Apologies in advance if I've misunderstood anything you're trying to say. I've got project deadlines coming up this week and my brain is sorta frazzled. Thanks, though, for an interesting discussion.
I also suggested that physical evidence can be used to determine reality. If the reality we know is determined by physical evidence then the only way to grasp the only reality we can grasp is to determine reality based on physical evidence.
First, let me clarify that I am not defending the OP's argument that propositions like "the sun will rise" are a matter of faith. I certainly agree that our reality can be known via physical evidence.
But you seem to make the further claim that our reality can only be known via physical evidence. (This is consistent with your original wording, "if you want to debate whether or not we know anything based on evidence then you have to debate whether we know anything at all," which is what led me to think you were espousing positivism.)
My post was intended to point out that there are numerous propositions that we consider to be true -- i.e., we consider them to correctly describe reality -- yet which are not based on evidence. In fact, the Matrix question is rigorously non-empirical; it is impossible by definition to obtain evidence for or against it. Yet, almost nobody would consider it irrational or unscientific to believe in a real universe. This belief can even coexist rationally with the intellectual admission that it could be wrong.
So is this philosophy? Yes. But is this about reality? Also, yes.
Indeed, science typically presupposes a real universe -- which is clearly a philosophical position, not an empirical one. Which brings us to the second point:
It is entirely possible that our reality is not in fact reality but it is useless for us to attempt to analyze what we cannot analyze. If we don't accept that then there can be any number of explanations including God. This isn't very useful though. That's the problem. Philisophically it's fine to think about these things but scientifically it is not.
Let's make sure I understand. I think you're saying that empirical reality (which you call "our reality") is the only thing that is knowable, so even if "True Reality" is different, hypothesizing about True Reality is meaningless because anyone can claim anything about it, including God or fairies or time cubes.
If that is what you meant, I would point out that you're still making a philosophical claim: that only empirical knowledge is valid knowledge, and everything non-empirical is speculation. Sure, that sounds and feels very reasonable, but it's nevertheless an axiom that is being taken as true without formal justification. And it is still a form of positivism, so it has the same problem of self-refutation: the statement "only empirical knowledge is valid knowledge" is not empirical knowledge, so it is not valid knowledge... just speculation. Even plain ol' rationalism doesn't have this particular drawback. Empirical positivism is simply too limited to be a good model.
(To verify that this isn't an inadvertent strawman, I believe the following is equivalent: the statement "it is useless for us to attempt to analyze what we cannot analyze" belongs in the "cannot analyze" category and so "scientifically it is not [fine].")
So science, which is solely a methodology, is always accompanied by an underlying philosophy -- not an "anything goes" philosophy of abstract word games, but a philosophy that seriously claims to have something to say about True Reality (or lack thereof), and science's relation to it (or lack thereof). Formally, I'm saying that you can't do science without an epistemology, because your epistemology determines what you consider to be knowledge.
> > Nope. Most theologians correctly pair faith and reason together as inextricably tied. > > Uh-huh. So... based on that line of reasoning, we can trust in theology to > be a reliable source of logic and reason?
He's not saying that faith is the same as reason. He is saying that faith is compatible with reason. His point about "blind faith" being unbiblical is correct: Kierkegaard notwithstanding, the colloquial word "faith" has always been encrusted with many meanings, one of which is "irrational, blind, unquestioning faith." But the faith spoken of in the Bible derives from a Greek word meaning "to be persuaded."
Part of the problem is that you seem to have an incorrect and perhaps vague idea of what faith is. Much of your post, and previous posts, seems to rebel against the idea that faith should replace reason and investigation.
Well, no one in this discussion is saying that.
Yes, engineers should deal in confidence intervals and rigorous measurement and exhaustive testing. Yes, every assumption in every situation should be questioned and questioned again. The "faith" that so bothers you is not what we are talking about. So let us arrive at a clear definition, then.
There is a common idea that "faith" is a repulsive, backwards, outdated concept. After all, a "rational" person should never believe in anything until it's proven, right? But it turns out that rational people believe in plenty of things that are not proven, foremost being Reason itself. After all, there's no formally valid way to logically establish the correctness of logic, or to empirically establish the correctness of empiricism. Anyone who engages in debate or discussion or science holds such axioms as true, without proof.
Another truth that most of us accept is the existence of the universe itself. Does that sound silly? Let me rephrase it: the belief that we aren't living in the Matrix. Again, we take this belief as an axiom, without proof. It is impossible by definition to even conceive of an experiment to detect the Matrix; it is rigorously unknowable. Yet, no one would call you irrational for believing the universe is real. Here then is an example of reasonable faith in the absence of evidence. In other words:
Faith is relying on your axioms.
This is the "inextricable tie" that the GP was speaking of. Reason does depend on faith, because you cannot prove that reason works. This is (loosely) an a priori relationship. Yet, faith does depend on reason, because a good axiom should work well and a bad axiom should work poorly. This is an a posteriori relationship.
As it happens, the common notion of a "rational," "intelligent," "educated" person is of one who accepts the axioms of Reason and the axiom that the universe is real, and so on, but rejects the axiom that God exists. This is an arbitrary cultural distinction, and has nothing to do with being rational, intelligent, or educated.
You may argue that God is a poor axiom. You are welcome to do so, and I may respond with my arguments for its being a good and quite indispensible axiom. In such a discussion, the above formulation of "faith" can be reworded thus:
Faith is the choice between two plausible alternatives.
Wasn't it theologians who maintained that the world was flat, the sun revolved around the Earth, and that the Moon is a perfectly smooth sphere?-- all conclusions based entirely on their reasoning?
We've already established that no one (here) is proposing that faith substitute for investigation. But a historical aside: the geocentric theory that was held by the Church organization in the Western world -- few people today know about the equally large Eastern Church, seeing as they were slaughtered quite thoroughly -- was not based on Biblical theology but upon Ptolemaic cosmology, which was considered to be the state of the
Please offer us some empirical evidence of a deity.
- Please offer us some empirical evidence that we are not living in the Matrix. - Please offer us some empirical evidence that logical argument is reliable. - Please offer us some empirical evidence that anyone exists besides yourself.
These are all things that most of us believe in, but cannot be established empirically. All beliefs of any kind are predicated on axioms that are taken as true without proof. In the most general sense, this is called epistemology.
The idea that "all truth must be established empirically" is a form of Logical Positivism, and was very popular for a very short time in the early 20th century, until people realized that it undercuts a large number of things that are pretty well accepted to be True, such as the examples I've listed above.
Interestingly, the scientific establishment latched onto positivism with a vengeance but lacked the philosophical training to recognize its flaws, and so turned it into unquestioned dogma. Elsewhere, positivism died a rapid and thoroughly embarrassing death at its own hands:
- Please offer us some empirical evidence that "all truth must be established empirically."
This is a terrible argument. If you want to be a complete skeptic and actually wonder if the sun will rise the next morning then you cannot know anything, including whether a God exists or not. People do not have faith that the sun will rise, they know it will based on observable evidence, which, by the way, is completely lacking in ID theory. That is why it is called faith, or by your definition, blind faith. I've heard this argument in various forms by every IDer or creationist out there. Scientific theories are not faith-based. They have a lot of evidence to back them up. If you want to debate whether or not we know anything based on evidence then you have to debate whether we know anything at all. That would make you a skepitc, and if you're a skeptic what the hell are you doing believing in a God anyway?
What you've got here is two views on epistemology: philosophical skepticism, the position that knowledge does not exist; and logical positivism, the position that only empirically verifiable claims are meaningful.
Neither of these positions are generally held to be intellectually viable, despite your claim that they are the only two options. In fact, there are dozens of epistemologies, and -- here's the point -- a person's epistemology is by definition an unproven assumption, taken on faith.
What's wrong with positivism? It flourished for a while in the early part of the 20th century, but major problems were discovered quite rapidly, and it was discarded -- though not before much of it was embraced by the scientific establishment as unquestioned dogma.
Simply stated, there are a lot of things that are generally regarded as True, but are rejected by positivism. You cannot empirically verify that the universe exists (or: you cannot demonstrate that we don't live in the Matrix). You cannot empirically verify that logical reasoning is reliable. But the real heart of the problem is this: you cannot empirically verify positivism. Positivism therefore claims that positivism is meaningless.
The proper status of faith is of determining one's axioms. Christian faith takes God as an axiom alongside such things as logic and existence (rationalist axioms, incidentally).
This is simply not true. Evolutionary biologists find flaws in existing theories of evolution fairly often, and the theories are adjusted accordingly over time.
But only as long as core beliefs are upheld. While I am not arguing for or against ID, the author of the study makes a surprising statement of faith in TFA itself:
"The evolution of complexity is a longstanding issue in evolutionary biology," said Joseph W. Thornton... "We wanted to understand how this system evolved at the molecular level. There's no scientific controversy over whether this system evolved. The question for scientists is how it evolved..."
This is simply how all science, including biology, works; there is no crisis of faith as you claim.
Ideally, but humans are humans and the real world isn't that convenient. While reading Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps, I was fascinated by his observation (demonstrated by a very readable historical account) that scientific theories have a marked tendency to resist revision until the scientists who hold those theories... die off. And he was talking about some great luminaries of science here, from Maxwell to Planck to Einstein and onwards.
Real Life asserted itself too forcefully this week... very sorry for the delay in responding to your thoughtful post.
My problem with your earlier statement is that you equate religious hypocrites with ethical atheists
I was not actually equating those two things. A theist who commits some specific sin obviously has no valid analogy to an atheist who by definition cannot sin. We are in agreement there. The analogy is between the theist who lives a life that is clearly inconsistent with religious principles (for example, by habitual child abuse), and the atheist who lives a life that is clearly inconsistent with naturalistic principles (for example, by behaving as if free will and inalienable rights exist).
