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Okay quick question: Is this basically just Platinga's "Evolutionary Argument" for the existence of God?
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Aug 16, 2015 06:54
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Okay lemme try to break this down. As I understand it, Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument goes something like this: 1) Evolution selects cognitive processes that allow an organism to understand and survive in its environment (the "beliefs" that Effectronica refers to). 2) However, evolution operates blindly: it doesn't care whether those processes (or their resultant beliefs) accurately reflect reality or not: just on whether those processes/beliefs help us to survive. 3) It seems highly unlikely that evolution would direct the development of our cognition towards rational processes that lead to the truth, they just give us belief systems that help us survive. 4) Thus, if we want to say that our reasoning accurately reflects reality (rather than being a blind set of heuristics) an external agent (God) must be appealed to as something that directed our cognitive development accurately. Now here's my way of addressing it: Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument is much like any other basic epistemic argument for God. It just has more window dressing. At its core such epistemic arguments have four basic elements: A) A requirement that human reasoning needs an explanation to "perfect" it. B) A requirement that truly "perfected" human reasoning allows us to accurately understand reality qua reality (reality as it truly is rather than what we think it is). C) An internal deficit in human reasoning (this varies by the argument) that prevents it from "perfecting" itself internally, hence requiring... D) An appeal to an external, suprarational entity that would allow us to "perfect" reason. (usu. God, Faith, etc) Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument is just a much more convoluted version of your standard epistemic argument, in that it tosses in some scientific details into the mix. His approach with element C) is to draw a dichotomy. Either "Human cognitive processes DO accurately reflect true reality (which is what we're looking to prove)" OR "Human cognitive processes DO NOT accurately reflect true reality (which would be a problem for philosophy)." Since evolution works blindly, it is unlikely that evolution alone could allow for the former. Thus we must appeal to an external agent (God, Faith, etc) if we want to have the intellectual right to say that human reason gives us an accurate reflection of reality. There are several problems with this argument. First, this dichotomy just isn't something we need to speculate on. A basic course on human psychology will show you that the human mind did NOT evolve to operate rationally. Rather, it evolved to operate on heuristics: simple mental shortcuts that give us a rough, unoptimized, but workable model of reality that helps us get food, avoid threats, and live long enough to procreate. For example, consider rolling a ball off of a table edge and how it will drop. You have three possible options:  Now if you asked your average schoolkid, the vast majority will say the answer is 1. A sizable number will say the answer is 2. But only the great minority will understand that motion operates along a parabolic curve, most closely represented by 3. This is because our understanding of motion is grounded not on reason, but on simple intuitive processes that we've evolved to deal with relatively simple problems of survival. A college physics course on Newtonian motion therefore isn't about operating from the heuristic-based reasoning we've developed through evolution. It is about developing a higher-order sense of reasoning that trains away natural cognitive processes. Moreover, Newtonian Physics developed only after many millenia of incorrect reasoning and had to be constructed through centuries of experiments and expert thinkers. Here's the thing: if the argument is "God guided the evolution of our minds to percieve reality accurately" then he did a pretty loving lovely job. There are more fundamental problems with the Evolutionary Argument, but this is the most apparent one: that our evolution gave us crappy cognitive processes, and the superior systems of reasoning we've developed were constructed not by natural selection but by thousands of years of painstaking academic work, with a lot of trial and error.
