Pseudoskepticism and logic

I step in here with some trepidation, and some wonderment at the persistence, heat and (occasional) opaqueness of the RAZD/Straggler dialog. Here's hoping I'm not making a fool of myself...We have the very clear and concise synopsis of the current topic provided at Message 22 (thanks and kudos to petrophysics1), and we have the sense (not mentioned in the OP, but now obvious) of the intended ("real") focus of the topic: whether there is (or can be) an evidentiary basis for atheism.Let's try to consider a distinction: (a) atheism with respect to any and every possible conception of a deity, vs. (b) atheism with respect to particular deities. If someone were trying to assert a "positive claim for atheism," we might want to identify this as being in support of one or the other type of atheism, and the choice would boil down to (a) "proving a negative," or (b) positively falsifying specific assertions about the existence of a particular god.In one sense, option (b) could be very simple to establish: identify specific material claims about the past or (near) future actions of the chosen deity (e.g. life on earth as we know it will end later this week), and check that against the available evidence (as soon as it becomes available). If the claim is proven false, this may be taken as positive evidence that the deity does not really exist.That won't satisfy most folks, of course, because they can decide that the falsified claim itself was based on faulty knowledge of the deity, incorrect interpretation of scripture, etc. But this points to the fundamental problem in every discussion/argument/understanding about deities in general and any specific deity you would care to name or make up: as I understand it, it is in the nature of deities that the following are generally considered to be true (at least among theists):

1. The deity is an entity with delberate intentions, and acts in accordance with those intentions.
2. The actions of the deity have direct impact on people, and/or on people's physical surroundings/conditions.
3. People in general cannot know the "true" intentions of the deity with respect to the events or conditions it may have caused that affect people's lives; a given individual may form a belief about knowing the deity's intention, but others have no basis for confirming whether this individual's belief is true or false.

It's item (C) that is the crux of the problem. Before going further with that, it'll help to focus on these two items from RAZD's 11-point "algorithm": Okay, here's where we are: the theist has an assertion of an entity with deliberate intentions and direct influence, whose actual intentions and influences are essentially not knowable by humans. Is that philosophically tenable? I would say no, because it is essentially nonsensical. At this hour, I can't tell whether this summation meets RAZD's conditions of logical consistency, but I hope it suffices.This argument is applicable to every theist's deity I'm familiar with, and so it effectively applies to any theistic conception of a deity. The proof seems stunningly simple: if something is intrinsically unknowable by humans, then any assertion of human knowledge about it has an overwhelming likelihood of being in error.So here's my take on Straggler's position (or perhaps this is just a projection of my own position, which I think Straggler might agree with): whether we are talking about theism or deism, we are dealing with something that is by definition unknowable.(*1*) It is the very definition of this "deity" thing that marks it as an artifact of the human condition: it's the result of our linguistic potential for asserting the existence of something that we can only define by describing or enumerating what it is not. This is a very general and useful facility in human language, and given that our grammars all have this facility, it's no stretch at all to see how it can combine with our own sense of intentionality in this odd and extreme manner, creating a god and forming the basis for religious belief.Bottom line: maybe I misunderstand RAZD, but if he's trying to say that a "positive atheism" is somehow less supportable than "agnostic atheism", my response would be that theism/deism, and any form of agnosticism (just allowing a possibility of a deity) is the far less supportable position, by virtue of the fact that it simply extends a quirk of linguistic structure into a logical contradiction.(*1*) In the context of deism, this deity "thing" is not assumed to have any direct impact on our day-to-day existence, so what difference does it make anyway... it's just word-play with no particular relevance to anything at all.Edited by Otto Tellick, : fixed spacing

