Underlying Philosophy

Let me give you an counterexample.I am an atheist.I say that from the propositionsAandA v Bwe can deduce:BThere, you see, an atheist using logic. Therefore the reasoning which led you to say that this was impossible must be fatally flawed. But this is not true. Even if one's logic is perfect, to arrive at the correct conclusion requires premises which are correct, and where do we get them from, eh? No, the process would be logically sound. That is not an attribute that a conclusion can have.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Indeed, I am reasoning with you using logic. I have not said that no one can use logic, but I have merely pointed out the impossibility of an atheist using logic, which they must of course use if I am to be able to communicate with them.

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Obviously you have forgotten everything I have said. There is no impossibility of an atheist using logic. The truth and validity of logic do not depend on the existence of a God in any way.

I say it is. Real neutrality would be taking him into account and yet not taking him into account. That's impossible. What I do, as I explained, is take into account claims for which there is evidence. Would you mind telling me why I should take something into account that has no evidence to support it? Should I take Bigfoot into account when planning a trip to the woods Should I take Santa Clause into account when deciding to be naughty or nice? Should I take wish granting leprechauns and their pots of gold into account when I go to the end of the rainbow? Tell me, should I? The moment I have convincing evidence for either of these things, I'd glkadly take them into account. That's what I mean with neutrality, I'll change in a heartbeat should the evidence compel me to. I know, you stated so several times. That's very honest of you, thanks. Well, yes, the way you see neutrality, that is impossible. But, like I said, tht's not how I view neutrality. If I were to reject the notion of god, or Santa Clause or leprechauns when there was evidence for them, then I would call that biased. Changing when the evidence is compelling, is what I cal neutrality. Actually, I'd call that the null position. The position everyone should take as a default. The neutral position, if you will. But I'm not refusing to take him into account. I would take him into account were there evidence for him. Yes. There are only two choices here. But still, I say one should keep the possibility open to change that position, it hould all depend on evidence. Yes. I'd say it's the positive side, but that's just my gripe. All else you said makes sense. The point remains though. Why should I take something into account for which there is no evidencez You don't follow the law. You've said as much when the stoning of kids or killing of people who work on the sabbath concerns. You say Jews are under the law and it's punishments, so would you help stone a jewish child? Would you help kill a jewish man that worked on the sabbath, remmeber, the law commands you do. This way you are not punished by the law, you are however acting according to it, like you just said we all should. Well yes, how else would you determine something to be real or not? Everything I have seen in my life says it does. Do you have an example where evidence for a claim is actually evidence that the claim isn't true? It's not biased to await some certainty before you make decissions. DO you use a heads/tails coinflip to make decissions, or do you weigh different things in your final decission? Why should we not await evidence to see what we should do? It's not a holy book to me, should it be shown that empirical data is worthless in determining truth, I will gladly abandon it for a better method. Have you got such a method? Can you show empirical data is not a good method for obtaining knowledge about the world around us? Actually, no it sin't. There's a whole sector build around just that principle, it's called science. Actually, they've probably seen other people dive in as well, and they all returned to the surface, so they do have evidence for this claim. Also, they'll know that in the event they won;t get back to the surface, their parents will help them, as they have helped them in many occasions before. I certainly do. Like the example you give, the child has evidence for his parents claims. The evidence can even be demonstrated to him by his parents. There is. Still, is "a god" all that can provide an afterlife? How do you know? Yes. There is always hope. Will will it last? I don;t know, Should that stop me from trying? No. No I wouldn't. That would be detrimental to society, and that's not good for the human species, nor for the people araound me that I love. Like I said,m there is always hope. The fact that it may not does not mean it is not worth doing. Is the only reason you behave because you want to have a nice after life? If so, than I hope you never lose your faith. My worldview doesn't justify their actions. Not in the least. Whatever gave you that bizarre idea?

Of course not. How can anyone possibly be justified in committing a crime? Laws are a set of regulations/rules placed upon a populace that the populace agrees to by living in that area (assuming a democratic region like the ones you and I likley live within). Therefore, it is impossible to ever "be justified" in committing a crime. No, it would not be. But, since this never happens... there's nothing to worry about. Again, they seem to be very similar to the reasons I am "nice" and how I judge those who do wrong. So, again, I ask... what is the point of bringing up your God?If I'm atheist and you believe in God. And we both are nice "just to be nice" and we both judge others who do wrong because they are not being nice... then what's the point of adding God into it at all?