In both cases, there is an inconsistency -- and while we agree that inconsistency represents no ethical problem for the atheist, it certainly represents an intellectual problem for the atheist and theist alike.
That was the aim of quoting notable naturalists and their thoughts on this conflict -- particularly the clear lack of resolution in their professional vs. personal lives. This is sometimes called the Modern Schism: oh no, science tells us that our greatest virtues are baseless, what do we do? But science, which is a methodology, says no such thing; it is scientific naturalism, which is a philosophy, that rejects all nonscientific truths.
The fact that the Modern Schism is still with us, despite 150 years of treatment by philosophers and scientists, indicates to me that naturalism is generally not being lived out to its logical conclusions. I brought up rights as just one example of this inconsistency (and did not make my intentions clear enough, which made it seem offtopic).
The religious man who says "God wants us to sacrifice a goat..." and then proceeds to not sacrifice a goat is acting amorally -- sinning. On the other hand, the atheist who... exercises free will to leave the neighbor's bananas and wife alone is not "violating" anything, as there is no morality inherent in the biological imperative
A very interesting point! I had not thought of it from that perspective. However, those are not the only two scenarios. The third one is: the atheist who exercises free will and does rape the neighbor's wife is also not "violating" anything.
Supposing the neighbor is also an atheist, he is forced to accept that the perpetrator may hold a different "pragmatically wholesome organizing principle" (or no principle at all) and leave it at that -- plus whatever laws may apply. But legal recourse is not moral recourse, and legal culpability is not moral culpability. Put another way: you can ask for deterrence or revenge, but you cannot ask for an apology. The very concept of remorse is illogical, outside of regret at being caught. In fact, I think (haven't thought this one all the way through) that the neighbor can't even say to his wife, "You have been wronged;" he can only say "Your preference to not be raped was unfulfilled [through the state's negligence/because the neighbor overpowered me/the stupid watchdog ran off/etcetera]."
The atheists who believe in human rights do so because they have arrived at the conclusion that human rights are a desirable framework, "useful fiction" or not. Or rather, I don't see how our behaviour would change depending on their Truthiness. Either you treat your fellow man with respect because you think he is imbued with deservingness by the Universe, or you treat him with respect out of a conviction that doing so is part of a pragmatically wholesome organizing principle.
Again, my previous post (the grandparent) details why I consider this inconsistent with naturalistic premises. An "irreligious ethic... derived from within" is perfectly effective when you are the actor; but in all other cases (such as being on the receiving end of the stick), you have no standing to say that something "wrong" has occur
Hume spends a lot of time establishing that reason is capable only of understanding facts, and no valid reasoning can deduce what is from what should be.
Bleah. This is backwards. Obviously, it should read, "...no valid reasoning can deduce what should be from what is."
You are making the classic error of saying that there can't be morals/ethics without religion.
Funny, I thought I was explicitly addressing the classic error of saying that there can be morals/ethics without religion.;-)
It is perfectly possible to come up with a set of moral guidelines regarding for example behaviours with your fellow humans without involving any deity whatsoever.
I certainly never said that agreements aren't possible; quite the opposite, I was pointing out that agreements are a rather rickety basis for the moral concepts that we tend to consider important. You speak of guidelines, but (unless I misunderstand) that's putting words in my mouth; I spoke initially of principles, like dignity, freedom, and inalienable human rights. As I address at length in a following post, how sensible is it for something to be inalienable by consensus? Anything agreed upon by humans can be dissolved by humans at any time.
But let's move from principles down to specific ethics:
Kant and Hume were amongst the first to propose atheist ethics. They are mostly based on the idea that one should help one's fellow man, because this is in everyone's best interest, in other words do unto others what you would like others done unto you.
Come now. Even though it's been a good decade since I've seriously studied Hume and Kant... I know at least that Kant was a deontologist! The very concept of deontology is strongly identified with Kant, given his landmark contributions to the concept.
Kant's ethics are absolute and universal; he does not endorse any normative concept of consensus or agreement, but uses consensus only to illustrate his central idea -- that true, absolute, universal morality can be identified using Reason alone, and so all correct reasoning should arrive at the same conclusions. But Kant's position -- simplifying tremendously here! -- that morality is simultaneously real yet immaterial requires some basis that allows Reason to identify the rightness or wrongness of an ethic. "[I]n other words, [we] must postulate the existence of God... We proceed to exhibit this connection in a convincing manner." (Critique of Practical Reason, Abbott translation, section V, "The Existence of God as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason")
Now, Kant is certainly not a Christian, but he is unarguably a theist, in that God is the guarantor and trustee of morality. Note that Kant takes moral freedom as a given (I think he believes it is incorrigible) and argues that this is nonsense without the existence of God.
Now, perhaps your misapprehension of Kant stems from his reputation as a fierce defender of naturalism. He certainly was! In fact, he wrote mostly on science; he took little interest in philosophy until this bloke named Hume began teaching a radical skepticism that seemed to undermine even Newtonian physics. But Kant was also a fierce defender of free will (which he calls freedom or autonomy) -- and he admitted that naturalism and freedom are contradictory concepts that he was never able to reconcile (an "antimony"). He settles instead for one of his most famous conclusions: that to live by any rational ethic, we must behave as if we have free will, whether it exists or not.
Oh, hey, this sounds a lot like the guys I quoted in my original post, eh?
[Section break:-)]
Now, as for Hume, it is entirely unsurprising to me that -- at the end of his writings -- he encountered the very same obstacle. The radical skeptic, Hume spends a lot of time establishing that reason is capable only of understanding facts, and no valid reasoning can deduce what is from what should be. Yet he finds that this obstructs any concept of morality. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, he allo
And of course, 100 P4 chips and the associated 20,000 watt PSU isn't nearly as cheap as a resistive heating element.
Unless the power company supplies it for me, and gives me free resistive heating in exchange for running their computations. Oh, they're gonna need powerline broadband to communicate with, so they'd better give that to me too.
Do you behave as if humans have freedom, dignity, equality? These concepts are impossible to justify under a naturalistic framework.
While you're pulling things out of your ass, how about digging around in there for anything at all to support this absurd statement?
The support is to reason from naturalistic premises, because their conclusions seem pretty inevitable. This was the purpose of quoting the authors I quoted, yes? Simply read their books, or any work on evolutionary psychology.
I have yet to encounter a convincing naturalistic justification for these concepts, and this is not for lack of trying (whether you believe me or not). Indeed, if you can provide such a basis, it would be extremely educational for me. Only one plausible and correct counterexample is required to end this argument.
But at the risk of simplifying dangerously, I will illustrate one of the basic problems: if humans are merely slightly advanced animals (or, as secular humanists often put it, "Man is the measure of all things," originally of Protagoras) then everything we value is invented by humans. Granted by humans. And can be taken away by humans.
Under these premises, I frankly do not see a way to tell a person, even my own children, "You possess value and rights." I can only say, "The collection of people I belong to agree to behave as if you possess value and rights." The often-unstated corollary: "There is nothing, and no reason, preventing a more powerful collection of people from overriding this behavior."
You snipped out the clearest example: most people, despite professing atheism and even professing moral relativism, nevertheless behave as if they believe in universal, intrinsic, inalienable human rights. Perhaps, if one is amenable to the intellectual fashions of the day, they might sagely agree that these are merely useful fictions. But in daily life, we continue to live as if they were much greater than fiction. A quite close analogy might be made of the question of the universe's existence. Intellectually, one must acknowledge that the universe may be an illusion; but how many of us actually believe we live in the Matrix?
Let us make this more concrete. Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, states that "[human rights] are grounded not in religion, or any other transcendental state or supernatural force, but in themselves. They stand alone. Humans deserve life, liberty, and happiness, not because God said so but because we are human. Period. These rights and values exist because we say they exist, and that is good enough. They are inalienable because we say they are, and that suffices." (The Science of Good and Evil, p156, emphasis mine).
To my understanding, this is a logical contradiction. How can something be inalienable by agreement? He is making a universal claim for humanity ("humans deserve...") based on the belief system of a subset of humanity ("we say so"). In fact, even if all of humanity did agree, it doesn't change the fact that some have disgreed in the past and others may do so in the future. Yet, we do not say, "Humans today deserve life, liberty, and happiness." Intellectually, we might concede that this the correct formulation, but in practice we don't live as if we believe this. No, indeed, our instinct is often to criticize those who disagree, past, present, or future.
I would actually be interested and appreciative to hear a solution to this.
They admit that God exists, and continue to live lives as though God does not exist.
I find this to be true of most theists.
The symmetrical observation may equally be made of most atheists.
The claim that there is no God has just as many consequences as the claim that there is. I know of few atheists who have the courage to live up to these fully.
Do you behave as if humans have freedom, dignity, equality? These concepts are impossible to justify under a naturalistic framework. Do you behave as if humans have value, and that it's somehow objectionable to slaughter human carriers of H5N1 along with the birds they contracted it from? What is the basis for the term "human rights violation" outside of a concept of rights that are univeral, intrinsic, and inalienable?
This is not academic quibbling. Here are some concrete examples of people struggling through the dilemma.
Rodney Brooks of MIT writes that a person is a robot, "a big bag of skin full of biomolecules." It's not easy to think this way, he says, but "when I look at my children, I can, when I force myself,... see that they are machines." Yet! "That is not how I treat them. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis.... I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs." (Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us).
Robert Wright, an evolutionary psychologist, propounds in The Moral Animal that, "We believe the things-- about morality, about personal worth, even objective truth-- that lead to behaviors that will get our genes into the next generation... Free will is an illusion... [an] outmoded worldview." And then he takes a lovely, grand leap of faith and declares that by our own choice (hmmm), we can "correct the moral biases built into us by natural selection" and espouse the ideal of "brotherly love." My, my. What standard is he appealing to, that he can call one moral system (the evolved one) inferior to another?
