h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Edward,

I forgot to address one other point in your response, let me do that here.

>>Things like emotion, beauty, awe, the 'spiritual' - it seems to me that they all fit quite easily in an Atheist worldview. Am I right in thinking that, to the Theists, they're in the purview of Something Out There?<<

1/ We have the concept of "Logos" used by Heraclitus to describe the natural reason and law that seems to persist across the ages in the world and man (see the annex material in 'The Abolition of Man' by CS Lewis A16019318 ). 'Logos. translates as the Word or Reason that brings things to being. This was picked up by the early Chritians writers of Gospel of John. Take a timeout to read the introduction it's lovely poetry. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%201:1-18&version=31

2/ The Platonic forms or triad mentioned (truth, beauty and goodness) have been kicking around in philosophy for sometime as well. The apparent fact that we (non socio-paths) all have access to understanding these forms is an interesting point to discuss. Plato's take was that they exist outside of the World we live in, as with Logos.

3/ Aristotle (his student) refined the concept (some would say) taking them to be Universals and that they are 'embedded' in things.

4/ From a (Christian) Theological perspective Augustine of Hippo came around to Plato several hundred years later and Hellenized the Platonic reasoning into Christianity.

5/ And Thomas Aquinas did the same with Aristotle thoughts

6/ William of Ockham (of Occam's razor fame) came after Aquinas. Was a English Franciscan friar who developed a theological theory of nominalism. Whereby the Aristotle and Platonic forms/univeersals are entities that can be reduced to the single nature of God. God exists, and exists in man's spirit, so thus do the forms and universal categories of the Greeks.

By the way Betrand Russell misquoted Ockham on the point of Occams Razor ("one should not multiply entities beyond necessity"), what he said was “For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.” See ...

http://www.hi.is/~sveinbt/files/papers/MythOfOccamsRazor.pdf

The uptake of points 1-6 is that the revealed religion of Judaism (in which we are presented with a God of Love and Justice), is Hellenized with a God of Logos. It is a one God of reason AND faith that Christians are called to. Not one or the other. This is greatly misunderstood.

Let's try and bottom out this 'meaning' beastie (Pilgrim4). I say that it's internal. You say it's not - and that either position is one of faith.

Do you see 'meaning' as synonymous with 'purpose'? Or with 'order'.

If the latter - I can agree with you insofar as the universe appears be to behave in consistent predictable ways...and we can increasingly, step-by-step discover this order/ meaning. I call that 'Physics'. As I understand it, the Spinozans (and Berkeleyites?) would call the same thing 'God' - but to quote (I'm afraid) Dawkins...'One can hardly go worshiping the laws of gravity'.

But if you man 'Purpose'...as in 'the meaning of life'...I don't get that at all. Where do we get this purpose from? Even the Theists are so far from understanding it that they devolve the capacity to do so to God...'His mysterious ways' etc. etc. The Rationalist Atheist Humanist (as opposed to the Kierkegaardian nihilist) is forced to fall back on a different cliché: 'Life is what you make it' - which approximates to what I meant when I said that 'meaning' is not external to us.

I don't see that as an article of faith. The onus is on the Theists to present evidence of external meaning.

Or to put it in Christian terms...is 'Logos' order, purpose, or both?

". . . the recent Regensburg speech by Benedict XVI - that unfortunetely blew-up becuase of other naive commentary"

Naive! Ratzinger!

Recumbentman,

Maybe you are looking for pattern in Ratzinger that is not there. Occam's razor would say its more likely that he was naive than he purposefully set out to upset Muslims.

But I may be wrong - Occam's razor is like that

So...Ratzo just happened to pick on relations with Islam as the subject of an arcane theological discourse? He's not trying to make out that Islam is a clear and present danger to 'Christian' Europe, then?

(Actually...no he's not. The danger for him is that we might develop *secular* ways of getting on with one another).

Edward

>>Do you see 'meaning' as synonymous with 'purpose'? Or with 'order'.<<

ORDER - Yes

See Baruch Spinoza and the concept of Immanence. Einstein was fond of quoting God in various ways. When challenged about position on the BIG question he said he believed in the God of Spinoza. Spinoza beleived that God was Nature, that everything was set up and held together as a consequence. So laws of nature (such a General Raltivity/Gravitation or Genetics/Memetics) are manfestations of the immanence of God.