Well if anyone wants to say that their god exists in much the same way that a perfect circle exists I for one won't stand in their way.

I'm not sure, but that might apply to deism.

Maybe in some cases. It depends which deist we are talking about I guess. In the case of our resident faith based agnostic with his much publicised deistic opinion it would only apply if perfect circles are capable of creating the universe and it's physical laws.

And empirically gained facts. Sounds again like empiricism plus logic. I am assuming that you do not mean that literally since it is trivially false as demonstrated by Dr A and Betrand Russell.So I think you mean that an atheist can provide no explanation as to the reliability of logic or something akin to that. My response to that is that if the atheist cannot, neither can the theist. I challenge you to demonstrate otherwise.You see - you cannot create a logically sound epistemology without starting from the assumption that one can use logic. So one can't use an epistemological method to ascertain the truth behind any claim about the 'origins' of logic or the like.One might be able to argue that logic is merely a generalised empirical/descriptive pursuit in the first place...but that argument gets fairly esoteric and is probably not worth pursuing at this stage. The scientific method utilises logic both deductive and inductive and it specifies a certain type of evidence gathering so that strict logic can be applied to reach confident conclusions.You are using evidence and logic too, just not the highly refined and strict standards that science generally demands. And you have reached this conclusion using a method that is coloured by the biases of man too. You realize that ALL epistemological methods suffer from this? You remember that was the point I was raising that you claim to be address? Yes, obviously. That is why the scientific method has openly embraced the principle of fallibilism. But it is also true of EVERY SINGLE method out there. The difference is that the scientific method takes steps to ameliorate these biases, even to the point of studying them to understand them more accurately.Can you tell me of an epistemological method that does better in this regard? And this is true of other methods - and science has internal mechanics to help detect when this occurs and try and correct for it. Agreed, which is exactly why science makes extensive use of logic, brutally applying it at all times.But logically sound conclusions can still be false. The only way we can tell if it is true or false is to check to see how it corresponds with reality.If all swans I have ever seen are white, then all swans are white.
All swans I have ever seen are white.
Therefore, all swans are white.Perfectly logically sound conclusion. But is it true that my subjective experiences can be extrapolated to a universal statement of truth like that? The only way to know is to test my experiences of swans against reality. It turns out that it is logically sound but false.Do you really think pure logic can get us answers which we can say are true? If so - how do you know that this is true?Edited by Modulous, : added something to end and a bit to the start.

And even if it did, that wouldn't prevent an atheist from using logic. By analogy, if the existence of horses depended on an act of fiat creation by God, that wouldn't mean that no atheist could ride a horse.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

You completely missed what Woodsy was saying. Please read the little story I gave you, The Physicist and the Metaphysicist in Message 95 (msgid=553486).Oh, who are we trying to kid here? You'll never go back and read it, so here it is again:

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The Physicist and the Metaphysicist

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In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast. This was a time when people stood up, made a toast, and then selected someone to respond. Nobody knew what toast they'd be asked to reply to, so it was a challenge for the quick-witted. In this case the toast was: "To physics and metaphysics." Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy -- truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.

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The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

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Now let's provide the complete quote so that you can again see Woodsy's context: Now it should become clear to you that he was alluding to the story I had posted. Hence that laboratory is a metaphor for the act of verifying through observation, experimentation, just plain pulling your head out of the cockpit, etc, whether the results/predictions of our hypothesis/theory/idea agrees with reality.In science, we are testing our ideas against reality all the time. In religion, that is done practically never. Indeed, when religion does try to verify its conclusions against reality, those conclusions almost always turn out to be wrong (eg, the claims of "creation science").Let us entertain a small example. Let us say that one's interpretation of Genesis leads one to believe that men have one fewer rib than women do. While I am not suggesting that you personally hold such a belief, there have been and still are many who do believe that, so this example is not at all far-fetched. OK, how do we tell whether it's true?Having that metaphoric laboratory, a scientific approach would be to compare two human skeletons, a male and a female, in particular comparing their rib counts. Preferably, several skeletons should be examined, making careful note of any exceptions they find. Even better, the results and the data should be published and several other scientists should then obtain their own sets of several skeletons and perform their own counts and count comparisons. Then, all these groups should communicate with each other and compare their results. As a result, the community can come together and form a consensus based on their research, which we know would be that men and women have the same number of ribs, that men are not missing a rib as was previously thought.Since the religious community does not have any metaphoric laboratory, how does it conduct its investigation?Seriously, how? I cannot think of any way that the religious community could test its conclusions without adopting the scientific method's comparing one's conclusions to reality. Seriously! When you in your theology and logic come to a conclusion, how do you know that it's right? How do you test it?With all due respect, what we've seen of how the religious "test" their conclusions is that they see that it seems to agree with their beliefs, so it must be true, even when it completely contradicts reality. Which is one of the reasons why we have "creation science".Edited by dwise1, : minor clean-up and picking of a grammatical nitEdited by dwise1, : minor rewording

Ah DC85, you forget, That's his presupposition. see Message 132enjoy.