Richard Dawkins proceeds along a similar path in The Selfish Gene, deftly sketching out a picture of biological determinism. But even the celebrated avatar of naturalism fails to live by his ideology, instead affirming that "[w]e, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." In an op-ed article on the Clinton affair, he condemns all the "sanctimonious" criticism of a guy who's simply obeying his genes. Yet he feels compelled to mention that "I take the un-Darwinian personal decision [to be] deliberately monogamous." Why compromise his position by bringing that up at all?
All of the ideals mentioned above do not exist, if you are a fully rational atheist. They are theistic values, and have no place or justification in a secular worldview. Francis Crick provides an excellent illustration, proposing that there is no reason to limit abortion to the unborn: "No newborn infant should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding its genetic endowment and that if it fails these tests it forfeits the right to live." (American Medical Association, Prism, May 1973). I find his position maximally repugnant, but I respect that he is at least consistent.
Theists are often charged with needing "convenient fictions" as a crutch to get by. The charge is at least as valid for atheists.
Prop-Cycle! Loved that game, and you could definitely work up a sweat playing it. The flywheel had hefty resistance to it, nicely matched to the gameplay. But yes, $1 a play was a bit rich when I was that age; like other racing games, beginners die more (and so pay more) than experts.
Come to think of it, most places charge $1/play for DDR too.
a heat pump is about 2.5 times more efficient for heating your house than just running electricity through resistive coils (as with a space heater, for example).
...or with a baseboard heating system, as I've got. Yes, this is essentially a space heater. Maybe it's just my locale (New England), but every house I've seen with electric heat uses these, one per room.
However, I will grant your point that I am an idiot. =) I'd never heard of household heat pumps before, but in retrospect the concept should've been obvious. I am enlightened... and now I want one.
But after I tested two or three appliances, I realized that this whole endeavor is completely nonsense except in summertime. If my computer, power amp, water heater, or even incandescent lights, are running during the winter... every watt of power they generate will reduce my heating bill by almost exactly that watt.
Now yes, I do have electric heating. The tradeoff may differ for those who don't. But the fact remains that powering devices in the home is much less wasteful than it seems, for those who live in colder climates. Since this study was done in Britain, I wonder if they controlled for this factor.
In the summer, of course, I try to keep things off as much as possible. But this is primarily because it's too hot, and only secondarily to save power.
the reason I consider religious beliefs to be irrational is because they are not founded on logic and reasoning, they are presupposed to be true based on religious faith.... Well, why do you believe in God? Because the Bible says I should. Why do you adhere to the Bible? Because it was written by God.
Again, you are simply asserting that the non-God axiom is somehow superior to the God axiom. Perhaps I misunderstand, but precisely what steps of logic and reasoning would constitute a foundation for any axiom? The acceptance or rejection of any axiom is ultimately a pre-rational belief. There are plenty of people in this world who do not hold logic as an axiom at all. I find that evidence suggests they are wrong. I also find that evidence suggests the God axiom is at least as plausible as the non-God axiom. Like the Axiom of Choice, the plausibility is not one-sided but symmetric: acceptance or rejection of the axiom both have desirable and undesirable ramifications, making Occam useless.
In other words, I do not use the Bible to justify itself circularly. You seem very keen on this idea, but blind faith is actually improper in Christianity. The claims made by the Bible are, to my satisfaction, sufficiently consistent with my observations of the human condition, my research, and yes, my personal experience. (Maybe this what you meant by logic and reason?) This is not proof of an axiom but it is evidence enough to evaluate some pros and cons and come to a decision. The decision between two plausible alternatives is one way to understand proper faith -- not just in God but in all aspects of one's worldview. After all, it is strictly plausible that we do indeed live in the Matrix, but how many of us really believe that?
Further details along these lines probably don't belong in this topic, but I can open a journal entry if there is interest in continuing the thread.
nothing in Christian religious doctrines was used to provide the basis for the scientific method. The scientific method actually originates from Greece.
The roots of almost everything Western go back to Greece.:-) Thales the Milesian is often cited as a key figure, notable especially for studying and proposing natural causes for natural events. However, it's unclear how rigorous his methods were, and crediting him (as some do) with establishing the scientific method is plausible but may also be an overstatement.
Thales notwithstanding, the greatest influence on Western thought came from Plato and Aristotle. Plato divided the world into Matter and Forms, raw material ordered by rational ideas. Sounds quite scientific! But the funny thing is, Platonism rejects that avenue, teaching instead that Forms are superior to and actually more real than the visible world of Matter; this is the point of his famous shadow-puppet allegory. Matter is inferior, chaotic, and never completely obeys Form.
As a result, intellectual inquiry into Form was an exalted pursuit (familiar today as mathematical platonism), while experimental inquiry into Matter was considered unreliable and even ignoble. This dualism was absorbed fully by Augustine, and therefore went unchallenged for ten centuries. For this reason, the medieval era saw little advance in the physical sciences, as monasteries flourished in drawing the best minds to a pseudo-Platonic life of abstract Formal rumination, rejecting Material concerns.
When Aristotle resurfaced in the 13th century, it almost brought about the Renaissance, had it not been for that pesky Black Death incident. Now, Aristotle certainly advocated natural inquiry; however, his method wasn't quite scientific either. He posited Four Causes, thr
Hint: any time you find yourself inferring or rephrasing someone else's argument, you're most likely just creating a strawman
Interesting! That's a good rule of thumb, I'll keep it in mind. Although, in this case I wasn't rephrasing the argument, but an ambiguously-stated parenthesis. It was really more of a lame attempt to find a segue.:-)
it's disingenuous to suggest that because nothing can be absolutely proven, all things are at equal levels of non-proof
This wasn't my intention, though I apologize if my tendency to oversimplify on Slashdot made it unclear. I am certainly not arguing for Humean skepticism!
Formally restated, a rationalist generally accepts only propositions that are either (1) axiomatic to reasoning or knowledge, (2) incorrigible, or (3) established to one's satisfaction by evidence in accordance with (1) and (2).
Being pedantic, as you say, means that we have to consider (1), (3), and perhaps (2) to be suspect. But pragmatically, we do not. We are, in a nutshell, talking about beliefs -- they might be untrue assumptions, but how many of us really think so?
So if I believe (3) to be true, then it easily establishes the rising of the Sun, and disqualifies the non-rising of the Sun. Even Hume did not walk around all day questioning the existence of everything.
However, my point was that there are propositions that most of us also accept as true, but are not rationally justified by the model above. And Godel showed us that some of these propositions will in fact be true. The existence of a real universe is the obvious example; we should consider that it might be an illusion, but how many of us really think so?
The existence of God is arguably another example. Thus, I did intend to suggest that the specific axioms of God and non-God are indeed at equal, or at least comparable, levels of non-proof.
So no, I do not expect a rational person to refute gods because they cannot be absolutely proven to be true. I expect a rational person to refute gods because their existence would be contrary to a larger and more consistent set of evidence about the cosmos.
This approach is entirely reasonable, if indeed you have made a considered decision that the evidence for God is similar to the evidence for werewolves. My complaint is firmly with those who think the assumption of non-God is automatically rational, mature, and intelligent while the assumption of God is somehow automatically irrational, ignorant, and unintelligent.
I will quibble, though, that the axiom of God is hardly contrary to any physical evidence. (Maybe you meant "unsupported?") At one extreme, the Deist God can't contradict anything since it never touches the physical universe (so then we cue Occam's Razor =). But the Christian model includes both the axioms of rationality, applied wherever appropriate, as well as the axiom of an active God, who might physically intervene every so often, but whose real interest is almost totally on the human condition; more specifically, on fixing individual souls; more specifically, on yours and mine.
Anyway, thus I reiterate (obTopic) that the axiom of God is absolutely not supported by vacuous statements about "science can't explain X, so there!" (And for TFA to trot this out is a strawman.) But I could argue that by accurately encompassing both science and humanity, the Christian model presents an even "larger and more consistent set of evidence." That is definitely a topic for another time, however.
This is getting pretty offtopic. Maybe I should refrain? Nahh.;-)
Ha! but in fact, science does tell us if war is just or not.. In fact, most every war waged this century had more to do with the scientific method than religion. Logical constructs of use-cases.
This appears quite circular to me. You're talking about using science to determine the truth or falsity of various measures of justice, but the original assertion is that science cannot provide a definition of justice.
Rather, you simply assume here...
Quantitatively weighing the human cost against the abstract political gain.
...what sounds like a utilitarian model of justice.
Any given "moral" issue can be socialogically deconstructed. And just like inconsistencies between quantum and reletevism, current gaps in our understanding of social moral delemmas are only a PHD thesis away.
Morality is socially deconstructible only if you believe it is. That's a philosophical assumption, a starting position that is no more, or less, rational than the assumption that morality is objective.
And frankly, I have a pretty low view of our "current... understanding of social moral [di]lemmas." The radical subjectivism characteristic of postmodern social sciences is beyond ridiculous -- and would be particularly irksome to the scientifically-minded Slashdot crowd if they ever realize that the "best" contemporary scholarship in the social sciences all begins with the assumption that truth does not exist -- not even scientific truth.
The idea that social and moral concepts will fall to the inquiry of Reason is an old one -- rooted in (of course) the Enlightenment, buoyed by the triumph of Newtonian physics. But as we know, science went on to achieve an unbroken record of success, while the sociological side is fairly a train wreck. All attempts to create Utopia have failed, despite the appearance of rigor and plausibility in their underlying theses. Marxism is the poster child, of course; but the same impulse led to that other regime that Godwin prohibits me from mentioning outright.;-)
The essential problems of the human condition are moral ones, chronicled in literature for thousands of years, unchanged in the face of scientific advancement. Lately, from Nietzsche to Skinner to Dawkins, the fashionable response has been to blandly assert that these things are just illusions and social constructions -- a non-answer that Kant famously decried as being pretty unhelpful, even if true.
