Puff Redux
Onegoodmove reader bp thinks you'll find Dinesh Dsouza's article What atheists Kant refute of interest. It's another, reason can't answer everything diatribe, and another argument from ignorance. Since there are some things that are unknowable in principle we can believe whatever the fuck we want about them. In any event his argument doesn't get you to a personal God, at most you could use it to support a deist's view of God. I don't think that's what Dsouza intends. The 'true believers' want it both ways. If they find a bit of evidence they believe supports their view they are ready to use it, but are unwilling to consider contrary evidence. "Well, isn't that convenient," says the 'Church Lady'. Perhaps Douglas Adams put this insipid argument to rest best in his "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Puff
The Monitor article follows.Religion has faced formidable foes in its history. But atheism hasn't generally been one of them – until today. A recent string of bestselling books has put believers of all stripes on the defensive. Religion, say authors such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, is an unreasonable form of blind faith, often leading to fanaticism and violence. Reason and science, they contend, are the only proper foundations for forming opinions and understanding the universe. Those who believe in God, they insist, are falling for silly superstitions.
This atheist attack is based on a fallacy – the Fallacy of the Enlightenment. It was pointed out by the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant erected a sturdy intellectual bulwark against atheism that hasn't been breached since. His defense doesn't draw on sacred texts or any other sources of authority to which people of faith might naturally and rightfully turn when confronted with atheist arguments. Instead, it relies on the only framework that today's atheist proselytizers say is valid: reason. The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know – reality itself. This view says we can find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. It holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality.
In his 1781 "Critique of Pure Reason," Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. Kant showed that human knowledge is constrained not merely by the unlimited magnitude of reality but also by a limited sensory apparatus of perception.
Consider a tape recorder. It captures only one mode of reality, namely sound. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond its reach. The same, Kant would argue, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend empirical reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that this five-mode instrument is sufficient? What makes us think that there is no reality that lies beyond sensory perception?
Moreover, the reality we apprehend is not reality in itself. It is merely our experience or "take" on it. Kant's startling claim is that we have no basis for assuming that a material perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. I can tell if my daughter's drawing of her teacher looks like the teacher by placing the portrait alongside the person. With my eyes, I compare the copy with the original. Kant points out, however, that comparing our experience of reality to reality itself is impossible. We have representations only, never the originals. So we have no basis for presuming that the two are even comparable. When we equate experience and reality, we are making an unjustified leap.
It is essential to recognize that Kant isn't diminishing the importance of experience. It is entirely rational for us to use science and reason to discover the operating principles of the world of experience. This world, however, is not the only one there is. Kant contended that while science and reason apply to the world of sensory phenomena, of things as they are experienced by us, science and reason cannot penetrate what Kant termed the noumena – things as they are in themselves.
Some critics have understood Kant to be denying the existence of external reality or of arguing that all of reality is "in the mind." Kant emphatically rejects this. He insists that the noumenon obviously exists because it is what gives rise to phenomena. In other words, our experience is an experience of something. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see Kant as positing two kinds of reality: the material reality that we experience and reality itself. To many, the implication of Kant's argument is that reality as a whole is, in principle, inaccessible to human perception and human reason.
So powerful is Kant's argument here that his critics have been able to answer him only with derision, as though his arguments are self-evidently fallacious. When I challenged Daniel Dennett to debunk Kant's argument, he responded on his website by saying several people had already refuted Kant. But he didn't provide any refutations and he didn't name any names. Basically, Mr. Dennett was relying on the ignorance of the audience. In fact, there are no such refutations.
Although Kant's argument seems counterintuitive – in the way that some of the greatest ideas from Copernicus to Einstein are counterintuitive — no one who understands the central doctrines of the world's leading religions should have any difficulty grasping his main point. Kant's philosophical vision is largely congruent with the teachings of many faiths that the empirical world is not the only world. Ours is a world of appearances only, in which we see things in a limited and distorted way – "through a glass, darkly," as the apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians. The spiritual reality constitutes the only permanent reality there is. Christianity teaches that while reason can point to the existence of this higher domain, it cannot on its own fully comprehend that domain.
Thus, when Christopher Hitchens and other atheists routinely dismiss religious claims on the grounds that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence," they are making what philosophers like to call a category mistake. We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason.
