Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Review of Coyne


In the February 2016 issue of First Things, I review Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.


Posted by at

588 comments:

  1. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 7:03 AM



    Santi,

    Your entire project obscenely eliminates and denies the undeniable fact of irreducible evil. And Person. And Mind.

    Therefore, your search for Good, irreducible or otherwise, will also eliminate and deny the undeniable.

    You set yourself up in that charmed location where you can invent just any claim you want and then proceed forward with said claim all tucked in, insulated from reality, as your entire sonnet echoes into the obscure and the vague, awash in waves of self-negation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 7:21 AM



    Santi,

    BTW:

    There is only one solution. It is located within the contours of immutable love.

    Nothing else will accomplish the necessary work.

    ReplyDelete
  3. SantiJanuary 24, 2016 at 7:23 AM

    World Not World:

    You are trained in the sciences, and are yourself a scientist, and so I appreciate that you graciously concede to me the following: "[Y]ou're quite right that the resurrection is an extraordinary claim. Can it be 'proven' beyond a reasonable doubt on the basis of textual analysis? I'd wager not. The 'extraordinary evidence' is not to be found there."

    Where, then, do you say the extraordinary evidence is to be found? You write this: "[I]t is to be found,...[by] swallow[ing] it whole...[by] incorporat[ing] it fully as a vital ingredient of your very being. As long as you merely gnaw cynically at its obvious 'impossibility,' considered apart from the whole tradition, you'll miss the whole thing, and will be in no position either convincingly to affirm or to reject it."

    This is an odd way for a scientist to talk, don't you think? As the old rabbis used to say, "Have your ears heard what your mouth hath said?" Imagine, for instance, one of your colleagues giving an equivalent response to the multiverse hypothesis, to string theory, or to the idea that the best explanation for the dimming of light from a distant star is solar megastructures built by aliens.

    To put it politely, you would conclude that they were a bit too emotionally stricken with the beauty, coherence, and elegance of their theory (notice how often you used the word "whole" in your response to me), and defending it with an excess of enthusiasm and insufficient caution (notice that you called my reasonable doubt "cynical").

    So wouldn't your response to a scientific colleague expressing belief in alien megastructures, for instance, rightly and sensibly, be something like this: "Your idea is wonder generating. What amazing news it would be if true! And it would be a wonderful puzzle piece to include into a larger system of ideas that you've worked out, but absent extraordinary evidence I must respectfully withhold judgment. I'm not 'gnawing cynically' on your idea or treading on your dreams (akin to that line in Yeats' poem, 'tread softly, for you tread on my dreams'), I just find any elaborate system of ideas, however beautiful, that hinge on miracles or other kinds of extraordinary claims, in need of airtight evidence. We don't want to build our intellectual systems on sand; on things we take to be true, but aren't. I'm sorry I can't share your enthusiasm, but I'm doing you a favor. By resisting your idea, and playing 'devil's advocate' against it, I'm keeping you on your toes, helping you avoid confirmation bias. And you've got me thinking as well. That is, unless you break conversation with me because you can't abide disagreement."

    ReplyDelete
  4. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:05 AM

    Santi,

    Swollowing anything whole without evidence.

    Straw man.

    Fluffy purple prose can't change vacuousness.

    ReplyDelete
  5. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:10 AM

    Santi,

    You should try dealing with reality instead.

    Straw men and your own inventions may make you feel better but in the end reality wins.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Don JindraJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:35 AM

    scbrownlhrm,

    "People disagree about the fundamental properties, events, and explanatory termini of gravity."

    Those disagreements are trivial compared to disputes concerning religious issues. And the disputes narrow over time. The parties disputing "fundamental properties, events, and explanatory termini of gravity" could nevertheless be in complete agreement on how to navigate to mars. That's a high quality test of reality. Where is that one authoritative religious book that tells us how to navigate to heaven or even through the good life? It seems to me that religion has yet to rise above an embarrassingly low standard of competence. Disputes in its areas of concern tend to widen over time. I admit its areas of concern is more complicated, but how can continuous fragmentation of views lead us to believe religion provides a genuine knowledge base?

    You claim I don't test my premises against reality. Landing a man on the moon -- now that's a high quality test against reality. What sort of test against reality do you propose from a religious perspective?

    FM,

    "You do not get medical advice from your uncle who works as a lawyer, but from a doctor in medicine."

    I don't doubt that experts on the Bible exist. I don't ignore them. When someone quotes a verse to me, I normally look at commentaries. It's not uncommon for them to disagree. But even when they do agree, that's still no more than agreement on opinion -- in this case, opinion expressed in the scripture itself. They may assume scripture is more than ancient opinion, but where is the evidence they are correct? Doctors can point to such evidence in their field. How would we test if spiritual advisers actually fix souls?

    ReplyDelete
  7. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:39 AM



    Don,

    You're still appealing to disagreement.

    Yawn......



    ReplyDelete
  8. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:45 AM



    Don,

    You're self-aware.

    Disagreement there on means, ends, and explanatory termini is worse than your entire diatribe so far.

    Therefore, you're not self-aware.

    ---------------

    See how stupid that is.

    And besides, you're *still* appealing to disagreement.

    ReplyDelete
  9. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:48 AM

    Don,

    I tested your premises against reality.

    But I'm *still* self-aware.

    Your premises fail reality testing.

    -----------------

    Need more?

    I'm trying to make it clear.....


    ReplyDelete
  10. AnonymousJanuary 24, 2016 at 10:11 AM

    Humor alert: "The Irrational Feser"

    http://theskepticzone.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-irrational-feser-part-1.html

    ReplyDelete
  11. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 10:45 AM



    Santi,

    You're still not allowing all vectors to inform all vectors as you continue you're pretense of looking for Good inside of your inventions neatly walled off from reality. Such wish fulfillment on your part poisons your handling of Auschwitz and births the obscenity which is your own express denial of the undeniable megastructure that is the irreducible Evil therein.

    That uncanny megastructure is wholly alien to all your pretenses here as are the irreducible megastructures constituting the Intentional amid Mind, and Reason amid Person, and so on as your entire project eliminates and denies those same undeniable megastructures, in fact committing them all to the pains of reductio ad absurdums.

    And your project must do so for the necessary means to such ends are entirely alien to your a priori which, despite irrefutable evidence, you remain emotionally and philosophically committed to.

    Therefore, your search for Good, irreducible or otherwise, will also eliminate and deny the undeniable.

    On your own terms we borrow a few lines and justifiably and rationally affirm that every bit of your unscientific polemic against irreducible evil, against science as you damn "New Information" as an obscenity in your own (alien) paradigm -- against reality itself and trade it away for your own blind faith in some indefensible and alien megastructure of "Reductio Ad Absurdum" -- all of that -- leaves your obscene idea of Auschwitz and the rest as wonder-generating there inside of your religion's bizarre reductio's.

    What bizarre news it would be if true that all such megastructures are in fact absurdities. It would be a (literally) unimaginable puzzle-piece to include into a larger system of ideas that you've worked out, but absent extraordinary evidence I must respectfully withhold judgment.

    I'm not 'gnawing cynically' on your alien idea or treading on your dreams (akin to that line in Yeats' poem, 'tread softly, for you tread on my dreams'), I just find any elaborate system of ideas, however beautiful, that hinge on absurdity or other kinds of extraordinary and incoherent claims, in need of airtight evidence. We don't want to build our intellectual systems on sand; on things we take to be true, but aren't. I'm sorry I can't share your enthusiasm, but I'm doing you a favor. By resisting your idea, and playing 'devil's advocate' against it, I'm keeping you on your toes, helping you avoid confirmation bias. And you've got me thinking as well. That is, unless you break conversation with me because you can't abide disagreement.

    BTW: on Auschwitz -- it will be immutable love, and nothing less.

    ReplyDelete
  12. GlennJanuary 24, 2016 at 10:47 AM

    How would we test if spiritual advisers actually fix souls?

    Spiritual advisers don’t fix souls; rather, they provide spiritual advice.

    Nonetheless, and according to the Bard **, it is the cobbler who can mend the soles of men.

    Naturally, 'can' does not mean 'will', so some people go through life with holes in their 'shoe'. They are porous without being absorbent. That is, and so to speak, while things go in one ear, they also come out the other.

    - - - - -

    ** Julius Caesar: Act 1, Scene 1

    MARULLUS: -- You, sir, what trade are you?

    Second Commoner: Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler.

    MARULLUS: But what trade art thou? answer me directly.

    Second Commoner: A trade, sir, that, I hope, I may use with a safe conscience; which is, indeed, sir, a mender of bad soles.

    MARULLUS: What trade, thou knave? thou naughty knave, what trade?

    Second Commoner Nay, I beseech you, sir, be not out with me: yet, if you be out, sir, I can mend you.

    MARULLUS: What meanest thou by that? mend me, thou saucy fellow!

    ReplyDelete
  13. UnknownJanuary 24, 2016 at 12:28 PM

    @Ben Yachov and @laubadetriste

    I didn't realize there were so many MST3K fans that also read Ed's blog. Wonderful company indeed (and, now I realize why some of the humour hear resonates with me so strongly).

    ReplyDelete
  14. laubadetristeJanuary 24, 2016 at 12:47 PM

    @Anonymous January 24, 2016 at 10:11 AM:

    I just posted a comment over there saying, "Hi, everybody! Visitors to this blog should know, before im-skeptical deletes this comment in order to hide the evidence, about his previous comments and behavior, at http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2016/01/review-of-coyne.html."

    @Taylor Weaver:

    Yup. :) There is a nice sort of droll absurdity pervading these parts, isn't there?

    ReplyDelete
  15. SantiJanuary 24, 2016 at 2:15 PM

    Glenn said: "Spiritual advisers don’t fix souls; rather, they provide spiritual advice."

    Except when they don't. When a priest says last rites over an unconscious, dying person, there is a presumption absent any evidence whatsoever that the soul is impacted by the priest's words, gesticulations, and other behaviors, isn't that the case?

    And when the Tibetan Book of the Dead is read into the ear of a person who has just died, there is a presumption that this is assisting the soul's passage (again, absent evidence), right?

    So my question would be a variation on Don Jindra's: How would we test whether a priest's actions assisted a soul--or even whether one's own actions assist one's soul? How would you know whether it mattered if you prayed for your soul, or somebody else's soul--or whether you got baptized or not?

    And for that matter, when can we call Jesus and Paul's claim that the Second Coming would follow imminently after the resurrection a failed prophecy?

    This is what I mean by saying that, for religion to function, religious claims like the definition of God and the soul must be fuzzied up on demand, and with ad hoc explanation always at the ready should the believer's (or unbeliever's) vision and inquiries become too acute and direct, for absent these escape hatches into mystery and maze-like complexity, predictions and fact-checking are in danger of exposing the claims as vacuous. And then all you've got left are straightforward cognitive dissonance ("blessed are those who have not seen, but believed") and emotional manipulation (the Stockholm Syndrome--getting love and threat from the same source).

    Your jumping to wordplay, dodging Don Jindra's serious question, is an example of simply ignoring a serious grappling of his question.

    So let's play this straight, now, Glenn. Tell us what's inside that pretty black box you've got there, called God? Why are you guarding the lid so jealously? What evidence do you think you have that you're not holding an empty box?

    ReplyDelete
  16. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 3:19 PM

    Santi,

    You're self-aware.

    There is disagreement -- which is all you're appealing to -- more on the means of that fact then there us in your entire list.

    Therefore (on your premise) you are not self-aware.

    But you are.

    So "different religions" is, well, a failure from the get-go.




    ReplyDelete
  17. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 3:39 PM



    Santi,

    The answer to death rights is simple.

    You take claim "A" of paradigm "A" and then do what you refuse to do -- you allow all vectors to inform all vectors. That's why death right claims live and die with the paradigmatic plausibility in play.

    Buddhism is self-negating as is materialism and never mind about the pesky business of absurdity -- oh dear -- as touched on earlier.

    That's why your claims are all failing here.

    You don't test each vector in your paradigm against all vectors in reality.

    We keep testing our paradigmatic claims and as new information comes in -- from all fronts -- we gain insight and grow knowledge.

    Knowledge is like that.

    According to Scripture’s terms and definitions.

    And science.

    You're left asserting that new information is an obscenity --

    Because you're just not a very scientifically oriented person.

    As touched on earlier.

    In short, logic, science, PSR, and convergence is how you test any single part of any particular whole.

    Sure, that's obvious.

    But it's you we are dealing with.

    ReplyDelete
  18. GlennJanuary 24, 2016 at 3:40 PM

    Glenn said: "Spiritual advisers don't fix souls; rather, they provide spiritual advice."

    Except when they don't.

    That is true. As is that stock brokers broker stocks. Except when they don't.

    As for the rest of your comment, I just spent two hours shoveling away snow, and I'm not about to spend time shoveling away something else. Nothing personal; it's just that I'm rather depleted at the moment.

    ReplyDelete
  19. SantiJanuary 24, 2016 at 4:13 PM

    Glenn,

    No worries. Replying should always be fun, not a chore, or one shouldn't do it.

    ReplyDelete
  20. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 5:00 PM

    Santi,

    It's like testing the syntax of the form "X brought Y back to life".

    Paradigmatically speaking, convergence, reason, logic, PSR, Scripture, and reasoned dialogue affirmed such long before modern medicine.

    As new information arrives, you adjust.

    It's called reality testing.

    And we already know that scientism is a fallacious claim, just as we know that any Non-Theistic paradigm annihilates half of reality from the get-go.

    So, forward progress isn't difficult.

    ReplyDelete
  21. scbrownlhrmJanuary 24, 2016 at 7:54 PM

    Interestingly, the Ancient Savage and the Modern Skeptic both house the same intellectual mistakes regarding the nature of death and mind(s) and knowledge in the arena of the syntax of the form "X brought Y back to life". For many of the same reasons too. We saw earlier how Santi seems to want Scripture's lines to be "Spooky" and "Un"-natural. The Ancient Savage thought about reality that way too.

    Of course, unfortunately for the Ancient Savage and the Modern Skeptic, yesterday's incredulous X is now today's science on said syntax. Much like Genesis, Timelessness, and today's Physics. Much like lots of things.

    The overlap there is of interest given that neither the Savage nor the Skeptic seem(ed) able to engage in reality-testing and both approach(ed) their own paradigmatic shapes *and* those of others from that same insulated and walled off stance of one lone data point just sitting there. Mixed into both is a spooky sort of magical thinking soaked in an array of As-If’s which take the place of hard logic, evidence, observational reality, and so on.

    It's as if we reason.....

    It's as if Auschwitz......

    The similarities amid Savage/Skeptic, intellectually and paradigmatically, are telling.

    ReplyDelete
  22. AnonymousJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:04 PM

    The gift that keeps on giving: "The Irrational Feser Part 2"

    http://theskepticzone.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-irrational-feser-part-2.html

    ReplyDelete
  23. AnonymousJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:12 PM

    Brandon: I'm not sure what your obsession with other people's genitalia is, but I'm quite sure 'Nothing' meant 'nothing', and required no translation.

    I don't think Santi actually has an obsession with other people's genitalia, just with his own. Unfortunately for him, there are people honest enough to state that his chosen idolatry is warped and creepy, and naturally this causes him psychological distress, so he is desperate to find a rationalization for dismissing them. Hence the endless streams of rhetoric which he uses to tell himself that he is refuting anyone who would disagree with him. They aren't real arguments, just a dam of words to keep out the logic, which is precisely why he keeps posting here even though there is clearly no chance of a worthwhile discussion, or even an attempt at it. That was never his goal, he is not communicating *with* anyone here, only talking *at* us. That's why he completely ignores responses like yours that cut through all the blather instead of pretending to take him seriously. He needs a response on his own terms so he can keep telling himself that he is succeeding. As long as he can serve back more verbiage, he can keep trying to convince himself that he is supporting the circle-jerk of "love". Although the fact that he has to constantly sustain the act indicates that his conscience is not completely buried under all the sludge, so there may be hope for him yet. We can't argue with him but we should pray for him.

    ReplyDelete
  24. AnonymousJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:38 PM


    So my question would be a variation on Don Jindra's:

    The trolls are teaming up. What can this omen mean?

    ReplyDelete
  25. AnonymousJanuary 24, 2016 at 9:42 PM


    Your jumping to wordplay, dodging Don Jindra's serious question, is an example of simply ignoring a serious grappling of his question.

    Don has never made a serious question in his life. I mean an objectively seriously question. Unfortunately, like you, he takes the bilge of his posts seriously.

    Don Jindra + Santi is one hell of a scary equation.

    ReplyDelete
  26. AnonymousJanuary 24, 2016 at 10:09 PM

    On Imskeptical's blog, Papalinton made what must be one of the ironic and hilarious comments ever:

    I too echo laubadetriste's comment for readers to visit Feser's site. Don Jindra, Santi and Skep do a sterling job in challenging the nonsense that falls under the rubric of religious thinking that shapes their bizarro worldview of 'things unseen', ghosts and gods and other things that go bump in the night. Read with interest and commit this moment to memory.

    ReplyDelete
  27. laubadetristeJanuary 24, 2016 at 11:02 PM

    @Santi:

    You're welcome. Of course, I don't mean that one should never bring up the Holocaust. In fact, I incline to agree with W. G. Sebald that, "No serious person thinks of anything else." But few are the folks with the humor, scholarship, or wisdom to be anything but crass or banal in bringing it up. "Your theory explains many moral phenomena, Mr. Holmes. But can it explain... *the Holocaust*?!"

    "...extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence..."

    Brandon before had a bunch of posts on the parts of Hume containing such reasoning. And of course, *The Demon-Haunted World* is a delightful book; I think Sagan was the one who popularized that phrase.

    I wonder what you mean, though, by using it against World Not World. I don't pretend to know just what he believes, or why, but if you mean to criticize *the extraordinary claim* of (e.g.) the Resurrection (as opposed to *WNW's belief*), then of course there are people out there like William Lane Craig and N.T. Wright who have in fact addressed the evidence at length. I suspect you know of them. Of course they may be *wrong*--but if so, it wouldn't be because (say) they were suffering under the delusion that *extraordinary claims require a flip of the coin,* or whatever you think the alternative is.

    Or if it is indeed *WNW's belief* that you mean to criticize, would not it be better either to criticize his reliance on a certain kind of authority (if in fact that's what he's doing), or (perhaps better still) to deliver your judgment on the evidence?

    "This is an odd way for a scientist to talk, don't you think?"

    Well, it is an odd way for a scientist to talk *as a scientist.* But of course, it is greatly begging the question to presume that the Resurrection is a matter of the sort to be included along with "the multiverse hypothesis, [or] string theory, or... the idea that the best explanation for the dimming of light from a distant star is solar megastructures built by aliens", as you continued. Presumably, you'd want someone who talks like a historian, and someone who talks like a philosopher, and someone (dare I say it) who talks like a theologian. (That last would be needed at least to help make sense of the thing.)

    True fact: one of my professors years ago was both an accomplished astrophysicist and an accomplished erotic poet. I assure you that some of his books were not like the others.

    ReplyDelete
  28. laubadetristeJanuary 24, 2016 at 11:02 PM

    "I'm not 'gnawing cynically' on your idea or treading on your dreams (akin to that line in Yeats' poem, 'tread softly, for you tread on my dreams'), I just find any elaborate system of ideas, however beautiful, that hinge on miracles or other kinds of extraordinary claims, in need of airtight evidence. We don't want to build our intellectual systems on sand; on things we take to be true, but aren't. I'm sorry I can't share your enthusiasm, but I'm doing you a favor. By resisting your idea, and playing 'devil's advocate' against it, I'm keeping you on your toes, helping you avoid confirmation bias. And you've got me thinking as well."

    I think I can speak for most everyone here when I say, thank you for helping us avoid confirmation bias. And please be sure you will receive much the same regarding your imaginative confections.

    "So let's play this straight, now, Glenn. Tell us what's inside that pretty black box you've got there, called God? Why are you guarding the lid so jealously? What evidence do you think you have that you're not holding an empty box?"

    I suspect part of what he would say is that, although he doesn't call it "evidence," 'cause that would be strange, he can rely on the arguments rehearsed here on this blog the last few years, and in the books we've discussed; and that calling God a "black box" rather undercuts your intent, as a *black box* by definition has output; and that "pretty" and "jealously" are more provocative than descriptive; and that his point was that spiritual advice is somewhat like teaching, therapy, or medicine, in that not all of the work can be done by the one who provides.

    @Glenn:

    Nice Shakespeare reference. :)

    @scbrownlhrm:

    Thanks.

    I want to put "Ancient Savage and Modern Skeptic" on my bumper somewhere. :)

    ReplyDelete
  29. laubadetristeJanuary 24, 2016 at 11:11 PM

    @Anonymous January 24, 2016 at 9:12 PM: "I don't think Santi actually has an obsession with other people's genitalia, just with his own. Unfortunately for him, there are people honest enough to state that his chosen idolatry is warped and creepy, and naturally this causes him psychological distress, so he is desperate to find a rationalization for dismissing them. [...] He needs a response on his own terms so he can keep telling himself that he is succeeding. As long as he can serve back more verbiage, he can keep trying to convince himself that he is supporting the circle-jerk of 'love'."

    Well, now, that's just Bulverism.

    "They aren't real arguments, just a dam of words to keep out the logic..."

    But you make a good point there.

    ReplyDelete
  30. laubadetristeJanuary 25, 2016 at 12:32 AM

    @Don Jindra: "The parties disputing 'fundamental properties, events, and explanatory termini of gravity' could nevertheless be in complete agreement on how to navigate to mars. That's a high quality test of reality."

    That those parties could be in complete agreement about something not affected by their disagreements, for reasons of scale and category, does not do much to differentiate science (engineering, navigation...).

    Ordinarily I would not be so workmanlike about this, but if you think science (engineering, navigation...) has passed "a high quality test of reality" *because* parties who disputed other things agreed on some things, and that agreement allowed them to accomplish something difficult, then you ought to think that religion (I wonder what you think that is) has likewise passed such a test, since some things usually considered religious beliefs, such as the belief in spirits, and the belief in an afterlife, are human universals, and religion is famously central to the creation and continuance of societies throughout history. "There is no culture without the cult," as Eliot put it. A Mars mission would be a glorious undertaking; so was Christendom.

    Of course, there are also the efforts to show that there is a great commonality between religions.

    "Where is that one authoritative religious book that tells us how to navigate to heaven or even through the good life?"

    Do you think "authoritative" means something like "universally and uniformly accepted"?

    "It seems to me that religion has yet to rise above an embarrassingly low standard of competence."

    Competence to do what?

    "Disputes in its areas of concern tend to widen over time."

    Do they really? As evidenced by what? The more doctrinally learned here may correct me for thinking so, but it seems rather the opposite is the case. In Christianity for example, most of the great heresies--Docetism, Arianism, Manichaeism, Pelagianism--are spent, extirpated, or obscure. The disputes that persist seem feeble (how many can now tell the difference between Methodism and Lutheranism, or would fight over it if they knew?). In areas where there is now conflict, like along the "bloody borders" of Islam, or under the encroachment of Western culture, there seems to be a growing uniformity, as ancient other faiths are forgotten, left behind, or destroyed.

    "I admit its areas of concern is more complicated..."

    :) You haven't been reading this blog very closely. "More complicated" ain't the half of it.

    ReplyDelete
  31. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 2:33 AM



    Santi,



    Your approach to Mankind’s awareness of God inside of Time and Physicality is quite unscriptural as the approach depends on premises and elements of the following presuppositions as such are built into them on several levels. As such, the complaint can’t be against Christianity but is instead against a set of Non-Christian truth predicates. A few Non-Christian premises of yours:

    1) When Christians assimilate new information, insights, and symmetry, that is evidence for no-god.

    2) When Christians refuse such assimilation of new symmetry, that is evidence of the unthinking nature of Christianity, and by extension of no-god.

    3) Christianity teaches a *static* Mankind where such awareness of God is concerned inside of Time and Physicality. Change inside of Time is contrary to the Christian paradigm.

    4) Christianity teaches that *Non-Static* beds of symmetry amid Mankind’s awareness of truths about God and His Means and Ends cannot be helpful nor truthful because *STASIS* in the awareness and knowledge of God inside of Time and Physicality is the Christian paradigm’s definition of Man/Knowledge/God.

    5) In Scripture it is always the case that the Majority Opinion and Statistical Percentage Winners about God inside of Israel and inside of the Body of Christ have always been the most Godly and Righteous and Accurate and Truth-Based vectors. According to Scripture.

    Those five constitutional nuances breathe life into the skeptic’s complaint – but of course such has nothing to do with the singular metanarrative that is Scripture’s claims upon reality, upon Man, upon God, and upon Man’s knowledge of God.

    ReplyDelete
  32. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 2:58 AM


    Santi,

    On all of physicality and of temporal becoming God commands Man to master and subdue it. That’s the entire scientific / intelligibility arena – Full Stop. Your paradigm lacks the tools to claim any credit there. Christianity’s paradigm doesn't – Full Stop.