PURPOSE - Yes

I have a Teleological perspective. It's not that hard to express it (some folks overcomplicate issues, making it difficult for others to grasp, such as Kant in his critique of pure reason). This purpose transcends the universe that we live in, it is what was before its creation. What is the purpose? Hit this link to find out...

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%201:3-14&version=31

On reading this you are introduced (that was my purpose), but the invitation to go to the party and believe is a choice for you to make.

Having both this transcendent and immanent view of God, makes me a PANENTHEIST. The Logos exists both before the world was begun (transcendent) and came into the world (immanence).

>>I don't see that as an article of faith. The onus is on the Theists to present evidence of external meaning.<<

Only if I really feel the need to persuade you. And I don't think I can do that in words and following a rational discourse. If you are really interested you have to come half way yourself so to speak. Open up your other human faculties and see what you feel and sense. Its always a personal journey for truth. A pilgrimage you make yourself.


My job is done - a voice crying in the wilderness. From here its up to you and the Holy spirit.

"I must get my coat"

Ah...right. So what you're saying is that I have to take the step of believing in order to be convinced.

And that's the unbridgeable gulf. As an Atheist, I can't apply a form of thinking (faith; belief) which simply doesn't work on any other form of life. Empirical Rationalism is the only game in town. Otherwise, it's but a short leap to 'Trust me...God created the world in six days'.

(I'm not saying that all Theists believe that - merely that they are incapable of distinguishing between the things that I should and shouldn't take on trust).

P4T:

"The myth of Occam's Razor" you linked to is fascinating, but I don't find any reference to the authority of Scripture there. You must have derived "For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture" from somewhere else. What it does say is:

that the principle of parsimony was suggested by Aristotle, and made explicit by Duns Scotus, Ockham's teacher;

that the attribution to Ockham was first asserted in 1812, before which it was attributed vaguely to "the Scholastics";

that the name "Razor" dates from 1852, a translation from the French "Rasoir Des Nominaux" used by Condillac in 1746;

that the modern wording "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" (which Russell puts very accurately into English as "one should not multiply entities beyond necessity") dates from 1639, when it was published by John Ponce of Cork, a commentator on Duns Scotus;

that the writer, Thorburn (1915) thinks that Ockham's distinctive saying (as quoted in his own time) was "Sufficient singularia, et ita tales res universales omnino frustra ponuntur" which gave him the title "The Singular Doctor". My shaky Latin suggests that this is a repudiation of Platonic Forms: "individual things are enough, it is vain to posit universals in addition".

Now it really doesn't matter whether it was Ockham or Scotus or Aristotle or anyone else who stated the principle of parsimony first; it has become revered as a legal maxim and scientific touchstone.

Above all, its value does not derive from authority!

Of course, (whoever's) razor *is* only a heuristic - the simplest explanations are *usually*, but not *always* the right ones. For convenience, we go through life making various assumptions - eg 'When I sit down, my chair will support me.' Now it may be that someone has maliciously sawn through the legs (or simply that the chair is old and rickety). To assume that these are not the case is not a matter of faith. Simply, we don't go changing our razorblades until we find that they're so blunt as to be useless.

The fact that deception is possible is a distraction that has dogged philosophy since Descartes. He argued that since our senses are *sometimes* deceived they are *always* unreliable.

Why did he bother? Any number of explanations, it doesn't matter.

Descartes' problem is put these days in the "brain-in-a-vat" form, as dramatised in The Matrix. Isn't it possible that the reality I see is an elaborate hoax?

Dennett takes this head-on in the beginning of "Consciousness Explained"; the computer needed to maintain such a hoax, even for one victim, would be bigger/more complex than our universe. Of course it's not impossible, but the principle of parsimony says the reality of this universe is more likely than the hoax.

<>

Plantinga is to philosophy what McGonagle is to poetry

The argument simply assumes that truth, beauty and goodness are something "other" than human judgements. But if they are not, then the argument collapses.

A very eloquent discussion.

Do come and join in, then. Don't be afraid!

If I may...

