Theism as a Grounding for Rationality

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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Hi Ucc,

And perhaps this is the area in religion that I question most heavily, and why I looked at, and rejected Christianity and all other religions as they showed that the premises put forward didn’t match up to the realities in too many ways. It isn’t that all of religion is false, because all religions have great wisdom to offer. It is the failure of religion to examine its own concepts and explanations that may have been satisfactory when first written but no longer stand the scrutiny of what is known today. I recall a thread started by Bob a year or so ago in which he suggested that we need new words, new metaphors to foster greater understanding and to make the spirit of the words come alive to those who listened. He was quickly criticized for suggesting any changes in “God’s holy word”. As I recall, he was accused of “tampering” with the sacred word. In fact, I believe you were one of the critics… :smiley: . Surely one must be careful, but it seems to me that religion should be in a constant state of revision of its dogma the better to ‘connect with the reality described’.

As you have pointed out, very few of those religious ever really examine their beliefs or question the authority of the ‘good book’, but where then is the leadership within religion that tries to find consonance between what is presented to the laity and the reality they must live in? I, and many others rejected religion because the owners manual wasn’t written for the machine we had. I see nothing that has changed this. In fact, I see a retrenchment of uncompromising dogma that drives the wedge even deeper. In too many ways, religion is dead, not because it has nothing to offer to modern man, but because too many of the old explanations no longer match current realities. This continued failure to ‘get with it’ obscures the wisdom and beauty that all religions have to offer. So I would ask, do we just say that is the way it is? Or could we possibly begin examining those contentious ‘irrationalities’ (my term) and bring religion into, say, at least the nieteenth century? Is anyone willing to risk the label of cherry picker? :unamused:

22

Sorry tent, that’s some other thing, and I have no idea why you brought it up. I’m going to redirect the focus on my argument.

23

Geez Ucc,

For a minute I thought we were going to talk about something substantive, but I see now the trick is to maintain the narrowest of focus so we don’t have to deal with the uncomfortable crap. By all means, re-focus. I’m done.

24

Hey Tent,

I understand your general skepticism, and your using it as a default position. I think, at worst, Uccisore’s argument is convincing with regards to rejecting the notion that Materalism as an automatic way of looking at or understanding the world. However, I don’t think that is where it needs to stop. The argument addresses the problem of skepticism itself, that is, if the universe was created to be knowable, then we can afford to generally trust our immediate impressions. Yes, it’s as metaphysical as any other proposal but it also helps make sense of our default impression of the world (before we read any Descartes).

Why necessarily choose skepticism over anything else, when the justification of it is itself the result of an abstraction? The only way you can justify it is with a priori arguments, as far as I can see.

25

While I have no problem with the theism-end of the argument, I do have a problem with the materialist end of the argument. Since we are of creatures of the material world (I think that justifying a non-material-only position is incredibly difficult, though I admit that does offer an out to this whole argument) and we have been shaped by the material world.

Now, whether we can every ‘truly’ know anything is such a misnomer-debate that could go on for pages, I think we can all agree that we can ‘know well enough’ what is going on in the material world as evidenced by survival. A creature who is totally alienated from understanding the material world/living in a fundamentally ‘unknowable’ universe would simply fail to thrive. So, while the universe may have started out as an unknown, if creatures are to survive, they must find a way to meaningfully interact with/know the universe. At this point, we essentially have the sieve of natural selection at play, where those creatures with a more accurate semiotic model of reality for their purposes will survive better than those with an inferior model.

In this way, we can actually know and understand the universe even if it were built without a mind in mind. The materialist argument Ucci puts forward takes the separation between the created and creation as a given, whereas this distinction doesn’t exist in a materialist worldview. In this way, as soon as life emerges, the game becomes ‘rigged’ towards developing creatures that can understand what is going on around them.

26

Originally gods were seen as conscious higher powers of nature.
Their bodies were symbolic and not literal.

Estimations about their existence was rationalism, just like theoretical-physics.
[It was also highly symbolic/artistic. Very artistic.]

Later, during fascist movements [religious totalitarianism], absolute gods with absolute political commandments replaced the original, relativistic theism. This was not rationalism but instead it was part of a religions world-conquest movement.