    That’s not the topic of this comment. Rather, your unwitting affirmation of the Christian narrative is. As in:

    Privation’s pains limit the distances which Man can traverse with/in the “stuff of God”. Christ revealed love’s ceaseless reciprocity amid self-sacrifice housed timelessly in Trinity – and that is the A and the Z of Man’s image. At least in this world. If we are asking for more, great – *but* – we cannot think that “more” is going to actualize given that our fundamental subtraction/addition remains imperfect.

    It will take a lifetime to learn to love, not perfectly, but simply better. And, to be honest, the most profound insights of God come in that arena. In all faiths. There is His Image, the image of love’s ceaseless reciprocity within the immutable love of the Necessary Being, and, then, all else is what Scripture defines as lesser, smaller, darker realities which hang from, or fall from, from that singular Rod, such realities amounting to the fractured (hence loveless) world we find ourselves in right now.

    “But some teach different things!!” That affirms Christ’s prescriptive/descriptive. And that complaint (and its close cousins) in fact *does* agree with Christ – with Scripture – though the Critic making the complaint may not know it. How’s that? The diagnosis which Christ spoke of, that of His Body being in division (on the one hand) coupled with love’s necessity there inside of self-sacrifice (on the other hand) just is the landscape which that complaint affirms.

    As such the Critic agrees with, and echoes, Christ about all such vectors.

    There are no mysteries which are to be revealed which are going to heal selfishness – that tendency toward the Self at the painful expense of the Other.
    In fact *none* of this, of that, is a matter of revelation or of trying to understand or of everyone getting a different view. It’s something very, very, very simple there inside of that which just is the landscape of, well, to simplify the topography, “love and lovelesssness”.

    Christ couldn’t have said it, and predicted it, and defined it, any better.

    It is the very fabric of our primary disease. Man’s enmity with himself and with others bothers the Critic as an ought-not-be and yet philosophical naturalism could never grant him the right. That Man’s enmity with himself and with others is the express target of most if not all of Christ’s primary targets in His Church and in Mankind speaks volumes which only “ontic-necessity” housing a paradigmatically irreducible (non-eliminative) form of love’s unending self-sacrifice can justifiably grant (as opposed to the useful fictions within reductionist lines, etc.)

    All of that it is quite telling given that these “complaints” by Critics actually affirm Christ’s very own words back to the world and back to the Church in the very complaints themselves. Indeed – it turns out that God is, in fact, speaking quite clearly as the Skeptic himself just is a moral being who in all of his own incantations just does utter the language of God in his (the Skeptic’s) own partial-truths and in his own fragmented half-sentences. To which the Christian states, “Welcome to the club.”

    Membership isn’t optional BTW – because reality is what reality is.

    The Skeptic’s metaphysics ends as a walking contradiction as he affirms Scripture’s singular metanarrative while simultaneously hiding his eyes from that which logic’s relentless demand for lucidity ultimately demands of his own intonations. The Critic need not waste his energy here trying to retort by foisting any sort defense which hinges on metaphysics saturated with reducible (eliminative) means and ends.

    ReplyDelete
  33. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 3:11 AM


    Syntax of the form "X brought Y back to life" amid the Modern Skeptic and Ancient Savage:

    Part 1 of 2.....


    In a thread at STR, “V.” stated, "It seems to me that the only reason for rejecting the essential historicity and reliability of the Biblical documents is a commitment to scientism and metaphysical naturalism, coupled with an addiction to unverifiable and unreasonable speculation."

    Moving further down that road:

    That is part of it to be sure, and, we can add that another component has to do with MIRACLES in the arena of the SUPERNATURAL. Indeed, both the Modern Skeptic and the Ancient Savage come to the same conclusions where the MIRACULOUS is concerned.

    For example, something as basic and as simple as the syntax of "X brought Y back to life" is coherent “out of hand”. Physicians do not violate the laws of nature as they morph – inside of Time and Knowledge – the very definition of the word "death". Infusing molecules and energy, or what have you, into dead bodies violates no "laws" (whatever laws of nature means) – but only serves to morph the definition of “death” to that which carries a definitional contingency upon the physician(s) / person(s) ability(s) rather than something that carries a definitional contingency upon the body proper.
    The definition of Death is non-static – ever in flux vis-à-vis the Mind(s) which surround the Body in question.

    It happens every day.

    And the definition keeps changing. Fluxing. The reach(s) of said Person(s) around said body ever reaching farther.

    How uncanny that death itself should turn out to be such a contingent state of affairs where Persons/Minds/Physicians are concerned.

    The Skeptic is left without observational reality, without science, and even without the definition of death in his favor – rather – the only item he has left *IF* he means to reject the syntax of "X brought Y back to life” in any sort of “out of hand” fashion turns out to be his own a priori of what sort(s) of Person(s) exist / what sort(s) of technical ability(s) said Person(s) bring to the table.

    Period.

    Given that the definition of death is clearly, obviously, *not* housed in the body proper, but in the sort(s) of Person(s) surrounding said body, their capability(s) to infuse molecules, energy – and so on – well then of course it is all very simplified.

    The only key variable left is the sorts of persons involved, as observational reality, science, the ever changing definition of death, and no need to mess with the “laws of nature” (whatever they are supposed to “be”) all affirm the coherence “out of hand” in syntax of the form “X brought Y back to life” in the real world as we actually find it. Given the nature of reality the Christian rationally predicted and predicts that said syntax easily obtains inside of nature all the while never doing “violence” to “nature”, never summing to the Skeptic’s straw man definition of “un”-natural.

    Supernatural? Again – The Modern Skeptic and the Ancient Savage both suffer the same sort of disjointed logic as they both expect to be able to measure a kind of material ripple atop the water should God dip His toe into the pond that is the natural (created) order. The Ancient Savage does this from his ignorance of Science, while the Modern Skeptic does this from his ignorance of Theism’s actual truth predicates fallaciously fueling his own straw-man “supernatural” semantics, and, also, the Modern Skeptic also makes these mistakes akin to the Ancient Savage because of, in part, the Modern Skeptic’s tendency towards the many faces of, not science, but scientism.


    Continued......

    ReplyDelete
  34. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 3:14 AM


    Syntax of the form "X brought Y back to life" amid the Modern Skeptic and Ancient Savage:

    Part 2 of 2.....

    How revealing it is that the Modern Skeptic and the Ancient Savage tend to come to the same sort of conclusions about the nature of what they are “seeing” in the peculiar yet repeatable syntax of “X brought Y back to life” here in the real world.

    But the Savage and the Skeptic are each certain that such must be – somehow – doing “violence” to “nature”, each must be somehow “un”-natural and thus each misread reality.

    It is unfortunate that the Skeptic rejects metaphysical necessities in favor of Scient-ism or else he might have a clue as to just why it is his definition of “supernatural” sums to the classic case of the Skeptic’s Straw Man void of any *real* metaphysical coherence.

    Science and the Christian’s truth predicates have left the ancient Savage – and hence the Skeptic’s own definitions – behind long, long ago.

    Science affirms what the Christian has always known – that the syntax of X brought Y back to life is all very natural in that it does not do any violence against the “laws of nature” – and hence the Christian’s definitions of mind, of body, of life, of death’s definitional contingency upon that which is something other than the body proper (and so on) have easily granted him from day one the ability to predict and even expect such occurrences to obtain inside of the created order.

    That is why both the Hebrew and the Christian (and now Science) got it right – all those millennia ago.

    Sadly, the Naturalist reminds us of another commentator elsewhere who asserted, wrongly, that "miracle" equates to "un"-natural, that dead people are never raised back to life, that everyone only dies once, and that should any of those be violated then such would be a “insult” against “nature” and that, given science, they are not possible. Of course, his basis for asserting such was the same conceptual poverty comprising all of the Naturalist’s own premises seen here thus far.

    Ultimately he was verifiably wrong about the word nature, about the word violation, about the prefix "un" in un-natural, about the word raised, about the word miracle, about the word science, about the word – and definition of – death, and about the word possible.

    Here we have verifiable evidence that, not science, but scientism – which sums to a rejection of metaphysics – caused him, and is causing the Skeptic here – to misinterpret the nature of reality, to define things based on false premises and ultimately to badmouth the progress of science.

    Whereas, the Christian’s metaphysics successfully predicted that such events “did” and “can” and “do” and “will” occur given the nature of reality.

    Exactly as the Hebrew and the Christian (and now Science) have always affirmed.

    There is no valid philosophical, scientific, or metaphysical reason to deny observational reality and the f.a.c.t. that syntax of the form "X brought Y back to life" is seamlessly coherent with reality. Science affirms the contingent status of death's non-static definition as such relates not to the body proper but rather to Mind(s) and Person(s) and Knowledge and Reach.

    Truth correspondence amid perception and verification affirm that the Hebrew, the Christian, and the NT authors got it right.

    ReplyDelete
  35. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 3:37 AM


    Santi,

    Science finally blossomed, and, then, finally achieved staying power:

    Before moving on to the necessary assumptions brought to the table wherein said endeavor not only (finally) blossomed but actually achieved staying power (finally) upon the world stage, and on God's command to master and subdue the entire order of physicality and temporal becoming, and before the historical contours of Christianity's unique claims about the created world, Man, God, and knowledge, and before the fact that, sure, said constructs were the first to claim such and then to run with such, first a bit of important background information in a comment or two:

    Who said it first!!!???

    Seriously?

    As if it matters.

    As it is typically the Non-Theist who is using a sort of false identity claim by (irrationally) equating [A] chronological epistemology to [B] metaphysical accounting in his attempt to accuse the Christian of some sort of error.

    First principles and ultimate explanatory stopping points, being truths about the fundamental shape of reality, are true regardless of the epistemological features of anyone who employs them. Intuiting truth and employing it is not the same as metaphysical *accounting*.

    For example, *if* Christianity is true, *then* objective moral truths existed, and were known by Man to this or that degree, prior to Sinai. Tracing out and pinning down timelines of chronological epistemology has nothing to do, at all, with the metaphysical accounting of truth/ontology. This applies to everything. Moral and Scientific epistemology, for example, being employed is not ontology being possessed. It just is the case that reason, and logic, and so on down till ….Z are *all* in this situation.

    The silliness of defining truth by pinning down timelines of chronological epistemology is not, at all, what Christianity’s truth predicates are about, nor is it what truth *period* is about or even can be about given what (metaphysical, paradigmatic) truth necessarily sums to. That the Non-Theist often seems to think otherwise about “truth” is just bizarre.

    Therefore, when it comes to the trio of 1: first principles and of 2: ultimate explanatory termini and of 3: the accusation of circular logic – well then – we find that the definition of circular logic fails to apply to the Christian paradigm should the accusation be constituted of a move which seeks to define truth by tracing out and pinning down timelines of chronological epistemology.

    Gravity was true regardless of who discovered it first, or who spoke about it first, and so on, and, as such, Truth is not defined by the many modes of temporal becoming vis-à-vis the Mind of Man, but, rather, by the Mind of God. The attempt by the Skeptic to reverse this and define truth by timelines of chronological epistemology is just bizarre. Even unscientific. Even irrational.

    Ought-love was true regardless of who discovered it first, or who spoke about it first, and so on, and, as such, Truth is not defined by the many modes of temporal becoming vis-à-vis the Mind of Man, but, rather, by the Mind of God. The attempt by the Skeptic to reverse this and define truth by timelines of chronological epistemology is just bizarre. Even unscientific. Even irrational.

    While the Non-Theist must cut off all presuppositions short of his own Ultimate Explanatory Terminus and therein force all of his metaphysical claims to suffer the pains of circularity (or else he must suffer the pains of incoherence and unintelligibility), the Christian need never pull up short, need never cut off his presuppositions prior to, or "distal to" (whatever that means) one's own ultimate explanatory terminus. For the Christian paradigm such obtains in and by the many and varied contours of the Divine Mind, in and by the many and varied contours of Pure Actuality.

    ReplyDelete
  36. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 3:39 AM



    Santi,


    And, of course, lest we forget, the Christian’s paradigmatic shape also obtains in and by that pesky business of its own “meta-narrative”, which finds all its Firsts, all its Lasts, in the Triune God such that what just does sum to the infinitely worthy Self timelessly amid the infinitely worthy Other ceaselessly constitutes Being’s relational interfaces wherein Pure Actuality unendingly begets love’s infinitely worthy and singular Us. Such sums to love’s ceaseless reciprocity amid the relational interfaces housed within the unavoidably triune landscape of “Self / Other / Us” as the Triune God transposes Himself into time and physicality as Truth Itself obtains in and by being’s three unavoidable vertices as reason affirms that such, and no less, constitutes infinite love.

    ReplyDelete
  37. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 3:50 AM


    Tom Gilson’s Thinking Christian has a few nuances helpful in background information here. One is on the error of Conflating Method for Meta and another is on the fallacy of the Copernican Myth.

    Brief excerpts:

    “The Copernican myth assumes that premodern geocentrism (earth-centered astronomy) was equivalent to anthropocentrism (human-centered ideology.) However, according to the ancient Greek geocentric viewpoint that was commonly assumed through the time of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), earth was at the bottom of the universe. This was no honor. “Up” pointed to the exalted incorruptible cosmic heaven; “down” here in the terrestrial realm, things fall apart. The British literary scholar C. S. Lewis summarized the medieval vision of the human place in the cosmos to be “anthroperipheral.” Accordingly, Galileo wrote in 1610: “I will prove that the Earth does have motion … and that it is not the sump where the universe’s filth and ephemera collect.” Galileo offered heliocentrism as a promotion for humanity out of the filthy cosmic center that Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265-1321) had associated with hell………..

    …………The Copernican revolution didn’t demote humans. It didn’t exalt us, either; especially not in the confused way some modernists do. It wasn’t about us, at least not in that sense. It was about the way the heavens worked. It wasn’t the Christians of Copernicus’s day who put an ideological/theological stamp on it, it was modernists. They wanted to embarrass those late medieval Christians for their lack of knowledge. Ironic, isn’t it?

    A truer understanding of the meaning of the Christian religion would correct a lot of myths. So would a truer understanding of the history of science.”

    End excerpts.

    ReplyDelete
  38. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 3:55 AM

    Indeed, we see it here too on the lack of knowledge, for Santi operates under the premise that New Information is an obscenity -- whereas Scripture's terms and definitions predict and expect such lines amid Man and Knowledge -- both of God and the created order. And science -- the Christian's approach to "the way things work" -- affirms said prediction.

    ReplyDelete
  39. AnonymousJanuary 25, 2016 at 6:11 AM

    As much as I enjoyed your review Ed, I still support the spirit of atheists who point up the universality of religions and religious stories which involve non-biological miraculous births, bodily ascents into another realm etc.

    Only a face to face or telephone discussion could explain my position as opposed to this blogging.

    ReplyDelete
  40. SantiJanuary 25, 2016 at 6:46 AM

    Laubadetriste:

    The Holocaust has come up, and I want to clarify why I bring it up in the context of Feser's book review: science and the Holocaust are linked in a contemporary secular mind like mine (and Coyne's) precisely in the way that empiricism and Stephen Greenblatt's new historicism should be linked and important: both are concerned with contingencies embedded in time.

    Feser writes books that are "out of time" in the sense that they are concerned with locking down metaphysical arguments in such a way that neither history nor science can disrupt their conclusions. Feser attempts to treat metaphysics as akin to mathematics, making history and empiricism unable to touch metaphysics even in principle. Hence the hyper-confidence and posturing he brings (and some of his thread followers bring) to his metaphysical conclusions, accepting, for example, God's existence with 100% certainty (as a matter, supposedly, of airtight logical reasoning).

    By contrast, Coyne has written two books that are "in time," one on evolution, the other narrating his intellectual journey and musings on the contemporary religious scene, tracing the varieties of religious arguments (akin to following the varieties of organisms in evolution), and finding them wanting. Feser thinks this exercise is worthless because, for a philosopher like Feser, rehearsing the irrationality and fallacies of, say, Scientologists, doesn't get you any closer to the truth of matters. It's just a distraction.

    But a secular Jewish scientist after the Holocaust is naturally going to be concerned with history's contingencies, and concerned with ideologies that become unmoored from empiricism and historical concern. He's going to want to think about that.

    So just as a Christian who is a supersessionist after the Holocaust is tone deaf to history, so it is with the metaphysician who is tone deaf to the Holocaust and the concerns of historians and scientists that ideas not free-float too far from the lives of real human beings in time (gays, women, etc.).

    The Holocaust, of all things that have happened over the past several thousand years, ought to give the hyper-confident metaphysician pause--exactly as Darwin's Origin of Species ought to have given the Protestant evangelical pause. That such things frequently don't give pause--indeed, get ignored--is going to be a distressing fact worthy of contemplation for a secular Jewish scientist like Coyne--and obviously I'm with Coyne on this.

    Put another way, the Holocaust ought to be a source of humility for anyone who pretends to be 100% confident of religious and ideological claims--exactly as evolution and historicism should be in general.

    Adorno, after WWII, thought about this very issue: the hyper, ahistorical, Hegelian-style confidence that saw large metaphysical forces at work, and that rendered contingent groups of people historically invisible and disposable, is part of what (Adorno posited) made the Holocaust possible. I think Coyne, as a secular Jew and scientist, is subconsciously troping this post-Holocaust concern to empiricism. People come under the spell of their metaphysical systems and neither history nor scientific evidence influences their confidence and thinking. By contrast, Feser, as a conservative Catholic (something I find bewildering to be after the Holocaust) has to subconsciously retreat into metaphysics because history is in many respects an uncomfortable and embarrassing issue for religious conservatives (from the treatment of women and gays, to Galileo, to historic Christian antisemitism, etc.).

    ReplyDelete
  41. SantiJanuary 25, 2016 at 7:32 AM

    Laubadetriste:

    I like your Sebald quote very much, and I appreciate that you agree that World not World talks about the resurrection in a way that is odd, scientifically (you said it is "an odd way for a scientist to talk *as a scientist.*").

    You then write: "But of course, it is greatly begging the question to presume that the Resurrection is a matter of the sort to be included along with 'the multiverse hypothesis, [or] string theory, or... the idea that the best explanation for the dimming of light from a distant star is solar megastructures built by aliens', as you continued. Presumably, you'd want someone who talks like a historian, and someone who talks like a philosopher, and someone (dare I say it) who talks like a theologian. (That last would be needed at least to help make sense of the thing.)"

    Here, I have to disagree with you. The methods of critical thinking are applicable across the board. You're letting World not World off the hook. You're giving a wink to irrationality, confirmation bias, and rationalizing, where you ought to be supporting rigorous scrutiny and evidence. Don't historians and philosophers also concern themselves with these? (I won't assume that the theologian does, except in arguing about the "data" of a biblical text or authority.)

    So what you've said is exactly what Coyne is concerned about with contemporary religious apologists: they make excuses for woo. The methods of science include the systematic application of critical thinking and investigation, and if you give someone a pass on science, you're giving them a pass on these.

    ReplyDelete
  42. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 7:54 AM



    Santi,

    Your autohypnosis is getting the best of you.

    You assert, but don't justify, this:

    "The Holocaust, of all things that have happened over the past several thousand years, ought to give the hyper-confident metaphysician pause--exactly as Darwin's Origin of Species ought to have given the Protestant evangelical pause. That such things frequently don't give pause--indeed, get ignored--is going to be a distressing fact worthy of contemplation for a secular Jewish scientist like Coyne--and obviously I'm with Coyne on this. ....Put another way, the Holocaust ought to be a source of humility for anyone who pretends to be 100% confident of religious and ideological claims--exactly as evolution and historicism should be in general."

    The very premise of your statement assumes Non-Christian truth predicates in order to make its case.

    It's now officially a pattern of yours.

    There is no reason why Evil confronts Christianity's metaphysical landscape. In fact, only within the geography of immutable love as such interfaces with the privation of Self can you even justify the word "pause" in your convoluted, and confused, assertion.

    I asked you earlier in this thread to justify that claim.

    Crickets.

    So I'll ask again: justify your claim.

    Then, on the Christian's a priori of Dirt-To-Man vis-à-vis the reach of Darwin, you again fail to justify why this is problematic for Christianity's metaphysical landscape. You just foist that it is so.

    Because you say so. Such is the charmed position you carve out for yourself --- claims walled off from reality.

    Dirt-To-Man, occurring at any rate of change within temporal becoming, isn't a "problem" -- and if you understood the Christian's metaphysical landscape you would know "why" the Corporeal amid its rate of change and the Adamic amid the Imago Dei not only fail to negate the other but in fact both affirm Scripture's definitions and terms.

    This is now an established pattern of yours, to merely invent definitions and blindly foist that there is a supposed "problem" that the Christian has to "solve".

    That pattern stems from your failure to test your (Non-Christian) premises against (actual) Christianity.

    Your own inventions and wish fulfillment may work in keeping your confidence falsely reassured, but reality is always the better option.

    Justify your claim that Evil/Darwin sum to "Problem" vis-à-vis Christianity's metaphysical landscape -- and when you either evade, equivocate, or fail, see if you can understand where you went wrong.

    Also, you may want to "try" to explain your bizarre behavior of operating and defining and analyzing "as if" new information is an obscenity. It's rather unscientific of you.

    ReplyDelete
  43. SantiJanuary 25, 2016 at 7:54 AM

    Laubadetriste:

    One more quick thought I'd be curious to hear your response to. I see Coyne's book as somewhat akin to Dante's Inferno. In other words, he's Virgil taking Dante (his reader) on a Grand Tour of the underground territory he knows well (the religious freak show, and its intellectual apologists). The effect of the book is cumulative, like Voltaire's Candide, a cautionary tale about the varieties of rationalizing that surround, not suffering, but the Old Nobodaddy himself, and why science (supposedly) can't access him.

    It's as if Coyne goes around and looks for somewhere--anywhere--that religion says something of value scientifically, and finds nothing. He's like Socrates roaming about the contemporary scene, asking, "What do the religious know?"

    In this sense, his evolution book and his new book are linked. One is on variation among organisms, the other on variations among religions--and the intellectuals who apologize for them. Coyne's book might have been called, "On the Varieties of Religious Rationalization in a Scientific Age."

    Abandon all your rationalizations, ye who enter here?

    ReplyDelete
  44. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 8:06 AM


    Santi,

    On the resurrection you've not addressed the evidence. You've merely claimed, "what evidence".

    Don't Non-Theists concern themselves with genre, linguistics, historicity, psychology, and the rationally affirmed syntax of "X brought Y back to life"?

    Apparently not......

    Allowing all vectors to inform all vectors is an intellectual habit the Non-Theist is too often missing.

    That one does not believe and affirm syntax affirmed by science, observational reality, and reality can only stem from ill informed emotional commitments.

    Coyne and yourself never address -- anywhere -- genre, linguistics, historicity, psychology, and the rationally affirmed syntax of "X brought Y back to life" because you're neither qualified to do so nor are you interested in allowing all vectors to inform all vectors.

    ReplyDelete
  45. JasonJanuary 25, 2016 at 8:32 AM

    @Santi

    Interesting reading from a perspective of a christian quantum gravity researcher, see his blog post called Theology: Less Speculative than Quantum Gravity

    ReplyDelete
  46. SantiJanuary 25, 2016 at 8:36 AM

    Okay, thanks Jason, I'll have a look.

    ReplyDelete
  47. JasonJanuary 25, 2016 at 8:38 AM

    @Santi

    Sorry posted the wrong url it is Theology: Less Speculative than Quantum Gravity

    ReplyDelete
  48. GottfriedJanuary 25, 2016 at 8:40 AM

    An admirer of Jerry Coyne and Stephen Greenblatt lecturing others on confirmation bias. Ah, Santi! ;)

    On that note, the contrast between the reception that Greenblatt's The Swerve received among the secular liberal cocktail party set and its reception by actual historians provides a remarkable comment on our modern cultural elites, and the legitimacy of their claims to authority.

    (And have you noticed that Santi's arguments amount to little more than one unending claim to authority?)

    ReplyDelete
  49. GottfriedJanuary 25, 2016 at 8:41 AM

    Sorry, that should be "arguments".

    ReplyDelete
  50. AnonymousJanuary 25, 2016 at 8:54 AM

    Santi: "It's as if Coyne goes around and looks for somewhere--anywhere--that religion says something of value scientifically, and finds nothing."

    I suppose it's contingent on what Santi holds to be "something of value scientifically," but the entire scientific "revolution" and the materialist assumptions of the modern era emerged from religious fundamentalism. Ockham and the resulting nominalist view of God of such thinkers as Descartes, Hobbes, etc. were the driving force behind a need for a "new science." At least according to Gillespie's convincing account: http://www.amazon.com/Theological-Origins-Modernity-Michael-Gillespie/dp/0226293467

    And what exactly have materialists come up with to replace idea of God-given Laws of nature today? It seems that particular religious rationalization had a great deal of value for science. There is quite a lot modern science is indebted to religion for. But I suppose Santi wouldn't recognize scientific value from his subjective perch anyway.

    -Robert

    ReplyDelete
  51. BrandonJanuary 25, 2016 at 10:37 AM

    (And have you noticed that Santi's arguments amount to little more than one unending claim to authority?)

