A Theologian Objects to the Courtier's Reply Charge against Theology

The author of Is God a Delusion?: A Response to Religion's Cultured Despisers argues that theology is "substantial," and it's irresponsible to ignore it on any question about god. This is in response to PZ Myers' argument, popularly known as the Courtier's Reply in homage to the Hans Christian Andersen story The Emperor's New Clothes, that theology is basically apologetic for the existence of something atheists have rejected on empirical grounds. In a post on Myers' website today, he says the point of the Courtier's Reply is not to excuse inaction on the part of atheists (in the form of refusing to pay heed to theology) but to demand more from theologists on the central point of disagreement: making a case for the existence of god. Myers' point is that the theology scholars like Reitan want atheists to attend to presupposes God's existence, which is why it makes no sense for atheists to give it any more thought than the boy in Andersen's story would give to a courtier's arcane discussions of the Emperor's taste in fashion: First explain why you think what seems to be nothing is in fact elegant couture, then we'll talk about how it reflects the Emperor's taste.

Here is Reitan's reply.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/2688/can_atheists_simply_ignore_theology

Can Atheists Simply Ignore Theology?

Only if they’re seeking a formula for intellectual irresponsibility.

By Eric Reitan

...

But belief in God isn’t primarily a belief about the contents of the empirical world. It is, rather, a certain holistic interpretation of our experience, one that offers an account of the meaning and significance of the empirical world and the lives we lead within it. To believe in God is to understand the world of ordinary experience in terms of an interpretive worldview that posits the existence of “something more.”

In this respect, belief in God is more like belief in metaphysical naturalism—by which I mean the doctrine that the empirical world exhausts what is real. Whether or not there is more to reality than meets the empirical eye isn’t a question we can answer through empirical investigation, the way that we can answer whether the poor emperor’s fruits are hanging free.

So how do we address this kind of question? The answer, I think, is that we have to “try on” alternative interpretations to see which offers the best fit with the whole of human experience—not merely with what we experience through our senses, but also with the broader and ultimately more important dimensions of our lived experience, including our moral and aesthetic experience and our sense of the numinous. Is a naturalistic worldview, one which explains away these latter features of our lives (or at least the last), ultimately a better fit with the whole of human experience than some alternative which posits a transcendent element of one kind or another?

How can we even begin to answer such a question without seriously “trying on” the alternatives? In its broadest terms, theology is the intellectual project of developing and exploring a range of alternative worldviews that all have something in common—namely, they include belief in a transcendent reality that is in some way both fundamental and good. As such, theology falls within a much broader intellectual project, one that develops and explores not only theistic worldviews, but other worldviews as well, such as the naturalistic one endorsed by Dawkins, Myers, and Sanderson.

...

It seems to touch on my own position: I think the valid position is to be genuinely as close to 50:50 as you can get. THERE, the truth speaks as clearly as is possible for humans to apprehend. To tilt in favor of one proposition over the other on this question, "closes the doors of perception" (Thank you William James).

Back later. Thanks for posting

:hi:

between what and what? And when the truth speaks to you, what voice does it use?

"And when the truth speaks to you, what voice does it use?"

hearing God is like listening to the cry of a sparrow in a whirlwind. Thats what I try to hear. As Bob Marley said, "The power of philosophy floats through my head / light like a feather and heavy as lead." Thats a nice way of putting it. Truth is the simplest of concepts, perhaps the most simple, but we make it into something so complicated.

What do you hear? Im not being facetious, I hate talking over the internet sometimes. But then again, w/o DU we wouldnt be having this discussion :)

is that the truth doesn't "speak to me," nor do I believe it speaks to anyone. That particular question was somewhat...rhetorical.

I'll admit that the metaphorical sparrow you've referred to here is much like the "still, small voice" that I was always taught was there as a child. The problem is that I never heard it. I imagined it once or twice, but I never really heard it. And THAT'S the thing. THAT'S really the point I was making:

If the truth is like a sparrow calling in the whirlwind, or the still, small voice in the back of your mind, then it seems incredibly difficult to discern this truth from simple imagination. I suspect that, for most people, the answer to the question what voice does it use? is "my own, as always."

...as the center of the then-relatively-small known universe, sensible folk would have decided that the Sun, Earth, and all of the planets all orbited some point midway between the Earth and the Sun, right? :)

Splitting the difference in all disputes is more a diplomatic measure to avoid ruffling feathers than a consistently reliable way to reach, or remain open to, truth.

...is FANTASY AND DOGMA.

In fact religion would prefer if one did close the door of perception altogether and ignore reality as much as possible.


- Seeing how it's long-term viability rests upon people who are willing to ignore the truth....

on this topic, and your comments on the downthread responses.

Reiten pulls out the same lame theological "arguments" we've all heard for years, with every single one of them REQUIRING a special dispensation that allows religious "explanations" to ignore the normal rules not only of FACT and EVIDENCE, but of consistency within a philosophical argument.

It's tiring. I wonder how Myers has the energy to swat down these flies. Perhaps it's easy for him, so there's no real effort involved. I imagine he has the same experience when he deals with his freshman college students showing up for the first day of class full of certainty about how the world operates.

There is no such thing as 'substantial theology' or 'substantial theologians': there is no substance, or possibility of substance, to the business they traffic in.

If I may presume to speak for atheists in general, I would say that what many atheists would say is that the empirical world exhausts what anyone can authoritatively claim is real.

All Reitan is doing here is giving us a dressed-up version of the old straw man atheist who lacks all imagination, who stubbornly refuses to believe anything he can't see with his own eyes, who refuses to believe that there can ever be much of anything that exists beyond the current limits of science, etc.


"'Trying on' the alternatives" is a big part of what the scientific method (the approach atheists such as myself favor) is all about.

When you "try on" an alternative, however, you need a metric for success, and you need to connect the claims you make about what you're trying on with the end results you achieve. If I "try on" being Wiccan or Seventh Day Adventist and find out that I feel great living out those beliefs, I'm filled with love and purpose and a sense of community, etc., that "success" is merely the success of finding out which thoughts, ideas, and rituals make me happy, it's not a measure of any greater truth about those ideas.

My favorite example of this is telling a small child to do his homework or else Santa won't bring him Christmas presents. The child does his homework and gets great presents, believing he has been rewarded by Santa Claus for his efforts. His desire to please Santa is "successful" in a sense, but that success hasn't got a thing to do with whether Santa Claus is real or not.

Well said.

:toast:

It gave me a new quote for my sig line. :)

This line leapt out at me from the comments, by a person calling him or herself Ibis3:

"This planet was created by an impressive and incomprehensible being and he's waiting by the phone to hear how fantastic we think he is."

...has rec/unrec links, where they are, and how one goes about clicking on them.

It's what PZ Myers refers to as the arguments *from* theologians against "the New Atheism," and in particular in response to Dawkins' The God Delusion. I'm sure most atheists know this, but I think anyone who didn't know what it was might be understandably confused by my introduction to this thread. It's not something atheists do, it's something PZ Myers noticed theologians in particular doing, i.e., condemning Dawkins and other atheists for being ignorant sluts about theology.

I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor's raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.

Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.

Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed — how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry — but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form.

Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

PZ practices making fun of people in an effort to provide excuses not to take anything they say seriously. One could not say to PZ (for example) that the metaphorical reading of angels, in the second volume of Wink's "Powers" trilogy, is very interesting and informative -- because PZ has a pre-crafted dismissal of any such comment: it is the Courtier's reply! it is the expected "exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship"!