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But this is to change the meaning of the word "biased" and indeed "presupposition" in such a way as to make them almost meaningless --- certainly to wrench "biased" away from its meaning in conventional English usage and to give it a strange new meaning of your own.Consider the following little parable.In a darkened room, I hand Alice a sphere and ask her what color it is. Alice freely confesses that she doesn't know, because she is literally in the dark. However, she says, maybe she could tell me if she saw it in a good light. I give her my permission to take it outside, where she inspects it from all angles in a good light, and sees that it is blue. She returns to the darkened room and reports that it is blue.Then I hand the sphere to Bob and ask him what color it is. "Ah," he replies, "it is most certainly pink. I know this because the Holy Book Of All Spheres Being Pink says that all spheres are pink, and is the H.B.O.A.S.B.P. not the work of the Great Pink Goddess herself, all praise to her pinkness?"Now, the way that you are using the word "bias", they are both biased: Bob by his belief in the Great Pink Goddess; and Alice by her belief that she can find out what color a thing is by looking at it.But this is not at all what an ordinary person would mean by "bias". A normal person would detect no hint of "bias" in Alice's behavior, but rather see it as a model of objective neutrality. She had no belief about the color of the sphere until she saw the evidence, and when she saw the evidence she allowed her beliefs to be conditioned by it. In the English language as it is spoken, that's what it means to be unbiased.In particular, to say that someone's view is biased is to imply that it may be unreliable. But Alice's "bias" in favor of looking at things in order to find out what color they are is actually something which gives credibility to any statements she might make about what color things are.Similarly with "presupposition". In English as it is spoken, Bob exhibited a presupposition because he made his mind up before he saw the evidence, whereas Alice didn't exhibit presupposition because she didn't make her mind up until she saw the evidence. That, to an English-speaking person, is the exact difference between having a presupposition and not having one. The "pre" in "presupposition" means "before", i.e. presupposition is supposing something before examining the evidence.Now you apparently wish to change the meanings of the pejorative words "bias" and "presupposition" so that they include things which in English they exclude (and which normal people would in no way wish to disparage). And of course you wish to change their meaning while maintaining their pejorative implication --- so that you can speak of things like neutrality and objectivity as though they were in some way bad things.Well, you can't change the English language. So I suggest that you find some word that genuinely does include the behavior of both Alice and Bob, and continue the discussion on those terms.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Philosophical implications? OK, yeah. But those are all the implications raised, certainly no practical ones. No, not interpreting the universe based on any gods means by definition that we do not interpret the universe based on any gods, period. Exactly the same as do theists!The universe is the universe and operates all the same regardless of whether we believe in any gods or not. Whether we believe in any gods or not has absolutely no impact on whether a particular engineering design will work. Will this software application work as it's designed and intended to? Gods or no gods, the outcome will be the same. Will that aircraft fly? Gods or no gods, the outcome will be the same. Will a particular chemical reaction take place, a particular decay chain reaction, a particular physical event? Gods or no gods, the outcome will be the same.Scientists, engineers, technicians, mechanics, hobbyists, and weekend repairmen all approach working physically with the universe in the same way, regardless of whether they believe in any gods or not. It does not make one whit of difference. Their own personal ruminations will vary, but their approach and their interpretation of what's going on in the physical processes they deal with will be essentially the same.Are you at all familiar with Isaac Asimov's first Foundation book? Being able to predict the collapse of the Galactic Empire, scientists form the Foundation in order to save all their knowledge and technology so that it can be used to jump-start the rebirth of galactic civilization. Early on in the Darkness, they deal with neighboring barbaric systems by exporting technology, but in a very controlled manner. They couch it in religious terms and train technician priests. The punchline is that in order to make a piece of equipment work, you needed to recite the specific prayers and incantations correctly, then push that red button.So, since you only interpret the universe based on a god, how do you start your car in the morning? Or your computer? Do you need to recite specific prayers and incantations in order to make it work? Or do you simply go the standard start-up procedures? The exact same procedures followed by those who do not believe in any gods? Gods or no gods, what difference does it make? Absolutely none! The universe, your car, and your computer all run exactly the same irrespective of the gods. Which causes problems for you.In studying a particular physical phenomenon, we make observations and take measurements and try to figure it out. We deal directly with the phenomenon. We are free to see it clearly, whereas you must also filter everything you see through your theology. I have a friend at church who used to be a fundamentalist Christian and who used to have to filter out every day everything that contradicted his beliefs; he finally couldn't keep it up anymore and became an atheist and now is much happier being able to deal with reality.That filtering can lead to the false "God of the Gaps" theology, which is widely practiced in creationism and ID. They point to things that we can't explain (or at least that they claim we can't explain) and proclaim that gap in our knowledge to be proof of God. The problem for them is that when we do find an explanation, when we close that gap, then that proof of God disappears. This leads to a distinct difference between scientists and creationists: the scientist sees a mystery and wants to solve it, whereas the creationist sees that same mystery as proof of God and wants it to remain a mystery. True enough. We deal with the universe as it really is, whereas you tie yourself up in a confused tangle of theological knots.I'm sure that you are unable to see it, but obviously ours is the better way to deal with the universe. As does bullshit. So why are atheists the only ones reaching for hip-boots and a shovel?Edited by dwise1, : I'm talking about belief in gods not having any actual impact