    I find him even more dull than that, actually. It always reminds of some fundamentalist Baptists I've known when they're out and about missionizing -- he doesn't argue, he preaches sermons, and like my Baptist acquaintances, it's always on a small set of sermon topics, no matter what the context or the actual arguments being discussed (this week's sermon topic, Thomists are walling off metaphysics from empirical confirmation, comes up regularly no matter what the context is or how unconvincingly shoehorned its introduction), and always the same tiny set of sermon illustrations (we've gotten the Holocaust this time around, which is a regular one; gay marriage comes up consistently, even in threads primarily concerned with esoteric topics in epistemology; thankfully we haven't been subjected this time around to cherry-picked patchwork pseudoscience about bonobo sexuality; and a few others). Like them, there's never any sense that other people might have their own legitimate interests that are just as worthy to be discussed as his own, or that perhaps sometimes it might be a good worthwhile just to discuss the topic on its own terms rather than trying to fit into the message; instead we just get the attempt to turn every single discussion to the same topics over and over again. And like them, he really honestly does think he is improving everybody's life, keeping everyone on their toes, rather than, as is an infinitely more likely consequence, driving everyone else into a dangerous complacency. At least the fundamentalists aren't somniferously tedious about it.

    But there are worse things.

    ReplyDelete
  52. SantiJanuary 25, 2016 at 12:42 PM

    Scbrown:

    You asked me to address the evidence for the resurrection, but which resurrection are you referring to?

    Matthew 27:51-53. Have you read it? Let's use it as a brief test case for the value of resurrection testimonial evidence from a first century source.

    Immediately following Jesus’s death, Matthew says that there was an earthquake that exposed numerous graves on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and “many bodies of the saints which slept arose.”

    Not only did many among the dead rise, but Matthew claims that they entered the city of Jerusalem, appearing “unto many.”

    So this is quite a stunning claim. Graves would have been exposed all around the outskirts of Jerusalem from Friday until Sunday, and if you happened to be walking among these burial places on Sunday, you would have seen many corpses of the dead coming “out of their graves.”

    But why believe this story? After all, no other ancient writer save Matthew records anything about this. It’s as if a UFO had descended on Jerusalem and no one, apart from Matthew, thought it worthy of marking the event in historical memory. The simplest explanation for why no one recorded it, save Matthew, is that it didn’t happen.

    Matthew's Night of the Living Dead passage also leads to this question: if Matthew can make a wild and unsubstantiated claim concerning many people rising from the dead, why should we believe his claim that Jesus rose from the dead?

    ReplyDelete
  53. SantiJanuary 25, 2016 at 12:58 PM

    Brandon:

    The difference between Coyne and Feser is a dispute over historicism/empiricism vs. metaphysics, so of course the Holocaust is relevant to this thread.

    After the Holocaust, do you think Catholics (and Protestants, for that matter) should rethink the doctrine of supersessionism?

    ReplyDelete
  54. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 1:15 PM


    Santi,

    Again, you've not addressed the evidence.

    Instead, you refer to claim X in history X, and then fail to address anything.

    Wow.

    Instead:

    Genre, linguistics, historicity, first century Gentile psychology and fact checking, first century travel and fact checking, first century Jewish psychology and fact checking, legend evolution, specifics peculiar to ancient biography --- to name a few.

    Please give a detailed account of the pro/con weighted evidence in all of those, and show us both where and how the irrational ensues. Don't bother wasting our time appealing to the magical thinking of Ancient Savages / Modern Skeptics as described earlier.

    Then, justify your claim that irreducible Evil does not exist. You know, your preferred topic of Auschwitz.....

    ReplyDelete
  55. JasonJanuary 25, 2016 at 1:52 PM

    Santi,

    In my humble opinion, Matthew is using a well known technique of "flash forward" in verse 52 and 53. He is tying this with what was said in Ezekiel 37:12-13. By joining the earthquake (which signifies God's activities within the world) and the raising of the dead in the future he is showing us the significance of the event.

    ReplyDelete
  56. AnonymousJanuary 25, 2016 at 2:09 PM

    Gottfried, I hadn't noticed Santi's arguments at all. They must be well written behind the nauseating verbiage.

    ReplyDelete
  57. AnonymousJanuary 25, 2016 at 2:11 PM

    Gottfried, I hadn't noticed Santi's arguments at all. They must be well written behind the nauseating verbiage.

    ReplyDelete
  58. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 2:23 PM


    Santi,

    Clarification:

    Don't bother wasting our time appealing to the magical thinking of Ancient Savages / Modern Skeptics as described earlier.

    Meaning....... please don't waste our time by trying to defend your premises by leaning on your magical thinking. While you may take comfort in or from your magical thinking, Christians are only interested in reality. *Therefore*, that you and the Ancient Savages agree on how to interpret and define reality is of no help to us given our agenda.

    ReplyDelete
  59. SantiJanuary 25, 2016 at 2:46 PM

    Jason,

    If I'm understanding your view on this, you're saying that Matthew perhaps constructed the Night of the Living Dead story--that it didn't literally happen. Matthew was reading Ezekiel 37:12-13, and he saw a way of incorporating the Ezekiel passage into his passion narrative as a fulfillment of prophecy. I can buy that, and it increases my respect for Matthew as a creative writer.

    Your idea, however, would seem to call into question the idea that the stories of Jesus's resurrection are historical, for these too would then possibly be products of writers' imaginations prompted by their creative readings of Hebrew scriptural texts.

    But if Matthew didn't make up stuff, we are left with a perplexing question: From where else might he have gotten the Night of the Living Dead resurrection story? The answer is: We don’t know. If Matthew believed that he was told a true story, there is no telling what evidence or testimony convinced him that it was true because he doesn’t tell us anything beyond the bare story itself. So even if Matthew believed it really happened, there is no reason the rest of us should, don't you agree?

    And Matthew tells other stories that seem similarly dubious. See, for example, Matthew 28:11-15, in which the author circulates a conspiracy theory around which Jews are said to have bribed soldiers to cover-up the resurrection of Jesus. The story, like Matthew’s Night of the Living Dead tale, provokes from us similar questions: Where did Matthew get the story? How does he know the story is true? Could Matthew have made it up based on a passage in the Hebrew Bible (another prophecy "fulfillment" story)? How do we know whether Matthew isn’t just circulating a grotesque and fantastic antisemitic rumor?

    It appears that Matthew, in short, is either: (1) a creative writer; or (2) someone with his bullshit and anti-Jewish conspiracy theory detectors dialed way, way down.

    ReplyDelete
  60. GottfriedJanuary 25, 2016 at 2:49 PM

    The difference between Coyne and Feser is a dispute over historicism/empiricism vs. metaphysics, so of course the Holocaust is relevant to this thread.


    I marvel at the amount of falseness, confusion, and tastelessness you can pack into one little sentence.

    ReplyDelete
  61. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 5:11 PM

    Santi,

    Still unwilling to address evidence I see.

    Do you always approach "studying reality" that way?

    Or only the slices of reality you don't care for?


    ReplyDelete
  62. BrandonJanuary 25, 2016 at 5:14 PM

    The difference between Coyne and Feser is a dispute over historicism/empiricism vs. metaphysics, so of course the Holocaust is relevant to this thread.

    As Gottfried notes, nothing in this claim is very plausible; there is no 'of course', because there is no particular reason to think that the Holocaust, in particular, is relevant to the issues between Feser and Coyne as expressed in Feser's review or any of his explicit comments on it. The extremely simplistic framing of the dispute in terms of historicism/empiricism vs. metaphysics simply substitutes vagueness for examination of the real oppositions between actual arguments made on both sides. And you have a consistent history of using the Holocaust for shock value in arguments rather than taking the appropriate trouble to establish that you have good reasons to bring it into the discussion.

    After the Holocaust, do you think Catholics (and Protestants, for that matter) should rethink the doctrine of supersessionism?

    This is an excellent example of the Santi method of sermonizing with a narrow treadmill of points. One would usually expect that a sentence in a comment is somehow relevant to the actual discussion of which the comment is a part; but Santi regularly violates the Maxim of Relevance. Supersessionism is specifically a theological doctrine, a position in Biblical exegesis, to be exact. The Holocaust is not a purely empirical phenomenon, as one would expect from the context; understanding it correctly requires understanding a large number of ethical norms. Thus it is not capable of serving as an example of what Santi was just talking about; neither empiricism nor metaphysics are involved. (Although it is in fact true that supersessionism is a historicist position, and that historicist positions often share the same structure as supersessionism, as we see in Hegelians both Left and Right; but this contributes nothing whatsoever to Santi's point.) Neither the Holocaust nor supersessionism has any direct relevance to the specific issues raised in the review; no amount of exegesis of Feser's arguments and claims will discover them. Nor has Santi provided any evidence that they are explicitly important parts of Coyne's primary case, either. It is a diversion of the discussion into an entirely different ground, one which has no established bearing on any of the discussion. And my views in particular of the Holocaust and supersessionism are not even relevant to the discussion even on Santi's own terms.

    ReplyDelete
  63. JasonJanuary 25, 2016 at 5:34 PM

    Santi,

    If I'm understanding your view on this, you're saying that Matthew perhaps constructed the Night of the Living Dead story--that it didn't literally happen

    Well the verses are a reference to what will happen (in the future) after the resurrection at the second coming of Jesus.

    Your idea, however, would seem to call into question the idea that the stories of Jesus's resurrection are historical, for these too would then possibly be products of writers' imaginations prompted by their creative readings of Hebrew scriptural texts.

    I do not see how two verses that are telling the future fulfillment of a prophecy call into question the historical resurrection of Jesus. It does not logically follow in my humble opinion. Even if Matthew is a great story teller that does not mean that Jesus’s resurrection is not historical. We have a host of other documents (other 3 Gospels, letters from the apostles, letters from early church fathers, non-christian historical references etc) supporting what Matthew is saying about the resurrection of Jesus.

    But if Matthew didn't make up stuff, we are left with a perplexing question: From where else might he have gotten the Night of the Living Dead resurrection story? The answer is: We don’t know.

    Again I think he is referring to a prophecy so he gets it from there. Even if that is not the case it adds little to the overall story of the redemptive power of God in Jesus’s death and resurrection.

    And Matthew tells other stories that seem similarly dubious. See, for example, Matthew 28:11-15, in which the author circulates a conspiracy theory around which Jews are said to have bribed soldiers to cover-up the resurrection of Jesus.

    This is a very interesting point you bring up. Wouldn’t the first thing that the you would do when the apostles boldly proclaimed Jesus’s resurrection is to go to the tomb and show his body to everyone (Christianity would have died there and then)? If that is not what the people of those times did so they had to come up with some rational alternative hence this “story” fits very well in the overall case of the resurrection. So I do not think that Matthew made this story up in my opinion.

    someone with his bullshit and anti-Jewish conspiracy theory detectors dialed way, way down.

    Sorry I do not understand what you mean by that.

    ReplyDelete
  64. scbrownlhrmJanuary 25, 2016 at 5:38 PM

    Santi's analysis and methods claim Jesus was an anti-Semitic "because" Jesus accused some religious leaders of the day to be guilty of A or B or C.

    Similarly, Matthew claims... therefore anti-Semitic...

    That's heady and sophisticated and very technical "research".

    Coyne and Santi apparently share methods.

    Fortunately actual historians exist. They write really big books. With lots of words. Big words in big books covering huge swaths of technical insights.

    The kind of books Santi and Coyne are painfully unfamiliar with.

    ReplyDelete
  65. SantiJanuary 25, 2016 at 6:20 PM

    Brandon:

    I asked: "After the Holocaust, do you think Catholics (and Protestants, for that matter) should rethink the doctrine of supersessionism?"

    You answered with a long, long paragraph dodging the question, which concluded with this hand waving sentence: "And my views in particular of the Holocaust and supersessionism are not even relevant to the discussion even on Santi's own terms."

    I'll take that as a no.

    ReplyDelete
  66. SantiJanuary 25, 2016 at 7:47 PM

    Jason:

    I said this: "Matthew tells other stories that seem similarly dubious. See, for example, Matthew 28:11-15, in which the author circulates a conspiracy theory around which Jews are said to have bribed soldiers to cover-up the resurrection of Jesus."

    You said in response: "[The Jews] they had to come up with some rational alternative hence this 'story' fits very well in the overall case of the resurrection. So I do not think that Matthew made this story up in my opinion."

    I'd ask you to look again. The Jews' reaction is not rational, but cartoonishly demonic. It's not true to the psychology of human beings--either of the Romans depicted, or the Jews. Put yourself in the shoes of those Jews as real human beings, and not as people being caricatured as monsters bent on resisting Jesus. Matthew is unmistakably insinuating that the Jewish leaders were so irredeemably evil that, although they knew Jesus had risen from the dead--knew it!--they still wouldn't believe, and actively engaged in a cover-up.

    This demonic behavior then feeds into the whole narrative earlier in Matthew that the Jews got what they deserved in the destruction of Jerusalem--and the supersessionist narrative that then went forward from there, that the destruction of Jerusalem was a sign that God had withdrawn from the Jews the designation of "Chosen People," and given it to the Church--and this because the Jews had crucified the Son of God--were Christ killers.

    ReplyDelete
  67. JasonJanuary 25, 2016 at 8:48 PM

    Santi,

    I'd ask you to look again. The Jews' reaction is not rational, but cartoonishly demonic. It's not true to the psychology of human beings--either of the Romans depicted, or the Jews. Put yourself in the shoes of those Jews as real human beings, and not as people being caricatured as monsters bent on resisting Jesus. Matthew is unmistakably insinuating that the Jewish leaders were so irredeemably evil that, although they knew Jesus had risen from the dead--knew it!--they still wouldn't believe, and actively engaged in a cover-up.

    I honestly went back and saw the passage but I still think that it rationally fits the resurrection story. The most that passage does is that it shows that the Jews and Christians disagree on why the tomb was empty but not if it was empty or not (a very important distinction in my opinion). Jesus did not die because some Jewish people crucified Him instead He die for our sins so that we may have eternal life in communion with Him.

    ReplyDelete
  68. laubadetristeJanuary 25, 2016 at 9:07 PM

    "...science and the Holocaust are linked in a contemporary secular mind like mine (and Coyne's) precisely in the way that empiricism and Stephen Greenblatt's new historicism should be linked and important: both are concerned with contingencies embedded in time."

    I suggest you avoid intruding your hobby horses into unrelated conversations. The fact that something is linked to something else in your mind is by itself no good reason to bring it up, as anything can be linked to anything in your mind, and not therefore with good reason. Why, if dogs could talk, there would be some of them that always talked of lemon whenever bells rang...

    "Feser writes books that are 'out of time' in the sense that they are concerned with locking down metaphysical arguments in such a way that neither history nor science can disrupt their conclusions. Feser attempts to treat metaphysics as akin to mathematics, making history and empiricism unable to touch metaphysics even in principle."

    If by "concerned with locking down" you mean that that is what he intends, then that is false. If you mean that that can be the result, then you state the obvious, as that is what it is to do metaphysics. (I imagine you saying, with a similar silly suspicion, "My teacher is concerned with locking down mathematical arguments, that on a right triangle a2+b2=c2, in such a way that neither history nor science can disrupt their conclusions.") You could of course argue that metaphysics is not akin to mathematics, but that would require you to make an argument.

    I wonder, *can* you make an argument about that? I mean, do you have it in you?

    "Feser thinks this exercise is worthless because, for a philosopher like Feser, rehearsing the irrationality and fallacies of, say, Scientologists, doesn't get you any closer to the truth of matters."

    How misleading. This implies that what he thinks, he thinks *because he is a philosopher.* And of course, by sidestepping any actual argument, and merely suggesting with a sort of innuendo that he is wrong, you get the cheap satisfaction of criticizing him, without having to do any actual work.

    You may remember that about 20 hours ago, I defended you against someone who said you were posting here *because you are obsessed with your penis.* If you pay attention, you'll notice that that is exactly the sort of thing you just did to Dr. Feser. In fact, let me expand on that, as it seems to be a large part of your method:

    ReplyDelete
  69. laubadetristeJanuary 25, 2016 at 9:07 PM

    "In other words, you must show *that* a man is wrong before you start explaining *why* he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became to be so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it 'Bulverism.' Some day I am going the write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father - who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third - 'Oh, you say that *because you are a man.*' 'At that moment,' E. Bulver assures us, 'there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet.'"--C. S. Lewis, "Bulverism"

    And of course, not only is Bulverism a large part of your method, but also you miss such ironies as that, just after you relate some half-chewed Adorno about the Holocaust being caused by "hyper, ahistorical, Hegelian-style confidence that saw large metaphysical forces at work," in the very next sentence you say that Coyne "is subconsciously troping this post-Holocaust concern to empiricism."

    And of course, humble student of the Jewish experience that you are, you know only too well what Karl Kraus said about jargon.

    (But why should that stop you? It's been two days since Craig Payne asked about it, and you still haven't looked up "empiricism"...)

    "But why believe this story? After all, no other ancient writer save Matthew records anything about this. It’s as if a UFO had descended on Jerusalem and no one, apart from Matthew, thought it worthy of marking the event in historical memory. The simplest explanation for why no one recorded it, save Matthew, is that it didn’t happen."

    Now you're just being historically naive. I *did* ↑mention Craig and Wright as places to start if you actually want to review the evidence for the Resurrection. But if, as it now appears, you would rather delve into why certain passages were written as they were, then perhaps you could start with some commentaries. From there, there's form criticism, redaction criticism...

    ReplyDelete
  70. laubadetristeJanuary 25, 2016 at 9:14 PM

    "You answered with a long, long paragraph dodging the question..."

    It is not a dodge to criticize an uninformed and misleading question.

    ReplyDelete
  71. SantiJanuary 25, 2016 at 10:11 PM

    One more quick thought on this. The narrative of Matthew 28:11-15 does not sound at all like a historical account, but is more akin to the genre of Greek tragedy, in which a leader is undbending. An example is King Pentheus in Euripides' Bacchae. He is cartoonishly rigid, blind, inflexible, and stiff-necked throughout the play, never budging in his hostility to Dionysus--not even in the face of the god's miracles.

    So this particular gospel story is more characteristic of writerly imagination, incorporating into his narrative a cartoonish devil (unbelieving Jews), not history.

    And would you, on having a firsthand account of a miracle, behave like these Jewish leaders? Or if you were a Roman soldier who had directly experienced a miracle, would you trade it for coins?

    Obviously not. The story thus bears signs of being a late fanciful rationalization in this sense: Jews had a story that circulated in their community (Jesus' disciples stole the body) and Matthew countered it by making up a story as to where the Jews got their story: evil Jewish leaders bribed Roman soldiers to tell a scurrilous story.

    Here's the libelous accusation Matthew puts forward against 1st century Judaism in full:

    Matthew 28:11-15 King James Version (KJV):

    11 Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.

    12 And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers,

    13 Saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.

    14 And if this come to the governor's ears, we will persuade him, and secure you.

    15 So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day.

    ReplyDelete
  72. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 1:09 AM



    Santi,

    Oh dear.

    So your "research" shows that the only option is that EVERBODYT KNEW and BELIEVED that the resurrection happened and so anyone who acted contrary to that MUST BE DEMONIC!!

    "Matthew is unmistakably insinuating that the Jewish leaders were so irredeemably evil that, although they knew Jesus had risen from the dead--knew it!--they still wouldn't believe, and actively engaged in a cover-up."

    Unfortunately you have just reduced human psychology to ONE DATA POINT.

    That is officially now a pattern of yours.

    Why not allow all data points on human psychology to impact your analysis?

    Why not allow all data points to inform all data points?

    Why think that Jesus was anti-Semitic -- "--Cause, umm, one data point...."

    Do you always approach "studying reality" that way?

    Or only the slices of reality you don't care for?

    There are professionals out there who can help you learn how to study historicity.

    That is, if you think you have anything to learn.

    You know, like......

    Genre, linguistics, historicity, first century Gentile psychology and fact checking, first century travel and fact checking, first century Jewish psychology and fact checking, legend evolution, specifics peculiar to ancient biography --- to name a few.

    Please give a detailed account of the pro/con weighted evidence in all of those, and show us both where and how the irrational ensues. Don't bother wasting our time appealing to the magical thinking of Ancient Savages / Modern Skeptics as described earlier.

    Then, justify your claim that irreducible Evil does not exist. You know, your preferred topic of Auschwitz.....

    ReplyDelete
  73. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 1:17 AM



    Santi,

    Clarification:

    That is now an official pattern of yours.

    Meaning..... not only on the one data point in Matthew, but in your entire approach to all topics in this entire thread.

    From the very beginning you just keep repeating that "methodology".

    Sure, quick sound bites projecting your wish fulfillment and unawareness of the facts make for a nice show -- the sort Coyne is known for -- but in the end the facts eventually rise to the surface and reveal such as merely that -- a quick sound bite void of content.

    You (and Coyne) set yourself up in that charmed location where you can invent just any claim you want and then proceed forward with said claim all tucked in, insulated from reality, constituted of one and only one data point, magically separated from all other data points.

    ReplyDelete
  74. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 1:29 AM



    Santi,

    Why do you inject your materialistic assumptions into the experience of Roman guards? The Corporeal of the resurrected Christ....what? Had to yell out to the Roman guard to move the stone so he can get out and go see his disciples? You're not arguing. You're just being circular.

    Also, scripture and scholars all affirm that there were three primary subsets of experience -- those who believed and those who did not believe and those who did believe but were frightened for their lives. Like Peter and other of Christ's disciples.

    Why do you assert otherwise and reduce it all to one data point within the very wide canopy of human psychology?

    Please show us your research that convincingly shows the failure of those scholars and of scripture's terms and definitions.

    ReplyDelete
  75. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 1:40 AM


    “You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it "Bulverism". Someday I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — "Oh you say that because you are a man." "At that moment", E. Bulver assures us, "there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall." That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.” (C.S. Lewis)

    ReplyDelete
  76. AnonymousJanuary 26, 2016 at 1:57 AM

    Santi, go away.

    That is how you respond to Santi. He is a troll. You only feed a troll by reponding with anything else. You can't defeat trolls by argument. You only get sucked into their mire (see how Brandon just demolished one of his points and he didn't bat an eye lid). But they hate being ignored.

    ReplyDelete
  77. AnonymousJanuary 26, 2016 at 2:17 AM

    laubadetriste: Well, now, that's just Bulverism.

    Actually, it's not. Although I can see it might be taken for it, but I am not arguing that Santi is wrong because of those reasons. I am saying that he has already been shown wrong, and here is a possible explanation. It is a hypothesis and I freely admit that without putting him on the couch, the details could be wrong. But I think the general thrust is the best explanation of the evidence, and you are welcome to suggest alternatives. You can say that his motives do not matter, only his arguments, but the problem is that Santi does not have arguments, and it's sometimes worth looking into because you cannot communicate with someone usefully if you do not know where he's coming from. Or in this case if it's worth trying to communicate at all. Someone who is not interested in a serious conversation should not be encouraged as if he did. The exact reason doesn't matter so much as getting people to notice that by responding to him on that level they are missing the point. Unlike other trolls, it's not just that he is bad at logical reasoning or that he keeps trying to steer the discussion off-topic, but unlike Brandon's Baptist friends, Santi insults people, whines when they point out his errors, and ignores anyone who is persistent enough to pin him down on a single point and insist on a real answer. Of course people will default to responding to any post by attempting to treat it philosophically, so you might say there is no point to looking for an explanation like this, but I really have concluded that there is something psychological going on here beyond simply 'bad arguments'.

    ReplyDelete
  78. Not the anonymous of a couple of comments back, we just think alikeJanuary 26, 2016 at 2:22 AM

    Jason: Sorry I do not understand what you mean by that.

    You do know that Santi is basically a troll, right? And you are feeding him.

    ReplyDelete
  79. AnonymousJanuary 26, 2016 at 2:22 AM

    Santi: You answered with a long, long paragraph dodging the question, which concluded with this hand waving sentence

    Ahahaha, the funniest thing Santi has ever written. Which is entirely lost on him of course.

    ReplyDelete
  80. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 3:07 AM


    Part 1 of 2:

    Coyne and Santi give good examples of taking one data point and forming arguments upon "it" rather than pulling in from all vectors and assimilating all data points into one, seamless T.O.E. Hence the implausibility, and outright fallaciousness, of their premises.

    There are entire anthologies compiled which look at all sorts of ancient writings. Not only NT writings, but *all* such bits of history.

    In fact, it's an actual science comprised of many sub-specialties.

    A very brief example from another thread offers some insight on the nature of the Non-Theist's flawed approach to, not only Scripture (as in the following) but, as we've seen here, every bit of reality:

    Non-Theist: “Well I don't think we're in a great position either. But we do have some tools at our disposal which the ancients did not. We have electronic databases of texts to compare, translations of all manner of ancient documents into our own language, and information technology allowing us to compare notes, ideas, and hypotheses, etc. And---although I don't want to get too carried away with this, as people even in antiquity were often quite brilliant---we also have a culture of critical thinking which the ancients did not….. As a physicist, you should especially appreciate the technological tools we have….. Of course, technology only goes so far. That's why I say that we're not in a *far* better position than the ancients. But, in certain respects, we are in a *somewhat* better position.”