This means, of course, that no productive dialog is possible there

Ernst Bloch, on the other hand, although an atheist, suspects texts like the Bible actually discuss matters of some real human concern. He then sets out to read the Bible seriously -- and in the course of doing that makes various cogent and illuminating comments. It seems very unlikely that he could ever have been dissuaded of his atheism, by reading the texts in the fashion in which he read them, but perhaps that point is of only minor important

There is a difference here. One could not ask PZ for a view of Albert Schweitzer's theology, because PZ is not interested in "the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics." Bloch, on the other hand, read Schweitzer, told us what he thought was good there, and criticized Schweitzer from Bloch's perspective: one can actually learn something from that

In your opening paragraph you object to the characterization of the Courtier's Reply, and then you follow that with a classic example of the Courtier's Reply while acting as if it somehow backs your objection.

Laughable...

and PZ covers up his laziness by making fun of people who believe things he doesn't believe, while Ernst worked quite hard to reinterpret statements, that he didn't literally believe, as comments about real things that interested him much. In this sense, Ernst was a genuine humanist, with a genuine interest in human experience and psychology, compared to PZ, who merely mocks others, in a rather sad and sour way"

considering that you said that nowhere before? Also, how do you not see that this objection is nothing more than your verbose version of the Courtier's Reply itself?

I borrow the term "Tooth Fairy science" from Dr. Harriet Hall (http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=44); essentially, "Tooth Fairy science" is the practice of engaging in lengthy speculation, and possibly even actual research, into whether the method of wrapping teeth (e.g. Kleenex vs. Ziploc baggie) affects how much money the Tooth Fairy leaves, or how many teeth the subject has already placed under the pillow (is this the first tooth or the twelfth?), the material the bedsheets are made of, etc. etc. But the problem is that none of the output matters in the slightest, because it has not been established in the first place that the Tooth Fairy actually exists. The entire "science" is based on the presupposition of an unproven premise, to wit the purported existence of the Tooth Fairy.

And that's the point of Myers' characterization of the "Courtier's Reply" (and why it's caught on as a meme): any discussion on the nature of theistic religion, or any religion that presupposes the existence of a supernatural entity, is so much pissing in the wind as long as there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that the supernatural entity in question even exists in the first place.

The "rebuttals" to Dawkins' God Delusion and similar books may be characterized, transposed to the context of Tooth Fairy science, as "how can you question the existence of the Tooth Fairy when we have all this data about how much money she leaves under which circumstances?" to which Myers' response is "your data is of no interest unless and until you at least provide some evidence that it's not the kid's parents sneaking into the room and leaving the money."

and gaining attention for himself, since as far as I can tell the Catholics do not make scientific claims for communion: they speak of salvation of the soul and similar concepts which essentially are non-scientific, but I think they do not make claims that admit laboratory testing. Since PZ is presumably bright enough to know that, and also presumably a good enough scientist to know that a real scientific experiment typically does not mean simply smashing something, we can conclude that PZ was not actually doing anything scientific when defacing communion wafers, that he knew he was not doing anything scientific, and that he was engaged in some adolescent prevarication if he portrayed such an act as scientific

The point of PZ's sneering little "Courier's reply," of course, is that it saves him, and others of like mind, such as yourself, the trouble of trying to understand what various other people are saying: one can simply throw out a phrase like "tooth fairy science," and if anyone responds that such a dismissal completely misrepresents large groups of texts, the response can be dismissed as "Courier's reply." I consider the approach dishonest, lazy, and somewhat stupid

It's not that we misunderstand you, it's that we won't swallow your premise hook, line, and sinker.

And Catholics DO make claims about the Host that are scientifically testable, but over the years they have vacillated on the concept of transubstantiation as microscopes and other testing apparatuses have become more advanced. (It's a familiar dance, actually...)

ETA: Host Desecration is a victimless crime. It's just too bad so many people died before that started to be realized.

Doesn't it still do that? Is that not a claim that can be tested by science--never mind what PZ did with them? If the claim is that the wafer only represents the body of Christ, that, of course, can't be tested.

Catholic doctrine is that the wine and host transform into the ACTUAL, physical body and blood of Christ; they are not merely symbolic in RCC communion, as they are in less looney religious traditions. That you would presume to comment on the issue without knowing that is mind-boggling (but very typical of you). And those ARE claims about physical reality than can be tested by science (or anyone with a wheat gluten allergy that tries to take communion).

Despite your sneering, the Catholic doctrine does not appear to be that the gluten in a wafer suddenly ceases to pose a threat to persons intolerant of gluten

What you're claiming is that the Catholic church doesn't maintain its long-held position on transubstantiation? Maybe that's why Popes keep apologizing for all the religious violence notions like that caused?

Pope Ratz, back when he was but a mere cardinal, confirmed this. It resulted in a young girl with celiac disease being unable to take her first Eucharist. A few Catholics engaged in a bit of hand-wringing, but as usual, after quietly muttering a few words about their displeasure, they continued to accept the archane rulings of their hierarchy.

a certain accommodation for gluten intolerance, the final bottom line since ancient times being that a right desire to take communion constitutes communion, if physical consumption is not possible

And as such, it deserves nothing more than to be sneered at. If you weren't just pulling things out of your ass and bothered to consult any of a multitude of sources (cutting and pasting is your forte, after all) you'd find that Catholic doctrine is that there IS NO gluten left after transsubstantiation, because it physically, chemically isn't bread any more. It is exactly that simple.

If you're going to post with such intellectual presumption, you might at least try to be right once in a while.

and your deep scientific commitment to disproving the Real Presence in consecrated bread and wine

I confess that my poor small mind does not see how either commitment to Reason, or the Very Foundations of Modern Scientific Thought, are threatened in any way by a belief in the Real Presence, but of course I understand that in your view that merely shows I am neither the Great Expert on Roman Theology, that you are, nor the Great Scientific Thinker, that you are

including your own intellectual dishonesty. But I'm not a bit surprised that you can't understand how maintaining a belief in that which is demonstrably untrue does not violate the fundamental precepts of reason. Nor that you really suck at sarcasm.

And if you'd like to link to an "authority" on Catholic doctrine that contradicts me, feel free. But we both know you can't, don't we? Best to cut your losses here and try to bamboozle people on another thread where you haven't dug yourself such a deep hole of stupid.

who have views somewhat different than yours?

not your own facts. And yes, the dissemination and promotion of blatant falsehoods DOES have a damaging effect on society (or weren't you paying attention during the Bush administration), so please stop trying to paint yourself as the poor victim here. You tried to base your argument on something patently untrue and you got called on it, so why don't you just admit you were wrong and move on?

Still waiting for that link to your version of Catholic doctrine, btw. Do you have it or not? My guess is that you'll duck the request again (as your ilk are wont to do).

They aren't even someone else's views and nobody asked you to explain them, now did they? All you have to do is link to a site that shows Catholic doctrine is something other than that the bread and wine become the true body and blood of Christ during transubstantiation.

It's easy...I'll show you. Here's what the United Methodist Church believes (no explanation necessary, at least not for most):

"The bread and wine represent the living presence of Christ among us—though we do not claim, as some denominations do, that they become Christ’s body and blood."

http://www.umc.org/site/c.lwL4KnN1LtH/b.2247711/k.C611/Communion_Overview.htm

Now you do it for the RCC...or else go away...please.

except some rightwing fundamentalists and others who operate in a similar mindset

The issue, that you pretend to want to discuss, is of practical interest to a very small subset of those who want to take Catholic communion, and they are perfectly able to discuss the various practical and theological issues (as seen by the Catholic church) with their local religious leaders

I do not find the Catholic view threatening modern science or medicine, but any detailed "discussion" with you on the subject will run along predictable and uninformative rhetorical lines

So it would be entirely inappropriate for me, as a non-Catholic, who agrees the Catholics on some points and disagrees on others, to attempt to explain the Catholic view for you in any detail, either in my own words or by pointing to websites, especially as you have no practical interest here but merely intend to ridicule them, a mean-spirited and intellectually silly project