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Aug 16, 2015 21:16
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Effectronica posted:But Plantinga's argument doesn't require that all our beliefs be accurate ones. Furthermore, as a side point, our ability to catch thrown and falling objects indicates that we understand Newtonian physics on an intuitive level, and therefore that our cognition actually works extremely well in this field. In point of fact, Newton's main contributions to physics are about providing a mathematical underpinning to things that were already fairly well-understood (Avicenna and Ibn al-Haytham corrected Aristotle on motion and gravity in the 10th century, though it wasn't until Galileo that a more firm underpinning was established). Actually, motion-detection/reaction and cognitive understanding are two entirely separate faculties. We evolved the former earlier on and the faculty uses non-conscious portions of the brain. The ability to conceptualize it accurately is much harder and required the development of systematic science. I'm quite sure that Plantinga's argument allows for erroneous reasoning, but my point is that our reasoning on more complicated elements would be naturally erroneous if it were not for the systematic development of scientific standards that took place outside of evolution. This would overall debunk the idea of a sort of guided cognitive evolution that you seem to be proposing. Heuristics are essentially comparable to vestigial organs in this kind of creationist argument: they run counter to the hypothetical organized design of a Creator. I mean sure, you could always say "Well this is how the Creator-entity designed it through evolution. Messily, with the ability to develop more complex forms/abilities over a long span of time and a lot of work." But this no longer serves as a proof, it's little more than post-hoc rationalization akin to Theistic Evolutionism. quote:Going back to the main point, this really just leaves the same basic gap between faulty cognition and accurate results, if we accept it. We still need an x-factor, or else to declare that we do not perceive reality all that well. I do not accept that this gap exists whatsoever, because I do not accept the ontology that reason must accurately reflect reality qua reality (or noumenal reality, or however you want to call it). In fact, I would argue the opposite. This is ultimately why Plantinga doesn't impress me: his argument is just a more convoluted attempt bring the question of reason and God back to a pre-Kantian era. The whole paradigm is somewhat archaic.
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Aug 16, 2015 21:51
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Effectronica posted:Plantinga's argument is that our beliefs accurately reflect reality, and therefore that there is an x-factor which ensures that this is the case. For Plantinga, this x-factor is God intervening in evolution to ensure that minds come into existence like his own, but as I said earlier, this could be a natural process that is yet unobserved, or it could be Buddha-nature. Your characterization of it is, literally, backward. Actually I would really like to know exactly what you think is backwards about my summary. Because I think my post pretty faithfully reflects the bolded part of your post here.
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Aug 16, 2015 21:55
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Effectronica posted:This isn't a creationist argument, unless you believe in ephemeral contagions. What exactly do you mean by "reality"? Because you're using this term very very vaguely.
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Aug 16, 2015 21:57
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Effectronica posted:Because Plantinga's argument is the reverse of how you characterized it. It's not "in order for us to say that we perceive reality", it relies on the assumption that we perceive reality accurately to begin with! From that point, then, Plantinga argues for an external factory which is responsible for accurate perceptions. He, personally, would characterize it as such, but it exists independently of him. No. It is only "backwards" in the order that I listed it in, not in terms of the development of the argument. I could just as easily reorder the steps from 4 to 1 and detail the argument as "We perceive reality accurately. But evolution alone does not account for this. Hence, God." Or whatever you like. At best this is just quibbling over minor details, at worst it's meaningless pedantry. quote:I am stating that the phenomenological reality we inhabit is one that can be made to correspond very closely to noumenal reality, in the Kantian definitions of those terms. I believe this because I reject Cartesian demonology and other systems as pointless, and because, like Johnson, I have kicked a rock and experienced pain from doing so. Why exactly, ontologically speaking, would a definition of reason require phenomenological reality to correspond with noumenal reality at all? Why can't a functional definition of reason operate within phenomenological reality on its own? And how, mechanistically speaking, does God (or whatever) bridge the gap between phenomenological reality and noumenal reality?
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Aug 16, 2015 22:23
