People live Hindu, Chistian, atheist, Buddhist, etc, lives, but this does not demonstrate that all of these mutually contradictory worldviews are true, nor any one of them.
(3) Judeo-Christianity is a wonderful collection of moral values and subtle notions of sin, and we couldn’t be moral without it, or not properly. That’s an unsubstantiated “my team is the greatest” claim rather than an argument. So I’m not sure that it required a counter-argument. But on behalf of Hindus, Buddhists, animists, atheists, etc, not to mention various ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, etc, I’ll express tolerant disagreement. But I don’t need to substantiate disagreement with an unsubstantiated claim.

So none of those things can be the “well thought out challenges” that Jeremy found in John’s posts. I’m turning to Jeremy for help. Jeremy, since you found the “well thought out challenge” to Ophelia in John’s post, could you explain what John’s point was that you think Ophelia should have responded to?

Thank you.

Laon

The “death of epistemology”, so confidently announced by John, is as real as the deaths, respectively, of Superman and Spock. (I didn’t believe for a second that ET had died, either, sitting there dry-eyed in a weeping cinema.)

Epistemology is the philosophical theory of knowledge. It is a fact that epistemology is still part of philosophical work, inside and outside academia.

There are epistemologists who take Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s work into account but give it a place in their framework. And there are epistemologists who reject Wittgenstein and Heidegger.

My suspicion, that I couldn’t prove, is that the second category is the larger of the two, and will become larger still with time.

The trouble with arguments from authority is that they only persuade people who already accept that authority. I suggest that the number of people who think that if Wittgenstein or Heidegger said something, then it must be true, is already small and is declining. (And shall we include “Heil Hitler” among the things that Heidegger said, whose intellectual and moral weight we might consider? Heidegger’s Nazism doesn’t refute his logical arguments, but to some extent we’re talking about morality, among other things, and when Heidegger gets cited as an authority anywhere near that context …: yes, let’s not forget Heidegger’s heiling of Hitler.)

Anyway: In “not knowing about the end of epistemology”, Ophelia is in the same category as people who don’t know about the death of rap, or of irony, or the author. She doesn’t know it, and nor do I, because of the simple fact that it just aint so.

(Yes, the onus of proof, that epistemology aint dead, is on me. If anyone wants to challenge, I’d be bored but willing to point out some real live working epistemologists, and their real live current books and articles. When things really do exist, it mostly isn’t very hard to prove it. But to save me from doing that labour for nothing, let’s bet US$10 on it, first.)

The passage on intolerant tolerance etc is irrelevant, isn’t it?

The attempt to suggest that Ophelia is authoritarian is likewise a bit shonky, as far as I can see. To argue, to expose one’s reasoning as clearly as possible, is the clear opposite of authoritarianism. It is both libertarian and egalitarian because it allows others an equal status. There are no claims from authority but only from the quality of the arguments themselves. Any person who sees the arguments can judge, accept or reject them as they please.

I suspect that the reason that Ophelia has taken so much personalisation in this debate, is that (in my observation) she argues better and more clearly than her opponents, and this has annoyed them.

Also, just as epistemology survived its alleged interment by Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Richard Dawkins will no doubt survive being called “a reductionist hack”. That’s certainly concise, but doesn’t pack much weight as an argument.

Cheers!

Laon

Well, Laon, cheery one, having taken the trouble of actually having read some basic work and assuming that others would have done so is not argument by authority. Of course, there are people who are paid to teach academic philosophy and must endlessly publish to maintain their berths and their status, so they will academically recycle these matters. But in the progressive history of philosophy, some basic arguments are dispositive. The “end of epistemology” arguments were more recently recycled in academic philosophy by the work of Richard Rorty, which, I take it, has had a wide reception in the anglophone world. I didn’t just make this stuff up. Nor do arguments always start from scratch, based solely on their own clarity, without regard to the prior history of argument and interpretation in which they are inevitably inscribed. Furthermore, I did take the time to spell out its implications. You offered up ten bucks that you could cite current epistemologists. What is that, if not a (purely conventionalistic) appeal to authority? I’ll offer you ten bucks, if you can reasonably answer this question: what does the “philosophical theory of knowledge” add to the reasons and evidences validating cognitive truth claims that is not already actually contained in those reasons and evidences?

Yes, Heidegger was a Nazi. How very observant and original of you. And Wittgenstein was a very queer fellow and Levinas was a Jew who could not get over surviving the Holocaust. Are you making any point? And as for your quantitative assessment, are you suggesting that polling settle all questions of validity. I do not like Heidegger. I much prefer Walter Benjamin and would sooner recommend his student Gadamer, from whom part of my argumentative line was derived. But historically that was where the issue was engaged, and Heidegger remains a powerful, if troubling, philosophical figure, at least from the point of view of sorting out lines of development. As for Richard Dawkins, I did once read one of his books. I was informed that animals were basically robots for transmitting sets of genes. While this had the great merit of being counter-intuitive, since we all know that all great science is counter-intuitive, it did not strike me as a remotely plausible, nor interesting account of biological reality. I am not conversant with the technical merits of the gene-selection theorem, so I will not argue any specific case. I did not read Gould’s book on the “two majesteriums”, since this is precisely the bloviating side of Gould I would like to avoid, but, at least, Gould, in some of his popular writings, has the merit of conveying something of the wonder and complexity of biological reality. In general, I consider reductionism a valid research strategy and one that is often the best that scientists can do at any given time, but, as a doctrine, it is lamentable. At any rate, I’m sure Richard Dawkins will survive my salacious slur and cash his royalties heartily.

You claim to have read my posts 3 times and I don’t know why. Though I may, indeed, be a poor and unclear writer, on the evidence you presented, your reading/interpreting skills are still poorer. If I argue from heaviness, then perhaps it is because there is weight in the world, even beyond any consideration of the burden of proof. Perhaps those who argue from lightness are blinded by their own light.

msg:

I did not address your post previously. I was not defending religious fundamentalism, but to the contrary, arguing against the reduction of religion to fundamentalism, by religious and non-religious alike. I find the Mormons just as weird as you do. And I am by no means unfamiliar with the critique of ideology and the unmasking of motives. Further, nothing I said could be construed as endorsing the persecution of indigenous peoples in the name of “true religion”, or anything else for that matter. Some of what you said would be allowable interpretations in my book, among others. But they are not the allowable interpretations of a complex and variable history. And some of this deep ecology rhetoric is a bit much; in particular the reduction of human societies and their cultures to biological populations is a quarter-truth, at best.

The invocation of Robert’s Rules of Order and sweetness and light in this context is a bit rich. Ophelia Benson may be a charming and witty person in her own right- I don’t know her-, but, in this case, she merely repeated the terms of her own argument, asseverated in lieu of response, flip-flopped a bit and altogether demonstrated a Lord Hutton-like sense of inquiry.

A couple of points.

First, John said:
“having taken the trouble of actually having read some basic work and assuming that others would have done so is not argument by authority.”

John, you claimed that epistemology is dead, and indicated that Ophelia must be pretty stupid if she didn’t “know” that. But the only argument you advanced in support of that claim is that Wittgenstein and Heidegger had said so.

That is an example of argument by authority. The distinguishing feature of argument by authority is not “actually having read some basic work”. Instead, the distinguishing feature is a failure to provide arguments on the claim at issue, providing generalised name citation instead.

A second point is that it may be an error, when someone protests that you have argued only by authority, to respond only by saying that the other person has not read any “basic work”. That follows an argument by authority with an argument ad hominem, doesn’t it? While still failing to present any arguments?

Related to that, de haut en bas assumptions about other people’s libraries and their use of them, are wankery even when they are accurate, so I guess they must be worse if they’re not.

I have a friend who, if they found that they’d typed the words “having taken the trouble of actually having read some basic work and assuming that others would have done so”, would have hit “Delete” rather than “Post”. There are various purely self-interested reasons for this.

Now, my disproof of the claim that epistemology is dead is the fact that in the real world, today, philosophers do epistemology. Some do epistemology taking Wittgenstein and Heidegger into account, and some do epistemology while rejecting Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But it is an empirical fact that the discipline of epistemology is alive and active, with a current history, issues, publications.

To point out this empirical fact is not actually an argument by authority. It’s a proof by evidence.

You asked, “what does the ‘philosophical theory of knowledge’ add to the reasons and evidences validating cognitive truth claims that is not already actually contained in those reasons and evidences”?

Epistemology is “the philosophical theory of knowledge”, so for this answer I’ll use the word epistemology rather than that definitional phrase. Now, epistemology concerns itself with such things as the reasons and evidences validating cognitive [and other] truth claims. Anything that is reasoned concerning the reasons and evidences validating cognitive and other truth claims is in the field of epistemology.

So the form of your question asks, essentially, “what epistemology adds to the subject of epistemology”. Logically, epistemology adds nothing to itself, as it already is itself, so the correct answer to your question is, “nothing”.

You responded to my observation that Heidegger was a Nazi by suggesting that the point is analogous to saying that Wittgenstein was queer and Levinas was Jewish. No, being a Nazi isn’t actually the same kind of thing as being queer or Jewish. Heidegger’s Nazism is a real problem in terms of his philosophy, while being homosexual (I don’t think Wittgenstein would have used the term “queer”, though I may be wrong on this) or being Jewish is not. I don’t think you really needed that explained to you. I think you were just trying something on, rhetorically.

Finally, you said: “Though I may, indeed, be a poor and unclear writer, on the evidence you presented, your reading/interpreting skills are still poorer”.

So each of my guesses as to what meanings there may have been in your earlier posts must have been mistaken. But I made an honest attempt to find something meaningful in there, based on specific words that you wrote. I said the fault was no doubt mine, and no doubt it still is. If enough other people admire and follow what you write, then of course you don’t need to try to write intelligibly, as you must already be doing so.

Cheers!

Laon

Well, it’s all off the edge of the world now, but I don’t think the debate lacked earnestness. And though there was a dogfight between John and myself, the nub, a claim that epistemology is dead, is important, on-topic, and something I feel earnest about.

Regards,

Laon

Let us all make our ritual ablutions and libations to Hades!

Well, Laon, cheery one, I’m sure you’ll recognize that your defense of epistemology is tautological and empty. Further, it simply restates the second point I made about the upshot of the end of epistemology. So much for the omni-competence of logic. (Logic is basically just a subset of operations of semantic inference and implication. “Making sense” is more fundamental than logic and not all the operations by which we make sense are semantic in nature- some are context-bound and illocutionary. Formalized or specialized artificial languages derive from our capacities as natural language users. Furthermore, outside the purely formal realm of mathematics, I do not think that anything can be definitively and irrevocably proven; neither did Plato. The 17th century obsession with absolute proof, which grew up in philosophy along side the development of modern science and mathematics, as well as containing something of pre-modern excessiveness, had something to do with doubt and anxiety about salvation; the Greeks were untroubled by such a concern.)

