Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Sat Jul 29, 2023 9:09 am
Those critics you conjure clearly haven't read the meditations. or at least not as far as this:
Finally, I am the same who feels, that is to say, who perceives certain things, as by the organs of sense, since in truth I see light, I hear noise, I feel heat. But it will be said that these phenomena are false and that I am dreaming. Let it be so; still it is at least quite certain that it seems to me that I see light, that I hear noise and that I feel heat. That cannot be false; properly speaking it is what is in me called feeling; and used in this precise sense that is no other thing than thinking.
I see nothing there that suggests anything different from what I've said about Descartes "radical doubt" method. I'm going to have to ask you what differences you're thinking you perceive.
Again, who are these biographers of Descartes of which there are "so many" who actually say that he was actually a dedicated Catholic, working on a Catholic apologetics project?
Let's just give you one here, because this is research anybody can do. Here's a secular, universal source, Britannica:
"Even during Descartes’s lifetime there were questions about whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily concerned with supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only with protecting himself with pious sentiments while establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic physics.
These questions remain difficult to answer, not least because all the papers, letters, and manuscripts available to Clerselier and Baillet are now lost. In 1667 the Roman Catholic Church made its own decision by putting Descartes’s works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”) on the very day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris. During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands called Descartes a Jesuit and a papist—which is to say an atheist. He retorted that they were intolerant, ignorant bigots. Up to about 1930, a majority of scholars, many of whom were religious, believed that Descartes’s major concerns were metaphysical and religious. By the late 20th century, however, numerous commentators had come to believe that Descartes was a Catholic in the same way he was a Frenchman and a royalist—that is, by birth and by convention."
So we can settle on this: that Descartes was a somewhat renegade Catholic, perhaps; but he was certainly not an anti-Catholic Atheist or skeptic. The evidence for such a belief just doesn't hold water.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 3:56 pmEither way, he failed. On that much we can surely agree.
As far as I know, the Meditations sold well
No: not that he failed to sell. That would be irrelevant. That he failed in his philosophical argument.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 3:56 pmThe technique of "radical doubt" is effective for the reduction of certainty all the way down to the point where we only know our existence as a "doubting" thing, or a "thinking" thing...but not every kind of "thinking," even.
This is an aspect of Descartes about which you are wrong. If you haven't already forgotten the above quote, you will now appreciate how abundantly the Meditations refutes your claim.
Let's see if you're right.
Maybe you can show the steps by which you understand Descartes to have built back certain knowledge out of the
cogito. Just give them in your own words, as you perceive them.
We begin with "I think, therefore, I am," or "I'm the doubter, therefore, I exist," whichever you prefer. What's the next step up from that?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 3:56 pmSo we know very little, if anything, for certain. However, it's impossible to use the same method, "radical doubt," to build back up anything positive by way of knowledge. That, too is generally recognized as a critique of Descartes.
That's not its job.
Actually, that's exactly what his intended job was: to build positive certain knowledge. The negation was only preliminary to that, as his title tells you. Furthermore, he went on to try to do that very thing, as you can read in the Meditations, starting Meditation III, which you will find is subtitled, "Concerning God: That He Exists."
He knew perfectly well that the other arguments for God do not work unless you first assume that God exists.
Actually, he was trying to make the opposite argument: that you wouldn't need to "assume" anything at all to know God exists. He was trying to derive it from "clear and distinct" ideas...he says that right in his introduction: have you read it?
To my knowledge, he does not even mention -- or think of -- the ontological argument. That's Anselm of Canterbury, actually, not Descartes.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 3:56 pmThe Atheist, just as much as any Theist, is going to have to take for granted his existence as a distinct person, the real existence of his body, the existence of an external universe, the existence of real other people, and so on...all of which he is powerless to do if he clings to the "radical doubt" methodology. So Atheism, like everything else, is an exercise of faith.
So in this context faith is 'taking for granted'. That's quite a swing from 'calculation'.
It is!
But the kind of "faith" the Atheist has is far more like Sartre's "bad faith" than any
actual faith. For Christian faith is based on probability, but Atheism's grounded-- by his own admission -- in absolute ignorance. That's why he insists he owes no proof: his skepticism is not the kind of thing for which any proof or evidence can be offered at all.
Even Dawkins saw that, and dodged the bullet. And there's not much that Dawkins knows about faith, for sure.
The Atheist argument simply amounts to, "I don't know any God, therefore you can't either." Now, that kind of argument takes one heck of a lot of "faith." Dawkins dodges it, because he knows that leaves the Atheist terribly vulnerable.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 3:56 pmBut since Atheism is non-evidentiary, declaring proudly its lack of evidence (and often its total freedom from having to provide such, at all) for its worldview, it's always been apparent that people are only Atheists on faith.
So are your Atheists taking for granted, or calculating that there is no God?
"My"?
I can't recall saying any Atheists belong to me.
No, all the Atheists take it for granted. And they tell you that's how they're doing it, too: they insist that no evidence or reasons for disbelief are necessary, because, they say, they're only claiming to be personally unaware of any God, and hence skeptical. But such skepticism is founded on nothing but a lack of evidence, by that very admission; and that they are only personally ignorant is a confession that should hardly commend them to anybody else. Moreover, they cannot even claim that they have any reason to think that evidence could not appear to them in the next five minutes that would defeat their Atheism. So they've really got a very weak kind of claim there, and one that is highly dependent on certain bad-faith propostitions, such as "Anything I don't know, others can't know either," or "If I disbelieve now, I will disbelieve later, too," or "What I haven't seen cannot exist."
Has anybody got a reason to accept such propositions?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 3:56 pmWe're all in the same boat here: we're choosing an explanation that seems to us the best explanation of evidence held probabilistically, not with certainty. That's the enduring lesson from Descartes' failure, I think. And that's a species of "faith," call it what we will.
Well, everyone who commits themselves to a specific explanation is in the same boat. Perhaps that is implicit in the works of Descartes as you insist. Frankly I don't see it in him, but the work of Polanyi, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Foucault. Bloor, Latour and others have made a very strong case that our personal beliefs are based on our personal experience. You can stretch the meaning of faith to include that, as you clearly wish to and in that sense, I would agree that anyone who nails their faith to a particular mast is no better off than you. The difference is, I don't think they are any worse off.
Faith has two dimensions: the quality of the belief, and the quality of the thing-believed.
The second first. Faith will only be as good as the object in which it's invested. I have not personally or experientially sailed around the world, but I feel secure in my faith belief, on the basis of scientific assurances, pictures I have seen, NASA, my history books, and so forth, that the world is not flat but round. However, if I have a kind of "faith" that tells me, contrary to scientific testing and fact, that phrenology or alchemy can still work, it's not a great faith, is it?
The first principle of faith is that there are reasoned and unreasoned "faiths," just as there are scientific experiments that are "low probability" and "high probability." One has to ask, which is faith-in-God (Theism) and which is faith-there's-no-God (Atheism): low or high probability?