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Effectronica posted:I'm not offering a definition of reason here. I'm also not saying whether reason requires correspondence. I am saying why I believe that phenomenological reality is generally consistent with noumenal reality, namely that in order for noumenal reality to be meaningful, we either need some form of supernatural process or entity to believe in which deceives us with phenomenology, or which offers a way out of deception, or we must believe that phenomenological reality corresponds closely to it. Okay? I'm not sure what the point of this thread is then, because all that's being said here is that "for something rationally impossible to function there'd need to be something external to reason to allow that to happen." Which I might be able to accept, but I don't see the point since human reason operates quite will without having to appeal to supernatural or suprarational entities. It's basically like saying "If we could eat numbers some mysterious nonrational X must be incorporated to make this to happen." It doesn't really make sense, even if it would be kinda neat. But we operate quite well without having to do the rationally impossible act of eating numbers. Also, I want to know what exactly you mean here: Effectronica posted:Or we can accept that there is a barrier between noumenal and phenomenological reality (between what is really real, and what we can perceive), but this still accepts that the supernatural exists, it just denies that we can ever know anything about it. What EXACTLY do you mean by "supernatural"? Or "exists"? Or that the division between noumenal and phenomenological reality still accepts that "the supernatural exists"? ShadowCatboy fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 22:55
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Effectronica posted:What a little worm you are. I said that what you quoted was off-topic, ancillary. I expressed hope that you would read this and treat it as such. You didn't. Why exactly is that quoted section off-topic? It's pretty much the crux of Plantinga's argument. Hell, I pointed out in my posts that once you strip away all the crap about evolution he's just proposing a standard epistemic argument for God in the vein of pre-Kantian philosophers. "God is the bridge between noumenal and phenomenal reality" isn't window dressing. It's the whole point that you and Plantinga are trying to get to. It's the unspoken central thesis of "Why Evolution Implies the Supernatural." Effectronica posted:I am going to define the supernatural as being that which is outside of the bounds of philosophical naturalism, which I will define as "Semantical games are childish", and that "exists" is defined as "There is no earthly reason why someone would demand to know the definition of this word but for the purposes of jackassery". From this, we can see that, since naturalism can only determine phenomenological reality, noumenal reality must also contain supernatural elements if it is distinct from phenomenological reality. 90% of philosophy is establishing definitions, clarifying definitions, and making sure your definitions are consistent. The rest is just trying to link them together in meaningful ways. How you define terms have profound implications for how those concepts interrelate. If you aren't prepared to define your terms in ways that are as specific and detailed as possible, you probably shouldn't be doing philosophy. And confusion surrounding the term "exists" was why the Ontological Argument was so confusingly abstract and difficult to directly address for like 1000 years. In the words of G.E. Moore: "What EXACTLY do you mean by THAT?" ShadowCatboy fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 23:34
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Effectronica posted:Well, ShadowCatboy, I hope you get help with that obsession with Christianity, but I have specifically stated that I believe that this x-factor is likely to be, like plate tectonics, a natural phenomenon without the necessary science to put it within naturalism's bounds, yet. So you should probably give a reason to substantiate your claim that I am lying. You do realize that the term "God" doesn't always refer to the Judeo-Christian deity, right? It was a pretty standard convention used in modernist philosophy to refer to a particular "ultimate substance" or other entity of great significance in proofs. Sure I could go with "X-Factor" like you seem to prefer, but it's a little too unconventional to me and frankly it sounds a touch silly. So I guess it's my fault for not being a little more explicit, because personally my philosophical background is rooted in theology and the modernist era of philosophy and that's how I operate. But there's still no need to go all explodey-hostile. Also for all your raging about other dudes here describing your argument (or Platinga's or whatevs) as "creationism" we weren't the ones who first drew the comparison: Effectronica posted:Either our senses can't be trusted, or creationism is true but there is no god directing it, or, and this is frankly the most reasonable- the supernatural exists. Something, which is beyond our perceptions and knowledge, is a phenomenon which ensures that our beliefs are more likely to be true than they should be given natural selection. Frankly, "Evolution alone cannot account for X, so you need to include a supernatural entity" is pretty much definitive of Creationism. quote:I am not interested in spending my precious time hashing out the definition of existence with a worm of a man like you. Maybe if you had been less of a prick, I might have considered it before my brain kicked in fully. Your words hurt me deep down inside, where I'm soft like a woman.