Post-epistemological philosophy has to do with understanding rather than “truth”, with the elucidation, analysis and interpretation of meaning and the explication of norms. It lacks the force even to recommend norms on its own authority; this would be an extra-philosophical, existential commitment and can only be persuaded to, not “proven”. Whereas philosophy can serve as a placeholder and mediator in rational discussion and an upholder of the value of reason, if a philosopher wishes to know anything, he must do the same leg-work as everyone else. Rational justification is to be achieved, if at all, not through grounding in some aboriginal metaphysical necessity, nor through deduction from some abstract logical structure, but simply through the role a given claim or complex of ideas plays in the warp and woof of our form of life, together with the practices activities, relationships and experiences that accompany it. Take, e.g., algebra: what would our achieved form of life be like if we abolished algebra, what could we no longer do, conceive, recognize or perceive without algebra, what would we lose and what present needs could we no longer fulfill, or perhaps even feel? But a form of life can not be judged as a whole, from without, as it were, or “transcendentally”- (the end of epistemology is the de-transcendentalizing of philosophy). This goes even for our most universalizing conceptions or practices: when there is a conflict within or between achieved forms of life, there is no other remedy but reasonable dialogue. Such rational justification is, of course, riddled with contingency; such contingency is unavoidable, and philosophy is only deluded, if it thinks otherwise. I made a similar argument for our cultural heritage from religious traditions, even for us secular, unbelieving folk. I made no claim that “Judeo-Christia morality”- (is there any such singular entity?)- is necessarily superior to any other morality, nor that religion makes one a better person. I explicitly confined myself to the broadly Judeo-Christian tradition because that is the only one I dimly know anything about; anything I would say about other traditions or moralities would be mere solecism. (It was because of gross misreadings of the letter of my text, such as this, that I saw no need to respond to your readings.) I merely asked, in the light of the failure or inadequacy of a formalized ethics, deduced from a meta-ethical theory, whether we did not still draw something of our ethical intuitions and critical thinking from such resources. What would we lose without such historical anamnesis? Perhaps we simply become less capable of recognizing our own moral failures and less capable of recognizing, articulating, and justifying what ethical intuitions we do have, which can never gotten at by an objectifying, entirely externally oriented type of thinking. If such a conception of philosophy, surrendering its much vaunted and cherished autonomy, is traumatizing, so be it: be traumatized. But there are probably much better things to waste one’s anxiety on. But it is not an “arrogant” conception; to the contrary, it is quite “modest.”

Philosophy is a peculiar endeavor, at once highly personal and entirely impersonal. As such, personal considerations can not be excluded from its interpretation, but they are not dispositive and philosophy can not be reduced to their ambit. Didn’t Nietzsche once write something to the effect that all philosophies are unwritten autobiographies? Did he mean to imply that at least it is better to do philosophy than to be so vain as to write one’s autobiography? That was the point I was making about Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Levinas, not some rhetorical dress-up. (It was late and I had just gotten back from an overnight shift at work, so perhaps I did not make the point clear.) As for Wittgenstein being “queer”, that did not mean homosexual- (I thought of changing the word to “odd” to avoid such misunderstanding, but, no, queer was the right word.) Homosexuality was the least of his “queerness”, according to biographies and the testimony of his friends. He was highly ascetic, moralistic, abrupt and overbearing, prone to a sense of abjection, constantly out-of-sorts, and often scarcely in human contact, fleeing to cabins by the sea in Norway and Ireland. Some of his friends think that at times he was verging in and out of madness. And yet he saw himself through and achieved his original philosophical work. By all accounts, it was a tormented and miserable life, yet when he was on his death-bed surrounded by his friends- (he died of inoperable prostrate cancer in his fifties)-, he told them that he had lived a happy life. How very Socratic.

Keith Ellis makes a plea for serious discourse without posturing and Laon won’t stop with that increasingly aggressive exclamation point!
Though statements like,“I suspect that the reason that Ophelia has taken so much personalisation in this debate, is that (in my observation) she argues better and more clearly than her opponents, and this has annoyed them.” ameliorate that greatly.
John C. Halasz weighs in with, (paraphrasistically) while Wittgenstein was queer it wasn’t as important as that he was odd. A peculiar idea but one I like a lot. Bill Carone writes from somewhere I’ve never been, where the rules of discourse, if any, seem impossibly alien, and difficult to learn.
The points I feel personally responsible for, in John’s terms “deep ecology rhetoric” and “reduction of human societies to the biological”, are getting sidetracked by an urgent sense that I need to use the word “epistemology” quickly and assertively or just stop writing altogether. But, so, anyway.
The dismissal of anything to do with ecological or environmental attitudes as trivial in any serious context, is something you, John, inherited from the academic world you trained in, and the mediated world you live in. I promise you within a couple of years these terms will not seem at all tangential to your life, as they must evidently now.
That human societies are only biological entities seems clearer to me every day. Nothing but. Big ones, sure, and bad as can be, but nothing other than that. Insisting that human societies are biological entities is not a “reduction” of the human. That scale of value, with adult male human at the top, and a hierchical descent down through woman to the lower races and then the animal, is as baseless now as it ever was, and yet it still gets used to justify bigotries of all stripes. Including the prejudicial treatment of the “natural”.
Anti-biology. Man against nature. Taming the wilderness. The difference between valiant self-assertion and sadistic degradation of the other seems to have been lost along the way.
We are biology. First and last. The illusion of the exclusive primacy, the virtual sanctity, of the individual for the sake of individuality alone, is a scam that’s been run for thousands of years, facilitated by organized religion.
It’s very seductive. “You’re important.” “God wants you to be happy.” The idea that you’re nothing more than a vehicle for your genes to get through time and into the next carrier is abhorrent, even to me, at times, but I can’t see anything to refute it, except the lingering vestiges of the magical thinking I was raised on.
That it’s quite possible that our conception of what “biological” truly connotes is profoundly diminished, that what our genes actually are may be substantially more than a collection of linked proteins, comforts me to imagine.
–
Sweetness and light, I don’t know; Laon is pretty entertaining, and rigorously precise. Introducing Lord Hutton seems pretty vindictive and inapt as far as Ophelia Benson goes. She gives no quarter, granted, but she has never, in my reading, let her exasperation slip toward the personal attack – more than can be said for some of her opponents. That she takes on a potentially dangerous role willingly and comports herself with aplomb is greatly to her credit.
The rhetoric thing – I know, but it’s fun. I like it. I’m better at street talk dialect and slang really, but I enjoy the edge of floridity. My apologies to anyone who’s offended by it.

“non-theists who understand the arguments revelation-experts make consider them valid. Both the faithful and the non-faithful know that the arguments do not apply to the non-faithful, only the faithful.”

This didn’t make much sense on re-reading, so let me give an example.

Three propositions:

A. There is an elephant outside my front door.
B. There is elephant DNA outside my front door.
C. If there is an elephant outside my front door, then there is elephant DNA outside my fron door.

I consider C true, even though I consider A and B false.

If I also believed A as well as C, then I should also believe B, right?

Fact is, I don’t believe A is true, so C has no effect on my beliefs about elephant DNA.

The fact that I don’t believe A has no relation to the validity of C.

I think this is Logic 001, no?

So, let’s move that to talking about revelation.

A. The Bible is a source of revealed truth.
B. Murder is wrong.
C. If you believe the Bible is a source of revealed truth, then you should believe murder is wrong.

I, a non-theist, believe C is true, although I am not an expert. I suspect that many of you non-theists think this as well; you certainly can take a position on it, true or false.

Fact is, I do not believe A, so the fact that C is true isn’t that important to me; it has no effect on my beliefs about murder.

The fact that you don’t believe A has no relation to the validity of C. In other words, the fact that you don’t have faith has no relation to the validity of the statements made by revelation-experts.

Theologians (revelation-experts) only make arguments that are similar in form to C. They produce propositions (like C) which may be true or false. They have no effect on the beliefs of the non-faithful, simply due to their structure.

That is what I meant when I said non-theists do not automatically believe that theology cannot produce knowledge; it is knowledge irrelevant to the non-faithful, but relevant to the fatihful.

Gosh, this is still going on; I didn’t realize.

Bill,

Well I do my best to answer anyway!

“You said, “theology doesn’t explain anything, it only claims to.”
– You said “I don’t mean religion is forbidden to tell us about that of which we cannot speak – only that it’s unable to. The formula says that science can’t answer those questions but religion can. I say no it can’t – that is, it’s not able to. It’s able to make answers, as any of us are, but they don’t amount to much. They are just assertions.”

With these statements, you are explicitly claiming that observation and reason are the only ways to “explain” anything, even though you try to deny it (your many “not trying to disprove” comments).”

No I’m not. I’m saying religion can’t explain, not that any other entity can. Saying ‘religion cannot explain X’ by no means entails saying that ‘therefore Y can explain X.’ That’s a separate statement, surely. And one that I’m not making. In fact that’s the whole point. This ‘two spheres’ argument depends on the idea that science says how things are and religion explains why. I’m saying that religion doesn’t explain why but rather (as I said) claims to do so. But I think ‘why’ is just an unanswerable question.

“Before you can say anything, you need to understand what you are talking about.

There it is Bill.
That’s at the end of a comment you addressed to Ophelia. In a social situation the assumption of superiority inherent in that language and tone would be considered at least mildly threatening. It’s odd, but aggressive; two qualities that people generally get”

It is exactly what I was arguing in the whole post, though, right? It was the conclusion of the argument.

Now I may be wrong; I often am. I should have said “You don’t seem to know what the structure of theological arguments are, yet you judge them.”

I find myself in the same place when discussing things with theists and non-theists alike.

I also have never been compared to Bush; this is a first :-)

“Humility and an open mind, honest motives, and loyalty to things outside the self”

Say more, say more …

Where have I shown myself to lack these things? How can I improve myself?

weel, briefly since I have to go to work.

No, “Lord Hutton-like” was not vindictive, but simply malicious and well-warranted. I did try to explain to you, yes, at some length, why the terms of your argument were simplistic and narrow-minded. Simply reiterating those terms is not responsive, i.e. not making an argument. And then when I convey the “news” to you that “epistemology” lacks the sort of credentials you attribute to it, not only am I accused of being authoritarian for citing as evidence a complex body of textual work for what is after all a textual matter, (as if “argument” were solely a matter of clearly ordering and spelling out deductions from apodictic premises)-, inspite of the fact that, I think, I did explain clearly and simply the points at issue, but, in response, the assertion is made that, to the contrary, epistemology is fine and dandy and of central importance in adjudicating public issues- (in the light of the desperately irrational level of public politics here in the U.S.A. and perhaps elsewhere nowadays, who’s sense of external reality is lacking here? Do you really think such “higher knowledge” and such brisk certainty will haul much weight in dealing with the traffic?)- and that you and all your friends are doing epistemology. Well, “all my friends are doing it” is something that adolescents say and if you would step outside of your academic cocoon, perhaps you would realize that. The role of both science and religion with respect to politics and civil society are complex and problematic matters and their difficulties and dangers should not be underestimated, especially in these increasingly darkening times. What is at stake among other things, is the caprrying-capacity of peoples’ belief structures in a complex, crisis-ridden modern world, where people are constantly dislocated and stressed from living inside a perpetual motion machine, governed by overweening power-complexes over which people have very little control. So, you see, the situation is not all that different for secularized unbeliever as for religious believers, and I don’t think the dividing line between rational and justifiable beliefs and practices and gathering irrationalism fruitfully runs exactly there where you would wish to put it. So do you see why one might reasonably characterize you argumentative procedure as “Hutton-like”?