    Christian/Theist: You make a good point. [1] Technology has established the high degree of (tediously dissected) satisfaction of historicity which the NT comes to the table with. [2] Technology has established that the Hebrew, the Christian, and the NT authors got it right on the science and metaphysics behind syntax of the form "X brought Y back to life". Good work.

    Non-Theist: "...no responsible historian takes ancient documents at face value...."

    Christian/Theist: That is correct. It's a whole science. Historicity's arena and all that. Odd that you think it is news. Technology has helped the Christian's case there. Lots in fact. You know, now that fact-checking can finally take place.

    The Non-Theist states, or foists, [A] and (then) just inexplicably equates it to [B], as in: "[A] How would you feel if you thought the gospels were written by unknown second- or third-generation Christians? Would you be so confident in your faith if you really believed that, say, Matthew's and Luke's alterations to Mark and [Q-communities] were [B] based not on a commitment to historical accuracy, but rather on religious and literary preferences?"

    As if a case of [A], which historicity's arena is loaded with in all sorts of non-disingenuous writings, just ipso facto equates to [B]. But such a false identity claim has such a high frequency of counter examples that the assertion (A = B) cannot be considered without evidence. No serious historian takes such a superficial and unjustified assertion (A = B) at face value. Archeological finds have affirmed all sorts of writings which, for the longest time, were oral traditions passed along.

    Etc.

    Hence the Christian is factually justified to just grant "no 1st generation fact-checking took place" (which is comical) merely for the sake of discussion (and follow with, “Shoulder-Shrug..."So what?") because granting [A] (for the sake of discussion, etc.) never can count as evidence for [B]. If and when *other* lines of evidence come in and help construct that assertion (A = B) or help deconstruct it, well then the conversation can progress.

    It's a whole science. That science even has a name. Fortunately today's technological advances have helped the proliferation of said science.

    Continued.......

    ReplyDelete
  81. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 3:16 AM


    Part 2 of 2:

    A painfully tedious book, Richard Bauckham’s “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” is a tome of over 500 pages.

    “………Part of Bauckham’s intention is to show that the old form-critical ways of looking at Gospel traditions were wrong. According to classic form criticism (the basis of the work of the Jesus Seminar), early Christian traditions circulated anonymously in communities that were viewed as if they were faceless collectives (for example, the “Q community”). Bauckham thinks this theory is deeply flawed and suggests instead that there were personal links from the Jesus tradition to known and named tradents (carriers of tradition) throughout the period of transmission right down to when these traditions were included in the Gospels. Bauckham is quite right to insist that analogies with modern folklore to explain how ancient Gospel traditions were handled are simply wrong and anachronistic. The period between the time of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels is relatively short (between 30 and 60-some years, depending on the Gospel), and during that entire time there were still eyewitnesses who could act as checks and balances to the formation of the early Christian tradition. The “period between the ?historical’ Jesus and the Gospels was actually spanned, not by anonymous community transmission, but by the continuing presence and testimony of eyewitnesses, who remained the authoritative sources of their traditions until their deaths,” Bauckham writes.”

    At over 500 pages it’s dense. The kindle version is nice for “searching” key words and so on.

    In short:

    There may be good reasons to discount claim A or B or C, and, there may be good reasons to find such claims credible, just as there are *bad* reasons to reject/embrace claims.

    The point is that one must employ a process which looks at all data points and then give a reasoned response which is itself tediously tied to all such data points whether pro or con.

    The *absence* of that sort of all data-points-included method of reality-testing is just far, far too common in Coyne's (and Santi's) "methodology".

    ReplyDelete
  82. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 4:15 AM

    Finally:


    A book by Richard Bauckham, “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” is a tome of over 500 pages:

    “………Part of Bauckham’s intention is to show that the old form-critical ways of looking at Gospel traditions were wrong. According to classic form criticism (the basis of the work of the Jesus Seminar), early Christian traditions circulated anonymously in communities that were viewed as if they were faceless collectives (for example, the “Q community”). Bauckham thinks this theory is deeply flawed and suggests instead that there were personal links from the Jesus tradition to known and named tradents (carriers of tradition) throughout the period of transmission right down to when these traditions were included in the Gospels. Bauckham is quite right to insist that analogies with modern folklore to explain how ancient Gospel traditions were handled are simply wrong and anachronistic. The period between the time of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels is relatively short (between 30 and 60-some years, depending on the Gospel), and during that entire time there were still eyewitnesses who could act as checks and balances to the formation of the early Christian tradition. The “period between the ?historical’ Jesus and the Gospels was actually spanned, not by anonymous community transmission, but by the continuing presence and testimony of eyewitnesses, who remained the authoritative sources of their traditions until their deaths,” Bauckham writes.”

    At over 500 pages it’s dense. The kindle version is nice for “searching” key words and so on.

    In short:

    There may be good reasons to discount claim A or B or C, and, there may be good reasons to find such claims credible, just as there are *bad* reasons to reject/embrace claims.

    The point is that one must employ a process which looks at all data points and then give a reasoned response which is itself tediously tied to all such data points whether pro or con.

    The *absence* of that sort of all data-points-included method of reality-testing is far, far too common in Coyne's (and Santi's) "methodology".

    ReplyDelete
  83. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 6:02 AM

    Laubadetriste:

    I'll accept your Bulverism critique. It's fair. I do that. Not all the time, but I do it. And obviously a lot of people, including on your side of the religious fence, do it. I didn't know what Bulverism was, so thanks for explaining it to me.

    Putting a sympathetic spin on Bulverism, however, I think that it is another way of saying that people tend to have a narrative in their own head that, to their satisfaction, refutes this or that claim, but rather than flesh it out (which takes time), they have an "ah ha" moment regarding a counter solution (a counter-narrative or meta-narrative), and they want to verbalize that, and so they put forward a moment of ironic meta-insight concerning what's "really" going on: "So-and-so says x because he's a man or a pysychopath," or "What this is really about is..."--or whatever.

    The Bulverist maneuver may be true, by the way, or part of the truth. It frequently points to blind spots in a holistic field surrounding truth (the truth is the whole). Freud and Marx do it, for instance, in their analyses of religion (daddy issues, religion in the service of power, etc.). Few would argue that their critiques of religion are irrelevant to understanding religion to some degree. They presume religion false, then look for the frame that most plausibly explains how it's functioning. It's a structuralist critique, as it were.

    So I'm presuming (for instance) that the conclusions surrounding Thomistic metaphysics cannot be treated as seriously as mathematical conclusions, and you've challenged me to make an argument for that, rather than run to the meta-analysis. So I'll make some short arguments, and see how you respond.

    ReplyDelete
  84. BrandonJanuary 26, 2016 at 6:22 AM

    You answered with a long, long paragraph dodging the question, which concluded with this hand waving sentence: "And my views in particular of the Holocaust and supersessionism are not even relevant to the discussion even on Santi's own terms."

    I'll take that as a no.

    If you think ten sentences is a "long, long paragraph", you must not do much serious prose reading; but since your interpretation shows quite clearly that you are not able to read English, that's perhaps not surprising. What's more interesting is that you continue your tactic of diverting discussions into irrelevant matters; faced with a comment pointing out all the ways your question is in fact irrelevant to the discussion, your response is to claim that it is a dodging of your irrelevant question.

    ReplyDelete
  85. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 6:31 AM

    My first argument against treating metaphysical arguments as akin to mathematics is a common sense one. For example, while every single mathematician in the world accepts the solution to Fermat's last theorem as a conclusive proof, there is no consensus of philosophers on any complex problem in philosophy (whether of God's existence, free will, etc.). It seems reasonable, therefore, to conclude that the premises behind which key metaphysical arguments are made are either: (1) in some sense ultimately arbitrary; or (2) stated with insufficient precision (because stated in words and concepts as opposed to numbers).

    If this wasn't the case, you, Laubadetriste, would yourself have to prove that your metaphysical arguments are not ultimately arbitrary or imprecise, and then explain why so many philosophers still disagreed with you (they are badly motivated, stupider than you are, etc.). You would be moving, in other words, into the realm of Bulverism, where you think your arguments are in need of no further elaboration--and so you don't provide that elaboration--and yet you've also got to account for why so many experts still think you're full of shit.

    Nobody in mathematics has to worry about this dilemma. When you've got the right answer, you've got it. All the experts can see you've got it. There is an expert consensus. This never happens in philosophy. And great minds who are both philosophers and mathematicians, like Bertrand Russell, recognize that philosophy, though rigorous, cannot, on the questions that matter most to us, be locked down like mathematics.

    So when somebody plays the role of the confidence man, acting as if they're 100% certain of a conclusion in philosophy or theology, I'm dubious. Aren't you?

    ReplyDelete
  86. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 7:02 AM

    A second reason not to treat one's metaphysical conclusions with 100% certainty (as one might with a simple equation like 2+2=4) has to do with the flawed nature of one's brain. The brain is an evolved organ, subject to disease, hormones, aging, memetic hacking, habituation, biases grounded in desire, and other potential errors of processing. "The easiest person to fool is yourself" (Feynman).

    So the more complex a question (does God exist? etc.), the more likely you are to make an error in analysis along the way--either in not giving proper emphasis to a step in your reasoning, or not even noticing that you've made an important misstep. And we know that, akin to the butterfly effect in chaos theory, if you get something even a little bit wrong at the borders of a concept, idea, or argument, it can drive you to very different conclusions by the time that you've come to the end of your analysis.

    So there's a reason Spinoza and Leibniz, both brilliant, nevertheless diverged on matters of metaphysics. It wasn't that they weren't rigorous, it's that small differences in conceptual premises (which they couldn't agree on) made for sharply divergent conclusions. They both tried to reason a priori, but didn't land at the same place. Words and concepts simply cannot be locked down in the way that numbers can. They're fuzzy at their borders in a way that numbers are not. And that fuzziness leads to butterfly effects.

    ReplyDelete
  87. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 7:18 AM

    A third reason I'm dubious about treating metaphysics with the confidence one would treat mathematics has to do with the history of math and metaphysics. Both mathematics and metaphysics have been around now for thousands of years. Many of the most brilliant minds to have ever existed have been devoted to both disciplines. Yet only one of these disciplines makes progress. Math makes progress--a progress that mathematicians all agree constitutes progress--whereas metaphysics has never locked down a consensus on anything of central importance.

    When experts sharply disagree in a field of science, the wise lay person (as Russell rightly noted) is wise to revert to agnosticism. Likewise with metaphysics. Professional philosophers are sharply divided on almost every major question of metaphysics. Why is this? Will you resort to Bulverism as explanation? Is it bad faith on the part of those who don't reach Thomistic conclusions? Or might it be simply that metaphysics is not as rigorous as mathematics?

    ReplyDelete
  88. Don JindraJanuary 26, 2016 at 7:35 AM

    laubadetriste,

    "then you ought to think that religion (I wonder what you think that is) has likewise passed such a test, since some things usually considered religious beliefs, such as the belief in spirits, and the belief in an afterlife, are human universals, and religion is famously central to the creation and continuance of societies throughout history."

    That's almost a good point -- pretty rare around here. :)

    1) Belief in spirits or other supernatural forces does seem to be common. But there is wide disagreement on what those spirits and forces are and what they do. Those beliefs are easily shaken when more rational explanations come to light. Who now (in the West) believes the planets are gods or moved by gods? (Except at the most fundamental level in that all things are moved by God.) OTOH, some people still believe in horoscopes. I think irrational beliefs are not the universal. They're side-effects of the true universal which is this: We humans believe in cause and effect. Where we cannot find it, we tend to invent it.

    2) There's no reality test for belief in an afterlife. There's no agreement on what form it might take. But it is fairly common for us to believe we are more significant (god-like) than we are.

    3) I'd dispute that religion is central to the creation and continuance of societies throughout history. I'd argue religion is often grafted on after the fact to further the interests of select individuals and groups. There is nothing inherently cohesive about a politicized religion.

    Do you think "authoritative" means something like "universally and uniformly accepted"?

    Something like, but not exactly like. There's always someone who refuses to accept a fact. But over time, if there is a compelling case for something, that something should show signs of utterly destroying competing beliefs -- like Newton's system utterly destroyed Ptolemy's system. Religion can point to no case like that. And in those cases where religion has tried to destroy its competition, it did so by force, which ultimately fails. We won't be going back to Ptolemy's system. You could say we won't be going back to the Greek gods either, but that's not quite true. We do go back to variations of the Greek gods, which some might say (and have said) is what the Catholic church did and what some Protestants do today with angels, demons and themselves as "little gods."

    "Competence to do what?"

    Specifically, competence to show the way toward truths; but more generally, competence to show an ability to follow through on any of its many claims (like its alleged beneficial effects).

    "In Christianity for example, most of the great heresies -- Docetism, Arianism, Manichaeism, Pelagianism -- are spent, extirpated, or obscure."

    Many believe Jesus was a myth. This is the modern version of Docetism.

    Arianism persists in Unitarians, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Thomas Jefferson famously called the Trinity nonsense. Even as a child, when I used to go to Sunday School and did believe in God, I never thought the Trinity made sense. Although they're not officially recognized by many sects, I think forms of Arianism are common.

    I think much of Christianity today is merely a form of Manichaeism.

    R.C. Sproul: "One thing is clear: that you can be purely Pelagian and be completely welcome in the evangelical movement today."

    And this just scratches the surface. There's practically a cottage industry of Christian sects calling each other heretical. There's somewhere between 9000 to 33,000 Christian sects in the world, depending how one counts. This number has not been shrinking over the centuries. It's been growing. And that's just Christianity.

    ReplyDelete
  89. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 8:34 AM

    Yet another reason I'm dubious about treating complex metaphysical conclusions as comparable to complex mathematical conclusions has to do with the history of science. Science has taught us, these past four hundred years, to be cautious; to look before we leap. What we think must be going on as a matter of logical course, isn't always in fact what is going on.

    And this is why prediction is important. Metaphysical propositions frequently cannot be subject to testing of any sort (such as whether God in fact exists, or angels).

    By contrast, think of the Higgs boson (the God particle). Rather than say, "If the Standard Model is correct, it must be there; the Standard Model is correct, therefore it must be there," scientists went through the formal process of locating the particle, and establishing certitude about it reaching above 5,000,000 to one (that the discovery was not arrived at by chance).

    This is a standard of rigor that metaphysics cannot reach.

    Think about it. The physicists's background knowledge might have been wrong (the Standard Model might not have been correct), or their background knowledge may have been correct, but the particle didn't show up (or showed up with properties or complexities that proved surprising).

    Because of testing, science can reach a precision and confidence that metaphysics simply doesn't bring us to. As such, it's arguable that metaphysics is not really getting us to a point where we're saying anything wholly meaningful (such as what, precisely, one means when referring to God). At best, it seems to lead us to the observation, "That's an interesting theory, but how would you ever test it? And what, exactly, are you claiming about God?"

    I think it's telling, therefore, that Thomism has long emphasized metaphysics for contemplation as opposed to doing. If metaphysics was really capable of mathematical levels of confidence, it could move seamlessly (as mathematics does) from contemplation to applications in the realms of action. It's imprecision is precisely what protects it from rigorous scientific investigation or mathematical levels of proof for its claims--and leads one to suspect that the deity of metaphysics is "a black cat in a black box that isn't there." No one would think of entertaining such a suspicion concerning the solution to Fermat's last theorem or the Higgs boson.

    ReplyDelete
  90. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 8:51 AM

    Another reason I'm dubious of metaphysics as akin to math or science is Wittgenstein. I find Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy convincing, and he was both a mathematician and a philosopher.

    For Wittgenstein, the problem with the traditional Thomist or Hegelian-style philosopher is the ambition to be as certain in conclusions as the scientist or mathematician; to discover and lock down truths into a comprehensive system by reduction (analysis) or generalization (synthesis). But the philosopher applies methods (Occam’s razor, etc.) to things for which no material or objective properties actually exist.

    Matter, unlike mind or a concept like the good, is subject to such things as observation, controlled manipulation, modeling in space and time, and public verification.

    ReplyDelete
  91. GlennJanuary 26, 2016 at 11:37 AM

    laubadetriste,

    I'm late in responding.

    I suspect part of what he would say is that... not all of the work can be done by the one who provides.

    Exactly right.

    ReplyDelete
  92. BillyJanuary 26, 2016 at 2:00 PM

    Santi,

    "Because of testing, science can reach a precision and confidence that metaphysics simply doesn't bring us to."

    Yea, but why does testing allow this? Ed Feser has repeatedly argued that you can't even make sense of science without some metaphysical foundation. Without metaphysics, you succumb to the conclusion that science on its own simply cannot explain why it is able to make effective predictions at all, and Feser has addressed many alternatives to metaphysics to provide this explanation.

    In saying that, however, maybe you will agree but I admit that different metaphysical views can be compared and some are more compelling than others, but no metaphysical view is compelling in itself.

    ReplyDelete
  93. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 2:03 PM


    Santi,

    You're confused.

    All abstraction lives, transposes, and arrives in and by the irreducible megastructures constituting intention's begetting in reason as truth finder. Mathematics moves atop metaphysics thereby.

    There's no bypass for you short of the elimination of your certainty/confidence. Your claim of confidence in anything becomes unintelligible.

    You've been asked earlier to save yourself from absurdity's reductio.

    Crickets.

    You've built your fairytale upside-down, shielded it from reality-testing, and landed nowhere in particular.

    ReplyDelete
  94. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 2:46 PM


    Dan,

    Like Santi, you've followed God's imperative to master the entirety of physicality and temporal becoming, which gets you off on a solid Christian start, only to then make embarrassing category errors when it comes both to knowledge and perception. You're a bit worse off though as you appeal to the fragmentation of knowledge as if it helps you. Such reveals both an ignorance of the contingent man in the pains of privation and also of the deflationary view of truth your means force upon you. Hence you are, before our very eyes, arguing against some Non-Christian set of premises and also building an ontologically upside-down house akin to Santi's. Your unwillingness to stomach neither Christianity nor your own paradigm as they actually are, through to their respective ends, is in large part the driving force behind those unfortunate moves. In that respect your wish fulfillment is apparent to all.

    Fortunately, your entire diatribe on the errors of man in his many motions untethered from the contours of immutable love affirms Christianity's metaphysical geography. In fact, I may quote some of it in my defense of Christianity against the many errors and problematic reductios over inside of both Pantheism and Materialism.

    ReplyDelete
  95. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 4:08 PM

    Scbrown said: "You've built your fairytale upside-down, shielded it from reality-testing, and landed nowhere in particular."

    My God, he's right. I'm home. I've been home all along. I'm Charlton Heston, and this must be The Planet of the Apes.

    ReplyDelete
  96. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 4:10 PM

    Billy:

    You said: "Feser has repeatedly argued that you can't even make sense of science without some metaphysical foundation."

    I can agree with this metaphysical minimum if the emphasis is on "some." We can't prove it, but we all assume we're not a dream in the mind of a butterfly. My question for you is, once you get past a list (short or long) of minimal metaphysical givens (we trust that cause and effect will function, we take it for granted that gravity will go on working, etc.), what more of metaphysics do we need?

    ReplyDelete
  97. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 4:22 PM

    Why don't Thomists just say, "Hey, based on some metaphysical argumentation, it might be that God exists," and leave it at that?

    Maybe. Why isn't maybe enough?

    Maybe some evidence will turn-up some day that God exists. In the meantime, why not just let science do the rest of the heavy lifting (the collection of the oar of knowledge)? Why are we so restless to reach for premature closure and certainty on the question of God? Why build a metaphysical system that exceeds evidence? Why not just leave the question of God open as a hypothesis awaiting hints of confirmation or disconfirmation (akin to the idea that we live in a holographic universe, or the idea that we might be living in a virtual reality program in a computer)?

    Maybe. What's wrong with maybe?

    ReplyDelete
  98. AnonymousJanuary 26, 2016 at 4:35 PM

    Is that why you hang around here? You're waiting for a maybe? Pitiful.

    ReplyDelete
  99. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 4:39 PM


    Santi,


    It's unclear why you now hedge and make this new appeal for all that is abstraction to be ushered through and arrive within the corridors of irreducible mind -- but only a little bit of "it" -- and not too much of "it". That you even make the suggestion of just a bit, but not too much, over there in an ocean which you reject is satisfying as it reveals quite a lot about your unfortunate thought process as you attempt to interpret reality.

    Your unwillingness to stomach neither Christianity nor your own paradigm as they actually are, through to their respective ends, is the driving force behind that entire string of unfortunate moves on your part throughout this thread. In that respect your wish fulfillment is now a settled matter as you request just a bit of -- but not too much of -- your latest hedge.



    ReplyDelete
  100. AnonymousJanuary 26, 2016 at 4:41 PM

    I plead with me people: Please do not respond to Santi and Don Jindra. They are trolls incapable of adding anything to the discussion here, as have been shown by an amazing amount of reality testing, but quite keen to pollute everything with utter bilge. Do not feed them.

    ReplyDelete
  101. scbrownlhrmJanuary 26, 2016 at 4:47 PM



    The feeding is merely to watch the dance of hedges and equivocations.

    It's called collecting evidence.

    It's called testing reality.

    ReplyDelete
  102. AnonymousJanuary 26, 2016 at 5:49 PM

    Except we all suffer because you feed them.

    ReplyDelete
  103. AnonymousJanuary 26, 2016 at 5:54 PM

    Ohmylanta, I accidentally read part of a Santi-spew and now I have a headache this big and it has “induced coma” written all over it. I don’t know how he comes up with such nonsense (well, I do: he knows nothing about Thomism, so he just made it up, the same way he made up a definition of Bulverism even though he was replying to a post that contained the definition and still got it completely backwards, though no more backwards than his mischaracterisation of Laubadetriste, who is doubtless surprised to have suddenly turned into a Thomist without noticing, because his comments consist of nothing more than slotting names into his standard prejudiced template), but I have this sudden urge to attack Russia in winter. With a jammed firearm. Whilst making toast in the bathtub.

    ReplyDelete
  104. Son of Ya'KovJanuary 26, 2016 at 6:07 PM

    Santi is simply a fundamentalist Positivist.

    For him only empirical science is a valid basis for any belief(except for this belief)...which they hold on Faith Alone apart from science.

    >Metaphysical propositions frequently cannot be subject to testing of any sort (such as whether God in fact exists, or angels).

    Nor can you prove Natural Selection is true using a The Large Hadron Collider & the precise measurements that devise provides. Of course claiming natural selection is the sort of thing that lends itself to be investigated by a LHC is a category mistake. In a like manner given the classic understanding of God saying God is something that is subject to empirical scientific investigation & not philosophical investigation is also a category mistake. Or do we need a chemistry set to know the law of non-contradition is valid?


    Gnus are so many levels of stupid. They only bring out pleas for Positivism because they are too lazy to learn actual philosophy to face the philosophical arguments for the existence of God on that battle ground. Nothing more.


    Learn philosophy or fuck off!

    >Maybe some evidence will turn-up some day that God exists. In the meantime, why not just let science do the rest of the heavy lifting (the collection of the oar of knowledge)?

    Where would Fundamentalist New Atheists be without the fallacy of equivocation? Science can only collect data nothing more. The meaning of the data & the nature of its being is subject to Philosophy. Philosophy is always the more fundamental science then empirical investigation.

    IF Classic Theism is not true and or if no gods exist Positivism can't be true either otherwise absurd contradictions can be true. if absurd logical contradictions can be true then one has no basis for any anti-religious polemics either scientific or philosophical.


    PS:

    >By contrast, think of the Higgs boson (the God particle). Rather than say, "If the Standard Model is correct, it must be there; the Standard Model is correct, therefore it must be there," scientists went through the formal process of locating the particle, and establishing certitude about it reaching above 5,000,000 to one (that the discovery was not arrived at by chance).


    More fallacies of equivocation. God in the classic sense is not an isolati. This idiot has Theistic Personalism on the brain &
    y'all know me people. I wouldn't wipe the shit from me arse as an offering to a Theistic Personalist so called "god". Gnu boy here has to learn the difference between Theistic Personalism vs Classic Theism. the Category mistakes are getting tedious.
    One almost longs for Skepo's stupidity.


    http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/.services/blog/6a010535ce1cf6970c010535c82845970b/search?filter.q=Teapot

    ReplyDelete
  105. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 7:48 PM

    I make arguments, I get in return fraught style and motivation critiques.

    I've asked, most recently, a serious question about caution in the accumulation of metaphysical premises. If we simply trust that the physical laws will work, what need have we of the add-on of a Law Giver?

    What does the add-on of God do for whether or not we trust that the sun will rise tomorrow, or whether we should approve or disapprove of gay marriage? God isn't talking on any subject, or overtly acting on the laws of nature, or interfering in historical events (the Holocaust proves that last one). And God's angels and devils don't appear to be doing anything either (making the earth quake, making people sick, etc.).

    If you have evidence otherwise, please share.