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Quixotically, you seem to be missing my point. If "position A" is the one that asserts (or allows the possibility) that a deity exists, whereas "position notA" is the notion that all human conceptions of any deity are logically unsound and (as Onifre expresses nicely) not susceptible to any evidential basis, why would you seem to give "position A" some sort of pre-eminence that makes it unassailable by "position notA" except by force of evidence?Even when "position notA" allows the mulligan of ignoring all the evidence about theistic predictions that utterly fail and theistic histories that are demonstrably false, why is the logical dysfunction of "position A" not taken into account, in accordance with "step 10" of your own epistemological recipe? Is it simply your own personal preference of wanting to guess that "some deity might exist"?Whatever the rationale for your position, I'm compelled to ask that you provide some sort of definition for your notion of "deity" that doesn't ultimately lead to logical contradictions. If you can do that, then I'll accept your notion that I should have evidence before asserting "position notA".Until then, rather than "positive atheism" being "pseudo-skepticism", I'd say instead that deism/theism (agnostic or otherwise) is based on a "pseudo-entity".

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

It's hard for me to pick out which of your many posts on this thread I should reply to. You didn't reply to the last thing I said, but Onifre has been carrying the same basic line of thought, so I'll jump in here... So now you want evidence that all human concepts of god are made up. Well, at first blush that seems reminiscent of the Creationist who demands that all details of all evolutionary steps from fish to human be explicitly demonstrated with observable evidence, otherwise no evidence whatsoever can be deemed sufficient -- but that's just a knee-jerk reaction on my part. Moving on...Shall we look again at steps 9 and 10 of your epistemological algorithm? Or maybe it will suffice to consider that hypotheses, theories and similar assertions may justifiably be held when they are supported by / consistent with available evidence, and can be considered the better alternative in comparison to other assertions that are not consistent with the available evidence.We have an assertion here that human conceptions of a deity are all made up. Daily observations of various people asserting the existence of a deity, and describing its attributes, leave no doubt that these individuals are indeed making this stuff up -- they make claims that directly contradict their own previous descriptions, descriptions provided by other people, and various written records that describe attributes of deities. And of course, these written records all conflict with each other, and many of them contain internal inconsistencies in their various descriptions of deities as well.We could (as I suggested earlier) rely on just the logical and philosophical steps of your "algorithm", and observe that the notion of a "deity" has intrinsic properties in its "definition" that make it a "pseudo-entity", whose essential property is its lack of any objective property. A deity is an entity with willful intent, responsible for the creation of reality as we know it, and this attribute in itself means that we cannot observe it directly in any objective sense, let alone have any direct, verifiable knowledge of its intent.But allow me to propose an alternative explanation (a theory, perhaps) about deities, which is consistent with the available evidence, and will (I hope) lend some support to those of us at position #7 on the Dawkins scale. I'm sorry I cannot go into rigorous evidentiary detail, but I hope most of the steps will involve topics familiar to you, so you can assess the availability of relevant evidence on your own. My hope is that given this explanation, we can cover all known instances of posited deities, and explain quite a lot more in addition.Reviewing what we are able to deduce about the past 3 billion years of known life on Earth, based solely on objective evidence and plausible natural processes, we see a progression in the nature of "awareness" (knowledge of environment) attributable to life forms. For the multicellular forms that develop mobile behaviors and specialized cells for perception and movement, the development of awareness shows an increase in the acuity and diversity of perception, a broadening of the range of movement behaviors, and a progressive elaboration of the cells that mediate between perception and movement:

• Initially, it's just a matter of chemical reactions to the medium in which the organism is situated; movement toward supportive environments and/or away from threatening environments is favored by natural selection.
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• Over time, as organisms and their behavior repertoires become more complex, perception expands to additional modalities: temperature, tactile contact, vibration, light/vision, acoustics/audition.
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• The specialization of cells that mediate between perception and behavior leads to greater advantage in natural selection as these cells form denser structures that improve both the speed and the appropriateness of responses to wider varieties of stimuli.
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• As some species develop "socialized" patterns of behavior, it's possible to discern notions of intention: patterns of behavior that reflect some degree of construction or planning of steps on the part of individuals.
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• At some point (with the introduction of Sapiens), the specialized mediation cells develop sufficient density and structure, and are connected to receptors and behaviors that are sufficiently tuned and adapted, to permit both the conception and communication of arbitrary symbols to represent and describe things and actions, leading also to the capacity for propositional logic and the ability to express questions and positive and negative assertions.
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• Having positive and negative assertions, and descriptions using arbitrary symbols, the Sapiens organism also has the capacity to posit entities that are not observable and have no objectively verifiable basis -- in effect, Sapiens can talk about things that do not exist.