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Aug 17, 2015 00:36
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Okay I think we should clarify a few things here, I'll try to keep it super brief but for context I want to go into a little bit of history that is hopefully kinda interesting to people: Aristotelian Baggage Weighs Down Philosophy During the Medieval era and up to the 1500s, academic thought was dominated by an Aristotelian model of the universe, which was locked up with a lot of archaic nonsense: geocentrism, the four-element model of matter, etc. Problem was that Western thought had essentially become fossilized by Aristotelian dogma, and there wasn't that much room for innovation. A lot of it was because the philosophers of the era (much like the classical Greeks and modern Libertarians) put far too much stock in a priori reasoning (from pure function of thought rather than observation or experimentation). Rational thought is important of course, but the products of such logic are only as good as the premises you base them on. That is, until Galileo Galilei came along and started stirring poo poo up. An infamously cheeky bastard, Galileo was apparently kinda resentful of the Aristotelian philosophers who were 1) obviously full of poo poo in his eyes, and 2) paid WAY more than a lowly mathematician like him. His approach was to put much more stock in empirical, a posteriori reasoning. Many of his theories and experiments (or "antics" as the many would've called them) were snubbed by the philosophers of his time, and the fact that he loved to snark his academic rivals didn't help in this regard. For example, when Galileo discovered the "Medician stars," or the moons around the larger planets, many philosophers refused to view them through his telescopes for fear that it was some crazy trickery or witchcraft. When one of these rivals died, Galileo famously quipped that "Well now he can see the Medician stars on his way to heaven since he refused to see them from Earth." Of course, this sass of his eventually got him in trouble with the Catholic Church. The Modernist Revolution & Ensuing Confusion You guys might remember Rene Descartes, the father of Modernist Philosophy. Now Descartes was already a burgeoning academic and was working on a big treatise about physics and whatnot, until he realized "Oh poo poo my work is dangerously similar to the stuff that got that Galileo dude in trouble with the Church," and immediately ran to the printers to stop them from producing his book. So his seminal work, Meditations on the First Philosophy, was a way to kiss some Catholic rear end and reconcile his work with the Faith. The actual thesis of Descartes' Meditations isn't actually all that important here. What was much more significant was his methodology: remember that up until this point academics was still carrying a lot of the baggage from the Aristotelian paradigm. Well, Descartes was trying to clear poo poo like that outta academia, and exerted a very severe form of reductionism: systematically tossing out all of his assumptions about how reality worked and building a new model of philosophy and science from the bottom-up using elementary, unquestionable facts and observations. You'll note that Descartes systematically questions everything that he knows and tries to get to the core of human knowledge. This core turns out to be God in his view, so this was his way of saying "Hey Church dudes I'm a totally good Catholic man, plz don't hurt me when I wanna science." So not only was discarding Aristotelianism the logical thing to do, it was perfectly Godly. This sparked off a revolution in philosophy, and this era of academic thought known as "Modernism" would be typified by Descartes' systematic, almost severe, reductionism to dig down and find the foundations of human knowledge. If you can't prove X, chuck that idea in the bin. You're looking for something unassailable, drat it! Problem was that philosphers who likewise wanted to dig down to the foundations human reason found themselves having to discard some concepts that are pretty fundamental to its operation. Berkeley for example wanted to cut the concept of matter out of the equation (since any attempt to prove matter empirically was circular). And we all know Hume's Problem of Induction, where he ended up having to just shrug his shoulders and say "gently caress it, let's just stick to using it out of Custom." Kantian Idealism This is where Kant comes in to try to fix things. His work is extremely abstract and difficult to understand (largely due to the massive run-ons in Germanic prose), but I'll try to do my best. Unlike other philosophers of the time, Kant wasn't all that interested in establishing a foundation for human reason. Instead, he was more interested in determining how it worked, and his whole shtick was "Look, you can't 'prove' that matter exists. You can't 'prove' that your inductive inferences through time are correct. However, you have to recognize that everything we call 'knowledge' about the world is acquired by interpreting it through things like matter and time. These aren't things you prove. That's just how human knowledge works. Deal with it." Objects and events only make sense to the human mind when organized through the "intuitions" of things like space and time. For Kant, things like matter and induction aren't things to be proved. They are integral functions of the human mind that allows proof to operate in the first place. Thus, for Kant there are two kinds of reality: There's of course Phenomenal Reality, reality as percieved, concieved, and understood by the human mind. Then there's Noumenal Reality, or the reality of "things-in-themselves," the elementary reality unorganized by human sensation or conception. The latter was only ever hypothetical and unknowable, because to "know" something requires we interpret it through the filter of human cognition. In a way it's like looking at an apple and seeing an apple rather than "a disorganized collection of red photons." The apple would be akin to the Phenomena, the "disorganized collection of red photons" would be akin to the Noumena. Not exactly, mind you, but that's the best analogy I can pull out of my rear end right now. Now this revolutionized philosophy and closed the chapter on what Kant saw as the pointless dickery of the Modernist era. However, this was a HUGE problem for theologians at the time since the entire point of theology was to get to the "real ultimate truth of God." Kant basically showed that human knowledge could only ever work within the Phenomenal realm. The Noumenal realm was ultimately untouchable, and hence probably quite pointless to pursue. tl;dr version: 1) Archaic ideas suck. 2) Reductionism/skepticism gets rid of archaic ideas. 3) Reductionism/skepticism among the Modernists takes things a little too far and poo poo gets kinda nonsensical. Gotta reject matter and induction. 4) Kant scales it back a bit. He makes room for matter and induction, and proposes a new theory of human knowledge. 5) Kant's theory ends up dividing reality into two realms, the noumenal and phenomenal. The latter is accessible, the former is not. 6) Theologians lose their poo poo over this and try to fix it. So this is where we are now. Plantinga & Effectronica's whole shtick is to establish a "bridge" between Phenomenal Reality (reality-as-humans-know) and Noumenal Reality (reality-as-it-absolutely-is). This is what the central point is, beneath the fluff and garnish of evolution talk. Me, I think such a bridge is not only unnecessary, it's impossible, so proofs like Plantinga/Effectronica's ultimately fail on a core level. ShadowCatboy fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Aug 17, 2015 |
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Aug 17, 2015 01:50
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HappyHippo posted:I tried to do exactly this and now you're ignoring me. He called me a worm whereas I am obviously a catboy. An atheist catboy who believes there is nyo God. 