I do expect, of course, that I better able to determine whether a view is mine, or someone else's, than you are able to determine whether the view is mine, or someone else's -- and you, of course, know that and would accept it if you were interested in any ordinary civil discussion: but since your interests are mockery, you cannot acknowledge that in your rhetoric, and so sneer when I say say certain views are someone else's

You just never get tired of it do you? Please tell me you didn't spend all afternoon dreaming up another response that completely avoids the point.

that I fancied myself a great gadfly, I practiced pain-in-the-assedness with substantially more intellectual rigor, originality, and wit than you are mustering now -- though I will concede the possibility of variant opinions on that topic, since we all consider our own obnoxiousness infinitely more brilliant and delightful than the obnoxiousness of others

PZ imagines himself a great iconoclast for smashing communion wafers, but from an adult POV such activities suggest some unresolved issues from puberty, since the project closely resembles a thirteen year old's tantrum. I suppose you imagine that you are taking his project to a higher level, but I think you actually make little or no progress in that regard

Don't forget how this subthread started. In the midst of trying to dismiss PZ with your own version of the Courtier's Reply in #103, YOU were the one who brought up specific Catholic dogma. Then in subsequent posts you even tried to defend and explain it. Now, after being schooled on such dogma and challenged to back up your claims, you're tying to say you shouldn't have to back those views because you don't personally hold them. How weak of an argument is that? If you didn't want to discuss, research, or otherwise delve into the topic of Catholic dogma then why the fuck did you bring it up to begin with?

Oh, I remember, you were grasping at straws trying to find a way to attack PZ's character so you don't have to answer his points or any that spawn from them. The only thing more pathetic than that line of attack is your apparent exit strategy. Do you seriously think that telling SkepticScott he's an amateur pain in the ass is going to do anything but make you look like a sore loser?

Let's not go back and look at actual history, OK? Wouldn't want to get anyone even more flustered than he already is.

you resort to trying to drown the thread?

The "Courtier's Reply" (note: courtier, as in "one who attends the court of a monarch") was coined specifically in response to critiques of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. The cardinal (no pun intended) point of these critiques came down to that Dawkins is insufficiently versed in the finer points of theology to be able to deliver an informed opinion concerning theistic religion. But this argument is a red herring for the very simple reason that theology fails to provide any evidence for its fundamental premise, namely that God exists in the first place. Or, to paraphrase Myers' analogy, "I don't need to know the difference between a gusset, a Godet, and a gathering to point out the Emperor is naked" (it occurs to me Myers might as readily have titled it "the Couturier's Reply").

There's nothing dishonest or stupid in pointing out that the existence of lengthy speculation about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin does not constitute evidence of the existence of angels as such.

:applause:

...they've historically "http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=214&topic_id=248662&mesg_id=248744">personified the argument." Making and directing their venom against a person rather than try to make it against the rationality and the logic of the speaker's argument(s). And the so-called "theologian" ranks among the world's best and most prolific STRAW-MAN builders.


- It's the cheapest of shots, and also the most telling. Because it verifies the TOTAL BANKRUPTCY of the religious argument. A position whose foundation is first built upon FEAR and the remainder upon air and BS......

- I do, whenever I possible. Because religion IS FANTASY. It's not intended for RATIONAL MODERN people, but only for those prepared to ignore the TRUTH.......

field of objective (as opposed to personal and subjective) inquiry advances in knowedge and understanding over time. Theology fails utterly in that regard, and can be dismissed as something to be taken seriously for that reason alone.

When asked to describe what we know as a result of theology that we didn't know 20 or 50 or 100 years ago, all theologians and their apologists (who know who they are here) can do is babble incoherently about how theology doesn't work that way. IOW, more special pleading, and declarations that the rules of critical thought should be suspended when dealing with religion.

- Theology = Crappola

You can, of course, take that view if you choose: what it means, however, is that you have simply decided no conversation is possible between you and various other people on certain topics

Sometimes a more interesting response, to views that one personally does not hold, is to attempt to see if the terms used in the discussion can be understood in other ways and if such a reinterpretation enables one to make some different useful sense of what the other person says: but this approach is not for the lazy

At some point after failing to get a substatial response for about the 50th time you ask someone to back up their position and their claims, you get annoyed and dismissive and see no further reason to expend intellectual energy on them. I'm sure you're familiar with that..

The Montreal Gazette - Jul 17, 1976
Milan Machovec is a Marxist philosopher living in Prague ... He is also an atheist and, in the words of an American theologian from Princeton Theological Seminary, "more of a believer than many a New testament scholar in the Christian fold." His book Jesus for atheists displays both characteristics, not in contradiction but in creative tension ...
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19760717&id=ZDcjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=naEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1004,771946

You seem to want an intellectual "answer" -- but perhaps the real tasks-at-hand are rather different from "providing intellectual answers." If one asks a question, and the response is, "Well, that is the wrong question; here is a partial answer to a different question that maybe you should have asked instead," I suppose one can be annoyed that the original question was not answered -- but if everyone knew the original question was not really answerable, or if it were entirely unclear whether one could really do anything with an answer to the original question, then perhaps one might want to reconsider what partial answers might be given to other questions instead

"Well, that is the wrong question; here is a partial answer to a different question that maybe you should have asked instead", what that usually means is "If I answered your question honestly, it would completely undermine my argument, and if I answered it dishonestly, it would be obvious that I'm a fool, so I'm just going to tap dance around your question with some intellectual-sounding, content-free bullshit."

But of course, you know this as well as anyone on the board.

Some questions may be more productive than others, but to divide them into yes/no or black/white is just nonsensical.

And how exactly would you classify the question of what objective knowledge the alleged field of inquiry known as theology has led to in the last 100 years?

It could mean quantifying a quality, which on its face might seem a ridiculous thing to try to do with 'god,' considering what a vaporous idea god is of itself. I think, though, that if you posit that god is really something, then it must have some quality that can be measured. What people believe is not a physical thing, but we're able to measure it based on what they say they believe. We can quantify the commonness of belief in god by comparing what people say they believe to the beliefs of a whole population. Some theists believe that the prevalence of belief in god among people is a measure of something about the divine, though I think it's more a measure of something about human beings.

It would be mighty convenient if God were the only thing in the universe that could not be measured at all in any way. And yet it's also mighty inconvenient for those who want to insist in the absolute realness of god as a "being" responsible for the whole shebang rather than merely an idea humans hatched.

To put it another way, Myers accepts nothing that is not subject to scientific replication.

To put it yet another way, Myers accepts nothing that is super or extranatural.

While that approach has its uses, it ultimately is a restricted method to define human experience.

Regarding God, immeasurability is not simply convenient, it is also its essential quality.

That's why these debates never get off the ground and devolve into pointlessness.

are required in order to properly define or understand human existence, maybe the debate will get off the ground.

on grounds other than Myers'?

To be clear, I'm not trying to be flip. I simply have no reason to explain anything at this point. It is clear that natural explanations do a damn good job of explaining human existence, and I need not defend the millennia of scientific progress proving this point. You, on the other hand, have made a claim that super or extranatural things are required to be accepted in order to fully explain human existence. I don't see any concrete evidence or logical reasoning that backs that up, so I ask you again to explain why you take this view.

You first made the claim that super or extranatural things are required to explain the whole of human existence. This claim has no proof that I know of. Provide it please.

Your assertion, your burden.

(This can go on ad infinitum, pun intended.)

Natural explanations have been sufficient to explain most of the strange phenomena we used to consider either mystical or magical. Natural explanations that we are currently aware of may not explain EVERYTHING about the universe as it stands, but that is no excuse for claiming that supernatural explanations are required. There isn't even sufficient reason to assume that anything supernatural exists. (Before you scoff at that statement, I suggest you ponder and research the meaning of the word supernatural.)