So, given that there isn't much historical reason to believe that social Progress has anything to do with scientific Progress, I can only assume that you look to the impending solution to all our moral problems as an article of faith? (Kidding, kidding. Mostly.)
But hasn't the purpose of religion always been to fill in the gaps in human understanding
Nope. That's a myth.;-) Religion serves a great many purposes, of which explaining the natural world is sometimes a small part. In Christianity, specifically, it is almost no part. On the other hand, Christianity spends a lot of time talking about the purpose of life, about which science has little to say.
(albeit with unfounded/illogical assumptions)?
I'll infer that you consider the existence of God to be the primary illogical or unfounded assumption. After all, a "rational" person should never believe in anything until it is proven, right? Except rational people believe in plenty of things that are not proven, foremost being Reason itself. Another example would be the existence of the universe. Oh, does that sound silly? Let me rephrase it, then: the belief that we are not living in the Matrix. These beliefs cannot be proven. They are axioms. You can accept or reject an axiom, but not through pure reasoning.
God is an axiom.
Our notion of a "rational," "intelligent," "educated" person is of one who accepts the axioms of Reason, the axiom that the universe exists, but not the axiom that God exists. This is an arbitrary cultural distinction, and has nothing to do with being rational, intelligent, or educated.
When you can't explain something with reason (backed by empirical observations when appropriate), then you turn to theological explanations which rely on mythos rather than logos.
I wonder who you're referring to. Certainly not most of the Christians I know (although being from the Northeast I don't personally know too many raving fundamentalists). Did you know, by the way, that (contrary to the delightfully articulate but sometimes ill-informed Thomas Paine) Christianity is directly responsible for the scientific method? Prior to the writings of Aquinas, scientific thought was governed primarily by Platonic and Aristotelian worldviews, which specifically deny the reliability of physical experimentation.
I thought it quite interesting that the researcher quoted in TFA feels the significance of his research is to show that "we can use science to understand the world around us." Christians originated modern science, and it's silly to see both sides of this idiotic non-debate forgetting that fact.
But with the advent of science and philosophy, religion has become an antiquated relic of the past.
Since we have already established that religion is perfectly agreeable with science, we will address your other assertion: what philosophies, exactly, have effectively displaced religion? Again, as above, philosophy stems from prior assumptions -- one of which is, again, the existence of God. Perhaps you were not aware that there are theistic and nontheistic philosophies? In recent years, Alvin Plantinga has done much work in establishing theism in the forefront of philosophical scholarship. To pin your hopes on philosophy is merely to work off of beliefs you have already assumed.
Look up history, tell me when rights stopped any massacres.
Yes, rights never stopped anything. But rights are what allow us to say that the massacre was wrong. Without a concept of human rights, there is no logical justification for opposing or even criticizing someone else's massacre. The most we can say is, "I don't like it, but that's just my opinion."
I am a christian and think "rights" are nice ideals but their imaginary.
Then you should remember that God himself establishes our rights. If you believe it is sin to murder, then by definition all humans have a right not to be murdered. In Christianity, human rights are absolutely factually real.
In contrast, it's non-theistic philosophies that suffer from the problem of having imaginary rights. Anything granted by human authority can be taken away by human authority.
and in fact it's usually considered a sign of weakness in one's faith to actually pursue actual truth
Interesting. Since you don't mention what faith you're referring to, I won't assume you're talking about Christianity, since this is clearly not proper Christian behavior. =) If I found any of my students doing this, they'd get an earful.
Of course some believers are distinctly anti-intellectual. I've met plenty -- easily too many. Yet, it would certainly be enlightening to see some hard numbers for your claim of "usually." Seriously, if you have such data, I would be appreciative; I'd have use for it.
because that challenges the foundation of the religion in question. When an entire way of life is built up around fiction, the only way to preserve it is to make questioning the story the one thing that's not allowed.
Again, quite interesting -- since I was taught, and now teach, that questioning is not only welcome but obligatory. Perhaps this has something to do with our actually having confidence that Christianity is nonfiction, as opposed to hoping that's the case without really finding out. (Again, yes, there are a good number of Christians who do the latter. Big deal, it just means they're not very bright. I've met some pretty dim atheists, too.;-)
Ahh, another nice flame. Mod or post? Guess I'll post.
Lots of people repeat your line, that there's really no conflict between good science and good religion. But in science we always look for the simplest possible explanation of what we see, and since there's no evidence for 'God', science wouldn't even consider 'His' existence.
You're making two basic errors of reasoning. First, you assume the purpose of having a God around is to explain the world; then you argue that we have much better explanations for things these days, so God is out of a job. Bit circular there. In reality, the central message of the Bible is that God's main interest is to fix things; more specifically, individual souls; more specifically, mine and yours.
Second, you express the belief that nothing is true unless it is established by evidence and reason. Ah, the rallying call of the Enlightenment! Finally, we can get God out of the picture! The whole of Truth in its infinitude can be known to us if we just study it hard enough! (Cue: Godel. =)
Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up. Every one of us, except maybe solipsists, believes axiomatically in a bunch of stuff that cannot be established by science. Logic is a common one. The existence of the universe would be another. (Does that sound silly? Let me rephrase it in contemporary terms: do you believe we're not in the Matrix?)
But most striking is this: the belief that "nothing is true unless established by science" is itself a purely philosophical axiom that cannot be established by science. That puts it on the same epistemological footing as belief in God.
Which, incidentally, makes this:
Fuck you religious types.
...a religious statement.;-)
In contrast, a proper Christian worldview holds both God and science as axioms -- ergo, the "line" that good theology and good science are in agreement. So, it should not surprise you that I have no overall objection to biological evolution, and furthermore that I hold this view without committing the fallacy of placing science above Scripture.
It's so absurd, it's not even worth thinking about.
That's too bad. I won't comment on this directly. A word of caution, however: you will find that this non-argument can and will be used to defend a lot of things that you don't agree with.
And when you spend my taxes on xmas trees you're basically stealing.
And my tax dollars are being spent teaching secular humanist ethics in elementary schools. Ranting about it hasn't been very useful, however. I've found that I prefer to just educate. It's more enjoyable, too.
There shouldn't be, of course. That was the irony, right? =)
Abiogenesis is quite admittedly a weakly developed and weakly supported field. That is hardly surprising considering that it attempts to address a singular microscopic event hidden in the deep depths of time, and which has left no direct trace.
Again, this is the interesting bit. It's perfectly acceptable and accurate for you to say this. But imagine if Pat Robertson (bleh) were to get on national TV and make the same statement. The flaming arrows would be flying within the hour.
When a debate turns into kneejerking, it's time to make fun of the debaters.
I wouldn't call ID "the end of science",... On the other hand I've never even heard of radical postmodernism before, so it does not appear to be a particularly signifigant threat to anything.
The "end of science" bit was a reference to that common refrain here on Slashdot, as well as in a few other places (New Scientist editorials, for instance). I agree it is not the general position.
Half of what you learn in a class is the content; the other half is the teacher's assumptions (assuming you learn anything at all =). This is why a huge percentage of college students and graduates these days will say extremely illogical things like, "If you believe it's true, then it's true for you." If you've heard that, then you've heard postmodernism. In its more radical form, you get people making mind-blowing statements about science being nothing more than a tool of male oppression.
And here is where we get to the real crux of the matter. We are all talking about things that are fundamentally pre-rational. There are (simplifying greatly) three epistemologies at loggerheads here:
1. The worldview that includes these axioms: God, science. [theism] 2. The worldview that includes these axioms: science. [rationalism] 3. The worldview that includes these axioms: nothing. [postmodernism]
(To be more precise, the word "science" here should be replaced with "logic" or "reason.")
Epistemology cannot be chosen rationally because it defines what you consider to be rational; an adherent to any of the above views does so purely on faith. I view postmodernism to be a vastly greater threat to science because it rejects that you can even argue logically. I have heard highly educated people say, "Yes, I agree that you've proved your position. But my [contradictory] position is still true for me."
This certainly underlines the double standards of the ID right. They want religious criticism of evolution put in science classes, and are using the ID trojan horse to do so, while trying to silence those who point this out in those self same classes.
Disclaimer: I am not a proponent of ID, and do not support its teaching in schools.
But it's rare that anyone in a rancorous debate won't have double standards. Narrowing the field to abiogenesis for a moment -- when respected nonreligiousscientists espouse speculative, largely unfalsifiable hypotheses of origins that have no evidentiary basis other than (hmm) the lack of evidence for abiogenesis, they are welcome to speak publicly, and write for journals and magazines. Where is the outcry?
And you certainly can't wave your arms and yell "ID is the end of science in America!" when by far the greatest threat to science today is radical postmodernism, whose adherents thrive in overwhelming numbers on university campuses, enjoying secure and unassailable academic respectability, and teaching both implicitly and explicitly that all "so-called facts," science included, are subjective social constructions with no true validity. Where is the outcry?
Here's a personal observation. Although it's unfortunately true that most ID activists are motivated by a prior agenda, in my experience (of moderate sample size) most evolution activists are motivated by a prior agenda as well. Such people tend to be quite surprised when I tell them that I'm a Christian and that I have no overall problem with evolution -- and it is very revealing that this is often considered an insufficient response. They are ultimately satisfied only if I renounce religion entirely. Of course, I am not allowed to have an outcry.
Slashdot Mirror
Apologies in advance if I've misunderstood anything you're trying to say. I've got project deadlines coming up this week and my brain is sorta frazzled. Thanks, though, for an interesting discussion.
I also suggested that physical evidence can be used to determine reality. If the reality we know is determined by physical evidence then the only way to grasp the only reality we can grasp is to determine reality based on physical evidence.