That culminating ability is a natural by-product of a skill that offers obvious advantages for language users whose vocabulary lacks specific terms for describing or making assertions about novel objects or events. One of the essential functions of science is to create or adapt vocabulary as needed to meet specific needs for the communication of objective knowledge, and part of this process is to carefully delineate what a given term does not refer to, as well as what it does refer to.But when it comes to assertions about a deity -- a willful entity whose intentions are somehow served by the creation and progression of this physical reality that we occupy, whose nature and intentions are unknowable but are supposed to be relevant to us somehow -- we might as well be talking about those "colorless green ideas" made famous by Chomsky.The idea of a deity's willful intent is really an extension or projection of our own innate sense of planning activities to achieve desired results, and the deity itself is nothing more than a slot in a syntactic structure, serving as the subject of the verb "create", with "universe" as the object of the verb. It's just one of an infinite number of syntactic constructions having no particularly practical semantic value.If you want to assert that I have not presented an adequately rational and verifiable account for the conclusion that "all human conceptions of a deity are made up", I hope you can describe what is lacking here.If you are going to also assert that, because of whatever I may have left out, I must call myself an agnostic, meaning that I must allow some possibility for the existence of a deity, our discussion might be left in an odd state: your assertion entails some sort of description for a possible entity, and this description, in my view, must be made up, especially if it involves any attribution of willful intent, and more so if this intent is supposed to have direct relevance or impact on my day-to-day life. Conversely if you want a maximally "generalized" entity -- this deity is simply the thing that accounts for everything we can't explain on objective, naturalistic grounds -- you're just pushing a god-of-the-gaps idea, and I don't see any value in that.Bear in mind that if there is any basis at all for the opposite position ("not all human conceptions of a deity are made up"), this would need to be followed up with how these non-made-up conceptions were formed, (Be specific, so we know how to recognize the difference between made-up and not-made-up!) And then there's still the separate issue of whether any human conception of a deity is (can be) correct, as opposed to being wrong, regardless of its provenance. Wouldn't that entail that there can only be one correct conception, or will you want to assert that multiple incompatible conceptions can be true? Is that the sort of entity we're supposed to be agnostic about?Bottom line: Onifre and I (and some others here, presumably including Straggler) will continue to allow that you may hold any personal (internal, subjective) notions you like regarding the possible existence and attributes of deities, according to your own "idiolectal" gyrations of entities defined only by negations, but we won't agree that your personal notions are sufficient reason to label us as "agnostic", because the only basis for that label is your own personal notion of a deity.One last point to elaborate my evolutionary explanation of awareness, for those who are concerned about the notion of purpose: The development of intentional behavior brings with it the ability to form a sense of purpose, and to perceive purpose in the actions of others. Purpose is an "emergent property" of Sapiens, and (presumably) of any other organism that might happen to follow a similar path of cognitive development. As members of the Sapiens species, we establish purpose. We create it. As Dawkins would say, there is no need to posit a deity. To the extent that our sense of purpose leads to behavioral patterns conducive to our continued existence as a species, natural selection favors this property of our current evolutionary status.We have some ability to mold our sense of purpose -- and our particular intentions -- in order to achieve the best overall result for survival as members of a dominant species living in a highly interdependent network of countless species on a finite planet. We are learning that natural selection can (and often does) produce better results than intentional design, and that greater diversity is generally better than reduced diversity. In this context, something that essentially amounts to the golden rule is our best first intention, applicable not only to other people but to life in general, as far as this is possible. Ultimately, "do unto others..." isn't a religious doctrine; it is an ecological imperative.Edited by Otto Tellick, : adjusted the subtitleEdited by Otto Tellick, : improved the introduction to the list of developmental stages for awareness; added a sentence about Dawkins in next-to-last paragraph.Edited by Otto Tellick, : added a bit to last paragraphEdited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.Edited by Otto Tellick, : minor stylistic tweaks