Now let's get something straight: Myers uses these simple points and more to answer the claim of believers that something supernatural exists, and that it is required. Your offerings here have done nothing more than parrot the claims of the believers that Myers already answered. Ad infinitum, indeed...and you complain that the conversation never gets off the ground. :eyes:

The ball is in your court, rug, and in the court of your believer fellows. You've made the claim for generations that supernatural explanations are required, but none of you have the wit or the werewithal to back it up with REAL proof. All you've done is play a shell game, trying to hide your false assertion under fallacy, circular reasoning, and when all else fails, ad hom.

I would say that I await your answer to these charges, and your proof that supernatural causes are required to explain human existence, but I know better than to expect you'll do anything but one-line your way out of this.

Since you insist that I have stated supernatural reasons are required, you then verbosely proceed to explain why they are not.

Since I never stated they are required, you are talking to yourself.

To repeat, precisely:

Myers' flaw is that he rejects out of hand any non-natural explanation.

That is not stating they are required.

To be incapable ab initio of considering any other hypothesis is intellectual poverty. To do so intentionally is intellectual dishonesty.

(Disclaimer: I have not consulted with the generations of theists you invoke so leave them out of this.)

Why should anyone entertain supernatural explanations when you yourself now admit that they are in no way required?

You claim here that supernatural explanations are not required, yet chide others for intellectual dishonesty when they don't consider them. This is no different from admitting that Santa Claus isn't required to explain presents under the Christmas tree while chiding people who don't believe in him. You're trying to manufacture a middle ground, and you're using special pleading to do it.

The sad thing is, I think you know it's special pleading, and that's why I think it's intellectual dishonesty on your part. Keep playing that shell game, though, because it is entertaining to watch.

'Only' doesn't enter into it. 'Only' implies that there are explanations for human existence besides natural ones that are equal to them (or greater than them, perhaps, even). You have yet to demonstrate that any such explanations are viable.

There is simply no known phenomenon which *requires* a supernatural explanation.

Perhaps you can provide one. You'd be the first to do so.

In other words, the naturalistic view is totally adequate to cover all of human experience. The case that there's more to the universe than the natural is very poor indeed.

Which is why calling the convenience of 'god's' immeasurability essential to its quality sort of gives the whole show away. That's exactly what religion seems to be all about--that mystifying nothing no one can put their fingers on.

As scientific knowledge grows, the box in which we maintain the existence of gods and the supernatural will shrink to nothingness.

but anything you had to say that might have been considered on topic or a relevant point was drowned in your reflexive asshatery. Care to try again?

A rather bald assertion at that.

I doubt any scientist would say anything is totally adequate to cover all of human experience.

To contemplate the notion that something is limitless is neither idle nor mystical. It's the flip side of contemplating a cosmos that, though vast, remains definite.

To return to the original point, Myers can only do the latter, which makes his approach flawed.

that one should believe nothing which he cannot see by means of his physical eyes, then first and foremost one ought to give up believing in love. If one did this and did it out of fear of being deceived, would not then one be deceived? Indeed, one can be deceived in many ways: one can be deceived in believing what is not true, but one can also be deceived in not believing what is true" Søren Kierkegaard

the Christian notion of a moral imperative to love your neighbor as yourself, feel free to point us towards that evidence

No need for an fMRI or any other brain or body scan to find that "moral imperative." Eyes or glasses will do the trick.

I don't deny that people feel love for one another, for their pets, for the land, for the universe, etc. But what is love really? Best not to look too closely if you like your illusions.

mere delusion to imagine the world as-it-could-be or ourselves as-we-could-be, since the world as-it-could-be does not correspond to the reality of the world as-it-is, any more than ourselves as-we-could-be corresponds to the reality of ourselves as-we-are

But I think it would be contrary to some important human experience to assert that the here-and-now world as-it-is cannot be changed or that the here-and-now we as-we-are cannot be changed

It is easy enough to denounce the possibility of change as a vain illusion, but perhaps such denunciations really an existential choice to oppose change and even to oppose any effort to change -- for whoever does not actually actively attempt to change realities, simply drifts in the current of whatever forces are applied -- and there is no intelligent way to work to change realities, unless one first imagines possibilities contrary to current fact

Where do you get the idea that lack of belief in gods or the supernatural automatically asserts that things or people cannot change, as you have italicized in your second paragraph? That's quite an illogical jump.

No one is denouncing the possibility of change, or even of imagination, as you point to in your final paragraph. Indeed, I agree with you that imagination is important to the progress of the human race, else what technology could we create?

I find it interesting that you are the second believer in only a few days to claim here that because someone is skeptical, and doesn't believe in any gods, they are automatically without imagination. It seems that believers can make the connection between belief and imagination, but non-believers are disrespectful when they do the same thing. Don't look now, but I think a double standard is showing.

I do not mean thereby to imply that if you understood what I said you would automatically agree with it, since I commonly encounter people who clearly understand what I say and yet disagree: I mean that your responses suggest no understanding whatsoever of what I say

I did not claim lack of belief in gods or the supernatural automatically asserts that things or people cannot change. Nor did I claim that because someone is skeptical, and doesn't believe in any gods, they are automatically without imagination. Perhaps you ought to review carefully what is meant by "straw man" before you jam words in my mouth and then indignantly ridicule those words, that I never said and that you yourself jam into my mouth.

BurtWorm's #45 suggests BurtWorm believes all human experience can be covered by a naturalistic view. In response, I quoted the very suggestive opening from Kierkegaard's long essay on the commandment "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." BurtWorm's #48 indicates BurtWorm considers that I do not examine my own illusions with an adequately critical mind. While I am not certain what BurtWorm means by "illusion", I expect he means something like "an imagined state of affairs contrary to actual fact." While not made entirely explicit, I suspect that BurtWorm intends something like: "It is undesireable for people to flee from reality into dreamworlds" -- and if this is the case, I largely agree with BurtWorm, but the point of my reply was: "It is also undesireable for us to abandon completely our dreamworlds."

I don't argue that it's "undesirable for people to flee from reality into dreamworlds." My point is, however, that if you really do want to understand what love actually is *and* if you really do want to keep idealizing love, you may go to places that you won't want to go--in fact can't go without coming to an unpleasant internal contradiction. You may find that you have to surrender either your idealism or your interest in the truth.

Frequently I find when having this debate about science vs. faith, the faithful hold up "love" like a totem, as though it should be understood what a valuable thing love is in and of itself. I get the idea that the faithful believe love is a gift from god, that it's something that makes us the demi-gods--not wholly animal, not wholly divine--that the faithful seem to think we are. To me, this is a very lazy way of getting at truth or wisdom. It's a willingness to look the other way from truth--I think, because the truth is so painful and difficult. It's clear that we are in fact animals--unusual ones, for sure, but undoubtedly animals. I think love is something animal as well. Personally, that's not a problem for me. But I could see how someone who has been trained to venerate love as an absolute might find this a repulsive idea.

Your ramblings in this subthread indicate clearly that you regard a skeptical mind as incapable of understanding emotion, imagination, or indeed of even moving beyond what we are now. #46 and #50 make this plain as day. I understand exactly what you're trying to say, and it is an empty argument. You have substituted strict logical positivism for simple skepticism, and substituting one position for another so you can knock down the position you're familiar with is the very definition of a straw man.

...and not just randomly throwing out random crap that doesn't support whatever case you appear to be trying to make -- if thinking you've actually got a point isn't, in and of itself, too much of an unjustified assumption.

Why bother saying something like, "It is also undesireable for us to abandon completely our dreamworlds"? What the hell does that have to do with the subject matter of this thread unless you're trying to make some connection between that belief in deities and not abandoning "dreamworlds"?

I can easily dream of better possible futures, even dream of past and present alternate fanciful realities, without asserting the actual existence of deities or anything else I might imagine.

Early experimental versions of television were electromechanical systems with as little as 20 lines of resolution. The overall density of the planet Saturn is less than the density of water.