27

Noel,

And so we’re back to apriori assumptions… The single point creator has to be assumed to make any of this work. There are other explanations based on different assumptions. Skepticism as a philosophical position is vulnerable as you have noted, but as a perspective, it is hard to undermine. As long as we inhabit our human form, there is duality. Have you ever made a mistake in identifying a sound? Mistaken a shape for one thing when it was another? Have you ever been convinced of something only to later find that you were wrong? Humans are vulnerable not only to illusion, but also delusion. Given that, testability becomes sine qua non; not in ivory tower philosophy, but in common get-through-the-day sensing and thought.

I’ve listened to the theist-deist-atheist arguments and they all depend on untestable assumptions. I’ve claimed at times to be agnostic, but for too many that implies that I am deistic, just not theistic. It isn’t that I haven’t had experiences of what I call the mystery, but that without testability, there is no way to convince others of that experience let alone myself. You, me, all of us are vulnerable to being ‘fooled’ - or fooling ourselves. Skepticism then seems rather prudent, and testability looms large.

The fact that humans are capable of generating questions doesn’t mean that there are any useful answers. It just may be that there are some places we can’t go, unless the object is to create a comforting entertaining fiction.

28

Xunzian- Regarding ‘knowing well enough’; I think you’re right, you know I support a view something like that, but I also think it depends on the context of the conversation. If we all know well enough what is going on in the material world, then do I know well enough that God exists? Does the solipsist know well enough that he is all that exists? If it’s a matter of practicality, almost all of us manage to get by.
Nevertheless, these conversations do happen. Materialism is accused of being rational, or not, theism the same. And of course these conversations happen on the presumption of us ‘knowing well enough’. Just by turning to face you when I speak, I am saying a lot about my confidence in the nature of the material world, regardless of my arguments.
But then here:

Do you say so? Like I was saying above, this kind of comment presumes much- eating is eating, obstacles are obstacles, death is death. Now, we all assume so, and I have argued elsewhere that there's no burden to justify it.  But at the same time, we should not believe that which contradicts or throws into doubt that which we must assume.  "If this didn't understand it's surroundings, it would die" is demonstrable by observation, but "there is no necessary connection between evidence and conclusion" is demonstrable in the same way, and I think there is a  need to reconcile them- not perhaps in day to day life, but if we're going to talk about which systems are rational, and which are not...  

 What I'm saying is that the materialist is initially as  entitled to these presumptions as anybody else, but that they become self-refuting sooner or later.  First one believes that the world is as he sees it- you must eat to live.  Then one believes that what he sees is all there is- he becomes a materialist.  Next, he realizes that what he sees is at best analogous to what there is*- he becomes a skeptic.  Finally, he doubts that the world is anything like he sees it at all, and wonders if he must indeed eat to live. 
  Now, it's true that the materialist will not take it that far and starve themselves. But it's not because the process doesn't lead there.
  • This is the stage where my “Knowledge as Interloper” presumption becomes most clearly seen.
29

I would have to argue against the soundness of tautologies being invalid. After all, if analytic presumptions are taken as invalid, then the card-house of logic absolutely collapses because it, quite literally, doesn’t have a base to stand on.

So, analytically, eating is eating.

Now, we have to add a synthetic presumption to this mix, where we say that “eating is required for living”.

Now, we can test this synthetic presumption, assuming we have an analytic definition for ‘life’ which, for the moment, we can take in a Scalia-pornography sense (we can revisit that later if you’d like, but I’ll wager we won’t disagree there so we can leave that as ‘common ground’ until challenged).

Now, you can say that causality is the bitch here, but that is why we have statistics. If we were to conduct this experiment, I think we both agree that the results would demonstrate a statistically significant difference between the control eating group and the experimental ‘not eating’ group with regards to the variable ‘alive-ness’. We could even do a dose-response/titration curve where we found the amount of eating (as measured by kilojoules, if we want to be SI). Now, is there a ‘cause’ here? Well, we can’t say for certain, but we can say that there is a definite relationship. I think Nazi experiments may actually have data on this – I’d rather not drag it up because of its morbid nature, but I could look around if necessary.

So, given that eating is eating and living is living, we can see that there is a relationship between the two and that not-eating leads to not-living with a high degree of collation.