When atheists summarily dismiss such common ideas as the immortality of the soul or the afterlife on the grounds that they have never found any empirical proofs for either, they are asking for experiential evidence in a domain that is entirely beyond the reach of the senses. In this domain, Kant argues, the absence of such evidence cannot be used as the evidence for absence.
Notice that Kant's argument is entirely secular: It does not employ any religious vocabulary, nor does it rely on any kind of faith. But in showing the limits of reason, Kant's philosophy "opens the door to faith," as the philosopher himself noted.
Kant exposes the ignorant boast of atheists that atheism operates on a higher intellectual plane than theism. He shows that reason must know its limits in order to be truly reasonable. Atheism foolishly presumes that reason is in principle capable of figuring out all that there is, while theism at least knows that there is a reality greater than, and beyond, that which our senses and our minds can ever apprehend.
Comments
If I tell you that there's a cat in the room next door, it would not be entirely unreasonable for you to believe so. Cats are known to exist, and they are common enough.
If I told you that there was a tiger in the room next door, you'd be sensible to doubt it. Tigers are expensive, and dangerous, and very rare, compared to cats.
If I told you there was a velociraptor in the room next door, I think everyone would expect you to say that I was a raving madman. Those things have been extinct for millions of years. (Although some species have been thought extinct, only to have been re-discovered.)
Now, if I were to tell you that there was a unicorn in the room next door -- ridden by a translucent leprechaun who laughs a lot, and every time he laughs, the unicorn shits statues of the Virgin Mary, and that if you buy these statues from me, you'll go to heaven fer sure (oh, and no, you can't go into the room next door and check up on the unicorn, sorry) -- well, I think it would be pretty doggon unreasonable for you to believe it.
Or as Wesley Snipes put it -- a little briefer, and a lot more eloquently, "Motherfucker, have you lost your goddamn mind?!"
How about this:
If I say to you, I love The Beatles, there is absolutely no way to prove that I actually love The Beatles, whereas with the cat example there is a way - you could open the door. But there is no way to absolutely prove that I love The Beatles. There is no door into my psyche, certainly not lie detectors, which are falable. Every piece of evidence would be, in lawyerly terms, circumstantial.
The point is you cannot prove the existence of any given desire, for anything, and yet it is desire that moves everyone from one place to the next. Desire is everything. Desire is choice and choice is life, because without choice, nothing at all happens. Reason is very useful for a lot of things, but it is not useful, fortunately, at unwinding the only mystery anyone really wants left intact - namely the unwritten course of their own sovereign lives.
Now here's a challenge: in responding to this, see if you can leave out the words, "Fuck," "Moron," or, for that matter, any and all derision. You know, just for civility's sake.
Bill
for the record, i dont agree with kant or dsouza.
i think there is enough already in the material world we can't see or undersand (like all that dark matter)
bp
No, no, no -- you can't check up on the unicorn, or the dinosaur, or the tiger or the cat. That's the very nature of that room -- it's sound proof, vibration proof, etc. If a black hole existed in that room, you wouldn't know about it. If it was filled with crazy, plutonium-shitting unicorns running amok, you'd have no clue -- unless I told you about it, of course.
The bottom line is very simple here: whether you love, or do not love the Beatles cannot be proven. This is not the claim that religion initially makes. Religion claims that there is something substantial -- something real; that there are miracles, that there are physical manifestations that proves that their religion is true.
Occasionally, someone will find a key to the room next door, and go have a look, and find no cats, tigers or unicorns -- so of course, at that point, the religious WILL make the argument that the cats were metaphysical or metaphorical. And that you can't prove or disprove that someone loves the Beatles. See?
Sure, dude. No problem -- but you'd have to meet me halfway though. I mean, that's the reasonable thing. I'll respond to your post in that manner, if you'll give me a post with lots and lots of "fuck," "moron" and oodles of derision.
Because as upset as I sometimes get with hypocrites, I can never seem to muster anything approaching the profound, bottomless, odious hatred of the holier-than-thou crowd... Say something derisive, won't you please?
Herr Dsouza must have read the Critique of Pure Reason in very small excerpts, because not a single of his assumptions shows any trace of a basic grasp of Kant.
To claim that Kant would accept an underlying, hidden, second reality of things anywhere in the first Critique simply demonstrates that one has given up reading after the Transcendental Analytic or never understood a word of the Transcendental Dialectic. Kant shows in the Antinomies (and in the three refutations of every argument for the existence of God) that those absurd assumptions lead to unacceptable conclusions - modus tollens.