Please, please try to interpret the above two statement in terms of the subject matter of this thread so I can then pounce on you for not understanding, making no effort to understand, and generally being intellectually lazy and unworthy of the discussion at hand.

:yourock:

as always

are common in this forum. Sometimes such an object is cogent; sometimes it is not. Factual claims corresponding to material realities can be interesting and important, but I do not think such claims exhaust all human experience worthy of attention. In particular, if someone believes his/her own ideas are all factual and only correspond to material reality, I will suspect the person is shallow and uninteresting, unselfcritical or perhaps downright dishonest

It is difficult to make sense of the world using only categories of thought "corresponding to material reality." For example, I do not know how to give such an account of statements like "She has the imagination necessary to be a first rate mathematician" or "He simply has no understanding whatsoever of the current conversation"

Similarly, "the counterfactual" does not deserve uniform scorn: we know that sometimes something-that-had-been-counterfactual can become something-that-is-factual; otherwise, no one would try to do anything

No purely naturalistic account can be given of a concept such as agape (αγάπη), as Kierkegaard notes -- and I suspect BurtWorm, in describing my interest in this notion as mere emotion and as an inadequately examined illusion, takes the view that the notion is counterfactual and corresponds to no material reality. But, for the reasons just mentioned, I myself would not regard agape as unimportant simply on account of counterfactuality, or as meaningless simply on account of failure to correspond to a material reality

...but that must just be my inadequate understanding of the subtlety of your argument.

No atheist here has called the existence of any variety of love "counterfactual".

No atheist here has tied the existence of deities to the existence of emotions.

No atheist here has said that something is unimportant because it doesn't have a material basis.

I have reason to suspect you are are unwilling or unable to see how much of human imagination and emotion are, or at least can be, accounted for materially. I would hope your understanding of materialism is not so cartoonish or stunted as to exclude dynamics and processes, things which do not exist as material and/or energy but as interplay of material and energy.

At any rate, since you've already admitted in another post that you willingly accept (perhaps even embrace?) a certain amount of irrationality from yourself (all dressed up in talk of "local maps" and such) I suspect it's pointless actually expecting you to ultimately make sense. It would just be nice if you didn't get so pissy with other people on calling your out for not making sense when you apparently know yourself that ultimately you can't make sense.

to make general comments about atheists. The question is whether it is possible to give an adequate naturalistic and material account of the entirety of human experience. Frankly, I am inclined to favor naturalistic and material accounts, when such are possible, and I would often prefer to have such accounts even when I am unable to provide them. But I suspect there are cases where no naturalistic and material account can be given

Consider the natural numbers, for example, 0, 1, 2, 3 , ... Perhaps one can make a naturalistic and material sense of the first few entries in this sequence. But this sequence is alleged to "go on forever" and thus must contain numbers larger than the number of elementary particles in the visible universe. It is difficult to make any naturalistic and material sense of a "number larger than the number of elementary particles in the visible universe." Worse than that, the collection of all of these finite numbers is obviously an infinite collection, and it is difficult to make any naturalistic and material sense of "infinite." One might, I suppose, dismiss "infinite" as a nonsense notion, but there are good logical reasons one does not want to do so: a mathematician might, for example, like to prove things about natural numbers, but there seem to be some "facts" about natural numbers that appear quite unbelievable --unless one accepts the "existence" of some simple and intuitive infinite collections, after which the "facts" are seen to be very obviously true. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodstein's_theorem

I hope you will be able to refrain from understanding the foregoing example as an attack on atheists

The "\'s" seems to cause problems (at least for me - it may be my system). This link takes me right there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodstein%27s_theorem

...to give an adequate naturalistic and material account of the entirety of human experience, but whether, when we hit the limits of our verifiable knowledge and powers of reason, whether we think filling in the gaps with irrational imaginings is somehow a solution to our dilemma, especially if we don't treat those imaginings merely as interesting intellectual playthings, but as something to build grand institutions and cultural movements around, or even something worthy of the devotion of a single human life.

That the sequence of integers "go(es) on forever" isn't "alleged", it's simply true -- true by matter of definition. The validity of the concept of infinity has nothing to do with, and does not depend upon, physical infinities. There's nothing irrational or supernatural about contemplating infinities. One can certainly argue whether or not abstract mathematics is "more real" than solid rocks, whether it's math or physics that's more fundamental or primary, but other than diverting intellectual play, it's quite likely that such contemplation leads nowhere but confusion.

That kind of confusion is, of course, a useful smokescreen for mysticism, but I've yet to see evidence that there's more to it than that. The elevation of that kind of mental masturbation to important prominence, making it a thing an atheist is somehow morally or intellectually obliged to answer to, is exactly what the "Courtier's Reply" criticism is all about.

A least the abstractions of mathematics are well-defined, and whether mathematics or physics is primary, both repeatedly and profitably work together with consistent results.

Give me a God concept as well defined as the cosine of an angle, and maybe you'll be on to something, especially if this concept isn't already handled better by a less grand word that doesn't carry so much unrelated baggage. Find a repeatable application of that concept that corresponds to the physical world, and I'll be even more impressed.

I do not expect theology to give me verifiable knowledge or well-defined concepts. Some people may expect such from their theology; I do not understand their view, so am not prepared to explain it or advance it

What I expect from theology is help finding an existential stance that can confront the suffering and groaning of the world, its cruel indifference and its injustice: the ontological issues here are issues of relationships, in a material sense as well as in a psychological sense; it is a matter of choosing how to live an authentic human life

Of course, if you ask me to do repeatable experiments involving the ability of some supernatural personality beyond space and time to influence our world, you are speaking nonsense. If I believe in such things, I will not believe that I have the control to force any demonstrations, let alone repeatable ones; if I do not believe in such things, I will not believe there is any possibility of demonstrations, let alone repeatable ones; so whether I believe or not in such things, I will not waste my time attempting to provide repeatable demonstrations

Nevertheless, I find it curious that you seem to believe that you can make "true" statements about things with no material existence, if you actually think the physical world is the sole test of reality: it appears then that you are simultaneously some sort of strict materialist while also believing with Plato that a world of abstractions is really real; you may not believe that, but it seems your manner of speech inevitably suggests you do believe it. A more courageous stance, at least as far as mathematics is concerned, would be to regard suitably small natural numbers as explicable in terms of material relations and large natural numbers as nonsense; one would discard all infinities; but one would then find oneself in the very strange philosophical position, that one used a great deal of mathematics which had been discovered by deluded people who had no idea whatsoever what they were talking about and who mistakenly believed all manner of fictions in order to discover and prove results, the justifications of which must now be dismissed as empty jabber

Now, I will find myself in the same position regarding theology. I wish to take the material world seriously and to view it accurately, so I am not hostile to science. But I wish to assign some ontological priority to just human relationships, in both a material sense and a psychological sense, and this commits me to speaking awkwardly about things with no material existence

Math and logic work, they function, and "this way lies madness" if you try to escape them. I can imagine the idea of math and the rules of logic not being real or true, that 2 + 2 really equals 5, or purple, and that all of the certainty and sense that I have of the rightness of the answer "4" is an illusion, but what does it get me to imagine this? If my ability to process thoughts and sensations were that fundamentally broken, it would be an inescapable trap.

Further, physical things can be well understood through the use of math and logic. There seems to be an intimate connection between the two. Seeing that connection is hardly the same thing as being a Platonist. Large numbers and infinities are no more nonsense than "all people who own dogs" is nonsense. Both can be useful conceptualizations even if they don't manifest in any particular physical way. Conceptualizing infinity leads to calculus, and calculus, which you can't get without infinity, certainly has real world applications.