I so want to ask just where you get such bizaare ideas from, but then I am familiar with Christian doctrine. Though that does not make your stated position any less bizaare and out-of-touch with reality. Please, you really do need to pull your head out of the cockpit and see what's real.I've encountered such statements before, so I'll share my response from several years ago to another such statement having been made by a father of four children:

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The point I was trying to make in my original email is that is if the Bible is NOT (accurate and literal) then I don't see what difference it makes (to me) once I'm dead how I lived life.

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Completely and utterly and blatantly untrue. I just cannot comprehend how anybody could seriously think such a thing!

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First, if there is an after-life but your biblical literalism simply got it wrong, then it would still be highly probable that how you lived your life would have a DIRECT effect on what will happen to you once you're dead. True, you'd be very surprised with it, once the Maya had worn off, but then I truly believe that if an after-life exists then a lot of people are going to be very surprised, especially evangelical Christians.

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Second, even if there is no after-life, how you had lived your life would STILL matter, long after you're dead. Why are you thinking only of yourself? You are a FATHER, a parent! Even if there is no heaven nor hell nor next life for you to go to when you die, how you lived would still matter very much. How you raised your children. How you treated others. Whether you helped or hindered them. What you built; what kind of legacy you left behind. All that matters very much!

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But let's go back to the subject line of your email: "RE: If evolution is right... ". If evolution is right and our bodies are little more than a way for our genes to reproduce themselves, then it STILL matters VERY MUCH how we live our lives. Because if we do not produce offspring and provide for them in such a way as to enhance their survival and their ability to produce their own offspring, thus propogating our genes into the future, then we will have failed. That includes ensuring that society and community will be able to enhance their survival, thus benefitting the entire gene pool we are a part of. How we live our lives affects the propogation of our genes, so it still matters. In fact, it matters even more, because it directly affects ALL future generations. It cannot matter much more than that!

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But let's return to your selfish perspective, your asking "but what's in it for ME?". Why bother to live a life worth living? Sounds so ridiculous, once you actually ask the question, doesn't it? And the answer sounds so obvious: because living such a life is worth it! How could anybody really think that it doesn't matter?

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So you see, sac, despite your selfish, narrowly self-centered theology, it is not all about you. It really is time for you to pull your head out of your theological cockpit, open your eyes, and conduct a reality check. Then why did you even bring it up? And just what exactly is your reason for doing any good things, if it's not for the benefit of others nor for the sake of doing good?

Certainly. So I'll then ask: what are your premises?And when I say you can't use logic, what I mean is this: if you were to strictly follow your worldview, you would be unable to account for the laws of logic and would thus have no reason for relying on them. I hold that when you use logic and reasoning, and follow particular morals, that you are borrowing from my worldview, which explains our ability to reason, and also why there is good and evil. I do not understand where good and evil could come from if there is no supernatural being.