First, let me clarify that I am not defending the OP's argument that propositions like "the sun will rise" are a matter of faith. I certainly agree that our reality can be known via physical evidence.
But you seem to make the further claim that our reality can only be known via physical evidence. (This is consistent with your original wording, "if you want to debate whether or not we know anything based on evidence then you have to debate whether we know anything at all," which is what led me to think you were espousing positivism.)
My post was intended to point out that there are numerous propositions that we consider to be true -- i.e., we consider them to correctly describe reality -- yet which are not based on evidence. In fact, the Matrix question is rigorously non-empirical; it is impossible by definition to obtain evidence for or against it. Yet, almost nobody would consider it irrational or unscientific to believe in a real universe. This belief can even coexist rationally with the intellectual admission that it could be wrong.
So is this philosophy? Yes. But is this about reality? Also, yes.
Indeed, science typically presupposes a real universe -- which is clearly a philosophical position, not an empirical one. Which brings us to the second point:
It is entirely possible that our reality is not in fact reality but it is useless for us to attempt to analyze what we cannot analyze. If we don't accept that then there can be any number of explanations including God. This isn't very useful though. That's the problem. Philisophically it's fine to think about these things but scientifically it is not.
Let's make sure I understand. I think you're saying that empirical reality (which you call "our reality") is the only thing that is knowable, so even if "True Reality" is different, hypothesizing about True Reality is meaningless because anyone can claim anything about it, including God or fairies or time cubes.
If that is what you meant, I would point out that you're still making a philosophical claim: that only empirical knowledge is valid knowledge, and everything non-empirical is speculation. Sure, that sounds and feels very reasonable, but it's nevertheless an axiom that is being taken as true without formal justification. And it is still a form of positivism, so it has the same problem of self-refutation: the statement "only empirical knowledge is valid knowledge" is not empirical knowledge, so it is not valid knowledge... just speculation. Even plain ol' rationalism doesn't have this particular drawback. Empirical positivism is simply too limited to be a good model.
(To verify that this isn't an inadvertent strawman, I believe the following is equivalent: the statement "it is useless for us to attempt to analyze what we cannot analyze" belongs in the "cannot analyze" category and so "scientifically it is not [fine].")
So science, which is solely a methodology, is always accompanied by an underlying philosophy -- not an "anything goes" philosophy of abstract word games, but a philosophy that seriously claims to have something to say about True Reality (or lack thereof), and science's relation to it (or lack thereof). Formally, I'm saying that you can't do science without an epistemology, because your epistemology determines what you consider to be knowledge.
Which leads us to the third point:
If you want science, evolution is what you get.
It's interesting that you assume I am
> > Nope. Most theologians correctly pair faith and reason together as inextricably tied.
>
> Uh-huh. So... based on that line of reasoning, we can trust in theology to
> be a reliable source of logic and reason?
He's not saying that faith is the same as reason. He is saying that faith is compatible with reason. His point about "blind faith" being unbiblical is correct: Kierkegaard notwithstanding, the colloquial word "faith" has always been encrusted with many meanings, one of which is "irrational, blind, unquestioning faith." But the faith spoken of in the Bible derives from a Greek word meaning "to be persuaded."
Part of the problem is that you seem to have an incorrect and perhaps vague idea of what faith is. Much of your post, and previous posts, seems to rebel against the idea that faith should replace reason and investigation.
Well, no one in this discussion is saying that.
Yes, engineers should deal in confidence intervals and rigorous measurement and exhaustive testing. Yes, every assumption in every situation should be questioned and questioned again. The "faith" that so bothers you is not what we are talking about. So let us arrive at a clear definition, then.
There is a common idea that "faith" is a repulsive, backwards, outdated concept. After all, a "rational" person should never believe in anything until it's proven, right? But it turns out that rational people believe in plenty of things that are not proven, foremost being Reason itself. After all, there's no formally valid way to logically establish the correctness of logic, or to empirically establish the correctness of empiricism. Anyone who engages in debate or discussion or science holds such axioms as true, without proof.
Another truth that most of us accept is the existence of the universe itself. Does that sound silly? Let me rephrase it: the belief that we aren't living in the Matrix. Again, we take this belief as an axiom, without proof. It is impossible by definition to even conceive of an experiment to detect the Matrix; it is rigorously unknowable. Yet, no one would call you irrational for believing the universe is real. Here then is an example of reasonable faith in the absence of evidence. In other words:
Faith is relying on your axioms.
This is the "inextricable tie" that the GP was speaking of. Reason does depend on faith, because you cannot prove that reason works. This is (loosely) an a priori relationship. Yet, faith does depend on reason, because a good axiom should work well and a bad axiom should work poorly. This is an a posteriori relationship.
As it happens, the common notion of a "rational," "intelligent," "educated" person is of one who accepts the axioms of Reason and the axiom that the universe is real, and so on, but rejects the axiom that God exists. This is an arbitrary cultural distinction, and has nothing to do with being rational, intelligent, or educated.
You may argue that God is a poor axiom. You are welcome to do so, and I may respond with my arguments for its being a good and quite indispensible axiom. In such a discussion, the above formulation of "faith" can be reworded thus:
Faith is the choice between two plausible alternatives.
Wasn't it theologians who maintained that the world was flat, the sun revolved around the Earth, and that the Moon is a perfectly smooth sphere?-- all conclusions based entirely on their reasoning?
We've already established that no one (here) is proposing that faith substitute for investigation. But a historical aside: the geocentric theory that was held by the Church organization in the Western world -- few people today know about the equally large Eastern Church, seeing as they were slaughtered quite thoroughly -- was not based on Biblical theology but upon Ptolemaic cosmology, which was considered to be the state of the
Please offer us some empirical evidence of a deity.
- Please offer us some empirical evidence that we are not living in the Matrix.
- Please offer us some empirical evidence that logical argument is reliable.
- Please offer us some empirical evidence that anyone exists besides yourself.
These are all things that most of us believe in, but cannot be established empirically. All beliefs of any kind are predicated on axioms that are taken as true without proof. In the most general sense, this is called epistemology.
The idea that "all truth must be established empirically" is a form of Logical Positivism, and was very popular for a very short time in the early 20th century, until people realized that it undercuts a large number of things that are pretty well accepted to be True, such as the examples I've listed above.
Interestingly, the scientific establishment latched onto positivism with a vengeance but lacked the philosophical training to recognize its flaws, and so turned it into unquestioned dogma. Elsewhere, positivism died a rapid and thoroughly embarrassing death at its own hands:
- Please offer us some empirical evidence that "all truth must be established empirically."
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Dum de dum.
This is a terrible argument. If you want to be a complete skeptic and actually wonder if the sun will rise the next morning then you cannot know anything, including whether a God exists or not. People do not have faith that the sun will rise, they know it will based on observable evidence, which, by the way, is completely lacking in ID theory. That is why it is called faith, or by your definition, blind faith. I've heard this argument in various forms by every IDer or creationist out there. Scientific theories are not faith-based. They have a lot of evidence to back them up. If you want to debate whether or not we know anything based on evidence then you have to debate whether we know anything at all. That would make you a skepitc, and if you're a skeptic what the hell are you doing believing in a God anyway?
What you've got here is two views on epistemology: philosophical skepticism, the position that knowledge does not exist; and logical positivism, the position that only empirically verifiable claims are meaningful.
Neither of these positions are generally held to be intellectually viable, despite your claim that they are the only two options. In fact, there are dozens of epistemologies, and -- here's the point -- a person's epistemology is by definition an unproven assumption, taken on faith.
What's wrong with positivism? It flourished for a while in the early part of the 20th century, but major problems were discovered quite rapidly, and it was discarded -- though not before much of it was embraced by the scientific establishment as unquestioned dogma.
Simply stated, there are a lot of things that are generally regarded as True, but are rejected by positivism. You cannot empirically verify that the universe exists (or: you cannot demonstrate that we don't live in the Matrix). You cannot empirically verify that logical reasoning is reliable. But the real heart of the problem is this: you cannot empirically verify positivism. Positivism therefore claims that positivism is meaningless.
The proper status of faith is of determining one's axioms. Christian faith takes God as an axiom alongside such things as logic and existence (rationalist axioms, incidentally).
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Dum de dum.
But only as long as core beliefs are upheld. While I am not arguing for or against ID, the author of the study makes a surprising statement of faith in TFA itself:
This is simply how all science, including biology, works; there is no crisis of faith as you claim.
Ideally, but humans are humans and the real world isn't that convenient. While reading Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps, I was fascinated by his observation (demonstrated by a very readable historical account) that scientific theories have a marked tendency to resist revision until the scientists who hold those theories... die off. And he was talking about some great luminaries of science here, from Maxwell to Planck to Einstein and onwards.
In this regard, the GP post is right on the mark.
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Dum de dum.
Walmart sells cheap crap - if your company does not sell cheap crap, you can't sell at walmart.
This is obviously what the submitter meant by commodization, as distinct from commoditization.
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Dum de dum.
Real Life asserted itself too forcefully this week... very sorry for the delay in responding to your thoughtful post.
... exercises free will to leave the neighbor's bananas and wife alone is not "violating" anything, as there is no morality inherent in the biological imperative
... derived from within" is perfectly effective when you are the actor; but in all other cases (such as being on the receiving end of the stick), you have no standing to say that something "wrong" has occur
My problem with your earlier statement is that you equate religious hypocrites with ethical atheists
I was not actually equating those two things. A theist who commits some specific sin obviously has no valid analogy to an atheist who by definition cannot sin. We are in agreement there. The analogy is between the theist who lives a life that is clearly inconsistent with religious principles (for example, by habitual child abuse), and the atheist who lives a life that is clearly inconsistent with naturalistic principles (for example, by behaving as if free will and inalienable rights exist).
In both cases, there is an inconsistency -- and while we agree that inconsistency represents no ethical problem for the atheist, it certainly represents an intellectual problem for the atheist and theist alike.