    Once you've got a minimal number of metaphysical rocks in place for science to function (one presumes there are no devils interfering with our experiments, one presumes the speed of light is the same now as it was ten billion years ago, etc.), then why add a single additional metaphysical premise beyond that? What purpose does it serve?

    Shouldn't we apply Occam's razor across the board to metaphysics, and not multiply premises?

    Science, over the past 400 years or so, has shown itself to be fruitful in expanding human knowledge. It's stripped down and conservative epistemology works.

    How, for instance, has dropping Aristotle's final cause from consideration of material phenomena hurt science's advance? What does a more elaborate system-overlay onto reality (Hegelian, Marxist, Thomist, Spinozan, Buddhist, etc.) add to our store of confident knowledge? I think Coyne would say, "Zip."

    What say you? Why should we hold a single metaphysical premise beyond what is warranted by evidence?

    ReplyDelete
  106. Craig PayneJanuary 26, 2016 at 7:51 PM

    I believe the registration is now open for the Sixth Annual Thomistic Philosophy Workshop at Mount St. Mary College, first weekend of June, I think.

    ReplyDelete
  107. AnonymousJanuary 26, 2016 at 7:56 PM

    Yes, I suppose there are arguments hiding in the bilge that clogs your posts. These arguments are no where near as interesting or insightful as you think. They are the boilerplate positivist and naturalist arguments Son of Ya'Kov and others have ably refuted and which we have seen and refuted here a thousands times.

    The problem is you seem unable of presenting and discussing these arguments clearly and concisely without the rest of the nauseating idiocy that fills your posts. This is why you deserve nothing in return.

    ReplyDelete
  108. Craig PayneJanuary 26, 2016 at 7:58 PM

    "How, for instance, has dropping Aristotle's final cause from consideration of material phenomena hurt science's advance?"

    Science uses the language of teleology all the time. You can't really consider efficient or material causation without considering their purpose. Otherwise you could not even say a sentence like, "Spiders spin webs to catch food."

    And the Holocaust "proves" that God has no interaction with human affairs? That's what we obscurantist metaphysicians like to call an "opinion." (Not even an informed or compelling opinion--although it obviously compels you to repeatedly make the assertion.)

    ReplyDelete
  109. Son of Ya'KovJanuary 26, 2016 at 8:52 PM

    I have a mountain of Alastair Reynolds novels to get threw as well as a host of other Hard Scifi to assimilate so I will make this quick and simple for our simple minded Gnus friend Santi.

    I will be maximally cruel. THE FULL BENYACHOV!

    >I make arguments, I get in return fraught style and motivation critiques.

    Please note you are making philosophical arguments however flawed, uninformed and low browed and you are NOT engaging in any empirical scientific endeavor to do so. Like I said Philosophy is the more fundamental science than the Empirical. The former gets to the questions of ultimate existence and the nature of reality. The later merely provides mere data.


    >I've asked, most recently, a serious question about caution in the accumulation of metaphysical premises. If we simply trust that the physical laws will work, what need have we of the add-on of a Law Giver?

    Which makes about as much sense as asking the following fucktard question "If we already have life on this planet who cares where it came from or wither or not it changed over time?" This is clearly a lack of curiosity which shows a very un-scientific mind.

    >What does the add-on of God do for whether or not we trust that the sun will rise tomorrow, or whether we should approve or disapprove of gay marriage? God isn't talking on any subject, or overtly acting on the laws of nature, or interfering in historical events (the Holocaust proves that last one). And God's angels and devils don't appear to be doing anything either (making the earth quake, making people sick, etc.).

    What I just said. The existence or non-exitence of God has plenty to do with everything otherwise fucktard Atheists of any strip wouldn't waste their time polemicizing religion or trying to lobby public policy. If it doesn't matter then as Sartre said "It matters little in the scheme of things if you lead the workers of the world in revolt against Capitalist oppressors or quietly drink yourself to death in a bar".

    Philosophy across the board is the discipline which asks these ultimate questions. It proceeds on the intellectual scale even choosing a particular religion.


    >If you have evidence otherwise, please share.

    Here the Gnutard begs us to show him Natural Selection is true using a LHC. Or like his young Earth creationist counterpart begs us to show him an Ape that can give birth to a man before he considers evolution.

    So stupid and so gay! Of course by gay I don't mean homosexual (after all who doesn't love milo yiannopoulos' perfect skin and hair? I am a straight man & I am very comfortable saying that in public) by gay I mean that new Supergirl TV series. WTF!!!

    ReplyDelete
  110. Son of Ya'KovJanuary 26, 2016 at 8:52 PM

    Part II
    >Once you've got a minimal number of metaphysical rocks in place for science to function (one presumes there are no devils interfering with our experiments, one presumes the speed of light is the same now as it was ten billion years ago, etc.), then why add a single additional metaphysical premise beyond that? What purpose does it serve?

    By that silly reasoning if I already know how do drive a car then why should anyone bother to learn engineering?

    Gnu Atheism sucks! At least the Atheists of Old could do philosophy. Their descendants today have Devolved.

    >Shouldn't we apply Occam's razor across the board to metaphysics, and not multiply premises?

    Making that judgement requires philosophical investigation not decrees or empirical science the later can only provide data not knowledge or wisdom.


    >Science, over the past 400 years or so, has shown itself to be fruitful in expanding human knowledge. It's stripped down and conservative epistemology works.

    Science has merely provided data. Science was built on philosophy and philosophy tells us the meaning of the data.

    >How, for instance, has dropping Aristotle's final cause from consideration of material phenomena hurt science's advance? What does a more elaborate system-overlay onto reality (Hegelian, Marxist, Thomist, Spinozan, Buddhist, etc.) add to our store of confident knowledge? I think Coyne would say, "Zip."

    I think Santi equivocates between Science and mere technology.


    >What say you? Why should we hold a single metaphysical premise beyond what is warranted by evidence?

    Note the above question CANNOT by definition be answered by empirical science.

    Like I said learn philosophy or FUCK OFF!

    ReplyDelete
  111. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 10:52 PM

    Son of Ya:

    Thanks for actually responding to some of the substance of my arguments. It was accompanied by the usual static of snark and insults, but at least you didn't dodge.

    In turn, allow me to retort.

    (1) You say that philosophy "gets to the questions of ultimate existence and the nature of reality. The lat[t]er [the empirical] merely provides mere data."

    I say: Please note that you don't say that philosophy arrives at ANSWERS that an expert consensus converges upon and agrees is correct. Instead, you say philosophy poses QUESTIONS, and I say it poses questions that it usually cannot, with confidence, answer. Science and math actually have tools for achieving what philosophy can generally only aspire to. Because of the fuzziness of language, the more complicated and elaborate the premises that accompany a philosophical argument, the more likely it is to suffer from butterfly effects (small differences of emphasis or interpretation leading to large effects on the conclusions drawn).

    (2) You say my questioning of the need to posit a Law Giver behind laws displays "a lack of curiosity" and "a very un-scientific mind."

    I say: I'm curious. I like science. What can you tell me WITH CONFIDENCE about the Law Giver? I say that you cannot tell me a single, non-trivial, clearly defined, specific thing about God WITH WARRANTED CONFIDENCE. Of what, Son of Ya, can your metaphysics achieve by way of relieving genuine curiosity about God (or angels or devils, for that matter)? Science and math both have reliable epistemic procedures for relieving with confidence an inquirer's curiosity. Aquinas on God or angels (or women!) does not. What the virgin Aquinas did was creative speculation, akin to Hegel, or, in creative writing, a Wallace Stevens. That's not a criticism, unless you take Aquinas to be more than an imaginative writer and language innovator. It's one thing to be a creative theorist, another to have confidence that the theory is right.

    (3) You say metaphysics is akin to discovering the details of a car's hidden engine, to actually learning "engineering."

    I say: Metaphysics is akin to SPECULATING about the car's engine before one lifts the hood.

    (4) You say: "Science was built on philosophy and philosophy tells us the meaning of the data."

    I say: Tell that to a theoretical physicist. Harvard's Lisa Randell doesn't call herself a theoretical philosopher. Her physical theories are valuable for raising our confidence about how the world really is and works only insofar as they can be tested and make reliable predictions. What predictions, pray tell, do religious philosophers make for verifying their speculations and theories about God? I'm curious. Does God, for instance, answer prayer? How would a religious philosopher tell us the answer to even this most simple of religious questions WITH WARRANTED CONFIDENCE?

    ReplyDelete
  112. SantiJanuary 26, 2016 at 11:16 PM

    What's at stake between Feser and Coyne is confidence. Which of these is a source for reliable and warranted confidence in one's conclusions: metaphysics or science?

    Thomists are apologists for metaphysical confidence ("By logic, I'm 100% certain that God must exist!") for one primary reason: it assists religious contemplation. "How wonderful are thy works, O Lord!" Naturally, it's hard to say this if you're not confident God exists. Nobody wants to be caught-out singing praises and talking to an imaginary friend. So theists have to pretend that metaphysics is as reliable as math or science, since God ain't talking, and seems happy to remain in hiding, no longer parting seas, sending fire down upon the heads of pagan priests, or sicking she-bears on disrespectful children. But in reality, everyone knows that we can put very little store in elaborate systems of metaphysics untethered from science.

    ReplyDelete
  113. BillyJanuary 26, 2016 at 11:30 PM

    Santi,

    "I can agree with this metaphysical minimum if the emphasis is on "some." We can't prove it, but we all assume we're not a dream in the mind of a butterfly"

    But why do we all assume? Trying to place an answer on this will bring us to psychology, then to human nature, which is back to metaphysics.

    "My question for you is, once you get past a list (short or long) of minimal metaphysical givens (we trust that cause and effect will function, we take it for granted that gravity will go on working, etc.), what more of metaphysics do we need?"

    We trust that cause and effect will function, sure, but why should we? This poses further metaphysical questions, and some argue about what must be necessary about cause and effect for us to do such things as science. From what you have written, it seems that you are working from science backward to metaphysics, which is not unreasonable, but thats basically as far as you go. Once you have a foundation for scientific inquiry actually being able to say something about the world, you say, "Lets stop here." But then you have to argue for what else can be confirmed from the metaphysical foundation. Aristotle didn't just shoehorn in final causality for no reason, and when it was removed, Hume didn't just raise concerns about efficient causality for no reason either.

    "How would a religious philosopher tell us the answer to even this most simple of religious questions WITH WARRANTED CONFIDENCE?"

    Well where I probably separate from other Thomists, and this may even be a contradiction, is that I view faith as described by William James. This same question you ask can be also applied to ethics, politics, etc. Heck the question of warranted confidence can be made toward scientific inquiry itself. If warranted confidence can only be gained by testable and predictable confirmation, then testable and predictable confirmation itself can't be defended with warranted confidence, as its defense must come from beyond itself, ie metaphysics, epistomology, etc. But if the truth in this regard is unobtainable, then there is no point in arguing as if warranted confidence even means anything significant, since you can't use it to defend itself. I can't say I have ever really understood properly how the Thomistic understanding of faith can be believed without appealing to the Jamesian understanding of faith.

    ReplyDelete
  114. SantiJanuary 27, 2016 at 12:18 AM

    Billy,

    Much of what you say above sounds sensible and measured to me. I'll just (not too strenuously) quarrel with two things.

    (1) You say: "We trust that cause and effect will function, sure, but why should we?"

    I say: Philosophy can raise this question, but I don't see it ever providing an answer that we can be confident is correct. Certainly adding God to the question--God ensures the workings of cause and effect--only appears to function as an answer. Actually, it acts as a place-marker for the question itself. I've always liked that cartoon with the physicist standing at a chalkboard looking at the location where he has inserted into the middle of his equation--"Then a miracle occurs!--and one of his colleagues gently pipes up and says, "Ralph, I think you need to work on that part."

    (2) You say: "[T]here is no point in arguing as if warranted confidence even means anything significant, since you can't use it to defend itself."

    I say: Maybe not, but warranted confidence can take you across a busy street. I know when it's warranted for me to be confident that I'll cross to the other side of the road. But no philosopher or theologian can have warranted confidence that the soul, or the prayer of a soul, crosses to the other side, into the supernatural realm, into the ears of God--if God has ears.

    Does God have ears, or is he like Marley's ghost: "I don't have ears, but I hear just the same!" And why did the empathetic lamentation cross the road? To get where The Other cried.

    ReplyDelete
  115. AnonymousJanuary 27, 2016 at 3:06 AM

    Santi, get lost.

    ReplyDelete
  116. scbrownlhrmJanuary 27, 2016 at 3:07 AM



    Santi,

    Still missing the point I see.

    There is no such thing as "just a little bit of" the particular irreducible ocean you now concede you need in order to rescue confidence.

    That you fail on that point is fatal.

    That you are now trying to borrow a few drops is, for us, quite satisfying.

    Thank you for the gift.

    Note: There is no mention of your motive here. Despite your complaining that such is all you get. Rather..... merely an observation of the obvious.

    ReplyDelete
  117. scbrownlhrmJanuary 27, 2016 at 4:13 AM



    All empiricism is pure motion – all motion is pure abstraction – found living in and by, found transposing through, found arriving upon, the movement of being as reason's impossibly extravagant appetite transports us. In all such junctures and transpositions the Non-Theist is forced on his own terms to, at some ontological seam somewhere, annihilate intention's irreducible and relentless demands for lucidity, just as he is (since he asked) forced to annihilate the irreducible and relentlessly obvious evil of Auschwitz, and in fact he is found in the pains of his own reductio wherein all Abstraction is expunged , and with that the Mind itself is jettisoned, the Self eradicated – ad infinitum. The darkness of stasis beneath the ceiling of indifference ushers the Non-Theist into his attempt (his hedge) to borrow some small part of, (he irrationally thinks it possible) just a few drops of, the uncanny motion of being which sums to no less than movement instantiated by the indissoluble mega-structure of "i-am". Such is itself on all fronts an “.….absolutely singular and indivisible reality which no inventory of material constituents and physical events will ever be able to eliminate. Here again, and as nowhere else, we are dealing with an irreducibly primordial datum….” (DBH)

    ReplyDelete
  118. scbrownlhrmJanuary 27, 2016 at 4:20 AM



    Total Rationalism. Perfect Bliss.


    “[The] concept of being is one of power: the power of actuality, the capacity to affect or to be affected. To be is to act. This definition already implies that, in its fullness, being must also be consciousness, because the highest power to act — and hence the most unconditioned and unconstrained reality of being — is rational mind. Absolute being, therefore, must be absolute mind. Or, in simpler terms, the greater the degree of something’s actuality, the greater the degree of its consciousness, and so infinite actuality is necessarily infinite consciousness. That, at least, is one way of trying to describe another essential logical intuition that recurs in various forms throughout the great theistic metaphysical systems. It is the conviction that in God lies at once the deepest truth of mind and the most universal truth of existence, and that for this reason the world can truly be known by us. Whatever else one might call this vision of things, it is most certainly, in a very real sense, a kind of “total rationalism.” Belief in God, properly understood, allows one to see all that exists — both in its own being and in our knowledge of it — as rational. It may be possible to believe in the materialist view of reality, I suppose, and in some kind of mechanical account of consciousness, but it is a belief that precludes any final trust in the power of reason to reflect the objective truths of nature. I happen to think that a coherent materialist model of mind is an impossibility. I think also that the mechanistic picture of nature is self-evidently false, nothing more than an intellectual adherence to a limited empirical method that has been ineptly mistaken for a complete metaphysical description of reality. I believe that nature is rational, that it possesses inherent meaning, that it even exhibits genuine formal and final causes, and that therefore it can be faithfully mirrored in the intentional, abstractive, formal, and final activity of rational consciousness. If I am wrong about all of these things, however, I think it also clear that what lies outside such beliefs is not some alternative rationalism, some other and more rigorous style of logic, some better way of grasping the truth of things, but only an abandonment of firm belief in any kind of reasoning at all. God explains the existence of the universe despite its ontological contingency, which is something that no form of naturalism can do; but God also explains the transparency of the universe to consciousness, despite its apparent difference from consciousness, as well as the coincidence between reason and reality, and the intentional power of the mind, and the reality of truth as a dimension of existence that is at once objective and subjective. Here, just as in the realm of ontology, atheism is simply another name for radical absurdism — which, again, may be a perfectly “correct” view of things, if reason is just a physiological accident after all, and logic an illusion. That is an argument that I shall not revisit just now, however. Instead, I shall simply observe that, if reason’s primordial orientation is indeed toward total intelligibility and perfect truth, then it is essentially a kind of ecstasy of the mind toward an end beyond the limits of nature. It is an impossibly extravagant appetite, a longing that can be sated only by a fullness that can never be reached in the world, but that ceaselessly opens up the world to consciousness. To speak of God, however, as infinite consciousness, which is identical to infinite being, is to say that in Him the ecstasy of mind is also the perfect satiety of achieved knowledge, of perfect wisdom. God is both the knower and the known, infinite intelligence and infinite intelligibility. This is to say that, in Him, rational appetite is perfectly fulfilled, and consciousness perfectly possesses the end it desires. And this, of course, is perfect bliss." (D.B. Hart, "The Experience of God")

    ReplyDelete
  119. BrandonJanuary 27, 2016 at 4:30 AM

    I make arguments, I get in return fraught style and motivation critiques.

    This is actually quite funny; what you generally make are in fact vague assertions linked together only by associations in your imagination and supported only by rhetoric. There are lots of obvious warning signs of this even if one weren't paying attention very closely. For instance, you've gone this long talking about the extraordinary importance of the metaphysics vs. empiricism/historicism distinction. Distinctions are highly sensitive to precise details of definitions, and what precise definition of either have we had at any point? Or: Almost everything that has been said by you here has been explicitly a defense of Coyne; but remarkably we never actually get Coyne's own position, but just vague claims about his aims without any backing from Coyne himself. The key issue in any serious defense of Coyne would be what Coyne himself explicitly says, but we don't get that at all -- Coyne is allowed more room to speak his own views in Feser's highly critical review than he gets in any of Santi's extremely vague defenses. Or take a random comment, numbering the sentences for clarity:

    (1) What's at stake between Feser and Coyne is confidence. (2) Which of these is a source for reliable and warranted confidence in one's conclusions: metaphysics or science?

    (3) Thomists are apologists for metaphysical confidence ("By logic, I'm 100% certain that God must exist!") for one primary reason: it assists religious contemplation. (4) "How wonderful are thy works, O Lord!" (5) Naturally, it's hard to say this if you're not confident God exists. (6) Nobody wants to be caught-out singing praises and talking to an imaginary friend. (7) So theists have to pretend that metaphysics is as reliable as math or science, since God ain't talking, and seems happy to remain in hiding, no longer parting seas, sending fire down upon the heads of pagan priests, or sicking she-bears on disrespectful children. (8) But in reality, everyone knows that we can put very little store in elaborate systems of metaphysics untethered from science.

    This is quite typical of a Santi comment. We have (1) an unsubstantiated assertion of a false dilemma; (2) a specification of sentence 1; (3) an unsubstantiated assertion about motivations of Thomists; (4) an allusion merely reaffirming sentence 3; (5) a trivial inference that religious contemplation is harder if you're not confident God exists, the one actual argument-structure in the entire comment; (6) & (7) a two-sentence explanation of the trivial inference in 5, making an unsubstantiated assertion about the motivations of theists in general; (8) an unsubstantiated assertion about what everyone knows, whose relevance to the discussion depends on sentence 1 already being true. This is not arguing; this is, as noted before, preaching. And it's even done in a preaching style; this is exactly how Baptist preachers have often been taught to construct their sermons: claim, elucidation of claim, attempt to raise a conviction of sin.

    Which is not to say there are never any Santi arguments. Despite its weaknesses, the Doubting Thomas argument with which it all opened at least had the advantage of being an actual argument relevant to the subject. It's just that they start vanishing whenever anyone starts raising any kind of critical protest. And there's no need to talk about motivation critiques (which is funny in itself, as if Santi hasn't replied with motivation critiques of almost every interlocutor and of both Thomists and theists in general at several points): it's right there in the actual comments.

    ReplyDelete
  120. Craig PayneJanuary 27, 2016 at 5:50 AM

    Joyce was really, really good at stream of consciousness. I love Ulysses. But to try to follow it through a philosophy thread is just frustrating. On the one hand, you have what appears to be deliberate obfuscation. On the response side, you have the immensely long, cerulean-tinted musings of deep cetacean spelunking on the far side of Jupiter. What gives? Dr. Feser, please post anything else--a recipe or ANYTHING--just to get us out of this thread.

    ReplyDelete
  121. Daniel JoachimJanuary 27, 2016 at 6:38 AM

    This is quite typical of a Santi comment. We have (1) an unsubstantiated assertion of a false dilemma; (2) a specification of sentence 1; (3) an unsubstantiated assertion about motivations of Thomists; (4) an allusion merely reaffirming sentence 3; (5) a trivial inference that religious contemplation is harder if you're not confident God exists, the one actual argument-structure in the entire comment; (6) & (7) a two-sentence explanation of the trivial inference in 5, making an unsubstantiated assertion about the motivations of theists in general; (8) an unsubstantiated assertion about what everyone knows, whose relevance to the discussion depends on sentence 1 already being true. This is not arguing; this is, as noted before, preaching. And it's even done in a preaching style; this is exactly how Baptist preachers have often been taught to construct their sermons: claim, elucidation of claim, attempt to raise a conviction of sin.

    What a neat (and hilarious) analysis. Now I'm just jealous that I didn't think of that first.

    ReplyDelete
  122. GottfriedJanuary 27, 2016 at 6:52 AM

    So Santi's Five Arguments for Non-Confidence in Metaphysics consist of some appeals to authority and lots of boilerplate scientism, all of which I could swear he's simply copy/pasted from earlier comments. And the astonishing thing is that he’s making these comments on a blog where the case against scientism and defenses against the standard objections to AT metaphysics have been made, as Feser likes to say, ad nauseam. Where specifically does Santi think those arguments fail? Underneath all the rhetorical bilge, what, precisely, are Santi’s objections to the arguments Feser actually makes?

    He doesn’t have any. For all the time he’s been here (a couple years? Or does it only seem that long?), one could be forgiven for thinking he’s never actually read a single blog post, or even the replies that have been made to him; that he’s merely scanned them for words or phrases that he can hit with a blast of hot air.

    Also, all this talk about “100% hyper-confidence” is a distraction. One doesn’t require absolute mathematical certainty to have confidence in AT metaphysics or anything else. All that’s required is that the arguments be better than anything else on offer. And from what I can see, the arguments for AT are much better than anything else on offer.


    Learn philosophy or fuck off!

    Normally I would call that intemperate, but in this case it seems appropriate.

    To continue with Brandon's analogy, if Santi wants to have some notion of the figure he cuts here, he should imagine a fundamentalist spamming the combox of an evolutionary biologist's blog with long quotations from Genesis, along with his own unhinged commentary.

    ReplyDelete
  123. BenYachovJanuary 27, 2016 at 8:26 AM

    Here is some more Gnu abuse. I checked it for rudeness and lack of civility and I am satisfied it has enough of that.

    >I say: Please note that you don't say that philosophy arrives at ANSWERS that an expert consensus converges upon and agrees is correct.

    How would you know Gnutard? You know as much about philosophy as a Creationist with a 4th graders knowledge of biology knows about Evolution & yet I am to take your idiot polemics seriously?
    You are arguing anti-philosophy which ironically by definition is a philosophical argument. An irrational and incoherent one at that. Thus I am certain your view is wrong even if there are no gods.
    The anti-intellectual basis for your atheism is inferior & unworthy of me.
    If I were to be an Atheist it would be based on philosophy. Like Jack Smart or Graham Oppy not knuckle dragging pseudo-Jerry Falwell fundamentalist positivist wannabes like you and Coyne.

    > Instead, you say philosophy poses QUESTIONS, and I say it poses questions that it usually cannot, with confidence, answer.

    How would you know? Have you tried to answer them or do you just channel your inner positivist and say “Coyne & Dawkins say it! I believe it! And that is good enough for me! Science! Good Heavens Miss Yuchamoto you are beautiful!”?
    The idea Philosophy cannot provide answers is a philosophical assertion & how can you know that to be true? Since if it were true then it contradicts itself right there if you argue it successfully.

    > Science and math actually have tools for achieving what philosophy can generally only aspire to. Because of the fuzziness of language, the more complicated and elaborate the premises that accompany a philosophical argument, the more likely it is to suffer from butterfly effects (small differences of emphasis or interpretation leading to large effects on the conclusions drawn).

    Translation: I Santi am too much of a lazy Gnutard fuck to actually bother learning any philosophy so I will respond with empty rhetoric and ignorance and more positivism bullshit.

    >(2) You say my questioning of the need to posit a Law Giver behind laws displays "a lack of curiosity" and "a very un-scientific mind."

    Pretty much. If I was arguing against the existence of God I would do so philosophically and thus in principle I could in theory put forth better arguments then your empty self-refuting Positivist horsecrap.
    All your Positivist based polemics thus will be nothing more than the Creationist quoting whole passages of Genesis as a “refutation” of Evolution.
    (If I may steal from Gottfried)

    That is what you sound like to me.