Obviously math can spin off into wild excursions into the theoretical, much of which may never have physical application. Maybe that's just "mental masturbation" too, but at least it's logical extrapolation from basic principles. I think most mathematicians (not that I can speak for them with great authority) know they're often just playing with numbers for the pleasure of it. They aren't trying to impose, or even gently recommend, new rules for how people should live their lives or prepare for death based on their equations. Even a mathematician who imagines himself to be exploring the Mind of God when he delves deep into his equations still has to follow strict rules that other mathematicians can understand and follow and check his work by.

The problem with theology is it's a head game with loose rules, sloppy logic, and grandiose claims for its own significance.


Unless you're demanding that humans and their relationships have to be something special and different because, damn it, you want them to be something special and different, or have a very cramped view of what "material existence" means, there's no good reason to suppose that human existence or psychology that can't be derived from a purely naturalistic and material view of the world. This is not to say we've worked it all out, but not having worked it all out isn't sufficient cause to invoke "the god of the gaps" to fill in the blanks, it's not a good excuse to toss around unprovable assumptions or conclusions.

You can "wish to assign some ontological priority" all you want, but if trying to get what you want leads you down a path that is indistinguishable from wishful thinking and delusion, I hope that you don't expect all atheists to automatically recognize that's what you're doing, that you don't act like they are shallow untutored idiots for not recognizing your deliberate embrace of irrationality, and that you don't expect atheists automatically bow to the glorious humanity of your irrationality and remain respectfully uncritical.

:applause:

Suspicion and $1 will get you 100 pennies. Put your money where your mouth is and make the effort to come up with an account that is non-natural.

You mathematical example doesn't work for me because as you, yourself, admit "one can make a naturalistic and material sense" of the first (surely more than a few!) entries in the sequence. Math is a human construct. It would not exist if minds hadn't evolved to conceive of it and express it. That's really all the material accounting you need, isn't it? Magical and unfathomable as it often seems, it's essentially a tool, and everything known about it is known based on knowledge that preceded it. What is more natural than that? What non-naturalistic account can you give for any single part of the mathematical knowledge that came after the conception of natural numbers?

There are things for which a naturalistic and material account can be given. And there are "things" for which a naturalistic and material account cannot be given. And there are some "facts" (about some things for which a naturalistic and material account can be given) which are proved by using "things" for which a naturalistic and material account cannot be given

I think it is somewhat of a cheat to claim that "our minds evolved, and we can imagine infinity, so we have a material account of infinity." Such an argument applies equally well, say, to unicorns -- a concept which (as far as I know) sheds little light on anything. A strict scientific materialist ought, I think, view infinities and uniforms with a similar suspicious skepticism. But in the mathematical example I gave, notions of infinity do seem to shed some light on something

Isn't that the best explanation of how infinity came to be? Did infinity exist before there were minds able to conceive of it?

it is too vague and leaves to me all the hard work of guessing what you might mean. I could suppose, for example, that you mean something like this:

Our brains are sense organs, like our eyes. And just as our eyes evolved to perceive certain things, our brains evolved to perceive certain things, like unicorns and infinity

I do not actually expect that you mean that, but it is really entirely unfair of you to expect me to try to guess in any detail what you really mean

If not, what is it? If so, isn't the best explanation for it and the set of all things mathematical a natural explanation, i.e., that the human animal invented it?

This is the definition of a Courtier's Reply.

It's ok to admit that. We won't think less of you.

:popcorn:

an existential duty to love one's neighbor, is not serving explanatory ends; the claim that one ought to love one's neighbor does not bring with it a claim that the world will become intellectually intelligible through that

If it popped up out of thin air, you might have a case that it's rooted in something non-natural. But it's rooted in the experience of living in the world. Love thy neighbor as thyself, because when people don't do that all hell tends to break loose. So just fuggin' do it, ok? That's my natural explanation for the moral imperative. It's similar to other rules humans have come up: Don't swim after eating (because a bunch of people have had cramps in such cases so probably everyone will have cramps); don't eat the mushrooms that look like this; don't screw around with someone else's partner. True, there are bizarre rules like, thou shalt have no other gods before thee, but those two can be explained naturally, in my opinion. A rule like that is meant to enforce group identity, which serves to protect and preserve the community at the expense of individual freedom.

Now do you have a better or equal way of accounting for moral imperatives that don't make any reference whatsoever to the experience of living in the world as we find it? I seriously doubt you do.

No purely naturalistic account can be given of a concept such as agape (αγάπη), as Kierkegaard notes -- and I suspect BurtWorm, in describing my interest in this notion as mere emotion and as an inadequately examined illusion, takes the view that the notion is counterfactual and corresponds to no material reality.

You seem to be saying that I think agape is "counterfactual" or apparently non-existent. You do have a cartoonish view of my position then. I don't argue that immaterial things like ideas or other abstractions are not real. What in what I've said so far leads you to make that serious, serious mistake?

My point is that love (the word you used originally) in all of its forms, the existence of which I don't at all doubt because I've experienced it in virtually all of its forms, does not require anything but a natural explanation to account for it. This doesn't make love any less complicated or mysterious or wonderful than it has ever been. Is that not clear enough for you?

I challenge you to account for love with anything other than a natural explanation. And explain how exactly your explanation goes beyond a natural explanation.

PS: I do want to clarify just one thing in what I wrote above: By calling love "mysterious," I am not saying it must remain so. In fact, science is doing a lot of interesting work to discover what, exactly, love is--how it manifests itself in the body and why it manifests itself that way, where it's centered in the brain, whether or not other animals experience it, what its social role is, etc. Of course pulling it apart this way de-romanticizes it, at least objectively. Subjectively, however, it looks like love will be love for a long, long while, i.e., as confusing and exciting as it ever was.

you'll find behind it people whose minds were focused on natural explanations for things.

If left to the supernaturalists, progress would be something you wait for in the "other world." Even the modern Christian notion that individual people can be changed owes more to the enlightenment idea of perfectibility (the result of rescuing "pagan" science from Christian banishment) than to anything in the gospels. The original Christianities were concerned with preparing the soul for the end times, which the Gospels preached were immanent. The Christian mission originally was to order the world for the return of Jesus Christ. This remains a major part of its mission among the most conservative and orthodox Christians. Only in the nineteenth century do you see the flowering of reformative Christianity--the idea that people can change their behavior if they accept Jesus as their savior, and this was only one of several threads running from the Enlightenment into the industrial world stemming from a realization that the world is in constant flux and applied science (knowledge, wisdom, philosophy, etc.) has the power to change it at will.

Granted this is a loose sketch of very intricate history. But I think you should be able get the idea of what I'm getting at. Kierkegaard himself would not have been what he was if he hadn't had the Enlightenment to inform his Christianity. Far from being a vacant, soulless, dead end for imagination, the naturalism of the enlightenment philosophes provided rich nourishment for human imagination and progress, for better and for worse.