As for there being no answers to “why” questions, this is overstated and silly. why do you think there exists the word “why”? This is to confuse and overgeneralize atelic norms for causal explanation operative in science, with questions about reasons and purposes, which, of course, are not pre-inscribed in the world- (and it is true that this fact is what seems to upset many people about Darwinism)-, but nonetheless are of concern and relevance to human beings. But perhaps matters concerning anything so vague, undefinable and dubious in its existence as human identity are not worthy of proper epistemological consideration.

I mean no offence other than that which is deliberate and warranted, but if you take it upon yourself to impugn others’ beliefs, you must be prepared to have your own beliefs impgned as well. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.

John Halasz

You call that briefly? Jeez, I’d hate to see your idea of long then. It would probably put CT out of business.

Who on earth is that long post addressed to? It seems to be addressed to someone in particular, but it’s chaotic. You quote from several different people and run everything together, but your addresse appears to be singular. I gather that most of the snottiness is addressed to me, but since you have such a muddled idea of who said what and who thinks what, I won’t take it personally.

I also won’t read it carefully or answer it. It’s confused, too long, unclear, boring, pompous, self-righteous, and bad-tempered.

Oh and Bill Carone, I thought I’d already said this but perhaps not. We’re talking at cross-purposes: you’re talking about theology (and you also say I’m talking about theology, but that’s an error), but I’m not, I’m talking about religion. I have nothing to say about theology. My comment that Chris was addressing was about religion, not theology.

“Bill-
Pay attention. Stifle your need to get attention. Listen.”

Again, show me please. Show me evidence in my posts where I didn’t do these things, and I can work to change.

I think I have paid attention and listened (and I don’t see why you think I didn’t). I don’t see that I have a need to get attention (and I don’t see how you figured out that I do).

I’m here to learn, to see where I am getting things wrong, and I do so by challenging people when I think they are wrong.

“I thought I’d already said this but perhaps not.”

Or maybe I didn’t listen :-)

“My comment that Chris was addressing was about religion, not theology.”

So what do you think the difference is? I am using the terms fairly interchangeably (religion is often used to describe a set of rules or practices, so I try to avoid the word).

You have said “theology doesn’t explain anything, it only claims to.” in past posts; it might have just been in response to my use of the term. It actually is one of the main types of thing you have said that I disagree with, and wanted to figure out what exactly you meant.

If all you are saying is that low-level, non-expert religious people say and think things that are harmful and clearly wrong, then I agree. Is this what you are saying? You seemed to be saying more.

Chris Bertram writes:

On Wittgenstein – I think I’m right in saying that this all comes from Schopenhauer (and, in a sense, from Kant). But my history of German idealism is shakier than it should be.

Bob McManus responds:

Although I am sure Wittgenstein was to some degree familiar with German Idealism, as far as I remember, closer sources are Frege and the Philosophy of Mathematics, and Russell/Whitehead Principles of Logic

Ophelia Benson adds:

It’s interesting about the Wittgenstein-Schopenhauer thing – I just read something about that in Brian [sic] Magee’s Confessions of a Philosopher (so that’s why it interests me, she said solipsistically). He is strongly convinced that Schop was indeed a big (and little-acknowledged) influence on Wittgenstein.

Professor Bertram is closer to the mark, of course – the metaphysical framework of the Tractatus is Kantian-Schopenhauerian. Except that where Schopenhauer speculates about the nature of the-thing-in-itself/the noumenon/will, Wittgenstein maintains a disciplined, Fregean, silence.

It is also true that, as Magee states, Wittgenstein’s Schopenhauerian leanings are little-acknowledged relative to the vast canon of Wittgenstein scholarship (in contrast, Schopenhauer scholarship is not quite as tardy – Christopher Janaway and Julian Young, among others, have made the connection). How important this omission is to a rigorous study of the early Wittgenstein I cannot say – but it seems to me that such an omission could be very glaring indeed – a whole, misguided school of positivism arose from just this failure to grasp Wittgenstein’s (unsaid) metaphysics.

Check out John Holbo’s very well-written dissertation on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – Chapters 12 to 15 contain a helpful summary of the strands of influence that come together in the early Wittgenstein. It is also suggestive that Wittgenstein hints (albeit obliquely) that the philosophy of the Tractatus is unoriginal, and that he makes no claim to novelty. What is unique though, is his amalgation of Frege’s logical austerity with an idealist metaphysics. But there is a wealth of other hints besides (inexplicably, for someone who is forthcoming about the influence of Russell and Frege, Wittgenstein exhibits a stubborn reluctance when it comes to acknowledging the man who gave him his philosophical backbone) – the ladder metaphor, the image of the eye and the visual field, “The world is all that is the case” (cf. “The world is my representation”), “The limits of my language means the limits of my world” (cf. “the world is my will and representation”), and so on.

Some are found in his notebooks, others in the Tractatus. The fact that Wittgenstein copied/reproduced Schopenhauer almost wholesale in his notebooks (which were not intended for publication), together with his expression of indifference as to whether any one else (surely he was alluding to Schopenhauer!) has articulated the same thoughts as he did suggests to me that he was not one to acknowledge his intellectual debts readily. But that’s not the end of it. Stylistically (at least with regards to the employment of aphoristic metaphors), Wittgenstein borrowed from Schopenhauer too. The difference is that, where Schopenhauer is the paragon of clarity, Wittgenstein is cryptic.

Christopher Janaway is rightly scathing in his assessment of the early Wittgenstein. From his Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy:

. . . the influence of Schopenhauer on Wittgenstein was considerable and systematic, and . . . reading him against this background gives a degree of overall coherence to parts of his early work which are otherwise all but inexplicable. However, it has also been apparent that Wittgenstein was neither very original, nor very clear headed, in the way in which he took over terminology, images, and arguments from Schopenhauer, nor very eager to reveal his sources.

So much for inarticulable metaphysical frameworks.

Jon C. Halasz writes:

As for epistemology, I had thought that that was no longer a going philosophical concern, having been definitively critiqued and refuted a while ago, though, of course, that does not mean that epistemic or cognitive issues can not be argued and discussed.

Has it really? “Refuted” in what sense?

A bit later, Jon adds in characteristically looping style:

Ophelia Benson is not aware that epistemology is not a going philosophical enterprise. Perhaps she missed that stop on the Grand Tour; I myself have only hitchhiked, since I did not get an all-expenses-paid trip. Well, outside the nooks and crannies of academic industry, where anything will be a going concern somewhere, the locus classicus of the critical dissolution of epistemology is in the philosophical work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, though my preference is for the former and, if one follows out Levinas criticism of Heidegger, it is questionable how well or fully the latter executes this turn. As I said, end of epistemology by no means proscibes or inhibits the discussion, sorting out and evaluation of epistemic claims. To summerize some of the upshot of the end of epistemology baldly: philosophical reason has no special competence or authority by which it can dictate or adjudicate epistemic claims; at most, philosophy as such can elucidate the purport of such claims and what is at stake in them, but they are validated otherwise and elsewhere; there is no such thing as distinctively philosophical knowledge; the criterion of certainty and the abstract generality with which epistemology conducts itself are mistaken-(knowledge is not true belief, which, having attained the level of certainty, disqualifies all other beliefs and claims, nor are knowledge claims necessarily integrated into a singular conceptual whole or unity); higher or greater or newer knowledge does not result in or allow the derivation of a new ethics therefrom- at most, there is the same old ethics, whatever it may be, taking place under new truth-conditions-( this latter point being largely the impetus behind the epistemological project from Kant to Husserl); ethical norms, conceptions of the good, the right, and the just, do not derive from truth claims and change or transformation of them takes place in their own dimension- truth claims refer flatly to what is the case about states-of-affairs in the world and do not necessarily gather and subordinate all other concerns and claims to themselves.

First, the caveat “outside of . . . academic industry”. Gee, Jon, one would have thought, given that epistemology (or the theory of knowledge) is by and large a philosophical enterprise, and given that most – if not all – philosophy nowadays is academic philosophy, then of course excluding academia would mean that epistemology is no longer “a going philosophical enterprise” (outside of academic philosophy). You might as well say that outside of water, swimming is not a going physical enterprise.

Next, you claim Wittgenstein heralded the dissolution of epistemology. I don’t agree, but suppose that I grant you that – OK? OK. But that would presuppose that he was right, no? Ever countenanced the possibility, Jon, that he was, perhaps, wrong? I mean, there are so many competing traditions and approaches and accounts to a theory of knowledge. What makes you think the particular tradition you subscribe to is correct? No argument (or, none that I can discern).

You then claim that philosophy has no monopoly on epistemic claims, and that there is no such thing as “distinctively philosophical knowledge”. Fair enough, if I read you charitably. But if I do read you charitably, your claim has no relevance whatsoever. (Sure, scientific knowledge is scientific, just as religious knowledge is religious. So what?) So you must mean the uncharitable reading – namely that epistemic claims cannot be evaluated by a theory of knowledge rather than the charitable reading: i.e., that epistemic claims (that is, knowledge claims) are NOT ONLY philosophical in nature.

Does the former reading make any sense to you? According to you, since philosophy (epistemology) has no monopoly on knowledge claims, ergo epistemic claims about religion cannot be evaluated by some epistemological criteria. Sorry, but that argument is lame. It’s obvious – at least to me – that any evaluation of epistemic claims is an evaluation based on some theory of knowledge – some epistemology.

It seems to me that you are just equivocating between the latter, uncontroversial claim: that not all knowledge claims are philosophical – and the former, patently false claim: that not all knowledge claims are evaluable according to some epistemological criterion. Either way, your arguments don’t make any sense.

The rest of the passage I quoted is just a long-winded way of stating the fact-value dichotomy, a meandering mish-mesh of Gettier problems, Quine’s holism, and god knows what else. And most of it not even accurate as a characterization of some philosophical traditions in epistemology. Yes, some. There are epistemologies that do not concern themselves with “criterions of certainty” or “true belief”, you know.

As for the rest, I can make neither head nor tail of it. Maybe it’s incoherent. Maybe it’s just me. Oh well.

Actually, I was surprised that anyone would think that Shopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein was not widely known. Shopenhauer’s currency in Vienna of that time was wide-spread, as reported in Stephen Toulmin’s “Wittgenstein’s Vienna”- (there is a co-author whom I can’t remember.) And in Wittgenstein’s nachlass there are several lists he makes of his influences, so the claim that he did not acknowledge his influences, strikes me as odd. The one that I think is not acknowledged or understood in the anglophone reception is Karl Kraus. Wittgenstein was from beginning to end a disciple of Karl Kraus. Also, more speculatively,- and which, of course, appears nowhere in the literature, since he himself would not have know of it,- the last influence on all his lists is Piero Sraffa, who was a close personal friend of Antonio Gramsci. There is a significant homology between Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” and his conception of philosophy as raising common sense to good sense and the later Wittgenstein’s resort to and treatment of natural language and his later conception of philosophy in the affirmative sense, which he nowhere spells out, but which I think could be called a de-reifying and thereby transformative activity. There is perhaps a minor academic dissertation in there somewhere.

Now back to the old stuff.