    ReplyDelete
  124. BenYachovJanuary 27, 2016 at 8:27 AM

    Part 2

    >I say: I'm curious. I like science. What can you tell me WITH CONFIDENCE about the Law Giver? I say that you cannot tell me a single, non-trivial, clearly defined, specific thing about God WITH WARRANTED CONFIDENCE.

    Where is your scientific proof with warranted confidence that metaphysics can’t give any answers about the existence or non-existence of God? Well? Where is your philosophical argument? Well? You can give me neither thus you can have by your own standard no warranted confidence in your assertion.

    > Of what, Son of Ya, can your metaphysics achieve by way of relieving genuine curiosity about God (or angels or devils, for that matter)? Science and math both have reliable epistemic procedures for relieving with confidence an inquirer's curiosity. Aquinas on God or angels (or women!) does not. What the virgin Aquinas did was creative speculation, akin to Hegel, or, in creative writing, a Wallace Stevens. That's not a criticism, unless you take Aquinas to be more than an imaginative writer and language innovator. It's one thing to be a creative theorist, another to have confidence that the theory is right.

    So you just repeat your “I reject natural selection because I can’t measure it in my LHC” or “The Second Law of Thermal dynamics refutes Evolution” etc canard he? Point weak pound pulpit! More positivism nonsense.

    All your positivist nonsense sounds like that to me. Get off your lazy arse and make a philosophical argument or polemic against the five ways & MAYBE I will take you seriously.
    Till then I will regard you as Richard Dawkins justly regards the Creationist with the 4th graders knowledge of Biology(who has no desire to learn any more science) throwing shit piles at evolutionary theory.
    So will everyone else here. Learn philosophy or FUCK OFF!!!

    >(3) You say metaphysics is akin to discovering the details of a car's hidden engine, to actually learning "engineering."

    >I say: Metaphysics is akin to SPECULATING about the car's engine before one lifts the hood.

    Too bad you need to show that is the case with a philosophical argument since there is no empirical scientific experiments you could perform to prove your assertion thus we can’t by your standards hold it with any warranted confidence.

    >(4) You say: "Science was built on philosophy and philosophy tells us the meaning of the data."

    >I say: Tell that to a theoretical physicist. Harvard's Lisa Randell doesn't call herself a theoretical philosopher. Her physical theories are valuable for raising our confidence about how the world really is and works only insofar as they can be tested and make reliable predictions. What predictions, pray tell, do religious philosophers make for verifying their speculations and theories about God? I'm curious. Does God, for instance, answer prayer? How would a religious philosopher tell us the answer to even this most simple of religious questions WITH WARRANTED CONFIDENCE?

    I am sure I could deduce the existence of the Higgs Boson with my LHC and REJECT natural selection (not that I do but in theory I could). My success as a physicist has nothing to do with the success of biology or evolutionary theory. The philosophical arguments for the existence of God have little to do with Randell’s success in physics.
    Again with the category mistakes and fallacies of equivocation.

    ReplyDelete
  125. BenYachovJanuary 27, 2016 at 8:42 AM

    PS

    Brandon's response is way better than mine. Loved it!!

    ReplyDelete
  126. TaylorJanuary 27, 2016 at 8:42 AM

    What can I tell you about the Law giver?

    Pretty easy. Her name is Pearl. She is the mother of Clay. And she loves sending cheesy movies. The worst she can find.

    ReplyDelete
  127. BenYachovJanuary 27, 2016 at 9:17 AM

    You rule Taylor.

    ReplyDelete
  128. UnknownJanuary 27, 2016 at 11:04 AM

    @Greg @Laubadetriste
    Thanks for the links and info guys
    @modupownens
    Thanks for that argument and for the additional readings. Much appreciated. I hope someone writes a full length book critiquing the Gender theorists claims etc. from a thomist or otherwise realistic perspective soon.

    ReplyDelete
  129. SantiJanuary 27, 2016 at 9:04 PM

    Gottfried:

    You say: "[A]ll this talk about '100% hyper-confidence' is a distraction. One doesn’t require absolute mathematical certainty to have confidence in AT metaphysics or anything else. All that’s required is that the arguments be better than anything else on offer. And from what I can see, the arguments for AT are much better than anything else on offer."

    I say: You're hedging. And thanks for making my point about the need for abduction of apportioning belief to the evidence.

    But Occam's razor would say that you're wrong about AT metaphysics faring well in competition with more conservative intellectual systems (such as those grounding secular science). Why? Because AT metaphysics multiplies premises in such a way that it leads proponents to dubious conclusions. Aquinas, for example, on the basis of his metaphysics, and absent any evidence whatsoever, affirms the existence of such things as angels, and posits ludicrous theories about what women are "for," what sex is "for," and what should happen to heretics (they should be killed), etc.

    In a thread last year, I made your argument in favor of ABDUCTION and CONFIDENCE OF BELIEF APPORTIONED TO THE EVIDENCE, and found Thomism wanting. The context was Bayes' Rule and Occam's razor, but I was quickly swarmed by the thread metaphysicians insisting that Bayes' Rule and Occam's razor are yet two other things that can never lay a glove on AT metaphysics. Like a roach motel with the trap shut, nothing gets in and nothing gets out of the AT metaphysical system. It has reached the correct conclusions, and is akin to a diamond, not really subject to much historical change. Aquinas basically got it all right 700 years ago.

    Thus Feser treats the bulk of Thomas's interlocking system of arguments with a confidence akin to mathematics, and when I asked Scott, Feser's most loyal of thread followers and policers, what level of confidence he had that God existed and is all good and all powerful, his response, even in the teeth of the Holocaust, was: 100%. And that's based solely on metaphysical argumentation.

    So I'm pleased to see that you don't share this ludicrous level of epistemic confidence surrounding God. To do so would have meant that you had forgotten that metaphysical systems are LANGUAGES. They are languages that are often, strictly speaking, logically possible and coherent on their own terms, but they may have little contact with how the real world actually is and works.

    ReplyDelete
  130. SantiJanuary 27, 2016 at 9:15 PM

    So in relation to Feser v. Coyne, I say that the only way to decide among competing languages is to let evidence external to those languages split the difference. Science, history, and experience have to have the ability to infect metaphysical languages and theories, otherwise there is no way to decide among them. Anything goes. (Think of the amount of wasted genius spent by Aquinas theorizing angels.)

    Let science in. If scientists discover, for instance, persistent brain-mind correlates wherever they look for them (and they do), it ought to cause doubt for sane dualists. Maybe dualism is wrong. Belief should be responsive to new data, new evidence. One's confidence in the metaphysical argument for dualism shouldn't be impervious to the deliverances of neuroscience. If ad hoc rationalization is what's keeping dualism in play (mind-of-the-gaps arguments; the multiplying of premises), one's confidence in dualism should be on the decline or abandoned.

    ReplyDelete
  131. SantiJanuary 27, 2016 at 9:18 PM

    Do Mormons speak a more or less true language than scientists, Catholics, or Hindus? How can you decide without driving these languages around and seeing which ones seem to be in contact with experience, history, and reality? Which systems, like a tricked-out new car, are overloaded with an excess of wasteful and unnecessary features (ad hoc rationalizations and the multiplying of premises), driving down the car's gas mileage (epistemic confidence)?

    If you take such test drives, science wins hands down over any other competing language. It's crisp, clean, and minimalist. It gives you high confidence in the knowledge it does generate. It doesn't pretend to see further than it can. It's the best intellectual car on the lot.

    Voltaire's Candide is a nice example of an elaborate metaphysical theory colliding with reality. The novella starts with a metaphysical argument ("This is the best of all possible worlds") that gets a hilarious send-up in interaction with the real world.

    A non-funny example is Christian supersessionism morphing into European antisemitism, and culminating in the Holocaust. It's such a grotesque metaphysical-historical train-wreck that I find it astonishing that there are still people, seventy years after the Holocaust, glibly affirming supersessionism as if European history hadn't happened. If science, experience, and the tragedies of history can't give one pause, then one's metaphysical system amounts to a closed system, and you're engaging, not in a vulnerable and reasonable interaction with facts on the ground, but in epistemic closure.

    ReplyDelete
  132. GregJanuary 27, 2016 at 9:53 PM

    @ Santi

    If scientists discover, for instance, persistent brain-mind correlates wherever they look for them (and they do), it ought to cause doubt for sane dualists. Maybe dualism is wrong. Belief should be responsive to new data, new evidence. One's confidence in the metaphysical argument for dualism shouldn't be impervious to the deliverances of neuroscience.

    One's confidence in the metaphysical argument for the B-theory of time shouldn't be impervious to the deliverances of neuroscience.

    What is wrong with such a claim? Well, the deliverances of neuroscience just aren't relevant to the B-theory of time. We would need an argument establishing their relevance. Likewise, if instead of the B-theory of time, we are discussing dualism, we need an argument that the deliverances of neuroscience are relevant to the subject matter. If persistent brain-mind correlates ought to cause doubt for sane dualists, then this should be because persistent brain-mind correlates disconfirm dualism. This would seem to require that dualism predicts that there are not persistent brain-mind correlates.

    I don't see that this is the case for some forms of dualism (property dualism, emergent dualism, and hylomorphic dualism all come to mind). Certainly I have seen no argument for such a claim.

    If you respond, please keep it brief. No need to step back, look at the big picture, and change the subject.

    ReplyDelete
  133. SantiJanuary 27, 2016 at 9:55 PM

    Brandon's sentences in his retort have their own dropped and undefended premises. He does not acknowledge, before proceeding to critique, that he and I are engaged in putting forward framing gestures, and have competing languages. Before putting forward his critique, I could thus say, "But you didn't justify your own framing gestures before making them."

    Can you imagine how clotted any communication would become if you did not trust your reader to insert quickly and intuitively the dropped premises and framing gestures ("This is really about x") that are not always included in sentences--and to decide for themselves whether to agree or disagree?

    Aristotle, when observing rhetoric, noted that people drop premises from arguments all the time, trusting the reader or listener to supply and evaluate them. He called such sentences enthymemes.

    Example: "We should vote for Hillary because she'll fight for a single-payer health system." Some of the dropped premises, meant to be supplied by the reader, are that voting, universal health care, and greater social equality are good things. Such a sentence only begs these questions (is voting good? etc.) for those who have fundamental disagreements. But not everyone in the audience to which the sentence is directed will have such fundamental differences. Maybe most won't. So the sentence doesn't argue for the premises before it is put forward. The sentence belongs to a language that you either want to speak--or to argue with (call it "Democrat speak"). Part of the value of the sentence is putting on display an alternative language to "Republican speak" for talking about health care. Some will like the language, some won't.

    Thus I could play the same game with Brandon's response, numbering his sentences and pointing to all the dropped premises that he didn't defend in advance of putting them forward. But that would be a distraction to the real tug-of-war between us: which competing language about the world works better for the 21st century?

    As Richard Rorty notes, languages are rarely overthrown within the strict and enclosed terms of the language itself (in this case, Thomism), but because people decide it's just not a very useful way of talking about the world anymore, and so they jump over to a competing language, a new language, and start speaking that.

    ReplyDelete
  134. GregJanuary 27, 2016 at 10:13 PM

    @ Santi

    Aristotle, when observing rhetoric, noted that people drop premises from arguments all the time, trusting the reader or listener to supply and evaluate them. He called such sentences enthymemes.

    It is adorable, but a bit embarrassing, to watch you try to lecture Brandon on enthymemes.

    The post Brandon was criticizing did not contain enthymemes. For your discussion here to be relevant, why don't you tell us which of the now-conveniently-numbered sentences would become a serious argument if the major premise were made explicit? Here they are:

    (1) What's at stake between Feser and Coyne is confidence. (2) Which of these is a source for reliable and warranted confidence in one's conclusions: metaphysics or science?

    (3) Thomists are apologists for metaphysical confidence ("By logic, I'm 100% certain that God must exist!") for one primary reason: it assists religious contemplation. (4) "How wonderful are thy works, O Lord!" (5) Naturally, it's hard to say this if you're not confident God exists. (6) Nobody wants to be caught-out singing praises and talking to an imaginary friend. (7) So theists have to pretend that metaphysics is as reliable as math or science, since God ain't talking, and seems happy to remain in hiding, no longer parting seas, sending fire down upon the heads of pagan priests, or sicking she-bears on disrespectful children. (8) But in reality, everyone knows that we can put very little store in elaborate systems of metaphysics untethered from science.

    Then Santi, true to form, finishes strong:

    But that would be a distraction to the real tug-of-war between us: which competing language about the world works better for the 21st century?

    My eyes might as well be rolling out of my head, as Rorty turns over in his grave.

    ReplyDelete
  135. GregJanuary 27, 2016 at 10:28 PM

    @ Santi

    Let me also emphasize that there is no interesting or legitimate point being made here:


    Example: "We should vote for Hillary because she'll fight for a single-payer health system." Some of the dropped premises, meant to be supplied by the reader, are that voting, universal health care, and greater social equality are good things. Such a sentence only begs these questions (is voting good? etc.) for those who have fundamental disagreements. But not everyone in the audience to which the sentence is directed will have such fundamental differences. Maybe most won't. So the sentence doesn't argue for the premises before it is put forward. The sentence belongs to a language that you either want to speak--or to argue with (call it "Democrat speak"). Part of the value of the sentence is putting on display an alternative language to "Republican speak" for talking about health care. Some will like the language, some won't.

    Thus I could play the same game with Brandon's response, numbering his sentences and pointing to all the dropped premises that he didn't defend in advance of putting them forward. But that would be a distraction to the real tug-of-war between us: which competing language about the world works better for the 21st century?

    Arguments can be question begging relative to certain audiences, and enthymemes conceal one premise, so it's possible that the question-begging premise of an argument might be the concealed one. This hardly means that the person making the question-begging argument is speaking a different language than those against whom he begs questions. He's just begging the question and making bad arguments. That's not what it takes to speak a different language.

    Brandon also did not critique you or your posts from a Thomist perspective. His critique was not a competition between the language of Thomism and Santi-ese. It was, much like all of your posts, a competition between logic and Santi-ese.

    ReplyDelete
  136. SantiJanuary 27, 2016 at 10:40 PM

    Greg:

    You said: "This would seem to require that dualism predicts that there are not persistent brain-mind correlates."

    Can't we make this a bit softer--and not so absolute? A dualist from seven hundred years ago, presuming that minds are simple and can function apart from brains, might be SURPRISED to learn that, if you cut the corpus callosum, two independent minds appear, and the states of these two minds correlate to their own respective hemispheres of the brain's activity. Apportioning belief to the evidence, one's confidence may come down a little or a lot (depending on the significance you attach to the observation), but the effect on one's dualism, one would think, wouldn't be zero, would it?

    Likewise one's confidence in dualism might be weakened on learning that people with brain tumors can undergo radical and fundamental changes in personality, as if another mind has replaced the mind of the person who was there before. (Someone who was never impatient, and wasn't very sexual or risk-taking, suddenly takes on extreme forms of these characteristics.)

    So it's logically possible to keep dualism in play even if brain-mind correlates are discovered, say, 100 years from now, to be absolutely 1 to 1--but is it sane to do so?

    At some point, doesn't the thesis collapse of its own weight (akin to supersessionism in the face of the Holocaust, young earth creationism in the face of the fossil evidence, and global warming denialism in the face of climate science)? It's logically possible to be a supersessionist, a young earth creationist, a global warming denialist, and a dualist in the 21st century. You can come up with ad hoc arguments for making every data point fit these, but doesn't the cognitive dissonance, at some point, start to wear on the believer--and she reaches a point where she simply abandons the thesis?

    If the data fits more naturally an alternative model to your own, isn't there, in a sensible person, an erosion of confidence--and a temptation to jump over to the more natural model (the one that is larded with fewer and more plausible premises)?

    ReplyDelete
  137. BillyJanuary 27, 2016 at 10:49 PM

    Santi:

    "Philosophy can raise this question, but I don't see it ever providing an answer that we can be confident is correct."

    People can clearly be confident, as many are. I think you mean being justified in being confident, and I agree, though with one qualifier: You can be justified in being confident in one philosophical position over another, but not so with the position in itself. I'm sure many here will disagree. One example that is common is to take the law of non-contradiction(LNC). Anyone who tries to deny this or raise doubt over it will inevitably be using the LNC in order to do so, which is self-defeating. You can be justified in believing, with confidence, that the denial of this is not justified. Generally, the LNC is one of the only statements I can seriously say that you can be justified in your confidence in accepting.

    The problem here is that this justification of confidence also extents to science, since science relies on a philosophical basis (having a certain view of causation for example), usually involving aspects of epistomology and metaphysics. If the philosophical foundation of science is without justification, then science collapses with it.

    "Maybe not, but warranted confidence can take you across a busy street.

    But can it? Sure, every time you make a judgement of when to cross a road, built on the conclusions made via scientific inquiry (though I doubt anyone does any truly rigorous science for this situation but you know what I mean), is seems to coincide with you getting across the road safely. But whether you getting across safely had anything to do with your judgement of when and how to cross can be questioned. Sure, it seems rather silly to question it, but how do you know that all your past experiences of making your judgement and crossing the road safely has not been a huge coincidence? You can't just wave this away as Dawkin's does and just scream, "It works!" One can still reply, "How do you know it works?" You can't use the methods of scientific inquiry to answer this. And then, even if you can conclude that it works, one can still ask, "Yea, but why does it work?" Then you reply explaining the metaphysics required for it to work, and then someone replies, "Yea, but how can you be so sure that your metaphysics is correct? Sure, it provides an explanation for bridging the gap between our judgement's built on this method of scientific inquiry and connecting that with our ability to predict outcomes, but so what? You have provided an answer, but how do you know it is the answer?" TO rephrase what I said before, if the metaphysics underlying science also collapses under your critique, then science itself also collapses.

    To conclude, trying to defend science with metaphysics (since you can't use science to explain science) isn't that much different than trying to defend religious belief with metaphysics. You can't be critical of people being confidence while trying to bridge the gap between their religion and the world via metaphysics, but then take for granted that science doesn't need to bridge this gap, because it does.

    ReplyDelete
  138. BillyJanuary 27, 2016 at 11:05 PM

    Sorry "extents" is meant to be "extends".
    At the end, "confidence" is meant to be "confident"

    ReplyDelete
  139. AnonymousJanuary 28, 2016 at 1:03 AM

    I say....

    Here is where you go wrong. No one cares what you say. Few even properly read what you say by this point, and those that do regret it. You are an imbecilic troll who hides fallacies behind the sort of nauseating verbiage highly suggestive of a personality disorder. Now go away.

    ReplyDelete
  140. scbrownlhrmJanuary 28, 2016 at 4:02 AM



    Santi,

    That you think correlates between brain states and mind equates to sameness is funny. A being associated with B ipso facto proves A is not B. Question begging and equivocations can't help you there. That such association is predicted is even better. Also, that you're unclear on logical prerequisites layered beneath the inductive / deductive is apparent. To all but you.

    Unfortunately there's no such thing that can grant your request for "just a little bit of" the Irreducible.

    It's all or none. Why? Obviously, simply, because things are real or they are not.

    ReplyDelete
  141. scbrownlhrmJanuary 28, 2016 at 4:10 AM



    Santi,

    Billy is correct. You want "just a little" of the irreducible megastructure you reject. You also want to say that a bit is "enough". Hence the "an" answer vs "the" answer.

    In the end, your confidence lands upon pure abstraction.

    I'd explain where abstraction forces you to go where confidence is concerned.

    But you lack the necessary prerequisites to take that class.

    ReplyDelete
  142. GregJanuary 28, 2016 at 5:18 AM

    @ Santi

    A dualist from seven hundred years ago, presuming that minds are simple and can function apart from brains, might be SURPRISED to learn that, if you cut the corpus callosum, two independent minds appear, and the states of these two minds correlate to their own respective hemispheres of the brain's activity.

    Dualists seven hundred years ago (I suppose you mean Aquinas) did not think that minds can function apart from brains (or the body), at least without God's special help.

    So it's logically possible to keep dualism in play even if brain-mind correlates are discovered, say, 100 years from now, to be absolutely 1 to 1--but is it sane to do so?

    It's true that any hypothesis can be kept alive with ad hoc modifications. But that's not what I'm talking about. Irrelevant evidence does not affect the rational person's confidence; if the evidence is not relevant, then no ad hoc modifications are even needed.

    You can repeatedly assert (in the form of rhetorical questions) that you know the relationship between the evidence and the theory in this case, but that does not make it so.

    ReplyDelete
  143. GregJanuary 28, 2016 at 5:21 AM

    Put it this way. Suppose we raised someone without letting him learn any modern science, and he became a convinced Aristotelian in the philosophy of mind. Then he learns about modern neuroscience.

    Systematic inconsistencies between brain and mind would be far more damaging to the Aristotelian thesis than systematic consistencies.

    ReplyDelete
  144. DanielJanuary 28, 2016 at 5:52 AM

    Happy feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas folks!

    Cheers,
    Daniel

    ReplyDelete
  145. ScottJanuary 28, 2016 at 6:27 AM

    Yes, happy Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas! The Ordo Praedicatorum turns 800 this year, so pray an extra rosary and raise a glass of wine.

    ReplyDelete
  146. GottfriedJanuary 28, 2016 at 6:28 AM

    Is there a name for the rhetorical strategy of unleashing a flood of non sequiturs, begged questions, factual howlers, and red herrings so relentless that one's interlocutors are left gobsmacked and simply give up?

    ReplyDelete
  147. BenYachovJanuary 28, 2016 at 7:18 AM

    Santi is in essence Skepo only with more sophisticated rhetoric but even less knowledge.

    He is the moral equivalent of a Young Earth Creationist with a 5th graders understanding of
    biology who refuses to become educated in further scientific knowledge who quotes whole passages of Genesis as a "refutation" of Evolution and makes crackpot scientifically ignorant polemics against evolutionary processes. All the while persons with a college level understanding of biology shake their heads and roll their eyes.

    He just does all this with philosophy & metaphysics and for all intensive purposes his belief in Positivism/Scientism is Fideistic at this point.

    A.G. Flew at the height of his Atheism abandoned Positivism as hopelessly incoherent.

    Sinti no doubt believes it is true based on some inner testimony and or Mormon like burning in the bosom.

    Nothing more.

    ReplyDelete
  148. BenYachovJanuary 28, 2016 at 7:41 AM

    BTW why does he keep whining about the Holocaust? Given the premises of Classic Theism (as opposed to the problems generated by Theistic Personalism ie that shitty false view of God) and Thomism why should the Holocaust count against the existence of God?

    It's like claiming to have refuted every know cosmological argument then turning around and claiming this renders Pantheism unlikely. Um...no that would be a non-starter. Cosmological arguments demonstraight the existence of either a creator God or at least a sustainer God for creation. A Pantheistic view of God is neither so it would be a non-starter objection.

    God is not obligated to create any particular world. There is no world so good that God is obligated to create it and none so evil that as long as it participates in being God shouldn't refrain from creating it. Good is not a moral agent unequivocally compared to a human moral agent. God is not morally good in the unequivocal way a human being might be morally good. God is not unequivocally compared to creatures. Thus God has no obligations to us. Thus God need not stop the holocaust. God is not morally good in the unequivocal ...etc..but God is ontologically Good and Metaphysically Good so as to be the ultimate source of Goodness. But saying we should doubt the existence of God in the Classical sense because he didn't intervin in the holocaust makes about as much sense to cite Brian Davies as to say Plato's Form of the Good isn't really good because it didn't stop the holocaust. Or a good milkshake isn't really good because it didn't stop the holocaust.

    This asshole doesn't understand Theistic Personalism from Classic Theism from a hole in his fat head.

    I have no patience or pity at this point for the willfully stupid.

    Guns are mentally and intellectually inferior. Not worth one strand of a good Atheist philosopher's hair.

    ReplyDelete
  149. BenYachovJanuary 28, 2016 at 7:44 AM

    PS Please forgive my undiagnosed dyslexia.

    ReplyDelete
  150. SantiJanuary 28, 2016 at 8:17 AM

    Greg:

    How convenient of you to make a claim (mind-body dualism) that is indistinguishable from monism. Doesn't the very fact that you can't test it, even in principle, weaken confidence in the metaphysical argument? If someone who posits multiverses were to say that there is no way, even in principle, to test the hypothesis, that wouldn't give one greater confidence that the thesis is right, however seemingly airtight the argumentation for it, but lead to the suspicion that it is wrong. The best one could do with such an untestable claim is to shrug and say, "Maybe," and await the possibility for a more fruitful thesis.

    Focus on confidence, Greg. Confidence. Arguments standing alone can never achieve the level of confidence of those accompanied by evidence.

    ReplyDelete
  151. AnonymousJanuary 28, 2016 at 8:24 AM

    "Focus on confidence, Greg. Confidence. Arguments standing alone can never achieve the level of confidence of those accompanied by evidence."

    Is this an argument you're making? You seem pretty confident.

