Calvin on the Sensus Divinitatis

[Immanuel Can]

Just let us know where you'd like to go from here, IC. Would you like me to respond to your last post to me? Or would you prefer to explore new directions?

Well, Harry, perhaps we understand each other as well as we can for the moment, and we might even benefit if we take a bit of a break to rethink our explanations to see if there's a new angle possible. I'm not yet despairing that we will make sense to each other, as you are a particularly good conversationalist, but in any conversation we may sometimes get to points where it's challenging to see an obvious way forward. And I suppose it could even be that while we discuss some new issue we might stumble upon the means for making some headway in a situation that seems deadlocked at the suppositional level, at least for the present.

However, I certainly wouldn't want to lose you as an interlocutor simply because we switched topics to something that did not interest you. So I'm fine with just going forward as well. I don't want to ignore you or hijack the conversation without consulting you first...and James, of course, since he still has a message pending. I wonder how he feels about that.

I'm thinking that maybe something in Arising_uk's last message might get us going again, and I owe him a conversation. But I certainly don't want to shut down our own discussion. Is there anything in what Arising_uk has said that interests you as well? Or should we just move to a new angle.

Arising_uk: Any preferences yourself? I think I owe you first, if I recall correctly.

[Arising_uk]

...
That's of course a hyperbolic statement.
If you saw a disembodied consciousness you'd assume you were loosing your mind and would not believe it. If I someone else experiences a disembodied consciousness and tells you about it you would say that person is loosing their mind, is hallucinating, or is dishonest (see below for the experience of a disembodied consciousness). You are therefore presenting a no win scenario as though it is a legitimate way for you to become convinced of something. This is a very common method used in these Fora to dodge issues while trying to sound convincing.

Nope, its called reason and evidence. Unless you can give me a better reason than you just saying so for me to believe in something that all the evidence patently shows is not the case then I think I have a good reason for not believing you.

Here it is:
Spinal orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mary Neal dies in a kayak pinned under water for close to 30 minutes. Comforted by Jesus as she dies (disembodied consciousness) taken to the entrance to heaven and then told she must go back. One of the reasons, besides witnessing with her story, she is told is to be with her son when he is going to die at age 18. He was 5 years at this time. He died at 18 when he was hit by a car.

So the reason and evidence you wish to provide for the existence of a disembodied consciousness is the say so of someone who was seriously injured? What a strange 'God' it is that cannot manifest and relies upon such testimony.

Clearly, from what I have seen so far, the crowd over here cannot trust in someone else's competence when it goes against their ingrained biases.

Clearly from what I've seen of the theist crowd over here confirmation bias and selective reading is still the mainstay of their reasoning.

[Arising_uk]

... For example, it's widely believed that not only was satan cast out of heaven, but that a third of all angels were expelled with him, they apparently started a war with god, and subsequently were banished along with satan to be his demonic assistants. ...

Seriously? Is this idea not from Milton's Paradise Lost?

Looks like the poets are muscling in.

[Immanuel Can]

Well, it's certainly *in* Milton's "Paradise Lost," but actually Milton's account is an imaginative extrapolation from passages like Isaiah 14 or Revelation 12, which recount the fall of Lucifer (meaning, "light bearer," or "the morning star") in poetic or apocalyptic language.

Just FYI.

[Immanuel Can]

Because the obvious solution is not necessarily true. If it was then the world would be flat and the Sun goes around the Earth. For myself, it's exactly the immense complexity that points towards something other than a 'designer' at work.

Well, I admit, of course, that the data is somewhat ambiguous in the limited sense that one can *choose* to see or not see what is there -- which is true for both religious and irreligous folks, of course. But I would suggest as well that complexity (if by that we mean merely a more sophisticated arrangement of parts rather than one with fewer, unarranged parts) does at least incline the initial instinct of the observer to perceive a design at work.