Yes, Ophelia Benson, that last hurried post was directed toward you, by way of our deep ecology rapper friend’s labelling of “Lord-Hutton-like” as vindictive. It was in belated response to what you posted in response to my remark the epistemology was outmoded, as follows: “As for how very dead epistemology is- well, I’ve just reviewed a book about it, I know a lot of people who work on it, it’s basic to what the website I edit is all about, it’s central to a great many (perhaps all) of the conflicts and controversies that roil the public realm- but, whatever.” A very large claim and a large investment and commitment, as well. Not to mention a tad grandious and perhaps presumptuous. And thoroughly conventionalistic, as well. Do you really think that when youstep out amongst the stoa with your lantern held high that your dressing up your specific claims in the alleged prestige and authority of epistemology will cut the mustard? Do you not realize how utterly and even laughably such dressing up would be impugned, damaged, even torn to shreds- and not for all the wrong reasons. (Diogenes himself, Cynic that he was, would perhaps have been the one who was most amused.) Your argument was “Hutton-like” because, for all your proper p’s and q’s and i’s and t’s, it amounted to a piece of conceptual gerrymandering, and when objections were raised- and I do not think I was the only one- that, hey, wait a minute, that’s not what and how religious believers necessarily understand their beliefs and think about things, you merely reiterated the same narrow terms of your argument, without deepening them or taking in and responding to the objections. And thereby you evade any consideration of the stakes involved and their larger relevance. Yes, very Lord Hutton-like, very like a whale. Your “critical” intervention into the issues of religion, science and the public sphere amounts to a complete botch.

And now you resort amidst calls for decorum and your no doubt much practiced studied retreat into superficiality so as to reconfirm your own prejudices, to name-calling about what an unpleasant fellow I am- though- correct me if I’m wrong- I don’t recall having exactly called you any names, except for “positivist”, which may or may not be accurate. Perhaps this just serves to bring out the ad hominem nature of your basic argument, for all its “epistemological” costuming.

Typing in comments in a blog is putting a message in a bottle. I don’t expect many people to actually read me remarks since they are, as you tirelessly complain, over-long. Occasionally, I get a response, perhaps a put-down, rarely a complement, such as the half-compliment of Jeremy Osner above or the link to my first post on the blog of a Mrs. Tilton, a progressive Christian blogger. But I do like occasionally to objectify my thoughts, subblogging, if you will. If my posts are overly long, comsuming precious byte-space, or otherwise inappropriate, then the proprietors of CT are within their tutulary rights to delete them. You may e-mail them at your discretion.

I was perhaps not as clear as I should have been. Mine wasn’t a call for “decorum”, although decorum certainly is a Good Thing(tm).

I find that I rarely learn anything from a debate. Debate is interpersonal hierarchy negotiation behind a façade of discourse. Productive discourse occurs when people are actually interested in learning from each other. This is what I meant by “earnestness”.

Is there substance in Mr. Halasz’s comments? Indeed, there is. But my strong impression is that what substance there is, is mostly a feint. His real strategy is one of intimidation through displays of erudition. Likewise, I sense that Ms. Benson’s participation in this discussion is really an attempt at an imposition. Her strategy is pithy where Mr. Halasz’s is verbose and is overtly hostile where Mr. Halasz’s is covert. Both dearly would like to demonstrate that the other party is, essentially, an idiot. They mostly differ stylistically.

And while there seems to have been some friction between Mr. Carone and others, my overall impression of him is that he is, in fact, earnest. And certainly MSG is earnest.

The fact of the matter is that very reasonable, very intelligent people can and do differ on the essential issue of discussion in this thread. If one takes the belligerent stance that the contrary position is prima facie absurd, I cannot see how anything productive can result. As much as either Ms. Benson or Mr. Halasz may believe so, I can assure everyone involved that neither is Socrates to the other’s Meno. It very well may be the case that this conversation could be productive. But it won’t be until those involved hope to learn something and not to “win”. Even then, it may not be productive. But it certainly would be less tiresome to read.

I recognize that this note of mine could be misconstrued as a sort of dominance strategy of my own. But it’s not. Firstly, I am no saint when it comes to the vices I’m criticizing here. Secondly, my true motivation is simply that I would quite enjoy seeing the intellects and erudition on display here (and this applies to pretty much everyone who’s participated heavily) accomplishing something cooperatively and constructively, especially on this matter. I think it’s possible. But egos and prejudices would have to largely be set aside.

“No amount of scouring the universe will falsify the claim that “God exists and sits on a throne somewhere, sometime” ”

Heh. True. And even if we did, the claim will actually be “God exists and is no-where, and in no-time.” :-)

However, things might be true but unprovable. So I’m not sure what the “burden of proof” is in cases like these.

As an analogy, say I flip a coin, see the coin landed “heads”, then put it in my pocket. I have knowledge (the coin landed “heads”), but I can’t prove it to you, since you have not shared my “observed experience.” The only reason you would believe me is if you trusted me and I didn’t say anything too improbable.

Now think about the case of revelation. I might say “I know X to be true as a result of revealed experience; I have no scientific or rational basis for this belief.” Again, there is no way for me to prove to you that I am right, since you have not shared my “revealed experience.” The only reason you would believe me is if you trusted me and I didn’t say anything too improbable.

You wouldn’t say, if I actually saw the coin land “heads” in the first example, that the burden of proof is on me to prove that it landed heads, right? In other words, the truth is that it landed heads, even though I cannot prove it. I cannot ask you to change your beliefs, desires, or actions based on my knowledge, but you wouldn’t deny that it is knowledge, right?

Why is it not similar with the second case?

Once someone says to you “You should believe that Jesus rose from the dead,” or “You should do this because the Bible says you should,” then the burden of proof is on them; they have taken the burden by trying to change your beliefs or by advising your actions.

But they don’t have to take the burden if all they say is “This has been revealed to me; I have no way of convincing you that this is true, and I will not try, but I know it to be true.”

The burden is always taken voluntarily; it isn’t about knowledge, it is about convincing others. It isn’t “on” anyone by default, but it can be taken up.

Is this right? I am not a philosopher of knowledge, so I don’t know if ground like this has been covered many times before.

Most religious people do not try to prove their beliefs; they know it is impossible to do so. So they are not trying to convince you of anything; but you can’t claim therefore they have no knowledge just because they haven’t satisfied a “burden of proof.”

Note: I am not arguing that everyone who claims to have revealed experience possesses true knowledge (Unless I’m wrong, there are many contradictions between faiths, so they can’t all be true). I am just saying that the “burden of proof” idea isn’t the way we should think about who has true knowledge, only whether or not we should believe them.

Always refresh the page before you post.
–
This “knowledge” thing – what is that? Is it concern for what’s in the mind of the believer, or what’s in his or her hand?
Someone who wants to believe, who has to believe, who’s been shown in unmistakable glory and grace an irrefutable truth anything, fantastic, mundane, or silly – that’s ok, I have no complaint.
Someone who says it’s ok to take someone else’s land because they, unlike the “chosen”, believe trees have souls, and birds can speak to human beings who listen carefully – I have a problem with that.
I have a huge problem with people who choose to believe great volumes of “spiritual” nonsense that can be distilled into biological privilege and election, and then, key phrase, act on it.
Tolerance of the intolerant leads to a paradox.
It seems the solution is to not tolerate the intolerant. But then, correct me if I’ve missed something, that would make us…intolerant?
The real-world application is loose at the edges and humanly imprecise; a workable answer is possible; democracy is ok, not as good as a benevolent monarch maybe, but far better than a malevolent one. The thing that makes all this crucial and not idle speculation is we’re headed right for some kind of large discriminatory separation. Thus my insistence on the biological aspects of this metaphysical question. And its relative urgency.

“thoroughly conventionalistic deep ecology rapper” says:

Note first that my post was only about the “burden of proof” claims people were making, and how I didn’t quite understand them.

“This “knowledge” thing – what is that? Is it concern for what’s in the mind of the believer, or what’s in his or her hand?”

I don’t know; I suspect the philosophers of knowledge think that “knowledge” is objective. In other words, beliefs are subjective, existing only in the minds of each believer, while knowledge is not just in the mind of a believer but … well, I am not a philosopher. It certainly isn’t real (“in his or her hand”).

“Someone who wants to believe, who has to believe, who’s been shown in unmistakable glory and grace an irrefutable truth anything, fantastic, mundane, or silly – that’s ok, I have no complaint.”

Note that almost no real theological arguments claim irrefutable truth.

“Someone who says it’s ok to take someone else’s land because they, unlike the “chosen”, believe trees have souls, and birds can speak to human beings who listen carefully – I have a problem with that.”

Let me push on this a little.

How about if people living in a powerful democratic nation have faith, perhaps a majority who share a single faith. This isn’t a corrupt set of people, “subverting democracy”; it is just a bunch of people voting what they believe. Do you have a problem with them voting based on their faith?

BTW I don’t think people should be able to vote to take my land away; however, lots of people do think so.

“The problem is that revelatory experiences do not necessarily entail the claims that religious people make. They may be deceived, they may have been hallucinatory . . . so the sceptic who has no access to these experiences can claim, I think, that one doesn’t really know EVEN when one has had such experiences.”

I agree; I don’t understand how anyone can come to have faith when hallucination/indoctrination/deception/etc. all are much more plausible that revelation (which makes it different from science and philsophy, where hallucination et. al. are much less likely).

My claim was not that revelation works, it is that you can’t base arguments against it on “You have to be able to prove it, or else it isn’t _real_ knowledge like we do.”

I gave an example where something clearly was knowledge, and yet couldn’t be proved or disproved.

I concluded that you only have the burden of proof when you try to transmit knowledge to someone else, change their beliefs, advise their actions. This works equally both ways: theist to non-theist, and non-theist to theist. The one doing the convincing has the burden of proof. You then say,

“Claims that a (Judeo-Christian?) God exists is an unrestricted existential claim – it is claimed that he exists – and I would think, exists for all time? And could have a physical presence anywhere in the universe should He so choose?”

I don’t understand; which part of this defines “unrestricted existential claim”? Just that something exists, that something exists for all time, or that something exists for all time covering all of space?

BTW, the philosopher’s God is immaterial (outside space), eternal (outside time), and infinite, which is slightly different that what you say (I don’t know if it is relevant to your argument). I don’t know about the Judeo-Christian God, but I suspect it is the same.

“That is the reason why the burden of proof is on the theist. ”

Under any of the above definitions, I don’t see why my burden of proof argument fails; can you walk me through it a little? Perhaps give me an example where the “burden” crushes the theist more obviously? :-)

“those restricted existential claims weren’t what I was looking to the theist to prove.”

So you wouldn’t ask a theist to prove these, only the bigger “God exists” kind of claims? I think if you believe the Bible is a source of revelaed experience, then “an immaterial, eternal, infinite God exists” isn’t that much of a stretch, is it?

For example, is God’s creation of the universe a “one-off”? If so, then God must be immaterial (no material existed :-). So revelation implies the existence of an immaterial God, and you wouldn’t ask the faithful to prove this, right? Am I just really, really confused?

“I suspect the philosophers of knowledge think that “knowledge” is objective. In other words, beliefs are subjective, existing only in the minds of each believer, while knowledge is not just in the mind of a believer but … well, I am not a philosopher.“—Bill Carone

Some do, some don’t. Probably not many nowadays. Plato asserted the above view. A contemporary scientist would assert the above view. (See the discussion I participated in the comments thread for Mumbo Jumbo.) I doubt many contemporary philosophers would assert this view. This conflict of worldviews is implicit in this conversation.