    ReplyDelete
  152. SantiJanuary 28, 2016 at 8:26 AM

    Greg:

    Imagine Charlton Heston landing, not on the Planet of the Apes, but the Planet of the Guitars--a planet where guitars make up a civilization, and communicate with each other, not with vocal chords, but with their vibrating strings.

    And imagine that this civilization's religion posits music-guitar dualism: the ethereal music each individual guitar experiences is a unique and eternal gift from the supernatural realm, unaffected by the death of the body of the guitar.

    And then a guitar scientist comes along and says: "I've correlated every ethereal sound we make to the vibration of the strings that extend from our bodies to the length of our necks! Our music obviously does not survive the death of our bodies. Music-guitar dualism is false."

    Now imagine Charlton Heston from his jail cell listening in on an intellectual religious apologist responding to the guitar scientist's monism, saying this to the scientist: "You haven't weakened the claim for dualism, for this would seem to require that dualism predicts that there are not persistent music-guitar correlates. In point of fact, our prophet, seven hundred years ago, did not think that music can function apart from guitars, at least without God's special help."

    AT LEAST WITHOUT GOD'S SPECIAL HELP. There's the ad hoc escape hatch. The claim for music-guitar dualism, empirically, is indistinguishable from perfect, 1 to 1, music-guitar string correlation. This remains true for as long as the bodily life of the guitar goes on, then God intervenes, at the death of the body of the guitar, conveniently outside of the observation of scientists.

    What would Charlton Heston say of such a familiar metaphysical shell game? He'd look into the ceiling of his jail cell and cry in despair: "Somewhere in the universe there must be something better than man!"

    ReplyDelete
  153. DennisJanuary 28, 2016 at 8:27 AM

    Happy Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas! Our Church's greatest product.

    ReplyDelete
  154. Don JindraJanuary 28, 2016 at 8:47 AM

    Anonymous,

    "Do not feed them."

    You're probably right. I pulled off the highway when I saw the rusty Amoco sign. I stand there admiring the four vintage gas pumps. Lots of metal. But dirty, cracked glass. The front door is busted open. I walk through the premises. Everything in disarray. I'm trying to make sense of graffiti on the Men's Room wall when three squatters approach. I heard them kicking open an old vending machine. One guy blows dust off two Zagnut bars. Only one dollar, he says, tax free. The offer is tempting. Sometimes it's hard to resist junk food. But I stopped in for the nostalgia. The snacks are inedible.

    ReplyDelete
  155. scbrownlhrmJanuary 28, 2016 at 8:59 AM



    Santi,

    Of course dualism is testable.

    It's called physics.

    Causal closure forces you to place confidence in one of two Irreducible Megastructures.

    It's called Reason. Logic.

    You've been challenged here several times to reality test these very points. All verification sums to pure abstraction. Abstraction therefore is the lap in which all your confidence lands.

    You've been asked several times....

    Crickets.

    You don't test, and then you claim it isn't testable.

    Comedy in action.

    We can't take you seriously given such comedy, given such hedging, given your requests for "a little bit of" an irreducible megastructure you reject......

    Your rejection of physics and your own mind, and all abstraction -- and all verification thereby -- leaves you lost in an unintelligible solipsism wrapped up inside of a self-negating presuppositionalism.


    ReplyDelete
  156. AnonymousJanuary 28, 2016 at 9:07 AM

    Gottfried: Is there a name for the rhetorical strategy of unleashing a flood of non sequiturs, begged questions, factual howlers, and red herrings so relentless that one's interlocutors are left gobsmacked and simply give up?

    Of course. It's called the "insanti defence".

    ReplyDelete
  157. BenYachovJanuary 28, 2016 at 9:14 AM

    >How convenient of you to make a claim (mind-body dualism) that is indistinguishable from monism. Doesn't the very fact that you can't test it, even in principle, weaken confidence in the metaphysical argument?

    And yet his strong dogmatic belief in the metaphysical view called Positivism can't be tested either by science yet his belief in it is stronger than my belief God is a Trinity?

    He really believes in Positivism as an immutable dogma one holds on mindless faith alone. He really thinks empirical science is the only valid source of meaningful knowledge even thought he can't prove that scientifically and his weak armature contradictory pseudo-philosophical arguments are a sufficient for belief in it (but our strong coherent philosophical arguments for God are not?). Additionally he equivocates between belief in Positivsm with mere confidence in the processes of empirical science..

    Yep I called it before.

    Santi is a Fundamentalist Positivist.

    ReplyDelete
  158. GregJanuary 28, 2016 at 10:58 AM

    @ Santi

    How convenient of you to make a claim (mind-body dualism) that is indistinguishable from monism. Doesn't the very fact that you can't test it, even in principle, weaken confidence in the metaphysical argument?

    I just said that it would be a problem for Aristotelian-Thomistic dualism if there were not mind-body correlates.

    Also note that "monism" is not a determinate position. If one says "mind = body," then one has to give an account of what that means, because there is considerable disagreement over it. Is it type-type identity theory? token-token identity theory? materialist functionalism? anomalous monism?

    Each of these predicts complete mind-body correlation. (The latter argues that at least some of the traditional mental states will have to be thrown out.) So empirical evidence does not distinguish them. Thus, by your standard, there is no serious way of cashing out what monism is, besides, perhaps, the feeling that mind and body are the same (though one will never be able to state what mind and body are without begging the question in some in principle irresoluble way).

    Your positivism is silly.

    AT LEAST WITHOUT GOD'S SPECIAL HELP. There's the ad hoc escape hatch.

    No. The only point of that qualification was that Aquinas did not hold there to be a philosophical argument for the conclusion that the mind functions apart from the body. He was led to that conclusion by considerations of how intimately related mind and body are, and thus, when you say,

    A dualist from seven hundred years ago, presuming that minds are simple and can function apart from brains, might be SURPRISED to learn that, if you cut the corpus callosum, two independent minds appear, and the states of these two minds correlate to their own respective hemispheres of the brain's activity,

    you are wrong. There is no cause for surprise. Whether Aquinas holds that by faith one can know that the mind does function without the body is not relevant; it is no admission of ad hoccery, and your taking it as such reveals nothing but your inability to follow an argument.

    I can't analyze your guitar metaphor until I see a good argument for guitar-music dualism.

    ReplyDelete
  159. GregJanuary 28, 2016 at 11:00 AM

    (The latter argues that at least some of the traditional mental states will have to be thrown out.)

    Never mind this. I had thought to include eliminative materialism but thought better.

    ReplyDelete
  160. AnonymousJanuary 28, 2016 at 2:08 PM

    Santi is in essence Skepo only with more sophisticated rhetoric but even less knowledge.

    What's Don Jindra?

    ReplyDelete
  161. BenYachovJanuary 28, 2016 at 2:14 PM

    djindra....

    I don't know?

    I seem to remember dismissing djindra as an idiot hostile gnu in the past, but my fuzzy memory seems to tell me sometime recently he posted something conciliatory & I praised him for it.

    I am getting old and my mind always goes on Saturdays.

    ReplyDelete
  162. laubadetristeJanuary 28, 2016 at 4:16 PM

    @Santi: "One more quick thought I'd be curious to hear your response to. I see Coyne's book as somewhat akin to Dante's Inferno. [...] The effect of the book is cumulative, like Voltaire's Candide, a cautionary tale about the varieties of rationalizing that surround, not suffering, but the Old Nobodaddy himself, and why science (supposedly) can't access him. [...] [Coyne]'s like Socrates roaming about the contemporary scene, asking, 'What do the religious know?' [...] Coyne's book might have been called, 'On the Varieties of Religious Rationalization in a Scientific Age.'"

    I think that's unfair at once to Dante, Voltaire, Blake, Plato, and James. I do not doubt that you have at least read of those people. But merely alluding to them does nothing to further either your point or this conversation. Beyond mere association in your mind, which I addressed January 25, 2016 at 9:07 PM, and which Brandon addressed January 27, 2016 at 4:30 AM, I think it is rather unhelpful to claim without any further development that Coyne did what Dante had Virgil do, that Voltaire described something relevantly like what Blake described, that Coyne did what Socrates did, or that Coyne did what James did. Stated so baldly, it seems clearly doubtful that any of those claims is true.

    @Gottfried: "Is there a name for the rhetorical strategy of unleashing a flood of non sequiturs, begged questions, factual howlers, and red herrings so relentless that one's interlocutors are left gobsmacked and simply give up?"

    Several people here have described him as like a cuttlefish squirting ink to obscure his escape. By happy coincidence, to "fish" has a secondary meaning of to "try subtly or deviously to elicit a response or some information from someone"; and also, to "fisk" seems to be a term "figuratively to mean a thorough and forceful verbal beating of... [a] commentator who has richly earned this figurative beating through his words. Good Fisking tends to be (or at least aim to be) quite logical, and often quotes the other article in detail, interspersing criticisms with the original article's text." Therefore, I suggest "cuttlefishing" for what Santi does, and "cuttlefisking" for the response he often gets.

    Alternately, I would suggest something to do with caltrops, the "spiked metal device[s] thrown on the ground to impede wheeled vehicles or (formerly) cavalry horses," familiar also from their use to evade the police in numbered action movies. "You criticize my careless positivism? Ha ha, ADORNO [hurls caltrops], LISA RANDALL, WARRANT, ha ha! [dives into tunnel]..."

    "Here, I have to disagree with you. The methods of critical thinking are applicable across the board."

    That is not disagreeing with me. In order to disagree with me, you must say something contrary to what I said.

    ReplyDelete
  163. laubadetristeJanuary 28, 2016 at 4:16 PM

    @Jason: "Interesting reading from a perspective of a christian quantum gravity researcher, see his blog post called Theology: Less Speculative than Quantum Gravity."

    That's a very good article. Furthermore, it undercuts much of what Santi said, although naturally (since the author was not part of this conversation), without quite the sharpness one would like.

    @Gottfried: "On that note, the contrast between the reception that Greenblatt's The Swerve received among the secular liberal cocktail party set and its reception by actual historians provides a remarkable comment on our modern cultural elites, and the legitimacy of their claims to authority."

    Too true. For the curious, see here and here and here.

    @Santi: "The Bulverist maneuver may be true, by the way, or part of the truth. It frequently points to blind spots in a holistic field surrounding truth (the truth is the whole). Freud and Marx do it, for instance, in their analyses of religion (daddy issues, religion in the service of power, etc.). Few would argue that their critiques of religion are irrelevant to understanding religion to some degree."

    That is misleading in several senses. First of all, how many would agree is irrelevant (I for one agree with some of their critiques, and yet I *still* think you're talking out of your ass); secondly, it is important to *what* degree their critiques are relevant; and thirdly, a maneuver--any maneuver--cannot be true, false, or part of the truth.

    That is also sloppy. As the incomparable Richard Mitchell once said, "Such thoughtlessness is aggravated by the cloudiness of *field*, which readers of pedaguese will recognize as a handy plug-in replacement for *area*, *sphere*, and *domain*. Educationists can babble forever about the phases of their fields and the facets of their spheres. There is no need for precise definition where there are no real things to be defined. / There are no boundaries to the happy land of Let's Pretend."

    "So I'm presuming (for instance) that the conclusions surrounding Thomistic metaphysics cannot be treated as seriously as mathematical conclusions..."

    That may be what you presume, but that's not what you said. January 25, 2016 at 6:46 AM, you said, "Feser writes books that are 'out of time' in the sense that they are concerned with locking down metaphysical arguments in such a way that neither history nor science can disrupt their conclusions. Feser attempts to treat metaphysics as akin to mathematics, making history and empiricism unable to touch metaphysics even in principle."

    That would be a example of the infamous Santi method--to make claim A and then, when challenged, brazenly to defend claim B, and to do so with a non-sequitur.

    Santi: "Ketchup is made from mustard seed."
    Someone else: "No it's not. That's mustard."
    Santi: "What reactionary troglodyte says ketchup isn't the tastiest condiment?! Why, in 2011 Heinz ketchup sales outpaced those of French's mustard by 200%!"
    Someone else: "Wait, wha...?"

    ReplyDelete
  164. laubadetristeJanuary 28, 2016 at 4:17 PM

    So first, you make claims about "history and empiricism [being] unable to touch metaphysics even in principle"--and then you proceed to talk about universal acceptance, arbitrariness, precision, and confidence (January 26, 2016 at 6:31 AM); certainty, precision, and rigor (January 26, 2016 at 7:02 AM); progress and rigor (January 26, 2016 at 7:18 AM); and rigor, precision, and confidence (January 26, 2016 at 8:34 AM). Let me grant for the sake of argument what you say in each of those posts--you still have not established your own point, which several people disputed.

    I *did* deliberately use an example from geometry (a2+b2=c2) so that if necessary we could pursue this argument via mathematical cases regarding which empirical evidence and certainty can be highly relevant. I cannot tell whether your switching to arithmetic (2+2=4) indicates your desire to avoid the history of the fifth postulate, or the desire to stick to Nicomachus or Frege, etc., or still further sloppiness.

    "Another reason I'm dubious of metaphysics as akin to math or science is Wittgenstein. I find Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy convincing, and he was both a mathematician and a philosopher. / For Wittgenstein, the problem with the traditional Thomist or Hegelian-style philosopher is the ambition to be as certain in conclusions as the scientist or mathematician; to discover and lock down truths into a comprehensive system by reduction (analysis) or generalization (synthesis). But the philosopher applies methods (Occam’s razor, etc.) to things for which no material or objective properties actually exist."

    Hmn. This sure sounds misleading. (And self-undermining, if the *scientist* can claim certainty.) But to be fair, I've only read a few of Wittgenstein's books, so I'm gonna ask the Wittgenstein ref on this one. Hey, pck! Is Santi within spitting distance of accurate here?

    "My question for you is, once you get past a list (short or long) of minimal metaphysical givens (we trust that cause and effect will function, we take it for granted that gravity will go on working, etc.), what more of metaphysics do we need?"

    That is demonstrably not the question you asked until just then. Furthermore, (ahem) *as much metaphysics as it takes to tell the truth and make sense of the world.*

    "Why don't Thomists just say, "Hey, based on some metaphysical argumentation, it might be that God exists," and leave it at that? [...] In the meantime, why not just let science do the rest of the heavy lifting (the collection of the oar of knowledge)? Why are we so restless to reach for premature closure and certainty on the question of God? Why build a metaphysical system that exceeds evidence?"

    Because that is not the kind of argument that was proffered. And you beg the questions, who is doing the "heavy lifting" (whatever that is), whether the closure and certainty is premature, and whether the Thomist system "exceeds evidence".

    @Mr. Green: "...though no more backwards than his mischaracterisation of Laubadetriste, who is doubtless surprised to have suddenly turned into a Thomist without noticing..."

    :) Well, I confess I was taken aback by Santi's reference to *my* "side of the religious fence." But I do not deny that I was also somewhat flattered. Why, being mistaken for a Thomist around here is somewhat like being mistaken for an actor on Rodeo Drive...

    ReplyDelete
  165. laubadetristeJanuary 28, 2016 at 4:18 PM

    "I've asked, most recently, a serious question about caution in the accumulation of metaphysical premises. If we simply trust that the physical laws will work, what need have we of the add-on of a Law Giver?"

    Because the metaphor of "law" requires a law-giver. That's what law is. If there is no law-giver, then there is no law. There could be a dozen other things, but not law.

    "If you have evidence otherwise, please share."

    (Ahem.) See the blog archive, to the right of your screen.

    "Shouldn't we apply Occam's razor across the board to metaphysics, and not multiply premises?"

    Occam's Razor, as traditionally formulated, does not state that one should not multiply premises. It states that one should not multiply entities *beyond necessity.* Therefore, if necessary, multiply away.

    Speaking of your fake "empiricism," I remember what Santayana said: "Occam's Razor... or economy as a criterion of truth, is the weapon of a monstrous self-mutilation with which British philosophy, if consistent, would soon have committed suicide. Only if all ideas were condemned to be blind and ugly, like a secret telegraphic code, would there be a human advantage in having the fewest and the baldest ideas possible..." Of course, one who has read philosophy will remember which sort of philosophy the British are famous for.

    "Science, over the past 400 years or so, has shown itself to be fruitful in expanding human knowledge. It's stripped down and conservative epistemology works."

    Works to do what?

    "I've always liked that cartoon with the physicist standing at a chalkboard looking at the location where he has inserted into the middle of his equation--'Then a miracle occurs!--and one of his colleagues gently pipes up and says, "Ralph, I think you need to work on that part."'"

    A wonderful cartoon. Ironic that you're fond of it.

    @kyle coffey: "@Greg @Laubadetriste / Thanks for the links and info guys."

    You're welcome.

    @Santi: "Aquinas basically got it all right 700 years ago."

    Notice how misleading this is. The force of this statement is to imply that Aquinas did *not* "get it all right" *because* he wrote "700 years ago." Note that this only follows on an account of progress which Santi has not provided, wherein the last 700 years necessarily or very likely make a difference in *getting it all right* (Notice too how vague *that* is.) To which the obvious response is, in what sense have the last 700 years made a relevant difference to the metaphysical principles of Aquinas? (Note finally that a small part of the argument for A-T has been that thinkers within the last 700 years have gestured towards it.)

    Also, compare: "Euclid basically got it all right 2300 years ago." "Newton basically got it all right 300 years ago." To which the answer ought to be: well, *basically,* yeah, they did.

    ReplyDelete
  166. laubadetristeJanuary 28, 2016 at 4:18 PM

    "Do Mormons speak a more or less true language than scientists, Catholics, or Hindus?"

    Less.

    "How can you decide without driving these languages around and seeing which ones seem to be in contact with experience, history, and reality?"

    You decide *based on* which religion(s) "seem[s] to be in contact with experience, history, and reality".

    "Brandon's sentences in his retort have their own dropped and undefended premises. He does not acknowledge, before proceeding to critique, that he and I are engaged in putting forward framing gestures, and have competing languages."

    That's not what he did, and that's not what he had. On your own terms, and with your own language, he noted that your claims were either trivial or unsubstantiated.

    "If the data fits more naturally an alternative model to your own, isn't there, in a sensible person, an erosion of confidence--and a temptation to jump over to the more natural model (the one that is larded with fewer and more plausible premises)?"

    What Greg said.

    ReplyDelete
  167. BillyJanuary 28, 2016 at 4:21 PM

    Can give Santi some props for his persistence.

    It does appear to me that Santi is a positivist. Feser has specifically addressed the problems with positivism a few times. The most obvious being that positivism can't be confirmed via any kind of scientific inquiry, or with using any kind of scientific language. So it collapses, and if there is no other option available, as many other positivists would claim, then justification for science collapses too.

    ReplyDelete
  168. AnonymousJanuary 28, 2016 at 4:27 PM

    Santi: There's the ad hoc escape hatch.
    Greg: No.

    Wait, what the heck? You just finished explaining how mind-brain agreement is evidence for the Thomistic view, and he replies with an ad hoc charge — against his own objection?!?

    Santi is the only guy I know who can shoot himself in the foot and follow it with a triumphant, "Take that!"

    ReplyDelete
  169. GregJanuary 28, 2016 at 5:08 PM

    @ Mr. Green

    Santi is the only guy I know who can shoot himself in the foot and follow it with a triumphant, "Take that!"

    But in a world where professors of literature shoot themselves in the foot, how can one still believe in Thomist metaphysics?

    I have long thought that the problem of evil is really not the problem. Rather, the theist's challenge is the problem of Santi--how could he and God coexist?

    ReplyDelete
  170. JasonJanuary 28, 2016 at 5:32 PM

    @laubadetriste, glad you found that article good.

    Happy feast of St. Thomas Aquinas!

    ReplyDelete
  171. SantiJanuary 28, 2016 at 7:19 PM

    Laubadetriste:

    You say: "Therefore, I suggest 'cuttlefishing' for what Santi does, and 'cuttlefisking' for the response he often gets."

    I love that. It's brilliant. I feel like you guys are the cuttlefish more often than I am, but I love the metaphor.

    ReplyDelete
  172. SantiJanuary 28, 2016 at 8:15 PM

    Laubadetriste:

    You think that my claim that Wittgenstein took a similar view of philosophy that I do "sounds misleading," but in The Blue Book, Wittgenstein writes explicitly that the work of the philosopher is not to pretend that he or she is a scientist or mathematician. That is, the philosopher can never be a confident system builder, unifier, generalizer, simplifier, reducer, or explainer:

    "Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything."

    What then is the philosopher to do? What is her job? Wittgenstein would replace ambitious philosophical explanation of the world with description.

    Description of what? Of how words are actually used as tools in particular sentences and contexts. Describing the language games that people play. That should be the philosopher’s work. Wittgenstein once wrote the following in one of his notebooks: “My whole task consists in explaining the nature of sentences” (Quoted in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, vol. 8, 330). And the philosopher A. C. Grayling sums up Wittgenstein’s position in his Tractatus this way: “The proper task of philosophy, he says, is to make the nature of our thought and talk clear, for then the traditional problems of philosophy will be recognized as spurious and will accordingly vanish” (Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction, 2001, 18).

    A simple example: God. God has always been a ghost bird in our language games. Here’s how Wittgenstein puts it at the end of his Tractatus:

    "The inexpressible indeed exists. This shows itself. It is the mystical. The right method in philosophy would be to say nothing except what can be said using sentences such as those of natural science–which of course has nothing to do with philosophy–and then, to show those wishing to say something metaphysical that they failed to give any meaning to certain signs in their sentences. […] Of what we cannot speak we must be silent."

    ReplyDelete
  173. SantiJanuary 28, 2016 at 8:30 PM

    Philosopher Paul Horwich has an excellent article on Wittgenstein at the New York Times website: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/was-wittgenstein-right/.

    Here's a quote from the essay: "[I]t was always a mistake to extrapolate from the fact that empirical concepts, such as red or magnetic or alive stand for properties with specifiable underlying natures to the presumption that the notion of truth must stand for some such property as well."

    ReplyDelete
  174. GregJanuary 28, 2016 at 9:13 PM

    Oh, Santi, Santi...

    You complain, "You think that my claim that Wittgenstein took a similar view of philosophy that I do 'sounds misleading,'" but then you go on to cherry pick quotes and theses from both early and late Wittgenstein.

    Early Wittgenstein proposed a very ambitious (and opaque) picture of the world. He was very confident, very reductionist, very systematic. He thought all propositions were truth functions of elementary propositions. Late Wittgenstein (the Wittgenstein of language games, the only Wittgenstein whom folks like Rorty would care to appropriate) thought early Wittgenstein was largely talking nonsense.

    The commonality was that Wittgenstein thought, in both cases, that he had succeeded in dissolving all philosophical problems. And we all know you would love to devote yourself to that thesis. But before you try to stake your claim, you should decide which Wittgenstein you want to use, so you can try to devote yourself coherently.

    ReplyDelete
  175. GregJanuary 28, 2016 at 9:19 PM

    Also re: Wittgenstein and God.

    We do have something (lecture notes, maybe) from Wittgenstein on philosophy of religion. I haven't read his notes, but I have read the two chapters Hilary Putnam devotes to Wittgenstein and religion in Renewing Philosophy. And, of course, his settled position was nothing like the one you try to ascribe to him by using an irrelevant Tractatus quotation.

    Many of his favorite students were Catholics (converts, even), and he respected them greatly. I think he was probably too relativistic and non-cognitive with respect to religion, but he certainly didn't try to use his notion of a language game as a bludgeon to argue that the religious are talking nonsense.

    ReplyDelete
  176. UnknownJanuary 28, 2016 at 9:28 PM

    I came across a manuscript, probably a doctoral thesis, on Wittgenstein and his personal views on God and religion, about two years ago in a Half-Priced books in Austin. I wanted to buy it but the price was exorbitant. Skimming it, it was obvious, however, that the easy labeling of Wittgenstein's views about the subject are far from easy, and certainly don't seems to be 'religion is nonsense and so is God-talk'.

    ReplyDelete
  177. GregJanuary 28, 2016 at 10:07 PM

    From what I recall, he had a higher view of religion than either of metaphysics or positivism.

    ReplyDelete
  178. SantiJanuary 28, 2016 at 10:27 PM

    Greg:

    The thing that most spins my imagination in Wittgenstein is his logical atomism and pictorialism in the Tractatus, but that doesn't mean I don't like things in his later work, such as his notion of language games.

    In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein posits a fundamental unit of language that cannot be reduced any further, and so it can only be described, not explained by recourse to some deeper analysis or synthesis. For Wittgenstein, that atomic unit is not a word in language or a thing in the world, but a fact.

    A fact is two things in logical relation (the car is or is not in the garage) and that fact can be logically or visually pictured (we can see in our mind’s eye a car in a garage or an empty garage, but we cannot see a car both in a garage and not in a garage at the same time): “‘An elementary fact is thinkable’ means: we can form a mental picture of it. […] It is as impossible to say something that contradicts logic as it is to draw a figure that contradicts the laws of space or to specify the coordinates of a nonexistent point” (Tractatus 3.001, 3.032).