That was the aim of quoting notable naturalists and their thoughts on this conflict -- particularly the clear lack of resolution in their professional vs. personal lives. This is sometimes called the Modern Schism: oh no, science tells us that our greatest virtues are baseless, what do we do? But science, which is a methodology, says no such thing; it is scientific naturalism, which is a philosophy, that rejects all nonscientific truths.
The fact that the Modern Schism is still with us, despite 150 years of treatment by philosophers and scientists, indicates to me that naturalism is generally not being lived out to its logical conclusions. I brought up rights as just one example of this inconsistency (and did not make my intentions clear enough, which made it seem offtopic).
The religious man who says "God wants us to sacrifice a goat..." and then proceeds to not sacrifice a goat is acting amorally -- sinning. On the other hand, the atheist who
A very interesting point! I had not thought of it from that perspective. However, those are not the only two scenarios. The third one is: the atheist who exercises free will and does rape the neighbor's wife is also not "violating" anything.
Supposing the neighbor is also an atheist, he is forced to accept that the perpetrator may hold a different "pragmatically wholesome organizing principle" (or no principle at all) and leave it at that -- plus whatever laws may apply. But legal recourse is not moral recourse, and legal culpability is not moral culpability. Put another way: you can ask for deterrence or revenge, but you cannot ask for an apology. The very concept of remorse is illogical, outside of regret at being caught. In fact, I think (haven't thought this one all the way through) that the neighbor can't even say to his wife, "You have been wronged;" he can only say "Your preference to not be raped was unfulfilled [through the state's negligence/because the neighbor overpowered me/the stupid watchdog ran off/etcetera]."
The atheists who believe in human rights do so because they have arrived at the conclusion that human rights are a desirable framework, "useful fiction" or not. Or rather, I don't see how our behaviour would change depending on their Truthiness. Either you treat your fellow man with respect because you think he is imbued with deservingness by the Universe, or you treat him with respect out of a conviction that doing so is part of a pragmatically wholesome organizing principle.
Again, my previous post (the grandparent) details why I consider this inconsistent with naturalistic premises. An "irreligious ethic
Or you really believe there is an entity called Truth?
;-)
Do you believe there isn't? Is that true?
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Dum de dum.
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You are making the classic error of saying that there can't be morals/ethics without religion.
;-)
:-)]
Funny, I thought I was explicitly addressing the classic error of saying that there can be morals/ethics without religion.
It is perfectly possible to come up with a set of moral guidelines regarding for example behaviours with your fellow humans without involving any deity whatsoever.
I certainly never said that agreements aren't possible; quite the opposite, I was pointing out that agreements are a rather rickety basis for the moral concepts that we tend to consider important. You speak of guidelines, but (unless I misunderstand) that's putting words in my mouth; I spoke initially of principles, like dignity, freedom, and inalienable human rights. As I address at length in a following post, how sensible is it for something to be inalienable by consensus? Anything agreed upon by humans can be dissolved by humans at any time.
But let's move from principles down to specific ethics:
Kant and Hume were amongst the first to propose atheist ethics. They are mostly based on the idea that one should help one's fellow man, because this is in everyone's best interest, in other words do unto others what you would like others done unto you.
Come now. Even though it's been a good decade since I've seriously studied Hume and Kant... I know at least that Kant was a deontologist! The very concept of deontology is strongly identified with Kant, given his landmark contributions to the concept.
Kant's ethics are absolute and universal; he does not endorse any normative concept of consensus or agreement, but uses consensus only to illustrate his central idea -- that true, absolute, universal morality can be identified using Reason alone, and so all correct reasoning should arrive at the same conclusions. But Kant's position -- simplifying tremendously here! -- that morality is simultaneously real yet immaterial requires some basis that allows Reason to identify the rightness or wrongness of an ethic. "[I]n other words, [we] must postulate the existence of God... We proceed to exhibit this connection in a convincing manner." (Critique of Practical Reason, Abbott translation, section V, "The Existence of God as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason")
Now, Kant is certainly not a Christian, but he is unarguably a theist, in that God is the guarantor and trustee of morality. Note that Kant takes moral freedom as a given (I think he believes it is incorrigible) and argues that this is nonsense without the existence of God.
Now, perhaps your misapprehension of Kant stems from his reputation as a fierce defender of naturalism. He certainly was! In fact, he wrote mostly on science; he took little interest in philosophy until this bloke named Hume began teaching a radical skepticism that seemed to undermine even Newtonian physics. But Kant was also a fierce defender of free will (which he calls freedom or autonomy) -- and he admitted that naturalism and freedom are contradictory concepts that he was never able to reconcile (an "antimony"). He settles instead for one of his most famous conclusions: that to live by any rational ethic, we must behave as if we have free will, whether it exists or not.
Oh, hey, this sounds a lot like the guys I quoted in my original post, eh?
[Section break
Now, as for Hume, it is entirely unsurprising to me that -- at the end of his writings -- he encountered the very same obstacle. The radical skeptic, Hume spends a lot of time establishing that reason is capable only of understanding facts, and no valid reasoning can deduce what is from what should be. Yet he finds that this obstructs any concept of morality. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, he allo
And of course, 100 P4 chips and the associated 20,000 watt PSU isn't nearly as cheap as a resistive heating element.
;-)
Unless the power company supplies it for me, and gives me free resistive heating in exchange for running their computations. Oh, they're gonna need powerline broadband to communicate with, so they'd better give that to me too.
Now that's a pipe dream.
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Dum de dum.
The support is to reason from naturalistic premises, because their conclusions seem pretty inevitable. This was the purpose of quoting the authors I quoted, yes? Simply read their books, or any work on evolutionary psychology.
I have yet to encounter a convincing naturalistic justification for these concepts, and this is not for lack of trying (whether you believe me or not). Indeed, if you can provide such a basis, it would be extremely educational for me. Only one plausible and correct counterexample is required to end this argument.
But at the risk of simplifying dangerously, I will illustrate one of the basic problems: if humans are merely slightly advanced animals (or, as secular humanists often put it, "Man is the measure of all things," originally of Protagoras) then everything we value is invented by humans. Granted by humans. And can be taken away by humans.
Under these premises, I frankly do not see a way to tell a person, even my own children, "You possess value and rights." I can only say, "The collection of people I belong to agree to behave as if you possess value and rights." The often-unstated corollary: "There is nothing, and no reason, preventing a more powerful collection of people from overriding this behavior."
You snipped out the clearest example: most people, despite professing atheism and even professing moral relativism, nevertheless behave as if they believe in universal, intrinsic, inalienable human rights. Perhaps, if one is amenable to the intellectual fashions of the day, they might sagely agree that these are merely useful fictions. But in daily life, we continue to live as if they were much greater than fiction. A quite close analogy might be made of the question of the universe's existence. Intellectually, one must acknowledge that the universe may be an illusion; but how many of us actually believe we live in the Matrix?
Let us make this more concrete. Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, states that "[human rights] are grounded not in religion, or any other transcendental state or supernatural force, but in themselves. They stand alone. Humans deserve life, liberty, and happiness, not because God said so but because we are human. Period. These rights and values exist because we say they exist, and that is good enough. They are inalienable because we say they are, and that suffices." (The Science of Good and Evil, p156, emphasis mine).
To my understanding, this is a logical contradiction. How can something be inalienable by agreement? He is making a universal claim for humanity ("humans deserve...") based on the belief system of a subset of humanity ("we say so"). In fact, even if all of humanity did agree, it doesn't change the fact that some have disgreed in the past and others may do so in the future. Yet, we do not say, "Humans today deserve life, liberty, and happiness." Intellectually, we might concede that this the correct formulation, but in practice we don't live as if we believe this. No, indeed, our instinct is often to criticize those who disagree, past, present, or future.
I would actually be interested and appreciative to hear a solution to this.
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The symmetrical observation may equally be made of most atheists.
The claim that there is no God has just as many consequences as the claim that there is. I know of few atheists who have the courage to live up to these fully.
Do you behave as if humans have freedom, dignity, equality? These concepts are impossible to justify under a naturalistic framework. Do you behave as if humans have value, and that it's somehow objectionable to slaughter human carriers of H5N1 along with the birds they contracted it from? What is the basis for the term "human rights violation" outside of a concept of rights that are univeral, intrinsic, and inalienable?
This is not academic quibbling. Here are some concrete examples of people struggling through the dilemma.
Rodney Brooks of MIT writes that a person is a robot, "a big bag of skin full of biomolecules." It's not easy to think this way, he says, but "when I look at my children, I can, when I force myself,
Robert Wright, an evolutionary psychologist, propounds in The Moral Animal that, "We believe the things-- about morality, about personal worth, even objective truth-- that lead to behaviors that will get our genes into the next generation... Free will is an illusion... [an] outmoded worldview." And then he takes a lovely, grand leap of faith and declares that by our own choice (hmmm), we can "correct the moral biases built into us by natural selection" and espouse the ideal of "brotherly love." My, my. What standard is he appealing to, that he can call one moral system (the evolved one) inferior to another?
Richard Dawkins proceeds along a similar path in The Selfish Gene, deftly sketching out a picture of biological determinism. But even the celebrated avatar of naturalism fails to live by his ideology, instead affirming that "[w]e, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." In an op-ed article on the Clinton affair, he condemns all the "sanctimonious" criticism of a guy who's simply obeying his genes. Yet he feels compelled to mention that "I take the un-Darwinian personal decision [to be] deliberately monogamous." Why compromise his position by bringing that up at all?
All of the ideals mentioned above do not exist, if you are a fully rational atheist. They are theistic values, and have no place or justification in a secular worldview. Francis Crick provides an excellent illustration, proposing that there is no reason to limit abortion to the unborn: "No newborn infant should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding its genetic endowment and that if it fails these tests it forfeits the right to live." (American Medical Association, Prism, May 1973). I find his position maximally repugnant, but I respect that he is at least consistent.