I'm somewhat on Pilgrim's side when he says that tolerance between theists and atheists is essential. The word fundamentalism is always negative, isn't it? In my opinion, "being religious" is mainly about the questions Is there a God? and Is there an Afterlife? Everyone can answer these questions for himself and have a private opinion about them. I can't judge people for having a different point of view as long as they don't try and impose it on me. So, in my life, I only ever discuss religious matters with my closest friends, and sometimes not even with them. Because, with friends, you can idealy be a bit rude and offend them, because you know them. But I don't want to offend anyone, really , for example: I was talking to a girl I went to school with, I know that her best friend died recently, and I can guess that she takes great comfort in the thought of a life after death. Who would want to hurt her (more than she has been hurt already) in telling her about fluffy religion and probability of trancsendental ( spelling?) stuff?
Organised religion on the other hand...Well, is there any organised religion that doesn't want to convert people? I do feel that I wish to convert people to atheism, sometimes, but that would make me as bad as them, wouldn't it?

>>Everyone can answer these questions for himself and have a private opinion about them.

But that's my point. If you can have a private opinion about these, what *can't* you have a private opinion about? Whether the moon is made of green cheese? Whether aliens are sending one messages via the central heating system? The efficacy of alternative measles vaccines? Evolution? The moral necessity of bombing civilians?

The issue is whether there are any valid worldviews other than empirical rationality? It's that that I'm happy to be fundamentalist about - deliberately using the word provocatively, with full awareness of its negative connotations.

That is not to say that Theists can't be perfectly decent, well-meaning intelligent people. I'm prepared to tolerate them - in the same way that Canute was prepared to tolerate the tides. To put it in Theistic language....Love the sinner but regard with a spectrum of emotions somewhere between baffled incredulity and outright revulsion the sin.

I just wrote an answer and my browser closed itself and deleted everything...I hope I can remember all my brilliant arguements

"The issue is whether there are any valid worldviews other than empirical rationality?"

Valid? No, I don't think so. But the areas that I mentioned, "God?", "Afterlife?", and maybe also "Meaning?" are areas where there is no empirical analysis possible. We can think about these things, and in my opinion, if we do so rationally, we will get to the answer "Highly unlikely". But can we be sure? Have you been dead and come back to tell us, Ed? (still, I consider myself atheist and not just agnostic, because I think it's *very* unlikely.)

"...what *can't* you have a private opinion about? Whether the moon is made of green cheese? Whether aliens are sending one messages via the central heating system? The efficacy of alternative measles vaccines? Evolution? The moral necessity of bombing civilians?"

Can I take this step by step?

The moon made of cheese. Hmm, I think you can actually falcify that. Become an astronaut and go there. Or can't you do it as tourist already? I just can't be bothered to do this right now. And so I choose to *believe* in science, as any theist may very well say. It is a trust in scientists that is founded on the confidence that if I made the effort and became a scientist, I would come to the same results. (This is not imperative for all scientists and sciences. I know it can be a problem to blindly trust the guys in white lab-coats.)

Evolution. Can I come back in a couple of decades when I have read some more on the subject? It is a theory, right? It is not proven in every detail, right? That would be a point to annoy critics regardless of their faith. If it can't be proven 100%, then I can understand people who demand that teachers should say to their pupils "it's a theory". The teachers should then continue "But it's *the* theory among scientists" and incourage the kids to do their own research. If I've got this right, and evolution can't be proved, then there is a moment of faith to it where you believe, not believe or be "agnostic" about it. And so it goes in the box "private opinion, to be respected as long as it's not violent i.e. imposed on others or used distructively in some other way".

The moral necessity of bombing civilians. When people take the step into reality and actually bomb civilians, it clearly goes in the box "imposed on others", you can't get clearer than that. But *thinking* about the subject ... Ah, that's difficult. .... No. It's not a private opinion because the subject itself involves other human beings. Evolution, the concept of a creator or a of an afterlife, they don't involve others, they are private. (Repeating: as long as not imposed on others). So I guess that you can't have a private opinion (that is to be respected in all circumstances) about the moral necessity to bomb civilians.

Did I make sense?

OK - let's take 'Afterlife'. If we can be empirically certain that life equates to certain chemical processes within cells, then surely when that activity stops, we can reason that so does life. The person/ soul/ whatever can't carry on because that's also a neurocellular pehenomenon.


And to quote the dearly departed former president of the British Humanist Association (I've just heard her quote on R4)

"If God wanted us to believe in him...he'd exist!"


(I'll get back to this with a fuller answer later)

The idea balance between theism and atheism, like the argument for balance between teaching creationism and evolution, is like my grandson's idea of "a balanced diet": some healthy stuff, some junk.

Loadsa stuff here http://atheism.about.com/