Dinesh Dsouza's Kant exegesis is so wrong it's offensive.
Dzwonka,
Very nice, and you didn't use the word purple a single time.
I find the Dsouza argument ridiculous. Kant is a profound and penetrating thinker. But I would say the feature of Kant's program most rejected by the majority of contemporary Kantians is precisely Kant's distinction between noumenon and phenomenon.
Moreover the status of that distinction within Kant's work is a deeply ambiguous and hotly contested issue. Most commentators are agreed on this: What it cannot mean is what Dsouza says it does. Namely, that "noumena" 'give rise to'-- that is, cause-- phenomena. That is self-evidently circular, and Kant knew that. For thinking that thought requires conceiving of noumenal objects in terms of precisely those catagories of experience, such as cause and substance, that cannot by definition apply to noumena. (Granted, Kant does try to make the idea of a 'supersensible' cause in order to explain how the will can be freely determined in a natural world that operates entirely according to causal laws; but I doubt many will be tempted today by the idea of a 'supersensible' cause).
As for 'refutation,' I think this is usually not a useful concept in the history of philosophy. Other than obvious self-contradiction, which one will be hard pressed to find among great thinkers, what would count as a refutation is not clear at all--as it surely is at least much more clear in the empirical sciences. Moreover, many thinkers after Kant--including post-Kantian German idealist such as Hegel, and Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Husserel, Russell, Moore, Heidegger, and so on--directly engaged with some of Kant's arguments about the nature of 'reality'. Who knows whom Dennett had in mind when he said Kant was "refuted", but it utterly naive of Dsouza to suggest that Kant has "never been refuted": centuries of serious thought, both critical and appreciative, have gone into grappling with Kant's ideas and their implications.
You are a good man, Norm.
Exactly, that is what I was talking about when I said they were unknowable in principle.
I think, Bill, that I could prove you love the Beatles using functional MRI and comparing your brain activity while listening to the Beatles to that which occurs when you see your mother, wife, children, or eating your favorite food, or having sex. Perhaps we could use the Osmonds as a control. After all, love is a biochemical response that occurs in the brain.
Ok, this is probably above my IQ level, but it seems to me Dsouza is defining "reality" differently from the way rational people would define it.
He writes: "What makes us think that there is no reality that lies beyond sensory perception?"
Isn't reality defined by what we sensorially perceive through our minds? If there is a reality that lies beyond sensory perception, then we can't ever sense it, so doesn't it become a moot point? And when I say "we" I include religious people too. If God lies beyond sensory perception, then how exactly are religious people able to perceive this God? And if God is inperceptible through our senses, then how do they know that what they call God is actually God?
This is a little bit like the teapot example, isn't it? Religious people want us to believe there's some God we should worship but they can't show or prove to us he exists and they can't even agree on what He wants from us. So why do we even bother giving these people the time of day?
When atheists summarily dismiss such common ideas as the immortality of the soul or the afterlife on the grounds that they have never found any empirical proofs for either, they are asking for experiential evidence in a domain that is entirely beyond the reach of the senses. In this domain, Kant argues, the absence of such evidence cannot be used as the evidence for absence.
OMG! Dinesh is going to invade Iraq!
Isn't the basis this whole argument basically a rehash of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem basically saying that no system is both complete and consistent? You don't see us throwing out all of mathematics because of that, or even refusing to use math on certain types of problems, and if someone comes up with a bad theorem, we still apply the rules of math to check it.
Also, we certainly can't assume that something is probable, plausible or even necessarily possible just because it is untestable. I could write a computer program to generate untestable theories all day long. What percentage of those would you be willing to believe?
The problem with relying on your religious texts to prove that your religion is right is that it's very easy to write a book that says "I'm right because I say so" and the Christians don't mind if you use that method when you're reading the bible, but what about using that same method for other religious texts? How can you distinguish, how do you determine which religion is the "right" one? They all meet the criteria of claiming to be right!
Kant is right and wrong. Since his time we have been able to "perceive" things that our 5 senses can't. But he is right to doubt that the true nature of existence can ever be fully "uncovered" or understood by man.
Anyone who has no doubt that the scientific method can "uncover" all aspects of reality and make them knowable to man is bound up with the basic flaw of human pride.