Even assuming the posturing and such weren’t extent in this thread, it would still be very difficult for anything productive to come from it. It’s because there are too many ideas in play. The waters are very muddy. And, if you go to the intellectually rarefied heights that this conversation has meandered through, you go somewhere such that it no longer has relevance to almost anyone. The appropriate context for this discussion is not epistemology, as much as it would seem that it is.

Here are the questions I’d like to ask and discuss:

* Is Gould’s “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” the dominant view among contemporary western theists? If it’s the majority view, I submit that it would necessarily be a practical position and should therefore be discussed in that context. If it is a minority view, then we might ask who it is that hold to this view and what it is that they have in common.

* If this is a practical view, what is it, exactly, that’s being practiced? That is, do people who hold this view consistently apply it across all their activities and beliefs? If they do not, then is it possible that this belief serves some practical purpose other than what it seems?

* There is clear conflict and hard-feelings among many when attempting to engage in this discussion. Why? What do people have emotionally at stake; and, more importantly, are they falsely assuming that everyone else’s stake in this matter is similar? I don’t ask this question because I think this is group therapy; I ask it because I think it is essential to identify this dynamic in order to move beyond it.

* What is the historical context for Gould’s “NOMA”?

Now, allow me to digress for a moment. Epistemology is for me a vital concern because I, for one, do not think its questions have been sufficiently answered. It is also, for me, a practical matter because my epistemology is, in a sense, deeply pragmatic. I claim that we can only say meaningful things about something at “an appropriate level of description for a given purpose”. I regret that I have not worked through Gödel’s “On Formally Undecidable Propositions” myself (per Mr. Lapite’s criticism of me), but I have followed its outline and read quite a few commentaries on it. So I will use it as an example. There is in most people’s minds a presumption of the possibility of Knowledge, a “God’s eye” view. Gödel’s Theorem is sort of an example: various people assert that our supposed ability to recognize the truth of the Gödel statement is this sort of transcendent comprehension. I say not. There is a level (or levels) of description at which we can understand the statement as true, and a level (or levels) of description at which we cannot. Everywhere we try to completely reconcile holism with reductionism there is paradox. I suggest we stop trying to do this. There is a similar hubristic yearning for omniscience present in most of the views in this thread. People are trying to ask and answer questions that are just too big to be meaningful.

For this reason, and for the sake of simple practicality, I make my plea to restrict this conversation to a relatively narrow context in which shared comprehension and shared points of reference are possible, and work from there. At a hundred-odd messages, it may be too late for this. But maybe not.

“The problem is that revelatory experiences do not necessarily entail the claims that religious people make. They may be deceived, they may have been hallucinatory . . . so the sceptic who has no access to these experiences can claim, I think, that one doesn’t really know EVEN when one has had such experiences.”

I agree; I don’t understand how anyone can come to have faith when hallucination / indoctrination / deception / etc. all are much more plausible that revelation (which makes it different from science and philsophy, where hallucination et. al. are much less likely).

My claim was not that revelation works, it is that you can’t base arguments against it on “You have to be able to prove it, or else it isn’t _real_ knowledge like we have.”

I gave an example where something clearly was knowledge, and yet couldn’t be proved or disproved.

I concluded that you only have the burden of proof when you try to transmit knowledge to someone else, change their beliefs, advise their actions. This works equally both ways: theist to non-theist, and non-theist to theist. The one doing the convincing has the burden of proof. You then say,

“Claims that a (Judeo-Christian?) God exists is an unrestricted existential claim – it is claimed that he exists – and I would think, exists for all time? And could have a physical presence anywhere in the universe should He so choose?”

I don’t understand; which part of this defines “unrestricted existential claim”? Just that something exists, that something exists for all time, or that something exists for all time covering all of space?

BTW, the philosopher’s God is immaterial (outside space), eternal (outside time), and infinite, which is slightly different that what you say (I don’t know if it is relevant to your argument). I don’t know about the Judeo-Christian God, but I suspect it is the same.

“That is the reason why the burden of proof is on the theist. ”

Under any of the above definitions, I don’t see why my burden of proof argument fails; can you walk me through it a little? Perhaps give me an example where the “burden” crushes the theist more obviously? :-)

“those restricted existential claims weren’t what I was looking to the theist to prove.”

So you wouldn’t ask a theist to prove these, only the bigger “God exists” kind of claims? I think if you believe the Bible is a source of revealed experience, then “an immaterial, eternal, infinite God exists” isn’t that much of a stretch, is it?

For example, is God’s creation of the universe a “one-off”? If so, then God must be immaterial (no material existed :-). So revelation implies the existence of an immaterial God, and you wouldn’t ask the faithful to prove this, right? Am I just really, really confused?

“The problem is that revelatory experiences do not necessarily entail the claims that religious people make. They may be deceived, they may have been hallucinatory . . . so the sceptic who has no access to these experiences can claim, I think, that one doesn’t really know EVEN when one has had such experiences.”

I agree; I don’t understand how anyone can come to have faith when hallucination / indoctrination / deception / etc. all are much more plausible that revelation (which makes it different from science and philsophy, where hallucination et. al. are much less likely).

My claim was not that revelation works, it is that you can’t base arguments against it on “You have to be able to prove it, or else it isn’t _real_ knowledge like we have.”

I gave an example where something clearly was knowledge, and yet couldn’t be proved or disproved.

I concluded that you only have the burden of proof when you try to transmit knowledge to someone else, change their beliefs, advise their actions. This works equally both ways: theist to non-theist, and non-theist to theist. The one doing the convincing has the burden of proof. You then say,

“Claims that a (Judeo-Christian?) God exists is an unrestricted existential claim – it is claimed that he exists – and I would think, exists for all time? And could have a physical presence anywhere in the universe should He so choose?”

I don’t understand; which part of this defines “unrestricted existential claim”? Just that something exists, that something exists for all time, or that something exists for all time covering all of space?

BTW, the philosopher’s God is immaterial (outside space), eternal (outside time), and infinite, which is slightly different that what you say (I don’t know if it is relevant to your argument). I don’t know about the Judeo-Christian God, but I suspect it is the same.

“That is the reason why the burden of proof is on the theist. ”

Under any of the above definitions, I don’t see why my burden of proof argument fails; can you walk me through it a little? Perhaps give me an example where the “burden” crushes the theist more obviously? :-)

“those restricted existential claims weren’t what I was looking to the theist to prove.”

So you wouldn’t ask a theist to prove these, only the bigger “God exists” kind of claims? I think if you believe the Bible is a source of revealed experience, then “an immaterial, eternal, infinite God exists” isn’t that much of a stretch, is it?

For example, is God’s creation of the universe a “one-off”? If so, then God must be immaterial (no material existed :-). So revelation implies the existence of an immaterial God, and you wouldn’t ask the faithful to prove this, right? Am I just really, really confused?

“I suspect the philosophers of knowledge think that “knowledge” is objective. In other words, beliefs are subjective, existing only in the minds of each believer, while knowledge is not just in the mind of a believer but … well, I am not a philosopher.“—Bill Carone

Some do, some don’t. Probably not many nowadays. Plato asserted the above view. A contemporary scientist would assert the above view. (See the discussion I participated in the comments thread for Mumbo Jumbo.) I doubt many contemporary philosophers would assert this view. This conflict of worldviews is implicit in this conversation.

Even assuming the posturing and such weren’t extent in this thread, it would still be very difficult for anything productive to come from it. It’s because there are too many ideas in play. The waters are very muddy. And, if you go to the intellectually rarefied heights that this conversation has meandered through, you go somewhere such that it no longer has relevance to almost anyone. The appropriate context for this discussion is not epistemology, as much as it would seem that it is.

Here are the questions I’d like to ask and discuss:

* Is Gould’s “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” the dominant view among contemporary western theists? If it’s the majority view, I submit that it would necessarily be a practical position and should therefore be discussed in that context. If it is a minority view, then we might ask who it is that hold to this view and what it is that they have in common.

* If this is a practical view, what is it, exactly, that’s being practiced? That is, do people who hold this view consistently apply it across all their activities and beliefs? If they do not, then is it possible that this belief serves some practical purpose other than what it seems?

* There is clear conflict and hard-feelings among many when attempting to engage in this discussion. Why? What do people have emotionally at stake; and, more importantly, are they falsely assuming that everyone else’s stake in this matter is similar? I don’t ask this question because I think this is group therapy; I ask it because I think it is essential to identify this dynamic in order to move beyond it.

* What is the historical context for Gould’s “NOMA”?

Now, allow me to digress for a moment. Epistemology is for me a vital concern because I, for one, do not think its questions have been sufficiently answered. It is also, for me, a practical matter because my epistemology is, in a sense, deeply pragmatic. I claim that we can only say meaningful things about something at “an appropriate level of description for a given purpose”. I regret that I have not worked through Gödel’s “On Formally Undecidable Propositions” myself (per Mr. Lapite’s criticism of me), but I have followed its outline and read quite a few commentaries on it. So I will use it as an example. There is in most people’s minds a presumption of the possibility of Knowledge, a “God’s eye” view. Gödel’s Theorem is sort of an example: various people assert that our supposed ability to recognize the truth of the Gödel statement is this sort of transcendent comprehension. I say not. There is a level (or levels) of description at which we can understand the statement as true, and a level (or levels) of description at which we cannot. Everywhere we try to completely reconcile holism with reductionism there is paradox. I suggest we stop trying to do this. There is a similar hubristic yearning for omniscience present in most of the views in this thread. People are trying to ask and answer questions that are just too big to be meaningful.

For this reason, and for the sake of simple practicality, I make my plea to restrict this conversation to a relatively narrow context in which shared comprehension and shared points of reference are possible, and work from there. At a hundred-odd messages, it may be too late for this. But maybe not.

Well, the bad boy is awake again and returns to the underworld.