Note that last word there. I don't want to give the impression that I believe all progress is good progress, or that just because the ground has shifted to a naturalist view from a supernaturalist one that nothing but good comes out of it. It does seem clear to me, however, that supernaturalism is a view we're growing out of. It's very difficult to imagine what good comes from staying in that mindset, unless you consider mass delusion some kind of good.

is a very old idea, and in the Judaic tradition it is clearly expressed in a series of name changes, such as Abram/Abraham and Jacob/Israel. It also appears in the story of Jonah warning Ninevah, with its various fabulous and unlikely aspects (such as a man spit out alive after riding three days in the belly of a fish) suggesting perhaps the fabulous unlikelihood of other aspects of the tale, such as people actually changing after a timely warning: Jonah himself in the story is so unpleasantly surprised by anyone listening to him that he fall into a dark funk. The traditional Christian texts paint Saul/Paul as a man who is changed, and the earliest gospel (Mark) begins with John wandering about warning folk to change, much as Jonah warned Ninevah. After two millennia, of course, there is a heavy overlay of conflicting interpretation -- but a notion that the original sect was entirely oriented towards some world different than this one, or was oriented towards soul instead of body, is difficult to reconcile with "Sell all you have and give it to the poor" or "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me" in the gospels, or the primitive communism described more than once in Acts, or the injunction in James that one cannot claim to have faith if one merely gives the hungry and naked good wishes without food and clothing

You seem to feel a need to convince me naturalism is not a "vacant, soulless, dead end for imagination" -- but the effort is pointless, since I am not opposed to naturalism; in fact, I rather prefer it as a point of view. And you seem to feel a need to dissuade me from supernatural thinking -- but, again, the effort is pointless, since I generally dislike supernatural thinking and mostly try to avoid it. As my philosophical views on this subject seem easily misunderstood, and as I have made repeated efforts to describe them, again and again, using varying language and varying metaphors without much success, I will not bore you by reiterating them at this time

Material progress, of course, is based upon actual material work requiring material understanding of the material world: I think we need not debate that, since I think we agree there. There are, however, other aspects of human existence that apparently depend on nonmaterial abstractions: there is usually nothing wrong with me hitting a rock with a hammer, though if the rock "belongs" to someone else perhaps I might experience social consequences -- and if I were instead to hit another person with a hammer, I would very likely experience social consequences (perhaps even if the person were already dead). It is one thing to ignore a motionless rock submerged in a lake, and an entirely different thing to ignore a motionless person submerged in the same lake

It's not that they "mature," but that god has revealed to them their place in his plan. It's in this same spirit that the Christians urge the rich to give up their wealth, because wealth is a distraction from Christian brotherhood (i.e., the Christian plan). The kind of change demanded of people in the gospel is not personal or individual. It's programmed.

Don't mistake "natural" for "physical." Ethology is a large part of what animals are--how they relate to each other and the world around them. Those trivial commandments in the bible, which aren't even consistent from book to book--they're not the source of our ethology. There's no need whatever to appeal to anything at all outside of nature to explain our morals, our judgment, our understanding. It's all in the genes.

"divine plan" never struck me as an informative or interesting reading

I have no problem whatsoever with a scientific project that attempts to explain humans in evolutionary terms. Nor will I dispute that the Judeo-Christian texts exhibit various inconsistencies; I find such inconsistencies entirely unsurprising, though I suspect the inconsistencies can be read in informative and interesting ways. Nor, further, would I claim that the Judeo-Christian texts are the source of our morals, judgment, or understanding; I merely regard the texts as a partial record of a search for morals, judgment, and understanding

Science provides only an approximate map of the world, so to speak, and it is useful because the map often seems to be rather good and because one apparently knows how to improve it -- but one ought not to confuse the map with the world itself, nor does possession of the map bring with it any automatic wisdom. And the map itself is of our own making: when you say, "It's all in the genes," you have taken a scientific notion, corresponding to a piece of that map, and you have used it to make a sweeping unscientific statement about humans which cannot possibly be tested; you confuse yourself, because your rationalization uses scientific terminology and so seems scientific to you, without actually being scientific. You expect from the map something it cannot give -- rather as if someone said to me "John is in Chicago today" and I therefore pulled up Google Earth (which probably maps Chicago rather nicely) expecting to find his image there. The word "gene" is a part of a rather good map, which connects together some other words like "DNA," "messenger RNA," "double helix," "transposon" &c&c with many reports of various experiments -- but one ought not confuse it with the underlying reality, any more than one should confuse Google-Earth-images-of-Chicago with actual-Chicago-itself. At best, "It's all in the genes" represents a philosophical suspicion, particular instances of which might or might not be verified: you could perhaps test, for example, whether a preference for spaghetti with meatballs over crab cakes were hereditary (though I think most of us would regard it as a waste of research dollars); but since a real scientific hypothesis is one that is conceivably disprovable, any potentially scientific assertion "X is in the genes" will be regarded as undemonstrated until one has worked at it a while, after which it can at best only be regarded as approximately true, if one failed to disprove it convincingly

Although I have no problem whatsoever with a scientific project that attempts to explain humans in evolutionary terms, I do not consider the task of humans simply to be "explanation" -- there is a wider task at hand, which is the task of carving out some freedom for ourselves within the physical and social constraints that otherwise limit our existence. Science can be helpful in this wider task, by giving us tools that enable us to do more things -- but it is not automatically and invariably helpful; it is only helpful if we choose to use it to carve out more freedom; and the technological products of scientific inquiry can also be used to secure freedom for some while depriving many others

To put it more bluntly: I don't see much difference between paying homage to the meaningless statement "It's all in the genes" (which attributes a great deal to the concept "gene," although the concept "gene" is nothing more than a piece of a human-drawn map) and bowing down to This-Big-Stone-Face-My-Buddy-Just-Carved-From-Basalt (since This-Big-Stone-Face-My-Buddy-Just-Carved-From-Basalt is just another human invention). My personal feeling is that the map constructed from "gene" is probably more useful than This-Big-Stone-Face, though I might be willing to pay admission to a museum to see This-Big-Stone-Face; I nevertheless don't want to attribute to either human invention, either the concept "gene" or This-Big-Stone-Face, grandiose powerful qualities they do not possess

I'll attempt a reply, nvertheless, as soon as I take another look to see I'd something's in there worth responding to.

It just seemed like a lot of words noodling around and not getting to a point.

meaningless-word-salad-mixed-with-lots-of-hyphens? :shrug:

:bounce:

The conservative reading of the Gospels: When talking about Christianity's mark on European history up to the Reformation and into the Enlightenment, whether or not you like that reading, that's the one that counts as it's the 'official' Church reading. It helps explain why there was a Reformation and an Enlightenment, doesn't it?

The noodly middle part: The word 'gene' may be a 'map,' but there *are* genes and my point is that human behavior, morality, values, etc., all of that stuff is (as you somehow seem to have grasped, somewhat, before going off on your long-winded, time-wasting and off-point ramble through general semantics-ish something or other) a product of the evolution of life on earth and particularly of our species and ancestors. They're a legacy handed down, something we've inherited, just as we've inherited genes, which are themselves the product of billions of years of replication and reformation. Do you really have a problem understanding that? Is there something in that assertion that is controversial to you? Is it too clear for you maybe?

"Explanation": The "task" of humans, if there is a single one, which I deeply doubt, may not be explanation, but that was what we were discussing in this thread. That was our task, you might say.

"grandiose powerful qualities they do not possess": no comment.

Science aims at providing something like a bundle of intellectual charts for navigating natural material reality; these theoretical charts are to be tested against natural material reality by observation and experiment; and from time to time, one or another is largely redrawn due to shifts in knowledge or understanding. It is therefore important not to confuse a chart with the facts it represents. In the time of Ptolemy, the charts told us planets moved rather accurately on epicycles; after Newton, the charts said planets moved even more accurately along perturbed elliptical orbits under an inverse square law; but the epicycles and the elliptical alike exist only in the abstract charts and not in reality. Phlogiston once appeared in the chemical charts but vanished after Lavoisier; the luminiferous aether once existed in the electromagnetic charts but vanished after Michelson and Morley; it is not that phlogiston and the luminiferous aether once existed and now no longer exist, but rather that they only existed in the charts, much as old maps of the world might exhibit a great island inhabited by some one-footed cyclops tribe, which evaporated under more careful investigation. Today's biological charts contain genes, and they are fine charts indeed -- but "gene" is a concept intrinsic to the charts, and the concept might well at some later date be replaced by a different notion, or might splinter into multiple notions, when some chart is redrawn more accurately by future genius

It is not a mere semantic quibble to insist that the chart is not the reality, and the ideas used to construct or read the chart may be wrong in some ways. One simply cannot do good science if one regards all the charts as immutable and accurate representations of the world: one takes the current charts as the best available picture but doubts them somewhat nevertheless. A science student, unable to doubt the textbook charts, has no future in research

They very accurately predicted where the planets would be on any given night at any given time in the sky. They can still be used for that purpose.