Therefore, anyone who firmly believes that there can be no god or other-worldy something-or-other is naive. Anyone who believes in a specific God is naive in the same way.
Doubt is the only logical conclusion. Well, until The Singularity occurs.
All this philosophising and concentration on the arguments for or against religion/atheism is just mental masturbation.
Who cares what this religious nut thinks? Fundies don't argue logically, so why bother?
Get government funding of religion cut; no more tax breaks. Get religion out of our schools; no more creationist crap. Religious groups shouldn't be able to behave like multi-national conglomerates anymore (and neither should multi-national conglomerates, for that matter).
Let's oncentrate on real issues - you can't argue away religion - these people think they're going to heaven when they die... and besides look at homeopathy and superstitious institutions like Major League Baseball - irrational human behavior is here to stay for quite a while.
The Atheist Movement is a Fundie-Factory, just like the War in Iraq. All it's done lately is polarize.
actually I think Kant never referred to the 5 senses as Dsouza suggested - he talks of "reason", so I was wrong there...
I should've known that Kant wouldn't talk merely about what can be perceived by the senses, but rather by the mind.
But the fact that we have to take into account the limitations of the human mind when we discuss reality still holds true.
As I read this at 4 AM - my sleep disrupted by a head cold and a sore throat - I'm still lucid enough to wonder, how can D'Souza actually collect paychecks from an institution which carries the presumptive label "think tank"? I recall reading his argument in support of religion in which he wanted us all to bow down to Jesus because he claimed that Isaac Newton wasted decades of his life doing the same. (And that was exactly my thought: what a terrible waste of a wonderful mind.) Is this guy really supposed to be a deep thinker?
"Let's oncentrate on real issues - you can't argue away religion"
Just a quick response to your statement. I completely agree that superstitions will remain a strong element in the human psyche no matter how much rational folks hoot and holler about their being no magical creator, angels, afterlife or whatever. But I still think it is a needed effort for those with the knowledge to try and educate the others for the sake of preserving sanity in our regressing social enlightenment. Everything from the mainstream hijinks of shows like "House" to the hate filled rants of Christopher Hitchens serves a purpose in leveling the playing field on the social and political spectrum. While it is often polarizing, it is better than being irrelevant.
"Fundies don't argue logically, so why bother?"
Because it's an important first step. These people do not know of logic and rationality, or think they do, and have been brainwashed very heavily against it in actuality. Not only that, but they are caught in a very powerful cycle that perpetuates this ignorance and misunderstanding.
Arguing and being heard alone are obviously not enough, but being heard raises awareness. There will be precious few who learn their mistakes just by hearing what they have been sheltered from. Religions make sure to program against this for the most part. However, with awareness on the table, we can go to work on what can really solve the problem here: mending the cracked foundation.
That is to say, the root of this particular problem lies in the educational systems. And that is the important final step.
I'm sure many of you have argued with or simply had a discussion with a theist and thought "This is an intelligent, clever person. If they had had access to a better educational environment, if they'd known there were ideas and ways of thinking beyond what their parents forced upon them, would they still be like this today?"
And it's not just that schools (in the US) still somehow have unconstitutional religiosity in them. It's also that the educational system sucks and is horribly underfunded.
I dream of a day when each child can have an educator teaching them exclusively, paying close attention to their unique pace and methods of learning. I dream of a day when all curriculums contain exercises in critical thinking as the main lesson, with rote memorization a rare and marginal necessary inclusion!
No, I don't think with ideal educational systems in place that are completely religiously unbiased, perfectly secular, and improved in quality to much higher than what our standards should be, that magical thinking and religiosity will vanish completely.
What I do think, though, is that when a child grows up comparing their liberating and enlightening educational experiences with the indoctrination of what their parents try to shove down their throats, they will be much more likely to choose to think rationally, logically, and recognize when they are mistaken, admit it to themselves, and adjust accordingly.
At the very least, when children actually have a chance to truly learn, and know they have choices where before they did not, they will more often choose the intellectually honest path.
Can you imagine a world where the religious people are the fringe minority? I can, and I see it arriving simply through improved education and allowing people to make their decisions from there.
By the way Norm, it seems that there's no Captcha displayed while you're previewing a post, so posting after preview appears to always give "Text was not correct" error.
In case you were unaware.
Enough with that already. To accuse atheists of being fundamentalists, or militants -- or all the other things that the religious are guilty of -- than for a rapist to accuse his victim of rape.