I will admit that flat Enlightenment, positivistic, militant atheism has always just bugged me, and I myself am more or less an atheist. I put myself in the odd position of defending the point of view of beliefs I personally do not hold, which is almost, but not quite, a deliberate assumption of bad faith. And I am surrounded on this thread by unbelievers, some of whom seem to take offense at religious matters- (“Blessed is he who taketh not offence in me”)- and others who are blythely ignorant of them. (I had thought initially Mr. Carone was writing from a religious believer’s perpsective, but was soon disabused of the notion; at any rate, to some extent I agreed with what he persisted in posting and any demurrals did not rate a dissent.) In my first post, I sought to make plain to the imaginative, semantic and rhetorical understanding of anyone who would bother to read it something of the nature and complexion of the point of view of religious believers, not as a matter of mere empathy, though religious believers are my fellow creatures as well as my fellow citizens, but as a matter of doing hermeneutic justice to the matter and its discussion, a maximal rather than a minimal ethics of “truth”. And I did this out of a sense of growing disturbance at the rise and currency of religious fundamentalism in politics and the public sphere,-(though religious fundamentalism is not the only reigning kind of fundamentalism)- and the damage it inflicts on any hope for a rational, progressive politics, however dim, which I believe to be in the interests of believers and unbelievers alike, with many of the former, I would take it, to be allies in such a project. (Unlike many on the secular left, I do have more of a communitarian than individualist bent, but that is a whole other tangle of issues. Being a communitarian on the internet is a bit like being a spider who constructs his web above a manure heap: one just sits there and collects far more libertarian flies than one could possibly digest.) Perhaps a citation of the moneylenders in the temple would be a propos here. (As I put it in a post that got destroyed by my computer freezing up last night- Ms. Benson sighs with relief and glee-: “Not only does religion need to be de-mythologized, as some purveyors of self-referential hooey put it, but it needs to be stripped of its ideological functionality, for the sake of religious believers, as well as the rest of us.”) I actually sensed that there was a latent consensus about the dangers and damages of religious fundamentalism and its politico-economic instrumentalization among the contributors to this thread and it is in this context that I took issue with Ms. Benson’s argument/intervention in the matter as injudicious, obtuse and wrong-headed. Positivistic militant atheism of the kind that Richard Dawkins routinely peddles partakes of the very literalism it attacks. (It is a bit like the dispute between Northern capitalists and Southern slave-owners over the Civil War: both were right about the other and wrong about themselves.) Recycling this sterile and outmoded polemic merely re-enforces the battle-lines, with all the attendant collateral casualties among the innocent between them, and compounds the problem rather than seeking out a dialogue aimed at reaching a real accomodation and modus vivendi between science and religion within the civic order and public-political realm, to which both have something of value to contribute and, at any rate, in which both will inevitably persist and intervene in that realm with their tangled and problematic relationship to it. It was perhaps because he sensed this that Gould chose to devote some of his little remaining time to writing a book intervening in the matter, however wanting its rhetoric and argument may be, though I haven’t read it. (Hannah Arendt once wrote a peculiarly wrong-headed essay about the Arkansas school crisis, in which she wondered why school children were being used as proxies in this fight- a foreigner’s misunderstanding-, but in which she made the fundamental point that any genuine politics involves “plurality”, which means that there will be opposed postions with a complexion and “integrity” of their own, which can not simply be suppressed by violent or coercive means, which would be, in her book, anti-politics). Religion and science are two profoundly different, perhaps incommensurable, modes of constructing being-in-the-world within the minds and immaginations of human communities and of exercising care and vigilance for that world and its human communities. They can and historically have come into conflict, but they do not of necessity do so. This is not fudging the issue, but rather recognizing the reality of the matter, without claiming to having a monopoly on the understanding of “reality”. Carefully distinguishing different types of validity claims and their spheres of applicability within an order of political and social rights is very much germane to the issue and is work that needs doing with respect to mediating and resolving such conflicts in both their valid and invalid manifestations. Why should religion have unique authority over matters of meaning and value? Well, the obvious answer is that it shouldn’t and doesn’t, but that questions of meaning are fundamental, questions of value are not negligible and that science itself has no competence per se on questions of value and only limited and specialized competence on questions of meaning. But certainly, conflicts over these matters can not be resolved by suppressing, de-legitimating or disqualifying the perspectives of religious believers from their social and political rights to participation in the public realm simply because their prejudices fail to accord with the prejudices of some others, which could only be inflammatory and counter-productive. It is a matter of establishing the boundary conditions of those rights and criticizing and adjudicating the usurpation of those boundary conditions, not quite an “epistemological” matter. (if anyone would wish to proffer a more specific and practical proposal on this matter, I would welcome it.) So, yes, Gould, whatever his inadequacies, is basically right and Dawkins is wrong-headed and foolish. Ms. Benson’s argument struck me as obtuse, because it rested on two basic category mistakes. The first one was noted in the original CT post: that G-D is not an empirical “entity” and no one involved in the matter takes it so, so arguments about unicorns are a bit beside the point. To take G-d as an empirical entity would, after all, amount to a regression to animism, not the sort of stuff believers are wont to fancy. (As for why the physical universe is contingent, well, events are contingent and, as a first order of approximation, we take in the statistical regularities of distributions of events, on which the so-called laws of nature are, in turn, based, where locally, e.g. on earth, or universally, as far as we can detect background radiation. As for G-d being a necessary “entity”, if this is not a causal or metaphysical claim, I am not sure off hand what the word “necessary” would mean. I think religious believers view G-d as needful and as a Being to which they somehow relate.) The second category mistake was a failure to recognize any differentiation between types of validity claims, privileging solely that of cognitive truth, and the damaging and counterproductive effort, (from the standpoint of elucidating and understanding the matter and its stakes), to apply norms and criteria from one type of validity claim in the domain of completely different sorts of claims, which I was at pains to spell out, but which Ms. Benson refused to take up. At which point she claimed that the basis of her argumentative claim was epistemology, so that the ground shifted to the status, validity and authority of “epistemology”. So it emerged that her claim that religious perspectives, expressions and claims were essentially empty and nonsensical rested on the alleged authority of epistemology. Now understanding the limits of validity claims and thus understanding the basis of that validity precisely from its limits is basic to the fundamental intention of Kant, who seminally got this whole enterprise rolling, though perhaps something of this is a much older and more basic philosophical thought. But it turns out that one does not need to construct the whole conceptual apparatus of epistemology to accomplish this understanding: the constraints of human language and human finitude suffice to sustain such an understanding. This is where Wittgenstein supervenes upon and sublates Kant. Of course, one can choose to view religion as empty and nonsensical and I do not begrudge anyone such a choice, but there is no “necessity”, no “necessarily so”, in the matter- it is simply a choice for which one is responsible before the differing choices of others. Making plain that religion is a free existential choice, available to some, indifferent to others, without necessarily puffing up the matter of human choice in all the pretensions to human autonomy, is, I think, at the crux of the matter. This is what religious people need to be made to understand in their dealings with us secular folk and the secularized world, and perhaps vice versa.

Iknow this screed needs to be paragraphed, but I need to go out and fetch me some dinner now, so I will resume later.

Well, the bad boy is awake again and returns to the underworld.

I will admit that flat Enlightenment, positivistic, militant atheism has always just bugged me, and I myself am more or less an atheist. I put myself in the odd position of defending the point of view of beliefs I personally do not hold, which is almost, but not quite, a deliberate assumption of bad faith. And I am surrounded on this thread by unbelievers, some of whom seem to take offense at religious matters- (“Blessed is he who taketh not offence in me”)- and others who are blythely ignorant of them. (I had thought initially Mr. Carone was writing from a religious believer’s perpsective, but was soon disabused of the notion; at any rate, to some extent I agreed with what he persisted in posting and any demurrals did not rate a dissent.) In my first post, I sought to make plain to the imaginative, semantic and rhetorical understanding of anyone who would bother to read it something of the nature and complexion of the point of view of religious believers, not as a matter of mere empathy, though religious believers are my fellow creatures as well as my fellow citizens, but as a matter of doing hermeneutic justice to the matter and its discussion, a maximal rather than a minimal ethics of “truth”. And I did this out of a sense of growing disturbance at the rise and currency of religious fundamentalism in politics and the public sphere,-(though religious fundamentalism is not the only reigning kind of fundamentalism)- and the damage it inflicts on any hope for a rational, progressive politics, however dim, which I believe to be in the interests of believers and unbelievers alike, with many of the former, I would take it, to be allies in such a project. (Unlike many on the secular left, I do have more of a communitarian than individualist bent, but that is a whole other tangle of issues. Being a communitarian on the internet is a bit like being a spider who constructs his web above a manure heap: one just sits there and collects far more libertarian flies than one could possibly digest.) Perhaps a citation of the moneylenders in the temple would be a propos here. (As I put it in a post that got destroyed by my computer freezing up last night- Ms. Benson sighs with relief and glee-: “Not only does religion need to be de-mythologized, as some purveyors of self-referential hooey put it, but it needs to be stripped of its ideological functionality, for the sake of religious believers, as well as the rest of us.”) I actually sensed that there was a latent consensus about the dangers and damages of religious fundamentalism and its politico-economic instrumentalization among the contributors to this thread and it is in this context that I took issue with Ms. Benson’s argument/intervention in the matter as injudicious, obtuse and wrong-headed. Positivistic militant atheism of the kind that Richard Dawkins routinely peddles partakes of the very literalism it attacks. (It is a bit like the dispute between Northern capitalists and Southern slave-owners over the Civil War: both were right about the other and wrong about themselves.) Recycling this sterile and outmoded polemic merely re-enforces the battle-lines, with all the attendant collateral casualties among the innocent between them, and compounds the problem rather than seeking out a dialogue aimed at reaching a real accomodation and modus vivendi between science and religion within the civic order and public-political realm, to which both have something of value to contribute and, at any rate, in which both will inevitably persist and intervene in that realm with their tangled and problematic relationship to it. It was perhaps because he sensed this that Gould chose to devote some of his little remaining time to writing a book intervening in the matter, however wanting its rhetoric and argument may be, though I haven’t read it. (Hannah Arendt once wrote a peculiarly wrong-headed essay about the Arkansas school crisis, in which she wondered why school children were being used as proxies in this fight- a foreigner’s misunderstanding-, but in which she made the fundamental point that any genuine politics involves “plurality”, which means that there will be opposed postions with a complexion and “integrity” of their own, which can not simply be suppressed by violent or coercive means, which would be, in her book, anti-politics). Religion and science are two profoundly different, perhaps incommensurable, modes of constructing being-in-the-world within the minds and immaginations of human communities and of exercising care and vigilance for that world and its human communities. They can and historically have come into conflict, but they do not of necessity do so. This is not fudging the issue, but rather recognizing the reality of the matter, without claiming to having a monopoly on the understanding of “reality”. Carefully distinguishing different types of validity claims and their spheres of applicability within an order of political and social rights is very much germane to the issue and is work that needs doing with respect to mediating and resolving such conflicts in both their valid and invalid manifestations. Why should religion have unique authority over matters of meaning and value? Well, the obvious answer is that it shouldn’t and doesn’t, but that questions of meaning are fundamental, questions of value are not negligible and that science itself has no competence per se on questions of value and only limited and specialized competence on questions of meaning. But certainly, conflicts over these matters can not be resolved by suppressing, de-legitimating or disqualifying the perspectives of religious believers from their social and political rights to participation in the public realm simply because their prejudices fail to accord with the prejudices of some others, which could only be inflammatory and counter-productive. It is a matter of establishing the boundary conditions of those rights and criticizing and adjudicating the usurpation of those boundary conditions, not quite an “epistemological” matter. (if anyone would wish to proffer a more specific and practical proposal on this matter, I would welcome it.) So, yes, Gould, whatever his inadequacies, is basically right and Dawkins is wrong-headed and foolish. Ms. Benson’s argument struck me as obtuse, because it rested on two basic category mistakes. The first one was noted in the original CT post: that G-D is not an empirical “entity” and no one involved in the matter takes it so, so arguments about unicorns are a bit beside the point. To take G-d as an empirical entity would, after all, amount to a regression to animism, not the sort of stuff believers are wont to fancy. (As for why the physical universe is contingent, well, events are contingent and, as a first order of approximation, we take in the statistical regularities of distributions of events, on which the so-called laws of nature are, in turn, based, where locally, e.g. on earth, or universally, as far as we can detect background radiation. As for G-d being a necessary “entity”, if this is not a causal or metaphysical claim, I am not sure off hand what the word “necessary” would mean. I think religious believers view G-d as needful and as a Being to which they somehow relate.) The second category mistake was a failure to recognize any differentiation between types of validity claims, privileging solely that of cognitive truth, and the damaging and counterproductive effort, (from the standpoint of elucidating and understanding the matter and its stakes), to apply norms and criteria from one type of validity claim in the domain of completely different sorts of claims, which I was at pains to spell out, but which Ms. Benson refused to take up. At which point she claimed that the basis of her argumentative claim was epistemology, so that the ground shifted to the status, validity and authority of “epistemology”. So it emerged that her claim that religious perspectives, expressions and claims were essentially empty and nonsensical rested on the alleged authority of epistemology. Now understanding the limits of validity claims and thus understanding the basis of that validity precisely from its limits is basic to the fundamental intention of Kant, who seminally got this whole enterprise rolling, though perhaps something of this is a much older and more basic philosophical thought. But it turns out that one does not need to construct the whole conceptual apparatus of epistemology to accomplish this understanding: the constraints of human language and human finitude suffice to sustain such an understanding. This is where Wittgenstein supervenes upon and sublates Kant. Of course, one can choose to view religion as empty and nonsensical and I do not begrudge anyone such a choice, but there is no “necessity”, no “necessarily so”, in the matter- it is simply a choice for which one is responsible before the differing choices of others. Making plain that religion is a free existential choice, available to some, indifferent to others, without necessarily puffing up the matter of human choice in all the pretensions to human autonomy, is, I think, at the crux of the matter. This is what religious people need to be made to understand in their dealings with us secular folk and the secularized world, and perhaps vice versa.