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Aug 17, 2015 02:34
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CommieGIR posted:He's already admitted the entire thread is about baiting and trolling. Yeah I saw the post. Regardless, there's definitely something to be said about the category of epistemic arguments for God's existence. Or X-Factor. Or whatever superhero comic he wants to call it. I would just like to reiterate that the Plantinga-style argument fails on a basic level because naturally evolved cognitive heuristics that hinder sound rational inquiry seem to contradict the basic premise of an entity who would guide human cognitive evolution to help us accurately determine truth. This is the more apparent sticking point to me. On a more fundamental level I'd say that the need to connect human knowledge to noumenal reality is a wholly manufactured problem. It's like those commercials for a banana slicer and the first thing to ask yourself is why the hell would I need a banana slicer. I've got perfectly good tools elsewhere.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:44
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Phyzzle posted:There was an Interesting debate in the early analytical philosophy days over whether miracles or the supernatural are contradictory concepts. It really would depend on how you define these terms, specifically. Who What Now posted:I sincerely hope you're ashamed of yourself over this. Mildly.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:51
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HighClassSwankyTime posted:Do you even have the slightest clue? You're throwing around words at random here, chump.  I think you may be a teeny bit confused here. Scroll down a bit to get to Kant's Phenomenal VS Noumenal reality. HighClassSwankyTime posted:Cartesian demonology? Did Descartes study demons? Awesome. P sure he's referring to the part in Descartes' Meditations where Descartes speculates on the possibility of a malevolent being messing with A Priori reasoning, thereby rendering it potentially unsound. It's part of his deconstructive skeptical method.
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Aug 17, 2015 14:16
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HighClassSwankyTime posted:Ah, thank you for the informative post. Did Descartes imply with 'malevolent being' the devil or demons? I don't mean to play down the huge importance of his philosophy, just asking. (Most of my understanding of Descartes comes from John Cottingham's Cartesian Reflections.) Not that I recall, no. In truth that doesn't really matter. Descartes just generally speculates several possible ways his faculties of reason could be compromised, and hence not perfectly reliable. Up until Kant philosophy was all about getting to absolute or ultimate truths, or finding ways to root human understanding in more absolute terms. Kant forced philosophers to face up to the fact that human knowledge by its very nature conceptualizes reality in certain terms (a class of which would be known as the "synthetic a priori"), and so questions that extend beyond the phenomenal are kinda meaningless. Post-Kantian philosophers therefore were more about clarifying basic concepts of language and meaning rather than making grandiose claims about existence.