Atheism is reason -- or at the very least, the absence of irrationality. It is the norm. The middle ground.
Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians all have very different opinions about the nature of the world. And the individual branches of each religions also have very different opinions. They all say, "Your fantastical, improbable, and unprovable beliefs are wrong, while our fantastical, improbable, and unprovable beliefs are right." That's not what atheists say.
errrrr... shoulda been "To accuse atheists of being fundamentalists, or militants makes no more sense than..."
Dzwonka:
I am no talking about religion or defending religion - though, given the post, I can understand why you think I might be. I was talking about the limits of reason, as was Kant, though I was going about it in my own way.
If you think love is just a biomedical response that with enough hardware can be proven, then fine. But if you beleive that, then you also do not believe in free choice, because every decision becomes a because - because I was born in Armerica, because of the DNA I share with my parents, because of evolution, because, because, because, because, because all the way back to the big bang eventually, right? If everything is a biomedical resonse, then nothing is original. Everything has been pre-planned, unless you beleive in randomness, in which case you are still only a response - to Newton's immutable laws and randomness. Still, nothing original, nothing created, only responding.
I think reason reaches its limits when it tries to argue away free choice - tries to impose some explanation for love and preference and desire - instead of simply allowing that desire is original and ultimately within the same black box as your unicorn but obviously present nonetheless. Free choice is the ultimte responsibility, becuase it is saying I am resopnsible for my life, not some God in heaven and not some synapse in my brain, me, the sovereign me.
I've heard Kant used in this way before, but I think it's strange, since while it may be true that Kant has never been "refuted" on this score, you only get what Dsouza wants from some form of subjective idealism. If in fact the unity of things is not constructed by consciousness, if in fact there is no unknowable thing in-itself behind appearances, then you don't get at this faith-world beyond the senses.
What's probably more significant, however, is that Kant himself (who was religious, in a certain way) never used this strategy (I think Dsouza might have got this idea from a Christian political theorist named Glenn Tinder). Neither did Kant's contemporary Christian critics, at least the ones I know of. Kant did indeed believe that reason could lead you to the idea of God (not just a deist God), as well as the idea of noumenal freedom and even immortality. His religion, however, was within the limits of reason alone, not a religion that inhabits some outside space created by the limitations of reason.
"Atheism is reason -- or at the very least, the absence of irrationality. It is the norm."
This explains why I see "free thinkers" clubs and "philosophers'" clubs popping up, whose only qualification is being an atheist, and whose main activity is comiserating about how stupid religious people are.
Many smart people are atheists. Animals, newborns, and many others who don't have reason at all are atheists, too, though. Atheism may be a result of a long chain of reasoning for you, but not for most beings who lack a belief in god.
Bill--
"If you think love is just a biomedical response that with enough hardware can be proven, then fine..."
This example, and your previous example about desire, are about our access to subjective states. This isn't what Kant is talking about in the argument Dsouza is referring to. Sure, there is something wholly private about subjective states (e.g. desire, love, etc.). But Kant is talking about the thing-in-itself, "behind" the appearances of things in the objective world. Kant's argument has more applicability to the questions about god, angels, miracles, etc. since those questions are about the objective world (whether these things are really "out there"), not about subjective states.
"Can you imagine a world where the religious people are the fringe minority? I can, and I see it arriving simply through improved education and allowing people to make their decisions from there."
Hope springs eternal, I guess. The American public is probably more educated than any in human history, and in most cases completely free not to be religious (though perhaps under some social pressure to eschew "atheism"), and yet they remain strongly religious. That's true even though almost all Americans now accept scientific explainations for most things, aren't that superstitious, etc. Few have a magic worldview (many 18th century Americans did, however), and yet most remain religious. Jefferson thought that through the progress of reason most American young men would be unitarians before he died. Alas his prediction didn't come true, even though "reason" has progressed far beyond 1826.
No, you've seriously gotten that all completely wrong. Free choice can only ever exist without God. Free choice can only exist in a world that is (as Vonnegut put it, mostly) random.
If the Christian god God exists, we have no free choice. The christian top deity is perfect, omniscient and without fault -- thus, if we are His creation, then we have no more free choice than an animated cartoon character.
Reason does not try to argue away free choice. Seriously, that is a completely asinine thing to say.
If you say that reason has a limit, you'd better be prepared to offer a better alternative to it, than mindless superstition.
