Re: Hitchens on religion

In <f1u5sg$5g3$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> "Micha Berger" <micha@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

I agree with Steve that the question is how to establish first
principles, the postulates, presumptions or assumptions atop which you
build your logical edifice.

OK but given that, what do algebra and geometry have to do with anything?

I think, though, Jim is presenting a false dichotomy. I'm not
suggesting a priori knowledge. Rather, knowledge through experience of
the non-empirical.

But FWIW, I am no logical positivist. Probably an existentialist or
neo-Kantian. Which makes sense, since my religious influence from
childhood until half-way through college were primarily students of R'
JB Soloveitchik (including my parents), himself a neo-Kantian.

I've been hitting Wikipedia to get some info on the various philosophical
schools of thought needed to discuss this, but haven't gotten that far
yet.

So you don't believe in anything you can't hold up and show other
people? You don't love your wife, since your emotional states aren't
amenable to such demonstration?

What does "believe in" mean in this context? You're mixing a bunch of
things together here. If you tell me you love your wife, I have no reason
to disbelieve you, unless your behavior indicates to the contrary. I know
that "love" exists because I experience it, but I have no way of knowing
if what you perceive as love is the same as what I perceive as love -- I
can't assert the certainty that they're the same, I can only assume that
they are, barring evidence to the contrary. That's not the level of proof
that you seek to establish for your religious tenets.

Religion is about issues like love, freedom, oppression, morality... I
would hate to think Jim believes that no one can take positions about
any of these ideas since (1) one can never prove that position
empirically (trying to would be the naturalistic fallacy), (2) there
is presumably no synthetic a priori truths, and (3) any non-empirical
experience is being deemed solipsistic.

I don't follow this at all. Surely you're not claiming that belief in God
is necessary to experience or have opinions on love, freedom, oppression,
and morality, so what's your point? I know I experience a desire for
freedom, I assume you do as well, so we can work something out to maximize
our mutual freedoms. What's God got to do with it? Why is any sort of
absolute knowledge necessary for that purpose? In fact relative knowledge
is more important -- it doesn't matter what the "truth" about freedom is,
what matters in our negotiation is what you and I think it is.


I really mean "justification", in the sense of Plato's definition of
knowledge as being "true, justified, belief". IOW, "knowing" something
means believing something because of a reason for believing it, and
the something happens to also be true. This definition is flawed and
tweaked by pretty much every philosopher to touch the subject, but it
is consistently a starting point for such discussions. But I'm not
asserting this definition of knowledge, just using this broader idea
of justification.

I don't understand what you're saying, other than you believe something
and you further believe that your beliefs are justified. Fine, but what's
that got to do with me?

: You are correct that you don't need to prove anything to
: me in order to prove it to yourself, but you once insisted that your
: proof was objective. Surely it must be objective, you must be able to
: prove something to me, in order to assert that I *must* do something,
: as someone else insists upon saying.

I disagree with your definition of objective. Objective to me means
that the truth has nothing to do with my personal perspective.
Subjective truths are only true for people in a particular state. I am
saying this is an objective truth that happens to be experienced by
only one person at a time. Kind of like the experience of being alone
atop Wave Hill on the evening of Sept 20th, 1986 at 5:32pm. Would you
say that such an experience is subjective, since only one person could
ever be in that situation? I would suggest calling that experience
"objective", since the truth is that the person in question was alone,
and the details of how he experienced it based on his beliefs and
emotional state have nothing to do with whether we consider the event
"true".

No, no, no -- we're using these words entirely differently. To me,
"objective" means it's the same for everyone who experiences it, or for
the same person over repeated trials. "Subjective" is different for each
person who experiences the event. In your example it's absolutely
subjective -- if I were on that hill at that time, my experience would be
different. Thus, it's a subjective experience.

Now, I'm not doubting subjective experience or even disparaging it - as I
said earlier, one's love for music, or art, etc. are all highly subjective
and yet absolutely real, perhaps even more real or relevant than objective
experience. Nevertheless, subjective experience is, essentially, opinion.

So to bring it back, you as a religious person are free to tell me that
your experience as such to be beneficial, pleasant, etc., and that you
think I might experience it that way too and thus should try it. Fine. But
you cannot tell me that your subjective experience is in fact objective -
as people have specifically done here - that I must experience something a
certain way, that I must do something a certain way, etc. You can't go
beyond "this works for me" without making the leap into the world of
"faith," which is the assertion that the subjective is objective, more or
less.