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Aug 17, 2015 15:04
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blowfish posted:Effectronica also does not understand that selection for a "good enough" in this case would be expected to produce a result between "random number generator" and "perfection". I'm pretty sure he understands this. His main qualm is that "good enough" just isn't good enough. For him, a proper theory of knowledge would produce models that have the assurance of lining up with "perfection." Because such a system is highly unlikely to be produced by evolution alone, Effectronica feels that you need to include something else (he refers to it as an "X-Factor," while I just settle for the more traditional term "God") to explain it. Me, I think it's bullshit on both a high level and a low level. On the high level, this idea of "an entity guided the evolution of human cognition towards sound rational processes" is pretty unsound if you take into account the existence of heuristics, which show what a poo poo job that this entity did. It's about as sound a statement as "an entity guided the evolution of the human body to be so complex and well-designed." When you take into account vestigial structures and the design flaws of the human eye, this entity sounds a lot less impressive and the human body seems much more to be the result of natural processes. On a low level, I simply outright reject the root premise that a theory of knowledge must produce models that line up with a perfect understanding of the world. (P.S. I am not a postmodernist)
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Aug 17, 2015 15:27
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waitwhatno posted:I guess I'm just shocked by how completely ridiculous the main premise is. It's based on nothing but a misunderstanding of the evolutionary process and a lack of high-school-level probability theory knowledge. But I guess it's not unique to philosophy, for every thread like this there is probably some biology professor somewhere denying quantum mechanics and a physics professor denying epigenetics. I think you might be looking for flaws in the wrong places. Philosophy doesn't operate at the "high level" of reasoning (if you're a programmer, think coding language). It operates at the "low level" of trying to delve into more fundamental truths about knowledge and reality (think machine code). In truth, talking about things like the in-depth details of evolution and probability theory can only ever scrape the surface of Plantinga's/Effectronica's arguments. If you really want to address it you gotta dig deep and address either the premises or format of their argument. For example, consider a standard First Cause Argument: 1. Everything that exists has a cause. 2. The universe exists. 3. Therefore, the universe had a cause (which we shall call "God*") 4. Therefore, God* exists. *This does not necessarily mean "The Judeo-Christian God." The term is just a Medieval/Modernist convention for describing ultimate entities or substances. Now a scientist would argue from high-level research. They'd talk about the big bang, background radiation, redshifting, etc. All of this would indeed posit a natural explanation for the origins of the universe. And all of this is perfectly consistent with the First Cause Argument and would do nothing to debunk it, since the natural sciences would reach a point where an answer was unknown or even outright impossible. You can't address anything before the Planck epoch, for example. This is where there's room for the First Cause Argument to squeeze in. A philosopher on the other hand would point out more fundamental flaws in this argument: *The argument is internally contradictory (the conclusion of an "uncaused God" contradicts the premise that "everything that exists has a cause") *You didn't support premise 1. Where did that come from? *Suppose you make "God" consistent with 1, something would have created God (God-2), and something would've created that entity (God-3). You'd have an infinite series of Gods. Are you ok with this conclusion? *What's wrong with having an infinite chain of natural causes? Or a self-caused universe? *God of Gaps, bro. *etc. Fact is, philosophers and scientists use the same techniques of rational thinking. It's just that philosophers take it a step further and will seek to explain more fundamental phenomena that scientists take for granted.
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Aug 18, 2015 15:59
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Ytlaya posted:While I understand what you're saying, pointing out Effectronica's fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works actually does attack one of his core premises directly (the thing about beliefs being passed down and also the assumption"simplification"that they're passed down independently). It's not quite the same as the example you gave regarding the First Cause argument, since the hypothetical scientist in that example wasn't addressing/debunking any of the core points of the logic. Well, it is true that there have been a couple instances where theological arguments have been obviated by scientific research. Another prime example would be how the Teleological Argument (God as a designer to explain the complexity of life) being obviated by evolutionary biology. However, theology is quite robust, and these arguments have been reformulated to account for scientific discoveries by expanding to more abstract levels. This is mostly done by expanding the argument to more broad, abstract levels. For example, the First Cause Argument is the most basic of a class of what's called the Cosmological Arguments which seek to prove God by examining the origin of existence. The broadest and most abstract form would be the Contingency Argument (and I'm reciting this from memory so I could be getting the details wrong): 1. All things are either necessary or unnecessary. 2. Existence is not necessary ("Why existence rather than nonexistence?"). 3. Therefore, something must ensure existence (God). 4. Therefore, God Exists. Note that it's a very similar format to the First Cause Argument, but on a more abstract level. If you really want to cut off these arguments at the root, you'll need to rely on philosophy rather than science. Smudgie Buggler posted:You really mean this? There's an assertion about how philosophy is done, another about what it is, and an exceptionally flawed analogy tying them together, all in one neat little package. What do you find so objectionable about that post?