Dende Blogger:
Yes, I think you are right that Kant was applying his theory to the concrete knowable world, I was just spinning it out beyond that. Mind you, I have nothing against reason. It is the source of justice and our best tool in the everyday dirty business of not-dying. And yet it has its limits, and those limits, I believe, are very important. That is, that the only source of KNOWING is logic. I believe that is where I part ways with some of the posters here. I believe that preference is a form of knowing and a very important one. And I believe that personal form of knowing is a very important part of all existense.
Now I know that some people will say that this idea of personal knowing opens the door to revalation, and to some degree they are right. To which I say, too bad. I'm not here to say personal knowing is PROOF of a personal God, because I do not believe in a personal God, but I do think we must live with the mysterious nature of personal knowing. That if you take personal knowing away, you take away personal sovereignty, which no one ever seems willing to give up.
Dzwonka:
You presume that I believe in a personal God. I do not. I too believe that an omnipotent God cancels free choice.
But I do not believe in randomness. I believe in the immutable laws of physics and consciousness, which is choice. All action, all energy, is choice, and the choices operate within the framework of physics, which, I also believe was created by consciousness so that it - consciousness - would have a steady framework within which to operate.
I think that if you believe in randomness you do not believe in free choice because every action is only a response to either the laws of physics or this randomness, whatever it is, not your OWN choice, a sovereign choice.
Again, let me reiterate: I am not arguing for the existence of a personal God. I am not arguing for superstition. I am arguing for free choice. Nothing more.
(Experiences are relative + Unknown Variables) / Christopher Hitchens = Plutonium-shitting Unicorns?
Am I missing something here? ... Quite a foolish arguement, handled very well by Dzwonka. He beat me to every point I was going to make.
Bill - I think PZ Myers handled your arguement much better than I ever could.
This argument is saying that existing limits free choice. My consciousness limits my ability to not be conscious.
Well, you are arguing for a "consciousness" that created everything, and that created physics to limit your 'free choice' and that is unseeable and unprovable. I think that you don't believe in a "religious" god.
Bill:
Free choice is random.
Free choice can be nothing else. If you need someone to hold your hand and comfort you because life is cruel, and sometimes bad things happens to good people, I'll be there -- okay, maybe I won't, but I'm sure if you're a decent human being, someone will. Life is mostly random. Sorry, kiddo -- it really is.
Stalin, Mao, Hitler -- they didn't pay the penalty for their crimes. Life is mostly random.
Bill,
You're in possession of some oddly contradictory views, it seems to me. One the one hand you think that if one views our behavior as nothing more than a "biomedical response" then,
But I don't hink even the most ardent reductionist physicists would argue that way these days. Even when one knows all that one can know about the initiial state of even simple quantum mechanical systems, for example, the measured final states are subject to only probabilistic calculation - it isn't randomness because the quantum mechanics makes, exact, definitive predictions about what the probabilities are, but the final "measured" state is not determined by the initial state parameters.
Classical physical systems can be so exquisitely sensitive to variations in initial states, so that the "fine-grained" results (i.e., variations in the local conditions within a system) that it essentially meaningless to think one could wind up the universe and specify initial conditions and expect it to play out according to "Newton's immutable laws" (which - as you probably know - are very often not even applicable since the behavior of objects in the universe - from molecules to stars) in such a way that things like human behavior could be "predicted". Does any super-rationalist believe this? I don't think so. Which brings us to this statement:
I'm not sure what this even means, given that I'm not sure what you mean by "randomness",
or
"immutable laws" (and what you think they are and how you think they operate),
and "energy" in
"All action, all energy, is choice, and the choices operate within the framework of physics"
Huh? Forgive me, but as a literal-minded physical scientist, I find your use of physical terminology to describe "choices" be cringe-worthy.
"Hope springs eternal, I guess. The American public is probably more educated than any in human history, and in most cases completely free not to be religious (though perhaps under some social pressure to eschew "atheism"), and yet they remain strongly religious."
While hope may spring eternal as concerns the United States, there is much more hope in Europe and Canada. According to a Harris poll the percentage of people who are either atheist or agnostic is 52% in Great Britain, 64% in France, 41% in Spain, 45% in Germany, but only 18% in the United States.
In Sweden (not included in that poll), 62% of the people are either atheist or agnostic, and in Norway 71% are either atheist or agnostic.