Iknow this screed needs to be paragraphed, but I need to go out and fetch me some dinner now, so I will resume later.

Well, the bad boy is awake again and returns to the underworld.

I will admit that flat Enlightenment, positivistic, militant atheism has always just bugged me, and I myself am more or less an atheist. I put myself in the odd position of defending the point of view of beliefs I personally do not hold, which is almost, but not quite, a deliberate assumption of bad faith. And I am surrounded on this thread by unbelievers, some of whom seem to take offense at religious matters- (“Blessed is he who taketh not offence in me”)- and others who are blythely ignorant of them. (I had thought initially Mr. Carone was writing from a religious believer’s perpsective, but was soon disabused of the notion; at any rate, to some extent I agreed with what he persisted in posting and any demurrals did not rate a dissent.) In my first post, I sought to make plain to the imaginative, semantic and rhetorical understanding of anyone who would bother to read it something of the nature and complexion of the point of view of religious believers, not as a matter of mere empathy, though religious believers are my fellow creatures as well as my fellow citizens, but as a matter of doing hermeneutic justice to the matter and its discussion, a maximal rather than a minimal ethics of “truth”. And I did this out of a sense of growing disturbance at the rise and currency of religious fundamentalism in politics and the public sphere,-(though religious fundamentalism is not the only reigning kind of fundamentalism)- and the damage it inflicts on any hope for a rational, progressive politics, however dim, which I believe to be in the interests of believers and unbelievers alike, with many of the former, I would take it, to be allies in such a project. (Unlike many on the secular left, I do have more of a communitarian than individualist bent, but that is a whole other tangle of issues. Being a communitarian on the internet is a bit like being a spider who constructs his web above a manure heap: one just sits there and collects far more libertarian flies than one could possibly digest.) Perhaps a citation of the moneylenders in the temple would be a propos here. (As I put it in a post that got destroyed by my computer freezing up last night- Ms. Benson sighs with relief and glee-: “Not only does religion need to be de-mythologized, as some purveyors of self-referential hooey put it, but it needs to be stripped of its ideological functionality, for the sake of religious believers, as well as the rest of us.”) I actually sensed that there was a latent consensus about the dangers and damages of religious fundamentalism and its politico-economic instrumentalization among the contributors to this thread and it is in this context that I took issue with Ms. Benson’s argument/intervention in the matter as injudicious, obtuse and wrong-headed. Positivistic militant atheism of the kind that Richard Dawkins routinely peddles partakes of the very literalism it attacks. (It is a bit like the dispute between Northern capitalists and Southern slave-owners over the Civil War: both were right about the other and wrong about themselves.) Recycling this sterile and outmoded polemic merely re-enforces the battle-lines, with all the attendant collateral casualties among the innocent between them, and compounds the problem rather than seeking out a dialogue aimed at reaching a real accomodation and modus vivendi between science and religion within the civic order and public-political realm, to which both have something of value to contribute and, at any rate, in which both will inevitably persist and intervene in that realm with their tangled and problematic relationship to it. It was perhaps because he sensed this that Gould chose to devote some of his little remaining time to writing a book intervening in the matter, however wanting its rhetoric and argument may be, though I haven’t read it. (Hannah Arendt once wrote a peculiarly wrong-headed essay about the Arkansas school crisis, in which she wondered why school children were being used as proxies in this fight- a foreigner’s misunderstanding-, but in which she made the fundamental point that any genuine politics involves “plurality”, which means that there will be opposed postions with a complexion and “integrity” of their own, which can not simply be suppressed by violent or coercive means, which would be, in her book, anti-politics). Religion and science are two profoundly different, perhaps incommensurable, modes of constructing being-in-the-world within the minds and immaginations of human communities and of exercising care and vigilance for that world and its human communities. They can and historically have come into conflict, but they do not of necessity do so. This is not fudging the issue, but rather recognizing the reality of the matter, without claiming to having a monopoly on the understanding of “reality”. Carefully distinguishing different types of validity claims and their spheres of applicability within an order of political and social rights is very much germane to the issue and is work that needs doing with respect to mediating and resolving such conflicts in both their valid and invalid manifestations. Why should religion have unique authority over matters of meaning and value? Well, the obvious answer is that it shouldn’t and doesn’t, but that questions of meaning are fundamental, questions of value are not negligible and that science itself has no competence per se on questions of value and only limited and specialized competence on questions of meaning. But certainly, conflicts over these matters can not be resolved by suppressing, de-legitimating or disqualifying the perspectives of religious believers from their social and political rights to participation in the public realm simply because their prejudices fail to accord with the prejudices of some others, which could only be inflammatory and counter-productive. It is a matter of establishing the boundary conditions of those rights and criticizing and adjudicating the usurpation of those boundary conditions, not quite an “epistemological” matter. (if anyone would wish to proffer a more specific and practical proposal on this matter, I would welcome it.) So, yes, Gould, whatever his inadequacies, is basically right and Dawkins is wrong-headed and foolish. Ms. Benson’s argument struck me as obtuse, because it rested on two basic category mistakes. The first one was noted in the original CT post: that G-D is not an empirical “entity” and no one involved in the matter takes it so, so arguments about unicorns are a bit beside the point. To take G-d as an empirical entity would, after all, amount to a regression to animism, not the sort of stuff believers are wont to fancy. (As for why the physical universe is contingent, well, events are contingent and, as a first order of approximation, we take in the statistical regularities of distributions of events, on which the so-called laws of nature are, in turn, based, where locally, e.g. on earth, or universally, as far as we can detect background radiation. As for G-d being a necessary “entity”, if this is not a causal or metaphysical claim, I am not sure off hand what the word “necessary” would mean. I think religious believers view G-d as needful and as a Being to which they somehow relate.) The second category mistake was a failure to recognize any differentiation between types of validity claims, privileging solely that of cognitive truth, and the damaging and counterproductive effort, (from the standpoint of elucidating and understanding the matter and its stakes), to apply norms and criteria from one type of validity claim in the domain of completely different sorts of claims, which I was at pains to spell out, but which Ms. Benson refused to take up. At which point she claimed that the basis of her argumentative claim was epistemology, so that the ground shifted to the status, validity and authority of “epistemology”. So it emerged that her claim that religious perspectives, expressions and claims were essentially empty and nonsensical rested on the alleged authority of epistemology. Now understanding the limits of validity claims and thus understanding the basis of that validity precisely from its limits is basic to the fundamental intention of Kant, who seminally got this whole enterprise rolling, though perhaps something of this is a much older and more basic philosophical thought. But it turns out that one does not need to construct the whole conceptual apparatus of epistemology to accomplish this understanding: the constraints of human language and human finitude suffice to sustain such an understanding. This is where Wittgenstein supervenes upon and sublates Kant. Of course, one can choose to view religion as empty and nonsensical and I do not begrudge anyone such a choice, but there is no “necessity”, no “necessarily so”, in the matter- it is simply a choice for which one is responsible before the differing choices of others. Making plain that religion is a free existential choice, available to some, indifferent to others, without necessarily puffing up the matter of human choice in all the pretensions to human autonomy, is, I think, at the crux of the matter. This is what religious people need to be made to understand in their dealings with us secular folk and the secularized world, and perhaps vice versa.

Iknow this screed needs to be paragraphed, but I need to go out and fetch me some dinner now, so I will resume later.

Well, the bad boy is awake again and returns to the underworld.