Scientific knowledge is not as mushy as you're making it out to be. You seem to me to be throwing up great puffs of smoke to sidetrack the discussion needlessly.

Show me where I led you to think I regard "all the charts as immutable and accurate representations of the world." If you want to go down that dead-end path, I'll let you amuse yourself working on that problem.

That at least suggests we can talk on common ground about some matters

I do not intend to misrepresent your position, but it seems to me that you asserted "Genes are real" as part of a program to establish something like "All human behavior is reducible to genetics" -- the "It's all in the genes" of your #64

My first point would be that, although it may be very handy, in scientific discussions intended to improve the biological charts, to discuss "genes" as if they were "real," it is worthwhile to keep in the back of one's mind the fact that "genes" are actually just creatures in our intellectual charts, not creatures in the world. It's handy because the biological charts are pretty good, and it's often harmless, in the same way that it would almost always be harmless for someone to point at a map of Boston and say "Here's the Arnold Arboretum." But it is not always harmless, just as it might not be harmless for someone to confuse "the Arnold Arboretum" on a Boston map with the-actual-Arnold-arboretum

An assertion, along the lines of "a person is reducible to the DNA sequence in that person's cell nuclei and the RNA sequence in that person's mitochondria," is pure ideology: it begins from laboratory concepts but sweepingly applies those concepts in areas rather distantly removed from their origins

Did you just say that genes are actually a construct of human biological study and that they don't exist in the real world?

to express the notion that “love” in all its forms is inherited, passed down from generation to generation, learned, even, because we are humans and we’ve inherited all we are—including our ability to transform the species in our own small ways—from our ancestors.

If you have a problem with what I just said, you've not been expressing very well what the problem is. I suspect you're making a smokescreen because you don't know how to back up your claim that natural explanations alone can’t account for everything—because, I think, you actually agree with me! You want to make a case that life and the universe is just too big for science to be capable of explaining everything, but you are incapable of demonstrating how anything but science is so capable. I suspect you just don’t WANT science to be capable.

to convince anyone else that your philosophical views on the subject make any sense, that should perhaps be a clue to you as to where the problem lies.

take the obvious cheap shots? I suppose it may simply remain one of those little mysteries of life

Neither are babbling mad-hatters. The trouble is knowing which one you are when you find yourself in this position.

What part of human experience do you think is not coverable by a naturalistic view?

Can it be explained in a non-determinist natural view?

The kind of answer I fully expected, which is roughly along the lines of "I have no good answer." Don't feel bad. I don't think there is a good answer.

As for your question: Is there a non-deterministic way to account for choice and will? Is that what you're asking me? Can you elaborate on what you're looking for from me?

Get back to me when you feel up to providing one.

And at the same time make an effort to answer my question, if you think you can: how might something non-natural (by which I mean something extra- or super-natural, in your terms) account for human will and choice?

Now please explain what you want me to answer and I'll do my best to respond.

Purely natural processes, as I understand them, mean that a consequence flows from an action, event or phenomenon, which in turn causes other consequences. And so on.

If that is a correct statement, a purely natural process is a species of determinism.

Where does volition fit into this construct?

I'm looking for an explanation of how an act of will can be explained by a purely natural process.

What do you mean by determinism, exactly? Do you think that if only natural causes can account for anything, then everything that is, was or will be must by definition be predetermined? Why is it necessary to conclude that?

If you want a really detailed answer to your question, I highly recommend Daniel Dennet's "Freedom Evolves." Dennet calls himself a determinist, but he challenges the notion that determinism rules out freedom. In fact, he argues that the alternative to a determinist universe--one in which the rules of physics do not always apply, in which nothing is guaranteed ever to follow from anything--implies zero freedom for anything inside the universe.

Can't answer #43? Felt like trying your shell game again with someone else? How on earth did you expect it to unfold differently?

So impatient. I'm surprised you feel a need to converse with any other living thing.

You're claiming that "will" and "choice" can't be explained through natural processes and must invoke supernatural ones. Please show why.

Who said supernatural processes must be invoked? The criticism is that Myers adamantly considers only natural processes and further asserts non-natural ones do not exist. Why is that?

You were the one who referred to "supernatural" and "exranatural" explanations above. What exactly were you talking about?

Because in practice, every theistic religion holds as part of its doctrine that the one or more deities it posits matter. They have the ability and the will to make a difference in the here and now, which is why it's important to pray or otherwise worship them. In polytheistic religions, you have to pray to the god(dess) of agriculture lest the harvest fail; the god(dess) of war lest your enemies defeat you; the goddess of love and fertility lest you fail to find a mate and procreate; etc. If you're a crypto-polytheist, like a Roman Catholic or Orthodox, you pray to the relevant saint to intercede with God, and if you're a monotheist, you pray to God directly to do all of these things.

The upshot of this is that, for any practical (as opposed to theoretical) definition of "deity", such an entity may be undetectable in and of itself, but it should cause measurable effects in the natural, scientifically measurable, world. If it does not do so, we are left with a non-consequential entity whose putative existence is entirely indistinguishable from its non-existence, in which case, why should anyone give a shit? For practical purposes, "non-consequential" and "divine" are mutually exclusive; a deity that doesn't make a discernable difference isn't worth worshiping, and therefore isn't a deity by any definition that adequately reflects the various concepts humanity has actually held of deities throughout history.

Especially: "If it does not do so, we are left with a non-consequential entity whose putative existence is entirely indistinguishable from its non-existence, in which case, why should anyone give a shit?"

:applause:

As to the theological aspect of your post, humanity's various concepts of God says more about the limitations of the human intellect than the essential limitlessness of a deity.

about god. It might even aptly be called the father or mother of god, considering that it required god to explain everything about the universe it couldn't otherwise explain.

only.

I suspect this discussion is turning into one many atheists (myself included) are depressingly familiar with.

What you are doing, rug, is moving the goalposts by redefining "God" to include some ill-defined abstract concept of some nebulous metaphysical force, which does not even vaguely resemble the personal, anthropomorphic God/gods posited by any theistic religion (which, incidentally, is explicitly the concept of god that Dawkins was talking about). Hence my use of the phrase "practical (as opposed to theoretical) definition of 'deity'" in my previous post. While I dislike resorting to dictionary definitions to argue my point, most dictionary definitions of the words "god" and "deity" involve the entity in question being worshiped, and they do so for a reason. When we're talking about "God," it's rather disingenuous to introduce some concept that nobody actually believes in, let alone worships.

returning to the OP, as Myers does not even accept the notion that a God can, let alone does, exist, it is impossible to move onto the next level, the so-called "susbstantive" theological concepts of an incarnate God with all that that implies.

As I said, he is flawed.

You're quite correct that Myers refuses (as do I) to get embroiled on discussion concerning how many angels can dance on the head of a pin unless and until some concrete evidence is provided that angels exist in the first place. I fail to see the flaw in that position.

...for those who can't prove what they're talking about, or even make clear what they're talking about?

By your logic, surely you must believe in Gertrude the Very Very Physically Real Undetectable Invisible Pink Unicorn. Neither of us, of course, can prove she exists, being that she's undetectable and all that, but by her nature she's very, very physically real (by definition!), and you can't be a very, very physically real unicorn without being an existent one.

Of course, things get a bit sticky when we invoke Gertrude's full name, Gertrude the Very Very Physically Real Undetectable Invisible Pink Unicorn That's the Only Physically Real but Undetectable Thing That's Allowed to Exist. Wally the Very Very Physically Real Undetectable Invisible Orange Wombat (pronounced Wally the Wery Wery Physicawy Weal Undetectable Invisible Owange Wombat) finds this particularly irksome. Some guy called Jehovah gets pissy about Gertrude as well.

For those who don't get the reference, see Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World.