The results from a recent Pew survey show the following percentage of people responding "yes" to this question: "Must believe in god to be moral?" *United States 57 *Canada 30 *Germany 39 *Spain 25 *Italy 24 *Britain 22 *France 17 *Sweden 10
"Must believe in god to be moral?" Jo Ann,
I just had a fun little conversation with this new girl I'm seeing about that. She has always believed that people need God to be moral and when she found out I was an atheist she was confused because over the past few weeks she's seen me talk to various homeless people on the street and help them when they need it, be courteous to random strangers and be respectful of others. Fortunately knowing me as a person and then hearing me explain that as mature adults we don't need an eye-in-the-sky waitng to scold us into behaving properly. We do it because it is what mature, self-confident and good people do.
Stupid Git: I've argued that point before, but then most thiests will argue that "god put the morality inside you", did that come up in your conversation? What do you say to that?
Yes, but of course. Daniel Dennett and the vast majority of the philosophy profession (which is to say, the vast majority are atheistic) are all ignorant of Kant and his work. How excellent we have Dinesh D'Souza to enlighten us on the matter.
Treat yourself to Louise Anthony's new collection, Philosophers Without Gods before taking lessons from that little pimp.
No, I don't presume that. It is ironic, I guess -- you're the one presuming things here. I realize it is a tall order for me to convince you of that, but in this case, it's possible. Because I'm a bit of a nutcase in the sense that I never mind having egg on my face, and being shown to be ignorant, seeing how it offers me opportunities to learn.
So,
I seriously don't know what "a personal God" is.
I stopped reading at "[The Fallacy of the Enlightenment] holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality." Not only is that a blatant straw man, it makes no sense to use it as a reason to believe in God.
Dzwonka,
Perhaps what Albert Einstein said will be of some help in understanding what is meant by a 'personal god'..
Jo Ann, I like it better when people voice their own opinion rather than quoting others. But I think yours is a sincere response. So thanks. However, I think this idea of a personal God seems like a complete cop-out.
The "personal God" means the literal, misogynistic, crazy, evil, murderous, petty, pathetic, vengeful, homophobic, spiteful etc. (and proud of it! as one smart dude once said) God of the Bible. By "a personal God," you're just copping out and saying "Well, I don't believe in the wacky fairy tales of the Bible -- it was metaphorical and 'mystical' and whatnot," -- yet still saying you believe in some kind of divine creature, that governs the world. And you do so, because in spite of your intellect, and capacity for reason, you are still so scared of the unknown, that you want something to be out there, to look after you. Which is understandable -- but not reasonable.
But -- and please lemme know if I'm wrong -- the short answer is that "a personal God" means the wacky Biblical God, and that the alternative is "a universal force" or something like that, right?
The notion of a "personal god" is a rather abstract principle. What exactly Einstein was referring to is not clear and what any one person might be referring to in using this term is not that clear. I interpret his thoughts as meaning that there is such beauty to life and such profundity of love and understanding that we call it "god" because a more technical understanding demeans the notion of profound love.
I'm pretty much a hard-care atheist in that I feel that evolution brought humankind to this stage. And yet I find that love and kindness, and abstract intellectual thought processes are so important as to be elevated to the point where we might define such a level of beauty as "god", meaning that which is of the highest and most giving, and far removed from capitalistic and egocentric, type of thought processes.
But that is my own definition of that which is the best and most desirable. Other people's mileage will, of course, differ from mine.
The notion of a "personal god" is a rather abstract principle.
Oops... I meant to say that "the notion of a god that is NOT a "personal god" is a rather abstract principle...
The only reason that the term "god" is used is that "god" stands for that which is beautiful and kind and loving. There may, perhaps, be a better word for this idea.
Okay, thank you. I think I understand it now, although I'm kinda disappointed it would be something so trivial.
"A Personal God" is the belief in a cartoon character religion; six thousand year old world; dinosaurs on Noah's ark -- all that.
"Not A Personal God" is (well, this is my definition, as I understand it) the knowledge that religion is nonsense, but you're a) scared of the unknown and clinging to the remnants of your religion; or b) paying lip service to the retards who believe in the cartoon character.
So, this is what Einstein meant, when he said that he didn't believe that God played dice. So now, the crucifix-junkies are jizzing all over themselves, because they believe that Einstein believed in God.