Theists are often charged with needing "convenient fictions" as a crutch to get by. The charge is at least as valid for atheists.
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something with a flying bike
Prop-Cycle! Loved that game, and you could definitely work up a sweat playing it. The flywheel had hefty resistance to it, nicely matched to the gameplay. But yes, $1 a play was a bit rich when I was that age; like other racing games, beginners die more (and so pay more) than experts.
Come to think of it, most places charge $1/play for DDR too.
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a heat pump is about 2.5 times more efficient for heating your house than just running electricity through resistive coils (as with a space heater, for example).
...or with a baseboard heating system, as I've got. Yes, this is essentially a space heater. Maybe it's just my locale (New England), but every house I've seen with electric heat uses these, one per room.
However, I will grant your point that I am an idiot. =) I'd never heard of household heat pumps before, but in retrospect the concept should've been obvious. I am enlightened... and now I want one.
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after a powerbill I decided to add a switch that would cut the power to my projector, VCR, DVD, Radio etc..
I actually bought one of those power outlet meters to try to reduce my home energy usage.
But after I tested two or three appliances, I realized that this whole endeavor is completely nonsense except in summertime. If my computer, power amp, water heater, or even incandescent lights, are running during the winter... every watt of power they generate will reduce my heating bill by almost exactly that watt.
Now yes, I do have electric heating. The tradeoff may differ for those who don't. But the fact remains that powering devices in the home is much less wasteful than it seems, for those who live in colder climates. Since this study was done in Britain, I wonder if they controlled for this factor.
In the summer, of course, I try to keep things off as much as possible. But this is primarily because it's too hot, and only secondarily to save power.
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the reason I consider religious beliefs to be irrational is because they are not founded on logic and reasoning, they are presupposed to be true based on religious faith. ... Well, why do you believe in God? Because the Bible says I should. Why do you adhere to the Bible? Because it was written by God.
:-) Thales the Milesian is often cited as a key figure, notable especially for studying and proposing natural causes for natural events. However, it's unclear how rigorous his methods were, and crediting him (as some do) with establishing the scientific method is plausible but may also be an overstatement.
Again, you are simply asserting that the non-God axiom is somehow superior to the God axiom. Perhaps I misunderstand, but precisely what steps of logic and reasoning would constitute a foundation for any axiom? The acceptance or rejection of any axiom is ultimately a pre-rational belief. There are plenty of people in this world who do not hold logic as an axiom at all. I find that evidence suggests they are wrong. I also find that evidence suggests the God axiom is at least as plausible as the non-God axiom. Like the Axiom of Choice, the plausibility is not one-sided but symmetric: acceptance or rejection of the axiom both have desirable and undesirable ramifications, making Occam useless.
In other words, I do not use the Bible to justify itself circularly. You seem very keen on this idea, but blind faith is actually improper in Christianity. The claims made by the Bible are, to my satisfaction, sufficiently consistent with my observations of the human condition, my research, and yes, my personal experience. (Maybe this what you meant by logic and reason?) This is not proof of an axiom but it is evidence enough to evaluate some pros and cons and come to a decision. The decision between two plausible alternatives is one way to understand proper faith -- not just in God but in all aspects of one's worldview. After all, it is strictly plausible that we do indeed live in the Matrix, but how many of us really believe that?
Further details along these lines probably don't belong in this topic, but I can open a journal entry if there is interest in continuing the thread.
nothing in Christian religious doctrines was used to provide the basis for the scientific method. The scientific method actually originates from Greece.
The roots of almost everything Western go back to Greece.
Thales notwithstanding, the greatest influence on Western thought came from Plato and Aristotle. Plato divided the world into Matter and Forms, raw material ordered by rational ideas. Sounds quite scientific! But the funny thing is, Platonism rejects that avenue, teaching instead that Forms are superior to and actually more real than the visible world of Matter; this is the point of his famous shadow-puppet allegory. Matter is inferior, chaotic, and never completely obeys Form.
As a result, intellectual inquiry into Form was an exalted pursuit (familiar today as mathematical platonism), while experimental inquiry into Matter was considered unreliable and even ignoble. This dualism was absorbed fully by Augustine, and therefore went unchallenged for ten centuries. For this reason, the medieval era saw little advance in the physical sciences, as monasteries flourished in drawing the best minds to a pseudo-Platonic life of abstract Formal rumination, rejecting Material concerns.
When Aristotle resurfaced in the 13th century, it almost brought about the Renaissance, had it not been for that pesky Black Death incident. Now, Aristotle certainly advocated natural inquiry; however, his method wasn't quite scientific either. He posited Four Causes, thr
Hint: any time you find yourself inferring or rephrasing someone else's argument, you're most likely just creating a strawman
:-)
Interesting! That's a good rule of thumb, I'll keep it in mind. Although, in this case I wasn't rephrasing the argument, but an ambiguously-stated parenthesis. It was really more of a lame attempt to find a segue.
it's disingenuous to suggest that because nothing can be absolutely proven, all things are at equal levels of non-proof
This wasn't my intention, though I apologize if my tendency to oversimplify on Slashdot made it unclear. I am certainly not arguing for Humean skepticism!
Formally restated, a rationalist generally accepts only propositions that are either (1) axiomatic to reasoning or knowledge, (2) incorrigible, or (3) established to one's satisfaction by evidence in accordance with (1) and (2).
Being pedantic, as you say, means that we have to consider (1), (3), and perhaps (2) to be suspect. But pragmatically, we do not. We are, in a nutshell, talking about beliefs -- they might be untrue assumptions, but how many of us really think so?
So if I believe (3) to be true, then it easily establishes the rising of the Sun, and disqualifies the non-rising of the Sun. Even Hume did not walk around all day questioning the existence of everything.
However, my point was that there are propositions that most of us also accept as true, but are not rationally justified by the model above. And Godel showed us that some of these propositions will in fact be true. The existence of a real universe is the obvious example; we should consider that it might be an illusion, but how many of us really think so?
The existence of God is arguably another example. Thus, I did intend to suggest that the specific axioms of God and non-God are indeed at equal, or at least comparable, levels of non-proof.
So no, I do not expect a rational person to refute gods because they cannot be absolutely proven to be true. I expect a rational person to refute gods because their existence would be contrary to a larger and more consistent set of evidence about the cosmos.
This approach is entirely reasonable, if indeed you have made a considered decision that the evidence for God is similar to the evidence for werewolves. My complaint is firmly with those who think the assumption of non-God is automatically rational, mature, and intelligent while the assumption of God is somehow automatically irrational, ignorant, and unintelligent.
I will quibble, though, that the axiom of God is hardly contrary to any physical evidence. (Maybe you meant "unsupported?") At one extreme, the Deist God can't contradict anything since it never touches the physical universe (so then we cue Occam's Razor =). But the Christian model includes both the axioms of rationality, applied wherever appropriate, as well as the axiom of an active God, who might physically intervene every so often, but whose real interest is almost totally on the human condition; more specifically, on fixing individual souls; more specifically, on yours and mine.
Anyway, thus I reiterate (obTopic) that the axiom of God is absolutely not supported by vacuous statements about "science can't explain X, so there!" (And for TFA to trot this out is a strawman.) But I could argue that by accurately encompassing both science and humanity, the Christian model presents an even "larger and more consistent set of evidence." That is definitely a topic for another time, however.
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This is getting pretty offtopic. Maybe I should refrain? Nahh. ;-)
...what sounds like a utilitarian model of justice.
;-)
Ha! but in fact, science does tell us if war is just or not.. In fact, most every war waged this century had more to do with the scientific method than religion. Logical constructs of use-cases.
This appears quite circular to me. You're talking about using science to determine the truth or falsity of various measures of justice, but the original assertion is that science cannot provide a definition of justice.
Rather, you simply assume here...
Quantitatively weighing the human cost against the abstract political gain.
Any given "moral" issue can be socialogically deconstructed. And just like inconsistencies between quantum and reletevism, current gaps in our understanding of social moral delemmas are only a PHD thesis away.
Morality is socially deconstructible only if you believe it is. That's a philosophical assumption, a starting position that is no more, or less, rational than the assumption that morality is objective.
And frankly, I have a pretty low view of our "current... understanding of social moral [di]lemmas." The radical subjectivism characteristic of postmodern social sciences is beyond ridiculous -- and would be particularly irksome to the scientifically-minded Slashdot crowd if they ever realize that the "best" contemporary scholarship in the social sciences all begins with the assumption that truth does not exist -- not even scientific truth.
The idea that social and moral concepts will fall to the inquiry of Reason is an old one -- rooted in (of course) the Enlightenment, buoyed by the triumph of Newtonian physics. But as we know, science went on to achieve an unbroken record of success, while the sociological side is fairly a train wreck. All attempts to create Utopia have failed, despite the appearance of rigor and plausibility in their underlying theses. Marxism is the poster child, of course; but the same impulse led to that other regime that Godwin prohibits me from mentioning outright.
The essential problems of the human condition are moral ones, chronicled in literature for thousands of years, unchanged in the face of scientific advancement. Lately, from Nietzsche to Skinner to Dawkins, the fashionable response has been to blandly assert that these things are just illusions and social constructions -- a non-answer that Kant famously decried as being pretty unhelpful, even if true.
So, given that there isn't much historical reason to believe that social Progress has anything to do with scientific Progress, I can only assume that you look to the impending solution to all our moral problems as an article of faith? (Kidding, kidding. Mostly.)
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But hasn't the purpose of religion always been to fill in the gaps in human understanding
;-) Religion serves a great many purposes, of which explaining the natural world is sometimes a small part. In Christianity, specifically, it is almost no part. On the other hand, Christianity spends a lot of time talking about the purpose of life, about which science has little to say.