    And so our mental world is built up around logically possible facts, and our sentences reflect this. Facts are the atomic units of possible existence. No thing or word is an island, each is part of a chain (two linked things belonging to a coherent sentence). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein puts it this way: “In an elementary fact the objects hang in one another like the links of a chain” (2.03), and “God can create anything so long as it does not contradict the laws of logic” (3.031).

    And so Wittgenstein’s second sentence in the Tractatus is this: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (1.1). Again, this is because no thing in the world or word in a sentence is an island. The irreducible unit of language is the fact, the relation within a particular and logically possible language-game.

    What inspired Wittgenstein’s insight that a sentence really only makes “sense” when it reflects a logical relation in space and time? According to his Notebooks, Wittgenstein was reading a newspaper account of a courtroom reenactment of a car accident. The reenactment was done using toy cars and dolls. This proved to be a “eureka moment” for Wittgenstein, for it occurred to him that this is exactly what a coherent sentence does: it maps, pictures, or models objects in a logically possible “state of affairs” which the reader then apprehends and “sees” (turns into a mental picture). Likewise, musical notations mirror real sounds, which are then read off by a musician and translated into music.

    From this early insight of Wittgenstein’s, one can see immediately its implication for non-empirical languages: what is a language really mapping and reflecting with precision if it is not a material situation (such as a car wreck in space and time)? Answer: nothing. And so “Of what we cannot speak we must be silent” (Tractatus 7).

    The later Wittgenstein would not say nothing, but rather, a language game.

    So I see Wittgenstein's logical atomism as akin to Lucretius's physical atomism: abstract "reality" consists of the infinite series of logically possible sentences that can be laid out, and you can then arrange them, like atoms, in all sorts of ways. They can be sorted and swerved into all sorts of logically possible intellectual systems. But these systems are just the language games we overlay onto the underlying series of logically possible sentences, giving emphasis to some, and not to others. The truth is one (one big heap of logically possible sentences), the human languages for describing it are many. The truth, the big heap (the infinite series of logically possible sentences), is the raw material of our language games.

    ReplyDelete
  179. Jeremy TaylorJanuary 28, 2016 at 11:15 PM

    Wait, why should we care what Wittgenstein's opinion was? I mean, yes, he was no doubt a great philosopher and would be interesting to read some day, but why in this context should we be bowled over by his opinions? Maybe I missed something but the Santi bot only seems to be offering (pretty dubious) descriptions of a couple of Wittgenstein's claims. There is no real argument involved. No proper reasons given why Wittgenstein's belief about philosophy are correct. Personally, I prefer Proclus. If I quote a few things from him, does that neutralise Santi's point? What are the rules of the particular language game he seems to be playing?

    “Everything is overflowing with Gods.”
    ― Proclus

    There you go, take that Wittgenstein!

    ReplyDelete
  180. laubadetristeJanuary 28, 2016 at 11:54 PM

    @Jason: "Happy feast of St. Thomas Aquinas!"

    :) Happy feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, Jason.

    @Scott: "Yes, happy Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas! The Ordo Praedicatorum turns 800 this year, so pray an extra rosary and raise a glass of wine."

    Oh, good. I wasn't sure whether it was appropriate, but I happened to be deep in a large boxed merlot, so... cheers! (And cheers to you, too, Santi, and Don Jindra. And Omer and Felipe VI.)

    @Don Jindra: "That's almost a good point -- pretty rare around here. :)"

    Why, that's almost a compliment. How patronizing. :)

    "1) ... We humans believe in cause and effect. Where we cannot find it, we tend to invent it."

    Very well. We are now back at the start of Dr. Feser's arguments, except with a somewhat Kantian spin. Do check back when you have an argument against them.

    "2) There's no reality test for belief in an afterlife. There's no agreement on what form it might take. But it is fairly common for us to believe we are more significant (god-like) than we are."

    The term "reality test" is still godawfully unelucidated. But otherwise, I agree, and so does everyone else here, and... so what?

    "I'd dispute that religion is central to the creation and continuance of societies throughout history. I'd argue religion is often grafted on after the fact to further the interests of select individuals and groups. There is nothing inherently cohesive about a politicized religion."

    This seems to presume that "the interests of select individuals and groups" are not religious.

    Whether so or not, do you claim to have evidence of "the interests of select individuals and groups" which then, subsequently, at a later moment in time, in some fashion added religion *to further those interests*?

    Why would you think there is nothing inherently cohesive about *politicized* religion (as opposed to religion)? And where did *politicized* come from, anyway? (One would have thought that the *polis* was by definition a cohesion. Ditto the "political religions" .)

    "Something like, but not exactly like. There's always someone who refuses to accept a fact."

    :) My question was rhetorical. Clearly something can be authoritative, and yet some reject it. Otherwise we would have no crime.

    ReplyDelete
  181. laubadetristeJanuary 28, 2016 at 11:54 PM

    "But over time, if there is a compelling case for something, that something should show signs of utterly destroying competing beliefs -- like Newton's system utterly destroyed Ptolemy's system."

    Hmn. Tell me, how did *Newton's system* *utterly destroy* *Ptolemy's system*?

    "Specifically, competence to show the way toward truths; but more generally, competence to show an ability to follow through on any of its many claims (like its alleged beneficial effects)."

    *Truths* as such is vague. Dr. Feser has in fact argued for a number of truths, as have others. In the absence of any argument against them, you merely beg the question, whether "religion" has "show[n] the way towards truths".

    "Many believe Jesus was a myth. This is the modern version of Docetism. / Arianism persists in Unitarians, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Thomas Jefferson famously called the Trinity nonsense. Even as a child, when I used to go to Sunday School and did believe in God, I never thought the Trinity made sense. Although they're not officially recognized by many sects, I think forms of Arianism are common. / I think much of Christianity today is merely a form of Manichaeism. / R.C. Sproul: 'One thing is clear: that you can be purely Pelagian and be completely welcome in the evangelical movement today.' / And this just scratches the surface. There's practically a cottage industry of Christian sects calling each other heretical. There's somewhere between 9000 to 33,000 Christian sects in the world, depending how one counts. This number has not been shrinking over the centuries. It's been growing. And that's just Christianity."

    That "modern version of Docetism" is not Docetism, not least because one sort believed Jesus to exist, and the other not. That "much of" Christianity today is "merely" a form of Manichaeism is a large claim requiring substantiation. That one can be "purely Pelagian" and welcome in today's evangelical movement, according to R. C. Sproul, means little outside a polemical context, for to be "purely Pelagian" according to R. C. Sproul is not to be Pelagian, and being "welcome" certainly tends against there being a dispute. Calling someone heretical does not make them heretical. Today's count of "Christian sects" is by itself irrelevant, aside from a count of yesterday's count of "Christian sects", together with an account of how the number of "Christian sects" relates to the number of Christians, together with an account of how the number of sects relates to the number of "[d]isputes in its areas of concern."

    That all may seem a bit much, but being *scientific,* I know you're a fanatic for careful experimental design.

    ReplyDelete
  182. laubadetristeJanuary 28, 2016 at 11:56 PM

    @Jeremy Taylor:

    Everything goes better with a little bit of Proclus. It's almost like salt that way...

    ReplyDelete
  183. laubadetristeJanuary 29, 2016 at 12:26 AM

    @Anonymous January 26, 2016 at 4:41 PM: "I plead with me people: Please do not respond to Santi and Don Jindra. They are trolls incapable of adding anything to the discussion here, as have been shown by an amazing amount of reality testing, but quite keen to pollute everything with utter bilge. Do not feed them."

    I for one still find some interest in replying to them. Don Jindra has shown a dry humor (January 28, 2016 at 8:47 AM), and Santi has shown a willingness to be corrected (January 26, 2016 at 6:02 AM). Both of them are clearly well-read. Plus, I dislike the thought of responding only to those predisposed to agree with me.

    That said, they do recall that saying of Pudd'nhead Wilson (among others), that "A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes."

    @Santi: "I love that. It's brilliant. I feel like you guys are the cuttlefish more often than I am, but I love the metaphor."

    Glad you love that. Ima take what I think over what I feel.

    @Anonymous, here's what I'll do: I'll keep replying to Santi and Don Jindra until either I get bored, or the conversation ends for some other reason--*unless* I hear from several regulars (you know who you are) that my replying detracts from the fun of this blog. For while I seem to relish polemic rather more than many others here, I am also respectful of the totality of our experience here, and I will stop if that is in jeopardy, no questions asked.

    ReplyDelete
  184. laubadetristeJanuary 29, 2016 at 12:33 AM

    "...aside from a count of yesterday's count of 'Christian sects'..."

    That was poorly phrased. The merlot is getting to me.

    ReplyDelete
  185. laubadetristeJanuary 29, 2016 at 12:40 AM

    "For while I seem to relish polemic rather more than many others here, I am also respectful of the totality of our experience here..."

    Shit, that too. *Sigh.* People, don't drink and write...

    ReplyDelete
  186. pckJanuary 29, 2016 at 2:14 AM

    @laubadetriste (concerning some of Santi's remarks about metaphysics & Wittgenstein):

    Santi:
    I find Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy convincing, and he was both a mathematician and a philosopher. / For Wittgenstein, the problem with the traditional Thomist or Hegelian-style philosopher is the ambition to be as certain in conclusions as the scientist or mathematician; to discover and lock down truths into a comprehensive system by reduction (analysis) or generalization (synthesis). But the philosopher applies methods (Occam’s razor, etc.) to things for which no material or objective properties actually exist."

    laubadetriste:
    Hey, pck! Is Santi within spitting distance of accurate here?

    The most Wittgensteinian answer would perhaps be that it depends on how far he can spit and whether what the spit hits counts as a proper target. Going by the above quote I'd say he is mostly engaged in name dropping.

    The following quote by Wittgenstein about Hegel reflects a major theme in W.'s work and also dovetails with my standard sermon about the difference between conceptual and empirical knowledge, an example of which you already linked to ("pck").

    Wittgenstein: "Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: 'I’ll teach you differences'."

    W. is arguing here against philosophy trying to go the way of science (which emphasizes sameness/unification). This is as much as I can give Santi if I read him charitably. But W.'s philosophy is never about achieving the same degree of certainty as scientific methods do. Science and philosophy are about different kinds of knowledge and to compare them by degree simply makes no sense. W. would also not say that philosophy employs "methods". Particularly conspicuous is Santi's mentioning of Occam's razor, a principle that only ever seems to be talked about by science fanboys. Is anybody aware of a philosopher of the past, let's say, 300 years, who has made substantial use of OR? It really shoud be renamed to Occam's rhetoric.

    Most naturalists as well as 99.9% of all gnus cannot appreciate that logic is part of what constitutes the scaffolding of human reasoning and not the scaffolding of the world. Rather, they (often unknowingly) treat logic as a kind of "super-physics" and correspondingly misunderstand what metaphysics is about. If Santi understood the conceptual/empirical distinction, he would understand that both mathematical and metaphysical truths are of course "inoculated" against historical facts and all empiricism (as one of his complaints against Ed Feser seems to go). For they depend on how we talk about the world, not on what the world is like.

    Mathematics and metaphysics part company in that math is applicable in the world in a way that metaphysics is not. You can "do stuff that works" with math (as gnus never tire of reminding us). But to say that metaphysics should be judged by the same standard is just silly and is merely a display of insufficient education. It's like saying that talk of seeing is useless compared to talk about photons hitting the retina.

    ReplyDelete
  187. pckJanuary 29, 2016 at 2:57 AM

    Taylor Weaver said...
    [...]
    it was obvious, however, that the easy labeling of Wittgenstein's views about the subject are far from easy, and certainly don't seems to be 'religion is nonsense and so is God-talk'.

    Indeed. W. was deeply impressed by Tolstoy's "Gospel in Brief" which he came across at a young age:

    http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/witty.htm

    The moral guidance provided by Tolstoy's account would be with him for the rest of his life.

    A short documentary which is remarkable for its clarity and avoidance of bias:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFzfOXsOymk

    Some quotes on religion:

    https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein#Notebooks_1914-1916

    ReplyDelete
  188. laubadetristeJanuary 29, 2016 at 3:20 AM

    Thank you, pck.

    ReplyDelete
  189. scbrownlhrmJanuary 29, 2016 at 5:05 AM



    Santi won't dive into Pure Abstraction as the (final) foci of all his confidence simply because [1] science cannot house it, [2] causal closure annihilates it, and [3] mathematics needs it and dies without it. Solipsism and Illusion fall into unintelligible marriages whereby all confidence is eliminated. Only one category of One Irreducible Megastructure retains lucidity. But said category Santi rejects, though he requests a few drops from it along the way to help him get by just a little bit longer in what sums to autohypnosis.

    ReplyDelete
  190. SantiJanuary 29, 2016 at 6:30 AM

    Jeremy:

    You say: "[W]hy in this context should we be bowled over by his [Wittgenstein's] opinions?... I prefer Proclus. If I quote a few things from him, does that neutralise Santi's point?"

    I say: You don't need to be bowled over. You just need to take Wittgenstein into fair consideration. Apportion your beliefs to the evidence. Wittgenstein should give you pause.

    The context here in this thread is confidence. Confidence. 100% confidence. When does one's confidence in a metaphysical argument fall from 100% certainty to something less? When do you proportion your beliefs to the evidence? Because we are in history and are flawed animals, the opinions of people far smarter than us constitutes testimonial evidence that should be weighed--and reduce our confidence if they disagree.

    We are not thinking outside of history, and we do not have perfect faculties for thinking, so when one of the most brilliant logicians of the 20th century says the project of traditional philosophy is involved in a category mistake (treating the traditional procedures of system building in philosophy--generalization and analysis--as akin in epistemic value to the generalizing and analytic procedures of math and science), we would all do well to listen.

    And you can't have it both ways. If you're going to quote Proclus as retort, then you're in essence making Wittgenstein's point: philosophy, unlike science and math, doesn't make progress. It has been gnawing away at problems for more than two millennia without locking down any consensus opinions among the geniuses in the history of the field (nor among philosophers today). Leibniz and Spinoza could agree on math, they couldn't agree on philosophy.

    ReplyDelete
  191. pckJanuary 29, 2016 at 7:02 AM

    I should probably add that Santi in his post from January 28, 2016 at 10:07 PM delivers are rather cringeworthy exposition of what Wittgenstein's Tractatus is about. His mark is particularly off with regard to the relationship of world and language, including the oft-abused quote about what one must be silent of. (I often wish W. had added "If you don't know what you're talking about, please stfu.") The point of the Tractatus is to establish a correspondence theory of truth by explaining that what gives a proposition meaning is that language-internal relations and the structure of the world (= states of affairs) mirror each other. But this alone is not the big news (or a "Eureka" moment). What is new in W. is the realization that what makes the mirroring possible (some relation R) cannot itself be expressed/depicted/mirrored by language (because an infinite logical regress ensues: R, once hypothetically pictured, would stand in another yet undescribed relation R' to the world, and so on ad infinitum). Hence R is a part of reality we cannot speak of. We notice that this limitation exists (it *shows* itself) when we "run up against a wall" trying to capture R linguistically. We cannot talk about R but our failed attempts to capture it can make us aware of its existence. (This is what "climbing the ladder and then throwing it away" is about.)

    Later in his life W. realized that the "atomic facts" the Tractatus postulates can and will never be supplied or found. He described the T. as a "watch that works but never tells the right time".

    Another error typical of casual readers of W. is the in-passing mentioning of language games. Language games in W.'s sense are *not* "games played with language". They are applications of language "within the stream of life". They do not mirror states of affairs in the picture-sense of the Tractatus, but are directly embedded in the world as practices (which can be connected to other practices, both linguistic and non-linguistic). They constitute (part of) our intellectual background against which we make judgements. Thus, contra Santi, language games are not "overlays onto an underlying series of logically possible sentences". (This is quite probably the worst conflation of early and late Wittgenstein I have ever seen.) For the later Wittgenstein, meaning comes into language through a rather different way than then one posited in the Tractatus -- speech as act instead of a separate abstract system standing in some equally abstract relation to what it is about. (Many of W.'s thoughts about what constitutes sense and the arbitrariness of grammar remain intact though, the later W. does not break with the T. in its entirety.)

    ReplyDelete
  192. scbrownlhrmJanuary 29, 2016 at 7:10 AM



    Santi,

    I've been told by those of your ilk and even by the same appeals to disagreement a whole range of nonsense (...that in fact I do not exist... etc...) and a whole range of nonsense on that particular "incline".

    Etc.

    It's all the same: The annihilation of abstraction.

    You're repeating their method and, in effect, in each comment pointing to everything but what actually matters.

    Rest assured all confidence (truth value) is forced into deflationary injury but for that *one* stopping point that actually matters.

    Hence all your conclusions fail even if we presuppose Non-Theism -- of which Spinoza is a member.

    Such circularity is fine, but the *only* category of the irreducible (non-eliminative) megastructure which can change *any* painful fate into deflationary truth values (and *all* your models, permutations, and arrangements presented so far end in such deflationary injury) will, so long as you reject it, simultaneously position the Christian within lucidity while positioning all your permutations and combinations within the final death of confidence.

    It's not as if you can ever by, say, merely rearranging all of the various kinds of arguments all of which (on a priori) reject that one, pesky, and unavoidable Irreducible Megastructure arrive at *any* *non*-deflationary end because, as always, all your empiricism lives and dies atop.....wait for it.... Pure Abstraction.

    It's hard to, well, respect someone such as yourself who ventures all around what matters, but never goes into the only megastructure that can actually change truth value (confidence) at all.

    Your many combinations and permutations of your own a priori (all your comments) are interesting, insightful, adeptly worded, learned, and, completely irrelevant. Truth is ultimately deflationary and Abstraction is ultimately annihilated.

    ReplyDelete
  193. SantiJanuary 29, 2016 at 8:32 AM

    pck (ludicrously) says: "Particularly conspicuous is Santi's mentioning of Occam's razor, a principle that only ever seems to be talked about by science fanboys.... It really shoud be renamed to Occam's rhetoric."

    Seriously. If Occam's razor is not deployed by contemporary philosophers in comparing philosophies, it's because they have been influenced by Wittgenstein to see competing, non-empirical language games as incommensurable.

    But if you had the ambition of holding reality in a single empirical vision or language, of course Occam's razor would assist you. How could it not? It would help you choose among competing hypotheses. Occam's razor assists scientists, and continues to do so, because they have a testable ambition: among the theories on offer, which one fits the data most naturally, is conservative in not multiplying assumptions, has the greatest scope, and is most fruitful (capable of predicting outcomes)? The ambition is to strive for what Hawking calls "model dependent realism." If the Standard Model of physics isn't the final theory of physics, it will do till the final theory gets here. For now, it beats its competitors in part because it is conservative in not multiplying assumptions beyond what is strictly necessary.

    But once you've conceded that a non-empirical language game is coherent in its own terms, and its speakers are determined to defend the language game against incoming data with the multiplying of ad hoc rationalizations till the cows come home (I'm thinking of contemporary Thomists here, with their insistence on retaining a historical Adam and Eve, even though scientists say our species has never bottlenecked to two individuals), then you've disabled Occam's razor as a criteria for comparing that philosophical language in competition against other philosophical languages. As Rorty says, what you're left with is simply historicism: telling how this or that language came to be spoken, and of what use it is to the people who go on speaking it.

    ReplyDelete
  194. scbrownlhrmJanuary 29, 2016 at 9:07 AM



    Santi,

    Your (your's specifically) model dependent realism ends in a causal paradigm wherein closure eliminates confidence.

    Why?

    Because physics.

    The Non-Empirical-- void of Abstraction -- thus closes all your sentences. You truly have arrived, haven't you? You just go on As-If your language game is coherent in its own terms and so are determined to defend your language game against incoming data with the multiplying of ad hoc rationalizations till the cows come home.

    -------------

    See how easy that was?

    We're you impressed?

    Do you feel moved?

    No?

    We don't either.

    ReplyDelete
  195. UnknownJanuary 29, 2016 at 9:24 AM

    Something moved inside me.

    Oh wait. That was the Taco Bell.

    ReplyDelete
  196. scbrownlhrmJanuary 29, 2016 at 9:39 AM

    =)

    ReplyDelete
  197. The Ghost of WittgensteinJanuary 29, 2016 at 9:47 AM

    Ssssantiiii...sssstop name-dropping meeeee...learn philosophy or fuck ooooooooofff...

    ReplyDelete
  198. pckJanuary 29, 2016 at 10:35 AM

    Santi:
    If Occam's razor is not deployed by contemporary philosophers in comparing philosophies, it's because they have been influenced by Wittgenstein to see competing, non-empirical language games as incommensurable.

    I think it's time to stop with the Wittgenstein trolling. You clearly do not have the faintest clue about what Wittgenstein's influence is or has been, or what a language game is. FYI: a) Contemporary philosophers are mostly naturalists, i.e. exact polar opposites of Wittgenstein, and b) if two language games are incommensurable, they can by definition not be "competing" because they belong to different practices. The term "incommensurable" as used by Wittgenstein has absolutely nothing to do with the verification of theories (the proper key word would be "family resemblances"). So one has to ask: "Competing" for what? If you actually understood the terminology you are using you'd realize that you are asserting that chess is "in competition" with football because they are both called "games". So your whole "point" is either complete nonsense or so trivial that it borders on complete emptiness.

    This kind of cocktail party philo talk ("I'm so into non-empirical language games of late, please pass the incommensurable champagne") may sound great to a gnu like you, but will get you laughed out of the classroom (philo or science) within seconds.

    But if you had the ambition of holding reality in a single empirical vision or language

    Which is of course impossible. (Wittgenstein being among the most vocal critics of empiricism/scientism.)

    of course Occam's razor would assist you. How could it not? It would help you choose among competing hypotheses.

    OR is a matter of style, as an indicator of reality it is completely useless. If two theories make the same predictions, there is by definition no empirical way to determine which one is "better". And if they don't make the same predictions, the matter will be sorted out without reference to OR. There is not a single physics paper published which contains an invocation of Occam's Razor. If you had the slightest idea what actually goes on in physics you would know that.

    If I followed Occam's Razor in mathematical logic, I would be compelled to use the Sheffer stroke instead of AND, OR, NOT and IMPLIES. Things would not get better, just uglier. Same in any science. The better theory (among those with equal predictive power) is usually the one with more accessible concepts -- the theory which is most lucid -- not the one which uses the smallest number of symbols or concepts or even assumptions. Science worshippers often think that this is an ideal all scientists follow. It isn't and they shouldn't, no matter what Hawking or others may dream up in their pop science books. Actual science never looks like that, not even Hawking's. In the best case, a compromise between brevity and intelligibility wins. In math and physics, the shortest ways to put things are often completely unintelligble. (Which is one reason why there are so many badly written textbooks.)

    Your "arguments" are typical of someone who worships science but who has never actually invested the time and energy to study any science in depth, or has actually worked with models or formalisms.

    You will of course continue to have your wet dreams about OR and other heroic principles the blind belief in which afford you an impression of being smart without having to do any actual work. Such is the perspective and the fate of the True Gnu.

    ReplyDelete
  199. pckJanuary 29, 2016 at 10:38 AM

    Yeah, what The Ghost of Wittgenstein said.

    Thanks Ludwig. (And next time please leave some of the money to me.)

    ReplyDelete
  200. Don JindraJanuary 29, 2016 at 12:24 PM

    laubadetriste,

    Shit, that too. *Sigh.* People, don't drink and write...

    LOL!

    "Both of them are clearly well-read. Plus, I dislike the thought of responding only to those predisposed to agree with me."

    I get bored interacting with people who agree with me (except my wife, of course :)). I also gravitate towards books I don't necessarily find agreeable. But the more I read, the more I realize how little I've actually read.

    "Tell me, how did *Newton's system* *utterly destroy* *Ptolemy's system*?"

    Ptolemy's demise was caused by its lack of *general* predictive power. It could not account for new data. To a very small extent we can say the same for Newton's system. But Newton's system could account for an enormous amount of new data without any stress whatsoever.

    "In the absence of any argument against them, you merely beg the question, whether 'religion' has 'show[n] the way towards truths'."

    It's kind of superfluous for me to argue against any particular religious truth claims. Religions themselves do a good job of that without my input. Sects habitually contradict each other. There's virtually no truth claim that some sect hasn't supported. Which claims are correct? Even within a broadly defined religion, like Christianity, there's no reliable standard, not even the Bible. If a sect points the way toward a truth, the only way of knowing is to consult some standard outside the religion. And if that's the case, the religion is irrelevant. In this sense science and religion are in the same boat. Science can't prove its fundamentals, and religion can't prove its fundamentals. It has to be that way. Otherwise they're ideological monsters eating their own tails. A debate about science verses religion is fun. But it's a mask. The debate is really about values.

    Lately I've been reading about the Puritans in early New England. What strikes me is the divisiveness theological bickering brought to the area. For example, one of the most divisive characters, Jonathan Edwards, was thrown out of his own church. I don't think religion had a cohesive or unifying effect in 17th and 18th century New England. I don't see it happening in today's world either. I was amused by my wife's uncle, who was a minister. He was always being booted out of his churches. Look at practically any church and you'll see internal strife.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)