So, if we feed that mess into evolutionary theory (which, if you’d like, I could drag out the evidence for in a proper argument, but others have done that far better than I, so let’s take that as successfully demonstrated for now – I can, but I’d really rather not), then what I proposed does indeed pop out.

30

When I say “eating is eating”, I didn’t mean it in the tautological sense, sorry about that. I mean to say that in order for your claims about survival of the fittest re: knowledge to make sense, we have to take it for granted that the world is more or less like we picture it- full of creatures eating, fighting, mating, and dying. Again, that’s an assumption that theist and atheist alike are committed to, I’m arguing that the materialist cannot hold to it and be rationally justified. They certainly can hold to it because they have no choice psychologically.
And no, I certainly don’t mean to question yours or anybody else’s understanding of evolution, as far as I know it goes on more or less as the experts say it does.

 Also, I'd like to point out that the Matrix is this years Cartesian Demon.  These things are possibilities, and as such that means there's a chance that any other worldview is wrong, including theism. So I'm not arguing that theism must be true.  I'm arguing that materialism doesn't account sufficiently for why we can know the world around us*, and needs another widget to bridge that gap.
  • I’m also convinced by Plantinga’s argument that survival is not connected to apprehension of truth enough to trust brains produced by survival-benefit mechanisms like evolution.
31

I understand you aren’t trying to challenge evolutionary understanding, however, I had to throw that in if we are going to work from first principles and all that.

Now, with the Matrix example, let’s explore that for a moment. Now, let’s suppose that all my perceptions are completely incorrect and I am, in fact, floating in a vat of goo producing power for the robots that rule the world. Everything that I experience is a complete simulation.

However, if in this simulation I get shot, the trauma to my mind is sufficient to send my body into shock and death (the old, dubious stueck about 'if you die in a dream, you actually die) – or at the very least it shunts me out of the simulated world and into either a different simulation and/or the ‘real’ world.

So, regardless of how fake the world that I perceive might be, it is sufficiently real to harm me. It is, essentially, as real as it needs to be. Is it ‘true’? Well, that is ‘truth’? If ‘truth’ is defined as something unknowable unless it is removed from any reference frame, or if it remains solid independent of reference frame, I would question the utility of such a construct since we can never perceive it (since we are never outside of our own limited reference frame). “Real enough”.

Now, I would also argue whether things like creatures eating, fighting, mating, and dying is an assumption. After all, we can readily observe it. Indeed, he have and continue to observe it. What’s more, we’ve managed to create a wide variety of symbolic representations that allows us to communicate this experience with others (and those representations can be understood for what they represent – suggesting that our individual perceptions are similar enough for mutual understanding).

The only assumption is that our senses provide enough information to allow for survivability. It could be argued that our survival is independent of our perception, but I would be very reluctant to take any philosophy seriously that postulated that.

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Uccisore,

You know as well as I do that some belief is going to sit at the bottom of our knowledge pyramid unjustified. For me, that will be that my preoccupation with rationality is valuable and worthwhile, even if I cannot ultimately justify it. For you, you will say that your preoccupation with rationality is justified because an ultimate Knower gives rationality the imprimatur of his authority. At my base is my belief in myself and other people; at yours is belief in the existence and authority of this God. Your belief implies mine, it is an explanation of mine, but it only explains that one thing. It is as though I had a knowledge tree with my basic belief at the trunk, and you just added another section of trunk below mine. Your tree may appear higher but the basic structure is unchanged.

Perhaps our difference lies in the importance you give to justification. I choose not to demand ultimate justification for my belief in myself, in knowledge and reason, etc. That is a decision I can make, just like you can make the decision to worry about the problem, and then choose to believe in God to solve it. But you end up in the same place either way. You can push yourself off the wagon of rationality with skepticism and then grab God to get back on, or you can just not push yourself off the wagon in the first place. I’d rather just stay in the wagon and peek over the edge now and again.

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Xunzian

Sure, and in that case God is ‘real enough’ and the solipsist’s universe of One is ‘real enough’. If we’re just judging truth based on what makes the trains run on time, then any number of philosophies works- in fact, any major philosophy that isn’t absurd on it’s face works, because the people who developed them are living in the world, and have to reconcile their beliefs to the world.