I will admit that flat Enlightenment, positivistic, militant atheism has always just bugged me, and I myself am more or less an atheist. I put myself in the odd position of defending the point of view of beliefs I personally do not hold, which is almost, but not quite, a deliberate assumption of bad faith. And I am surrounded on this thread by unbelievers, some of whom seem to take offense at religious matters- (“Blessed is he who taketh not offence in me”)- and others who are blythely ignorant of them. (I had thought initially Mr. Carone was writing from a religious believer’s perpsective, but was soon disabused of the notion; at any rate, to some extent I agreed with what he persisted in posting and any demurrals did not rate a dissent.) In my first post, I sought to make plain to the imaginative, semantic and rhetorical understanding of anyone who would bother to read it something of the nature and complexion of the point of view of religious believers, not as a matter of mere empathy, though religious believers are my fellow creatures as well as my fellow citizens, but as a matter of doing hermeneutic justice to the matter and its discussion, a maximal rather than a minimal ethics of “truth”. And I did this out of a sense of growing disturbance at the rise and currency of religious fundamentalism in politics and the public sphere,-(though religious fundamentalism is not the only reigning kind of fundamentalism)- and the damage it inflicts on any hope for a rational, progressive politics, however dim, which I believe to be in the interests of believers and unbelievers alike, with many of the former, I would take it, to be allies in such a project. (Unlike many on the secular left, I do have more of a communitarian than individualist bent, but that is a whole other tangle of issues. Being a communitarian on the internet is a bit like being a spider who constructs his web above a manure heap: one just sits there and collects far more libertarian flies than one could possibly digest.) Perhaps a citation of the moneylenders in the temple would be a propos here. (As I put it in a post that got destroyed by my computer freezing up last night- Ms. Benson sighs with relief and glee-: “Not only does religion need to be de-mythologized, as some purveyors of self-referential hooey put it, but it needs to be stripped of its ideological functionality, for the sake of religious believers, as well as the rest of us.”) I actually sensed that there was a latent consensus about the dangers and damages of religious fundamentalism and its politico-economic instrumentalization among the contributors to this thread and it is in this context that I took issue with Ms. Benson’s argument/intervention in the matter as injudicious, obtuse and wrong-headed. Positivistic militant atheism of the kind that Richard Dawkins routinely peddles partakes of the very literalism it attacks. (It is a bit like the dispute between Northern capitalists and Southern slave-owners over the Civil War: both were right about the other and wrong about themselves.) Recycling this sterile and outmoded polemic merely re-enforces the battle-lines, with all the attendant collateral casualties among the innocent between them, and compounds the problem rather than seeking out a dialogue aimed at reaching a real accomodation and modus vivendi between science and religion within the civic order and public-political realm, to which both have something of value to contribute and, at any rate, in which both will inevitably persist and intervene in that realm with their tangled and problematic relationship to it. It was perhaps because he sensed this that Gould chose to devote some of his little remaining time to writing a book intervening in the matter, however wanting its rhetoric and argument may be, though I haven’t read it. (Hannah Arendt once wrote a peculiarly wrong-headed essay about the Arkansas school crisis, in which she wondered why school children were being used as proxies in this fight- a foreigner’s misunderstanding-, but in which she made the fundamental point that any genuine politics involves “plurality”, which means that there will be opposed postions with a complexion and “integrity” of their own, which can not simply be suppressed by violent or coercive means, which would be, in her book, anti-politics). Religion and science are two profoundly different, perhaps incommensurable, modes of constructing being-in-the-world within the minds and immaginations of human communities and of exercising care and vigilance for that world and its human communities. They can and historically have come into conflict, but they do not of necessity do so. This is not fudging the issue, but rather recognizing the reality of the matter, without claiming to having a monopoly on the understanding of “reality”. Carefully distinguishing different types of validity claims and their spheres of applicability within an order of political and social rights is very much germane to the issue and is work that needs doing with respect to mediating and resolving such conflicts in both their valid and invalid manifestations. Why should religion have unique authority over matters of meaning and value? Well, the obvious answer is that it shouldn’t and doesn’t, but that questions of meaning are fundamental, questions of value are not negligible and that science itself has no competence per se on questions of value and only limited and specialized competence on questions of meaning. But certainly, conflicts over these matters can not be resolved by suppressing, de-legitimating or disqualifying the perspectives of religious believers from their social and political rights to participation in the public realm simply because their prejudices fail to accord with the prejudices of some others, which could only be inflammatory and counter-productive. It is a matter of establishing the boundary conditions of those rights and criticizing and adjudicating the usurpation of those boundary conditions, not quite an “epistemological” matter. (if anyone would wish to proffer a more specific and practical proposal on this matter, I would welcome it.) So, yes, Gould, whatever his inadequacies, is basically right and Dawkins is wrong-headed and foolish. Ms. Benson’s argument struck me as obtuse, because it rested on two basic category mistakes. The first one was noted in the original CT post: that G-D is not an empirical “entity” and no one involved in the matter takes it so, so arguments about unicorns are a bit beside the point. To take G-d as an empirical entity would, after all, amount to a regression to animism, not the sort of stuff believers are wont to fancy. (As for why the physical universe is contingent, well, events are contingent and, as a first order of approximation, we take in the statistical regularities of distributions of events, on which the so-called laws of nature are, in turn, based, where locally, e.g. on earth, or universally, as far as we can detect background radiation. As for G-d being a necessary “entity”, if this is not a causal or metaphysical claim, I am not sure off hand what the word “necessary” would mean. I think religious believers view G-d as needful and as a Being to which they somehow relate.) The second category mistake was a failure to recognize any differentiation between types of validity claims, privileging solely that of cognitive truth, and the damaging and counterproductive effort, (from the standpoint of elucidating and understanding the matter and its stakes), to apply norms and criteria from one type of validity claim in the domain of completely different sorts of claims, which I was at pains to spell out, but which Ms. Benson refused to take up. At which point she claimed that the basis of her argumentative claim was epistemology, so that the ground shifted to the status, validity and authority of “epistemology”. So it emerged that her claim that religious perspectives, expressions and claims were essentially empty and nonsensical rested on the alleged authority of epistemology. Now understanding the limits of validity claims and thus understanding the basis of that validity precisely from its limits is basic to the fundamental intention of Kant, who seminally got this whole enterprise rolling, though perhaps something of this is a much older and more basic philosophical thought. But it turns out that one does not need to construct the whole conceptual apparatus of epistemology to accomplish this understanding: the constraints of human language and human finitude suffice to sustain such an understanding. This is where Wittgenstein supervenes upon and sublates Kant. Of course, one can choose to view religion as empty and nonsensical and I do not begrudge anyone such a choice, but there is no “necessity”, no “necessarily so”, in the matter- it is simply a choice for which one is responsible before the differing choices of others. Making plain that religion is a free existential choice, available to some, indifferent to others, without necessarily puffing up the matter of human choice in all the pretensions to human autonomy, is, I think, at the crux of the matter. This is what religious people need to be made to understand in their dealings with us secular folk and the secularized world, and perhaps vice versa.

Iknow this screed needs to be paragraphed, but I need to go out and fetch me some dinner now, so I will resume later.

Well, I’ll be damned, literally! I posted hours ago and got back a series of “template error” messages, gave up, transferred the post to MS Word, found the cut and paste option was precluded, had to delete some hundreds of messages, and just checked back to see someone else’s wording, and now I find out I’ve posted by accident multiple times. Apologies for that.

Well, as to that last comment by Keith M. Ellis, I do not “know” what the “average” “theist” believes. I do not know any average people, only mediocre ones, amongst which I count myself one. I was supposed to have been brought up Roman Catholic, but it didn’t take with any of us 4 kids and I was the youngest, so it was collapsed almost before it could be taken in. To this day, I don’t know what Daddy believes or believed, except that it was highly split, expert only in calling others’ beliefs into question, as per the Church Militant, and largely a matter of narcissistic defense, bad faith, in other words. But actually, I come from 3/4 Calvinist ancestry and I tend in that direction, as may be at times evinced. So I perhaps lack exactly your antecdotal basis and and its contact with “in touch” reality. But I do dimly and inexpertly know that that is what Christian believers are doctrinally enjoined to believe- hence the animism comment. These traditions, after all, emerged and developed centuries ago amidst millenial conflicts of flesh and soul and spirit and, however nonrational they may seem to us secularized moderns, they do have a complexion and coherence of their own. As for actual, empirical “beliefs” nowdays, its an Emersonian free-for-all and nightmare. There are people who “believe” in astrology, or UFO abductions or Saddam’s WMD. For the sake of a basis in reasonable discussion, let alone sanity, I think it best to confine ourselves to at least broadly warranted beliefs, however merely conventionalistic such a criterion may end up being.

Actually, I did post a while back on St. Anselm’s proof, saying that it was intended more in a hortatory and heuristic sense, differentiating and relating levels and kinds of belief, rather than as logically dispositive. I think I began the post: “Well, I’ll be a talking parrot.” But it got lost when my computer froze up just after I hit “preview”. I also made some comments about Searles. I think you and I have locked antlers once or twice before and clearly we do not think alike, but there are no hard feelings on my part. So I think that accusation of “simply false”, as per your own declared epistemology is in need of some amendment. (And who is being emotional now?)

Actually, I think on this thread there has been some degree of latent paranoia, inspite of its avowedly rationalistic veneer, about religious believers and their beliefs, together with a refusal on the part of some to distinguish between genuine and reasonably intelligent believers, (who do struggle with their received or imposed orthodoxies and its impassibilities, though for many such there are better things to waste their anxieties upon)- admittedly a speculative proposition amongst us unbelievers- and the fear of the unruly mob- a classic bourgeois fear. Certainly, most all believers transact their affairs in a real, material world and raise ordinary cognitive validity claims in transacting their affairs very much as the rest of us do. And there is a large capacity, as Bill Carone has oddly been at pains to spell out, for extending such an acknowledgement of physical and material reality quite far afield, under the guise of “Christian Realism”. How else would Christian tradition have survived unto the present day, inspite of its impasses and atrocities? And do we really think that present-day religion is even more decadent than everything else? To be sure, in some fundamentalist manifestations, especially when politically mobilized, there is a level of resentment and malice that no religion can cure, least of all their own. But, lapsed Calvinist that I am, I ask, is anyone entirely immune from such aboriginal iniquity? Is such blessedness possible or is that equally an imaginary belief? And how do you all propose to allieviate this burden that is, if we are to be at all “authentic”, upon us?

Now I want to finish off my last self-perceived item of business with Ophelia Benson:

Yes, in that hurried, unfortunate post I did use the word “friends” for “lots of people” you know, whom you work with and edit, your milieu. I was drawing on memory rather than directly quoting, a lesson in technical procedure for me. But is the assumption that you would draw your friends, at least in part and in the loose American usage of the word, from your milieu all that much of a stretch? You live and work amongst like-minded souls, no? (So much for ditch-digging.) But the quote I did back track to find involved the claims that “epistomology” is central to your work- hence personal investment- and that it was central to most, if not all, issues embroiling the public realm, a large claim, indeed. This is not a matter of mere fact and in your last response you simply backtracked and evaded the issue. Now I am not familiar with the work of your colleagues, not “friends”, but, from my vantage point either they are doing epistemology as an antiquarian academic exercize, similarly to continuing to do scholastic theology,- and I know that academia provides opportunities for such, especially academic analytic philosophy- or they are doing the philosophy and history of science, a valid, valuable and informative ongoing enterprise, at least, in the hands of some of its practioners, or they are engaging in “cognitive science”, much of which, in my view, would largely amount to aself-referentially scientistic continuation of epistemology by other means. I simply put to you the same question I put to Laon: what do your special epistemological reasons add to your cognitive validity claims that is not already contained in the reasons and evidences by which you actually hold them? If you can not reasonably answer this question, then I would submit to you that “epistemology” is simply a name for a deflated, if historically influential, pretence.

Back to Keith:

I am not a pragmatist. In fact, I am something of a partisan of the lost Aristotelean distinction between theoretical and practical reason and I think that matters of religion are primarily to be argued on the level of practical reason. Since you did Great Books at St. John’s, I trust you know something of this. But in regard to your epistemological comment, I would quickly ask two questions. Do you really think that language can be so operationalized so as to meet the requirements of your proposal, since any language, no matter how formalized- (and at the far reaches of science this is excruciatingly difficult)- must meet requirements of translatability so as to be understood. And secondly, doesn’t your pre-occupation with epistemology contain something of a speculative hankering that no established body of knowledge, nor any epistemological theory could fulfill?

Enthymeme:

No, religious people do not have, nor necessarily experience, a burden of proof about their unrestrictedly existential belief in G-d. For them it is a matter of faith. The injunction upon them is to bear witness, to testify. It is how they sometimes do this that is the trouble with them.

Msg:

thoroughly conventionalistic deep ecology rapper friend:

I do not understand your point about the biological imperative for human society. Are you proposing a return to the wild? Is this some sort of Schopenhauerian denial of the will, retracting the principle of individuation? Is this a referencing of Foucaultian “bio-power”? I am aware of the gathering threat of ecological catastrophe, the probability of which is ever increased by capitalist industrialism and militarism, since there effectively is no longer any other kind, and the burgeoning global population of mostly impoverished people. And I know as well as the next person that human identity is a contigent, fragile and limited affair with a vast reality beyond itself or anyone else. But how, pray tell, is such catastrophe to be averted, remedied or allieviated without recourse to the political and economic structures of human society, with the discursive culture that attends them, through programs for collective action which must inevitably be mediated through the dubious identities of social agents? If you have an answer to this question, other than declamations of florid rhetoric, I would be sincerely interested in hearing about it.