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Ah. Yes, this clarifies things very well. It's a bit sad that I went on at such length over a misinterpretation of your earlier material, but your careful response has really helped, and I appreciate your time, patience and perseverance.These two statements of yours provide a brief, simple and dispassionate antidote for the confusion and emotion that too often surround the terms "atheist" and "agnostic". It would seem that I've been a victim of the confusion myself -- the account of reality that leaves out a deity is so compelling to me that I just get carried away by it -- perhaps to the extent that I shouldn't really assign myself to point 7 on the Dawkins scale.Or indeed, perhaps there simply shouldn't be a point 7 on the scale -- until there is firm evidence for it (which could happen, if/when our thinking and our language become capable of capturing and expressing it properly, but I don't know if we're there yet).Thanks, RAZD -- this has been illuminating.{AbE:} I'd like to stress that this "turn-around" of mine, agreeing to consider myself "agnostic atheist" rather than just "atheist", is not at all a move in the direction of accepting the concept of a deity in my own thinking and beliefs. Rather, it's a matter of making a different choice among competing definitions for the terms "agnostic" and "atheist". In my earlier posts, I was working on definitions that were somewhat different from the ones that work with RAZD's statements, and I'm thinking now that I was wrong to do so.Edited by Otto Tellick, : added closing paragraph

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Yes, inescapably. We cannot hope (and really shouldn't try) to assure the continuation of all species through mere exertion of our own will, even if we could justifiably assert having enough wisdom for such a task (which is a ludicrous notion given the current state of our awareness). It is a conundrum, and I addressed it poorly. In any case, "do unto others..." isn't really apt. "Minimize the harm you cause..." perhaps, to the extent that there's an objective basis for assessing "harm".

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Hi Phage,This is now looking to me like you are where I was a day or so ago: I tried to present a hypothesis that would make it clear how there was plenty of positive evidence for the atheist position. I still think that the bulk of evidence clearly favors the absence of a deity, and also clearly refutes many core assertions about all specific deities for which "earnest" descriptions have been published.I also tried to establish on linguistic, cognitive and logical grounds that the very notion of a deity is simply ill-formed and vacuous. I still think that any assertion relating to a deity is essentially pointless and meaningless, and there is still the overwhelming absurdity of any human forming a "correct" conception of an entity that is by definition unknowable.But still, I have to admit: the reasoning to conclude that there is no such thing as a deity remains just that -- reasoning. It's based on a body of evidence that leads firmly to the conclusion that there is no need to posit a deity, and when RAZD frames his position like this (in Message 228): it seems entirely sensible, and I'm inclined and content to agree with that. Indeed, given my view that "deity" is a meaningless (or essentially undefinable) term, it makes perfect sense to posit nothing about it at all -- the less said about it the better.Maybe it would help to view RAZD's argument like this (I think I'm getting it right, now): given two assertions like "The King of France is bald" and "God is bald", you can certainly respond to the first by saying "There is no King of France." But the only sensible response to the second is "I have no idea what you're talking about."I know it seems inapt to refer to the latter response as being "skeptical", but it's the nature of objective discourse to be limited to saying either "I know" or "I don't know", and the term "skeptical" is what we apply to the latter case. It's a matter of being satisfied enough to establish a consensus and move on.A further point that RAZD seems to be pushing is that objective discourse needs no additional constraints or conditions with respect to assertions about deities; when presented with such an assertion, we shouldn't need to say "this has no place in a scientific discussion" -- it should suffice to say "we don't know of any way to confirm or deny this."If that is his position, I'm a little less sanguine about it, to the extent that it can be perceived as lowering the barriers for people who would like to push religious views into science classrooms, to the detriment of real critical thinking. But that's a topic for another thread, apparently.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.