But that strikes me as biting the bullet pretty hard. The best materialism can do for truth is pragmatism, so therefore pragmatism is truth? That’s a way out of my argument, for sure- but I would still prefer a system that can admit to a more standard understanding of truth if one is available.

Right, requiring the assumption that our observations are actually ‘of’ something. That’s what I’m talking about. A materialist starts with that assumption for the same reasons as we all do, but if you look at “The Materialistic Universe”, there’s no reason to go on believing it. It’s all very irrelevant to day to day life, we’re talking about metaphysics here. But that’s precisely what ‘materialism’ is. The belief that matter is the only thing that exists is itself irrelevant to whether or not we survive, so I think once we postulate it, examining these assumptions becomes fair game.

aporia

 Yes, that's very good. I was turning over that same thing last night- am I just adding another link to the bottom of a chain, so to speak? In a sense I am.  I'm grounding an assumption on something, which in turn is another assumption.  So what's it getting us to do that?
 If it were just a matter of justifying our assumption that we have access to the outside world, then I'd really have nothing to say. It's my position that such things don't require justification at all on the face of them.  But once we take those assumptions, we are obligated to belief systems that allow for them.  I cannot adopt a belief system that entails that the reliability of our senses is either very unlikely or odds-inscrutable, then justify that system by saying these things are [i]just assumed[/i] and so the odds don't matter.   There are philosophical difficulties with the reliability of observation, that you cannot solve by heaping on more observation. Now, if that were true of every belief system going, then we'd just have to live with it. The only thing really new or (hopefully) interesting about my argument is that I'm saying these difficulties with observation are [i]not[/i] universal problems we all must contend with. They rely on atheistic presumptions.
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You’ve just rephrased the argument I objected to. Certainly the reliability of our senses is odds-inscrutable in a materialist world, while it is assured in a theistic world. But now the god’s existence and reliability is what’s odds-inscrutable.

This could be read as a critique of any sort of explanation by first principles, since the principle is as doubtable as the phenomena it purports to explain. Of course I don’t hold this view. I believe principles are valuable when they increase the connectedness of our web of knowledge, and help us predict and look for things we’d never have looked for otherwise. The classic example from science is Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Nobody suspected that apples falling to the ground and planetary orbits had anything to do with each other until Newton came along, and his theory led us to predict and look for things like perturbations in the planetary orbits and patterns in the tides.

To return to the tree analogy, a principle is valuable when it connects a forest of knowledge-branches to a single, massive nourishing trunk, from which new branches can then sprout as well. But merely adding to the length of an existing trunk gets us nowhere. Principles, like princes, exist to rule many subjects and expand their territories, not to be content with a single vassal or majordomo to handle all their affairs.

Therefore, as I see it, your best approach to showing that God exists is to suggest that he best explains the diverse physical, biological, social, and religious experience of humanity. This is the classical apologetic approach. All those proofs of the existence of God can be viewed as lines of data converging to a common principle. We materialists then have to show that those things can be explained well using existing principles, so there is no need to add more.

This approach has the disadvantage of forcing us from the ethereal realm of skeptical epistemology into the flesh-and-blood world of natural and human history. But I suspect God does not give away his secrets cheaply.

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That would be the crux of it – the truth is pragmatic. What is a non-pragmatic truth? That is what I don’t get.

I also think that there needn’t be an assumption that our observations are of something since, again, we can interact with these observations they are indeed as real as they need be.

Now, you could argue against this sort of hermeneutic understanding of reality by going on about the hermeneutic circle, but I don’t see that as being particularly damaging. Wang Fuzhi argued that form and function were interrelated (though, clearly not on a 1:1 level), but that through function, form modifies itself to adapt to that. The new form was, in turn modified through function and so on. In this way we can create a reality from bits and pieces and then reference those bits and pieces to the reality more-or-less at the same time. Especially since the time when we were only aware of reality as bits-and-pieces, that earliest stage of learning, predates our memory. Indeed, we couldn’t have memory of such a world because everything would be so radically different we couldn’t properly understand it without context.

But, having taken care of that in infancy, I don’t worry about it too much.