Feynman said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. That, I agree with. I sincerely believe that there are far more things in heaven and earth than we can philosophize about, or (currently) comprehend -- but if you attribute it to a personal, or non-personal god -- or if you accept such a moronic and pathetic copout, you're doing yourself (and every creature that has ever existed) a pretty big disservice.
Our tendency, appreciation, and desire for love and kindness towards one another is a result of evolution -- we are social creatures. But that doesn't make it bad. Doesn't make it good, either.
But it is bad to attribute it to something supernatural.
I like love and affection, and music, and art -- and I can offer no explanations as to why I like it. But I'd rather be a dumb animal who likes those things for evolutionary purposes, than a machina that likes those things because my creator designed me to like them.
I'm not paying lip service to anyone. You asked what a "personal god" meant and I did my best to explain it to you. A "not personal god" is not a "creator".. it's more a concept, an abstract way of viewing certain aspects of life, that's all.
No, hang on -- don't get me wrong. I asked you a question in good faith, and you answered it in good faith. And I sincerely appreciate it.
But as far as I can understand this "not a personal God"-thing, it really IS a copout.
When Phil Donahue asked Ayn Rand, "God bless America?" she said she liked the IDEA of it. The fame and fortune she was enjoying was more important to her, than honestly. So she did not admit her atheism. She played a straight bat; she said she liked the IDEA of "God bless America." And that's a copout.
By Fundie-Factory, I meant that the atheist polemicists are polarizing the issue and saying you're stupid if you believe in God. This in turn makes people choose camps - the average evangelical who tends towards fundamentalist views becomes an outright looney. I've seen it happen. The next thing you know they're hooked up to the FOX News i.v. ...
"Coming out" is one thing, being intolerant about it is another.
I wasn't saying that atheists are fundamentalists (although some are just as intolerant - e.g Christopher Hitchens)
I like love and affection, and music, and art -- and I can offer no explanations as to why I like it. But I'd rather be a dumb animal who likes those things for evolutionary purposes, than a machina that likes those things because my creator designed me to like them.
It's really the reverse, actually. Christianity has at it's basis the idea of "free will"; for example, you can choose to be a homosexual.
On the other hand, the more we learn of biology, the more we're left with the feeling that we are nothing but response driven machines with the sole purpose of preserving our DNA...
I don't see why that has to be true. Someone who believes in a non-personal, non-judgemental, non-interfering God that created the universe is no different than someone who believes that the universe's existence owes itself to nothingness or that all the matter was always "here" and always will be for absolutely no other reason than "that's just the way it is".
It's better to just say "I don't know", than to claim that someone is stupid for believing with absolute assuredness that there is a God or that there is no God. There is no way to know for sure either way.
...so what? Why should I "believe" that there is absolutely no God? How does that make me do more service towards every living thing that ever existed? Is the idea of a randomly occurring universe so "holy" to you?
A tiny footnote, light-(li)ly skipping across deep waters, but... Over the Rainbow, can be transposed into In the Rainbow: viz radio imaging. Senses can be synaesthesed into one another. And I believe Pythagoras (and later, the Galilei-i, Godel, Napier, ...) have verily gazed upon the Ding-an-Sich nackt. Call it swinging pendula = McSquared, shadows are cast "from higher dimensions",... or call it a Blind Men and Elephant parable. I'm treading water here, but not being drowned "over 'the female numerators and denominators of the square root of 2's reductedly absurd "ratio"'". Meaning: Science-cum-logic can, and will go anywhere. A clever micro/macro-scope WILL be devised to peer through to see what it's like to be a Bat sensing a Ding-an-Whatever. A clever micro/macro-scope WILL be devised for a Bat so that a Bat can see through your eyes as you peer through to see what it's like to be a Bat peering... ...a Ding-an-Sich-Selbst-scope. A God-google. The Soul will be distilled and bottled. A Hyperspace ship WILL journey to Heaven and back, etc. There IS a Velociraptor in the next room, but finding that particular (invisible) door (amongst all "the Doors"), that's the rub. Science is the finder/de-velo(cira)p(t)er. Philosophy is Science unborn, in the womb. Religion is an abortion. D'Souza is an abominable unicorn. A Sa-deist/Sad-eist/Sade-ist. Norm is a (male) Norn.
Chiaroscuro Enigmatichiaro?
Light my Fire.
Evermind.
Appy-loggy-woggies, Willey, et al.