Nope. That's a myth.
(albeit with unfounded/illogical assumptions)?
I'll infer that you consider the existence of God to be the primary illogical or unfounded assumption. After all, a "rational" person should never believe in anything until it is proven, right? Except rational people believe in plenty of things that are not proven, foremost being Reason itself. Another example would be the existence of the universe. Oh, does that sound silly? Let me rephrase it, then: the belief that we are not living in the Matrix. These beliefs cannot be proven. They are axioms. You can accept or reject an axiom, but not through pure reasoning.
God is an axiom.
Our notion of a "rational," "intelligent," "educated" person is of one who accepts the axioms of Reason, the axiom that the universe exists, but not the axiom that God exists. This is an arbitrary cultural distinction, and has nothing to do with being rational, intelligent, or educated.
When you can't explain something with reason (backed by empirical observations when appropriate), then you turn to theological explanations which rely on mythos rather than logos.
I wonder who you're referring to. Certainly not most of the Christians I know (although being from the Northeast I don't personally know too many raving fundamentalists). Did you know, by the way, that (contrary to the delightfully articulate but sometimes ill-informed Thomas Paine) Christianity is directly responsible for the scientific method? Prior to the writings of Aquinas, scientific thought was governed primarily by Platonic and Aristotelian worldviews, which specifically deny the reliability of physical experimentation.
I thought it quite interesting that the researcher quoted in TFA feels the significance of his research is to show that "we can use science to understand the world around us." Christians originated modern science, and it's silly to see both sides of this idiotic non-debate forgetting that fact.
But with the advent of science and philosophy, religion has become an antiquated relic of the past.
Since we have already established that religion is perfectly agreeable with science, we will address your other assertion: what philosophies, exactly, have effectively displaced religion? Again, as above, philosophy stems from prior assumptions -- one of which is, again, the existence of God. Perhaps you were not aware that there are theistic and nontheistic philosophies? In recent years, Alvin Plantinga has done much work in establishing theism in the forefront of philosophical scholarship. To pin your hopes on philosophy is merely to work off of beliefs you have already assumed.
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Look up history, tell me when rights stopped any massacres.
Yes, rights never stopped anything. But rights are what allow us to say that the massacre was wrong. Without a concept of human rights, there is no logical justification for opposing or even criticizing someone else's massacre. The most we can say is, "I don't like it, but that's just my opinion."
I am a christian and think "rights" are nice ideals but their imaginary.
Then you should remember that God himself establishes our rights. If you believe it is sin to murder, then by definition all humans have a right not to be murdered. In Christianity, human rights are absolutely factually real.
In contrast, it's non-theistic philosophies that suffer from the problem of having imaginary rights. Anything granted by human authority can be taken away by human authority.
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and in fact it's usually considered a sign of weakness in one's faith to actually pursue actual truth
;-)
Interesting. Since you don't mention what faith you're referring to, I won't assume you're talking about Christianity, since this is clearly not proper Christian behavior. =) If I found any of my students doing this, they'd get an earful.
Of course some believers are distinctly anti-intellectual. I've met plenty -- easily too many. Yet, it would certainly be enlightening to see some hard numbers for your claim of "usually." Seriously, if you have such data, I would be appreciative; I'd have use for it.
because that challenges the foundation of the religion in question. When an entire way of life is built up around fiction, the only way to preserve it is to make questioning the story the one thing that's not allowed.
Again, quite interesting -- since I was taught, and now teach, that questioning is not only welcome but obligatory. Perhaps this has something to do with our actually having confidence that Christianity is nonfiction, as opposed to hoping that's the case without really finding out. (Again, yes, there are a good number of Christians who do the latter. Big deal, it just means they're not very bright. I've met some pretty dim atheists, too.
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Ahh, another nice flame. Mod or post? Guess I'll post.
...a religious statement. ;-)
Lots of people repeat your line, that there's really no conflict between good science and good religion. But in science we always look for the simplest possible explanation of what we see, and since there's no evidence for 'God', science wouldn't even consider 'His' existence.
You're making two basic errors of reasoning. First, you assume the purpose of having a God around is to explain the world; then you argue that we have much better explanations for things these days, so God is out of a job. Bit circular there. In reality, the central message of the Bible is that God's main interest is to fix things; more specifically, individual souls; more specifically, mine and yours.
Second, you express the belief that nothing is true unless it is established by evidence and reason. Ah, the rallying call of the Enlightenment! Finally, we can get God out of the picture! The whole of Truth in its infinitude can be known to us if we just study it hard enough! (Cue: Godel. =)
Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up. Every one of us, except maybe solipsists, believes axiomatically in a bunch of stuff that cannot be established by science. Logic is a common one. The existence of the universe would be another. (Does that sound silly? Let me rephrase it in contemporary terms: do you believe we're not in the Matrix?)
But most striking is this: the belief that "nothing is true unless established by science" is itself a purely philosophical axiom that cannot be established by science. That puts it on the same epistemological footing as belief in God.
Which, incidentally, makes this:
Fuck you religious types.
In contrast, a proper Christian worldview holds both God and science as axioms -- ergo, the "line" that good theology and good science are in agreement. So, it should not surprise you that I have no overall objection to biological evolution, and furthermore that I hold this view without committing the fallacy of placing science above Scripture.
It's so absurd, it's not even worth thinking about.
That's too bad. I won't comment on this directly. A word of caution, however: you will find that this non-argument can and will be used to defend a lot of things that you don't agree with.
And when you spend my taxes on xmas trees you're basically stealing.
And my tax dollars are being spent teaching secular humanist ethics in elementary schools. Ranting about it hasn't been very useful, however. I've found that I prefer to just educate. It's more enjoyable, too.
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Why should there be an outcry?
... On the other hand I've never even heard of radical postmodernism before, so it does not appear to be a particularly signifigant threat to anything.
There shouldn't be, of course. That was the irony, right? =)
Abiogenesis is quite admittedly a weakly developed and weakly supported field. That is hardly surprising considering that it attempts to address a singular microscopic event hidden in the deep depths of time, and which has left no direct trace.
Again, this is the interesting bit. It's perfectly acceptable and accurate for you to say this. But imagine if Pat Robertson (bleh) were to get on national TV and make the same statement. The flaming arrows would be flying within the hour.
When a debate turns into kneejerking, it's time to make fun of the debaters.
I wouldn't call ID "the end of science",
The "end of science" bit was a reference to that common refrain here on Slashdot, as well as in a few other places (New Scientist editorials, for instance). I agree it is not the general position.
As for postmodernism, the reason you haven't heard of it is that humanities teachers don't go into lecture and say, "Okay class, today we're going to cover postmodernism" any more than scientists go into lecture and say, "Okay class, today we're going to cover philosophical materialism." It's just a technical label; my description was the main idea: that "rationality [is] neither as sure nor as clear as rationalists supposed, and that knowledge was inherently linked to time, place, social position and other factors from which an individual constructs their view of knowledge."
Half of what you learn in a class is the content; the other half is the teacher's assumptions (assuming you learn anything at all =). This is why a huge percentage of college students and graduates these days will say extremely illogical things like, "If you believe it's true, then it's true for you." If you've heard that, then you've heard postmodernism. In its more radical form, you get people making mind-blowing statements about science being nothing more than a tool of male oppression.
And here is where we get to the real crux of the matter. We are all talking about things that are fundamentally pre-rational. There are (simplifying greatly) three epistemologies at loggerheads here:
1. The worldview that includes these axioms: God, science. [theism]
2. The worldview that includes these axioms: science. [rationalism]
3. The worldview that includes these axioms: nothing. [postmodernism]
(To be more precise, the word "science" here should be replaced with "logic" or "reason.")
Epistemology cannot be chosen rationally because it defines what you consider to be rational; an adherent to any of the above views does so purely on faith. I view postmodernism to be a vastly greater threat to science because it rejects that you can even argue logically. I have heard highly educated people say, "Yes, I agree that you've proved your position. But my [contradictory] position is still true for me."
Witness, then, the appalling rise of alternative medicine, such as homeopathy and energy healing. Of psychic celebrities, like John Edward. Of the dominance of constructivist education in America. You may think this is just good ol' run-of-the-mill superstition, but it's not. Defenders of homeopathy are often highly educated and yet have full confidence in statements like, "It has been established beyond doubt and accepted by many researchers, that the placebo-controlled randomised trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy." Nursing schools teach "healing touch" alongside basic
This certainly underlines the double standards of the ID right. They want religious criticism of evolution put in science classes, and are using the ID trojan horse to do so, while trying to silence those who point this out in those self same classes.
Disclaimer: I am not a proponent of ID, and do not support its teaching in schools.
But it's rare that anyone in a rancorous debate won't have double standards. Narrowing the field to abiogenesis for a moment -- when respected nonreligious scientists espouse speculative, largely unfalsifiable hypotheses of origins that have no evidentiary basis other than (hmm) the lack of evidence for abiogenesis, they are welcome to speak publicly, and write for journals and magazines. Where is the outcry?
And you certainly can't wave your arms and yell "ID is the end of science in America!" when by far the greatest threat to science today is radical postmodernism, whose adherents thrive in overwhelming numbers on university campuses, enjoying secure and unassailable academic respectability, and teaching both implicitly and explicitly that all "so-called facts," science included, are subjective social constructions with no true validity. Where is the outcry?
Here's a personal observation. Although it's unfortunately true that most ID activists are motivated by a prior agenda, in my experience (of moderate sample size) most evolution activists are motivated by a prior agenda as well. Such people tend to be quite surprised when I tell them that I'm a Christian and that I have no overall problem with evolution -- and it is very revealing that this is often considered an insufficient response. They are ultimately satisfied only if I renounce religion entirely. Of course, I am not allowed to have an outcry.
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