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Aug 18, 2015 21:22
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Ytlaya posted:I think I've seen this before, and I find it really bizarre. It seems like Step 3 doesn't have anything to support it (why can't unnecessary things still exist without their existence being "ensured"). I'm also not quite entirely what "necessary" means in this context; it seems like it just means "a thing which does not need its existence to be ensured." As I understand it, necessary truths are ones that are true by necessity and cannot have possibly been false (generally a priori). "My parents had a child" is a necessary truth, entirely because "parents" are by definition people who had a child. Contingent truths are ones that could have been false. For example, "My parents had a son (me)" is a contingent truth, because in another time and place I might've been born a girl, or simply not been born at all. Thus, my existence as a son is only comprehensible through an external, uncomfortable-to-think-about explanation. The Contingency Argument is arguing that the universe's existence is a contingent truth, and hence requires an external explanation rooted around a "necessary being," which they would call God. blowfish posted:now this argument at least has enough thought behind it to not immediately point and laugh The weak anthropic principle never really impressed me when it comes to these sorts of cosmological arguments. Certain forms of it are useful to debunk certain teleological arguments. But when it comes to cosmology it's a trivial fact that doesn't really address the Contingency Argument at all. I'll have to mull over your second point. Suffice it to say there are better ways to deal with the Contingency Argument. I'll get to them later, since I'm still at work.
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Aug 19, 2015 21:24
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waitwhatno posted:All of this poo poo goes completely over my head, I guess I'm too sober for philosophy. Well it's important to note that when we commonly encounter organized events of very low probability, we generally infer that these must have been the result of design. For example, it would be very difficult to explain the structure of Stonehenge with appeals to normal geological or weathering forces. Creationist arguments simply try to apply this logic to life itself. I must emphasize "try," of course. So yes, a lot of Creationist arguments these days hinge on probabilistic claims. You see this mostly in the Intelligent Design camp, since they specialize in more technical and less obviously stupid arguments. The second argument you propose here is similar to the Fine Tuning Argument, which goes like this: 1. Consider the laws and constants of the universe and all the possible alternate values they could have taken. 2. The vast, vast majority of other alternatives would make life in our universe impossible. (For example, if the strong nuclear force were just a hair stronger, hydrogen would fuse into other weird conformations instead of helium. Stellar dynamics would be drastically altered, and it would be impossible for human life to evolve). 3. Therefore, our universe must've been designed by some being (God). 4. Therefore, God exists. Now, how might you try to debunk this?
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Aug 20, 2015 01:14
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Traditionally such theological arguments were trying to address phenomena that couldn't (at the time) be explained by natural reasoning. Of course, these arguments were written in the Medieval era when scholars believed in monsters that would spray flaming poop at you and that horses were impregnated by the wind, so natural explanations escaped them more easily. This doesn't mean that such arguments were unassailable of course: David Hume of the 18th century did a great job at addressing Paley's Teleological Argument (aka the "Watchmaker Argument") even though at the time the complexity of life had an explanatory gap that God could be squeezed into. It wasn't until the development of the Theory of Evolution that it was more or less rendered obsolete. These days theological arguments are formulated in an abstract enough way such that science actually can't address them directly, or would have an incredibly hard time addressing them, so it's up to philosophy to do so. For example, if anyone knows Ken Miller they'll recognize him as a pretty famous Catholic biologist who studies evolution, and he's written several fantastic books defending evolutionary biology from creationists. In fact, I think he even testified at the Dover Intelligent Design trial. Now in his book, Finding Darwin's God, he laid out a set of fantastic rebuttals of Intelligent Design. Problem is, his very last chapter involves a defense of theism that left me mildly disappointed. It's not that surprising since Miller is a devout Catholic, but in that chapter he supported the Fine Tuning Argument, essentially kicking the question of God's existence out of biology and into the realm of astrophysics and cosmology. After doing so well in showing that it's dangerous to try to use science to prove God's existence, he ended up kinda skirting the edge of doing just that. Grogquock posted:Without reference to the weak anthropic principle to explain away the probability issue, one flaw with this argument is that is simply shifts the "probability measurement" to something that by definition doesn't have to be or can't be explained. Why is the existence of a being that defies all known physics and exists above/beyond them more probable than any other explanation? It falsely seems more probable because we don't understand and can't understand anything about that being. I hate to get into the who created the creator argument, but a logic that relies on "complex/unlikely