...
: First I'm not talking about transitory evidence, I'm talking about
: transitory fact. Second, I don't think counting apples does in fact
: "prove" 2+2 =3D 4 -- it demonstrates it, but doesn't prove it.

So you're arguing that religion is transitory fact? Or did you drift
from the topic at hand? I took it for granted that you were stating
that the religious experience is transitory evidence. The religion,
after all, is asserting non-transitory facts.

I don't know what I meant by transitory any more.

: The two are not mutually exclusive.

No. But the skeptic's position goes beyond the domain of science. An
Empiricist is a particular kind of skeptic. He is not only skeptical,
he denies the reality of other ways of justifying a belief.

OK. But what do you mean by justify a belief? You can justify anything you
want to yourself. What I'm talking about though, is how in science and
math you can actually make objective into subjective -- I don't have to
convince you, I can set up the experiment such that you can reproduce it
yourself, so you can have the identical subjective experience that I had,
and thus become convinced. You don't have to believe my assertion about
what happened.

I believe that you believe your beliefs are justified. You, however,
cannot believe that my non-beliefs are justified, because you're making an
assertion of absolute truth while I am not.

...
: In the case of religion, one can learn from two sources: direct
: revelation
: or authority. That's it, and that's exactly what's wrong with it.

Or trying the religious experience and assessing the experience. This
is admittedly difficult, separating the experience from one's
emotional responses to the experience. However, the emotional response
is itself a product of that assessment.

I don't understand this. If you're assessing the experience, what you're
assessing is your emotional response. It "feels right." That's an
emotional response. Further, I'm not denying that you believe it. That's
fine. I'm denying that your belief somehow obligates me to believe, or
that your experience somehow constitutes an objective proof.

Joe likes chopped liver, I don't. I like Egon Schiele's art, Joe doesn't.
These are real experience assessments, and yet they create no obligation
or onus or anything on the other. They create no larger truth.

This is akin to a mathematician's increased confidence in an "elegant"
proof, but to a greater extreme by inductively building on many such
experiences. Much as we make scientific generalizations based on
inductively building from experiencing many such examples.

Not really. The elegance of the proof doesn't speak to its validity --
people are annoyed by the computer proof of Fermat's last theorem, it's
not elegant, but they accept the validity of it. Conversely a proof can be
absolutely beautiful and yet wrong. Further, these proofs don't prove
underlying principles - they only show consistency with existing premises.
They don't get you to the definitions of absolute good and bad that you
desire.

I would say that without believing our existence is intentional, we
have no definition of morality altogether. Definitions collapse as
being the naturalistic fallacy or being a restatement of what is most
useful. To my mind, something being "right" requires knowing what it
is right for accomplishing, and why that goal has value. But that
broadens the discussion beyond manageability.

OK, that's your opinion, I disagree -- I think we can indeed have morality
without a belief that our existence is intentional. We (seem to) exist -
given that, how do we choose to exist? I don't think you need any more
than that for a basis for morality.

What I am saying is that morality is non-empirical. If one is an
Empiricist, then he would have to believe morality is arbitrary. There
is no way to prove a moral position. (As per above.)

Morality hinges on subjective experience, that's true, but since we humans
seem to have similar hard-wired wants and needs and emotional responses,
it's not entirely arbitrary. I can't know for certain what you're
experiencing, but it would seem that I can make a reasonable guess much of
the time -- stuff that hurts me probably hurts you, etc. That's enough to
work with.


But Al isn't arguing the value of proof from personal experience. What
does following that scripture suggest? Does it repeatedly resemble
encountering elegant math proofs, or is it a constant source of
cognitive dissonance? If it's overwhelmingly the former, doesn't it
make sense for me to assert it?

No, not really. Newton's laws work, as far as we can test in the "normal"
world. Does that mean we should assert that they're absolute truth and
refuse to investigate further?


And, to go back to my primary thesis, it is not a PREsumption. There
is a justification beforehand. One that I would argue is no weaker
than that backing any scientific theory.

But the strength of science isn't in the confidence we have in any
particular theory, but in our willingness to toss it aside should better /
contrary evidence arise.

--s
--

.

Relevant Pages

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