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Xunzian- I agree that for our discussion, pragmatism is at the core of it. For now, I’ll say that I don’t agree that pragmatism is an adequate way of understanding truth, but that’s a huge conversation to start all over again, so I’ll concede the point that materialism can be spared from the argument with pragmatism, if pragmatism is the right way to go.

aporia

Actually, I find the odds to be quite high, based on evidence and argument and such. By what grounds do you say they’re inscrutable? The reliability of the senses being odds-inscrutable for the materialist is a catastrophe for them if they want to claim to being rational- much moreso if they want to claim to be rational, then criticize alternative views for being less so.

Ahh, but see there’s two different definitions of ‘first’ at play here. God is a ‘first principal’ in the sense that once you come to belief in Him, you realize that he precedes everything else and gives it it’s reality. There’s a certain ‘firstness’ to that. But belief in God still does not come before belief in the reliability of the senses noetically. See, it’s like this:

Person 1: Starts off with belief in the reliability of the senses. Based on what he observes (utilizing that belief) he comes to be a materialist. With his understanding of matter and mind, he realizes that the odds of his initial assumptions being true are low or inscrutable. He’s in a self-refuting conflict.

Person 2: Starts off with belief in the reliability of the senses. Based on what he observes (utilizing that belief) he comes to be a theist. With his understanding of God’s creation of matter and mind, he realizes that the odds of his initial assumptions being true are rather high, and he was justified in working from them*. He gets to out for ice-cream, while person 1 has to stay home and re-do his world view.

Last but not least, I agree with you that the best approach to showing God’s existence (after first hand experience) is to use his existence to explain real things in the world. But that’s not really what I’m after- I’m trying to show that theism holds a greater degree of rationality than most or all alternatives. For all that it could still be false.

*- Or maybe he never comes to this awareness consciously - it could be expressed just as well as his belief in the reliability of the senses never being challenged by what he comes to believe later.

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Uccisore,

I’ll agree with you that theism, once believed for whatever reason, has the added bonus of explaining why reason is reliable. But as you have pointed out, this isn’t a selling point of theism so much as an added benefit afterwards. The materialist sees no point in adding that extra length of trunk to his tree, but the theist who already has it may well find it valuable to connect it to the epistemological branch.

The question, then, is whether the materialist should find his unjustified state intolerable. I don’t think it’s a problem, for pragmatic reasons similar to those given by Xunzian. Suppose my reason is unreliable. Two things might happen; either I find out at some point or I don’t. If I find out, there’s not much I can do about it; reason is all I have to go on unless something else like God proffers me his hand. If I never find out, then in what sense was reason ever unreliable?

In either case, what difference can it make to me or anyone else if my reason is unreliable? What should I do or refrain from doing? Nothing. It makes no difference. The question is entirely irrelevant to human life. My worldview can stomach not answering a pointless question.

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In a creationist view of the world,
When someone studies something
They also ask:
“What was its maker’s purpose for it?
Why was it made?
What is it for? What task is it meant to do.”

In the non-creationist view of the world,
When someone studies something,
They ask:
“How did this object create itself, by itself?
Or how did other inanimate forces create it?”

In truth, these are both questions which should be considered; why?
Well, even if there’s no “gods”, there are still aliens and high tech, inter-planetary species, which could have altered the earth. And then besides that, there are the self-causes and the inanimate causes, aswel as causes via fellow-species and environment, etc.

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aporia

Well, remember, I’m not saying that belief in the senses merely lacks a justification that the materialist could discover. I’m saying that applying materialism to belief in the senses gives the materialist an active reason to stop believing it.

That said, I think you’re right about pragmatism, as far as it goes. My problem with this would be that if we become just a little more pragmatic than that, we could do away with philosophy altogether. If the monist shows the dualist that dualism is irrational, it is really a fair response to say, “Well, dualism gets me to work on time every morning, so who cares?”

As far as I was really prepared to go with this argument was to show that theism is rationally justified in a way that materialism is not. Whether or not the materialist should be concerned by this is another question, I suppose. I’m not entirely sure that that’s any of my business. : )

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Ucc, I’ve been rereading your discussion with Xunzian. I notice that you take him to task for relying on reason (“eating is eating”) when he explains why a materialist universe will tend to produce organisms that can understand their surroundings. You also say that the theist path is unjustified reliance on reason, then acceptance of God, then realization that God justifies reason. But Xunzian is doing the same thing you are: using unjustified reason to create a certain plausible worldview which then can be used to justify reason. Why are theists allowed to follow this path but not materialists?