things must be created" only goes anywhere by ignoring that fundamental argument when applied to the creator. If it doesn't it's turtles all the way down. I suspect that a theologian would counterargue in the following way: "Why SHOULDN'T the laws & constants of the universe being what they are require an explanation?" "If you think that the laws of the universe can't be explained through natural causes, then all that's left is a supernatural explanation (God)." "The premises of the Fine Tuning Argument don't claim that 'complex/unlikely things must be created,' so there's no internal contradiction." And yeah, I similarly don't like the Anthropic Principles as rebuttals: Weaker forms ("life still might evolve in many of those weird realities you describe, just different forms! You can't determine the probability of it!") tend to bank on human ignorance rather than facts to rebut things and at best leaves us agnostic on the ability to answer the question. Stronger forms ("we might live in one of many possible multiverses") are much too speculative. That being said, here's my preferred way of addressing the FTA. By pointing out that the premise "we live in a universe perfectly tuned for the development of life" is entirely arbitrary. quote:Though I know this wasn't meant to be true example, Stonehenge is of course not explained with geological forces because it is more easily explained with known human phenomena supported by extensive supporting evidence. We don't need to use the existence of Stonehenge to prove humans exist. If anything the intelligent design argument more parallels the crazies who believe that Stonehenge and the pyramids were built by aliens, which simply requires more and even less probable events to have occurred. If on the other hand if we find a Stonehenge on Mars and there was absolutely zero other evidence to support that it was designed (beyond than its mere existence) you would certainly see attempts to explain it by known natural phenomena. The example of stonehenge isn't to prove that "humans exist." It's to point out that it's a form of structure and order that isn't natural, and hence is indicative of design by intelligent beings. Traditional teleological arguments (like Paley's Watchmaker Argument) make the mistake of thinking "order/complexity == design." In truth, nature can produce very ordered things, like this pattern produced by repeated freeze/thaw cycles:  The way we determine whether or not something is the result of design is partly from previous experience with designed things (a person who knows that watches are made by watchmakers will recognize that where there is a watch, there was a watchmaker). Yet design is also inferred in contradistinction to nature. If there is no natural explanation readily available to explain something anomalous, it is logical to infer that there was an intelligence behind it. We do this all the time with criminal cases: anomalies in the evidence are what distinguish a tragic accident from a planned murder, for example. If we find a Stonehenge on Mars I'm sure we'd want to try to find a natural explanation, but it seems to me that we'd have to rather quickly start considering an intelligent force behind it being there.
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Aug 20, 2015 04:05
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Potential BFF posted:It'd be weirder if we existed in a universe that we couldn't exist in. That's p much the teleological arguments in a nutshell. Also, here's a little theology tree I made for the purposes of organizing stuff. Theological arguments about the existence of God can probably be best classified in the following manner:  I probably should add epistemic arguments like the OP's to the Nonempirical category, though it also has similarities to the Argument from Faith. Kinda makes me wish I was still in school so I could start another class on the philosophy of religion. Or hell maybe I could do a youtube series or something I dunno.
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Aug 21, 2015 07:33
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Spatula City posted:Wow, this thread is incredible. I'm going to assume Effectronica isn't trolling, he's just really bad at argument, and makes up for it by repeatedly insulting people while simultaneously demanding to be treated with respect. People have capably pointed out many basic problems with his ideas, but here's a big one: social psychology research suggests beliefs are only sometimes causes of actions, and as often as not actions shape beliefs. This doesn't seem intuitive, because we are biased towards thinking we're rational actors who operate based on principle. This has definitely been the consistent theme throughout this thread: addressing the teleological aspects of Plantinga's argument (that there was some rational actor behind the evolution of human cognition to help ensure that what humans believe to be true is, in fact, absolutely true). Natural cognition is pretty lovely at determining facts about reality, so what does that say about an entity that supposedly "guided" human evolution when it comes to the development of reason? Given how messy natural human reason is and how hard we have to work to transcend it, why would we even assume that it was "designed" or "guided" in the first place? On a more basic level, the idea that human truth must be absolute is kind of a manufactured problem. quote:Also, I love your posts on theological arguments, ShadowCatboy. Thanks! This is precisely why I joined SA so many years ago in fact: to engage in the intelligent conversation on philosophy and theology so prevalent here in D&D. Shame all the Creationists and such ran off and we only have the rare Effectronica and Kyrie eleison.
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Aug 22, 2015 10:38
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