For example, you could *choose* to see these symbols you are decoding right now (i.e. my words) as random collision of non-symbolic lines produced by chance over many millennia, or you could choose to interpret them as intentional symbols arranged by an intelligence. The impression of randomness could be enhanced simply by unfocusing one's eyes, so that the words blur, at which time one could stridently claim, and honestly claim, to "not be seeing any order." And yet, the order could remain there to be seen, the only thing preventing it being the refusal to look.

There's no necessity you can only see it one way, but should we not choose the more obvious one, unless reason presents countervailing proofs that such is not the right way to see it?

But what I find curious is Dawkins' insistence that though (as he admits) the evidence strongly inclines one to believe in theory #1, design, he absolutely insists on seeing it the other way, theory #2, randomness. It's like he's saying, "I know these symbols look like words and sentences, but I absolutely assure you that they are not."

It is very clear to me from this sort of confession that the man is already, viscerally committed to evolutionary materialism, regardless of (what he admits are his) observations and data. This is not to say he couldn't turn out to right accidentally, of course, but it does suggest his working method is badly skewed and highly unscientific in itself. He is just as much a "man on a mission" as the most ardent religious acolyte. He brackets the data with his preset worldview; and if true, this suggests that he is not entertaining the evidence intelectually anymore: he's just not open to being questioned.

Hey, if I'm wrong, then perhaps tomorrow you'll read in your newspaper how Dawkins is suddenly rethinking his materialism in light of (what he admits are) the evidentiary data. But I'm not holding my breath on that.

[Immanuel Can]

In reaction to Dawkins's refusal to even entertain the possibility of any design hypothesis given the prima facie data in the universe, I wrote that the motive could be...

Only, I think, because if we don't we're going to undermine our own atheism.

You replied,

Not really, as the atheism you talk about is the one that says there is no 'God' in the sense of an interacting one.

No. That's Deism, not Atheism. Atheism says, "No God. None." Agnosticism says, "Probably none," and Deism says, "Yes there's One, but he's gone shopping indefinitely."
You continue,

There may well be a transcendent cause, the theist just can't say anything coherent about such a thing but apparently think they can.

"Transcendent Cause," opens up the door again to the God explanation, you realize. The question then becomes only "an impersonal cause," or "a personal cause," and ironically, the "impersonal" one becomes the less plausible of the two answers, since "impersonal" things don't actually "cause" things to happen without a prior causal chain in place.

However, this is not the important point: the important one is the second bit. Why would we suppose it to be true? On the hypothesis that there actually *were* a Personal First Cause to the universe, that is an Agent capable of creating whole galaxies, why would it be even remotely implausible to think He could find a way to reveal Himself? That sounds so easy to do that a child could do it, since even a child can say, "Here I am".

Self-revelation is hardly the kind of task that should exceed the abilities of a Supreme Being. So why do you think your claim self-evident? Can you expand?

[Immanuel Can]

Fine by me, a belief is just that, no connection to reality.

That's a transparent tactic, I'm afraid. I'll pass over it, except to say that it is one very habitual with Atheists. The thing they do is dumb down the definition of "belief" or "faith" until it means only "irrational credence" or even "belief contrary to evidence," and then sometimes even insist that analytically "belief" cannot include evidence! Then they triumphantly pronounce that "belief" is absurd, and they think they have won something.

But the absurdity, in that case, is not on the Theist side. It's a classic case of the Straw Man fallacy. I would simply point out that what they are talking about a sort of "belief" that only lunatics can even perform, and certainly not what the ordinary person understands by "belief": for sane people use the word all the time, and use it for things they do regularly, based on the preponderance of whatever evidence is on hand. If the Atheists would even respect ordinary usage then they would find they could not play such silly games.

I don't "believe" in the kind of non-reality-oriented "belief" you indict and dismiss here either. I believe in evidentiary beliefs. And I'll bet whenever you say that you personally "believe" a thing, that is also what you mean. So seeing that we are both sane men, let us drop the nonsense about "belief" meaning anything other than what sane people mean by it.

[Immanuel Can]

Quote: Don't make the causal fallacy of assuming that if physical events and mental events happen contemporaneously, that must logically mean one is the cause of the other. It does not follow. The one can "cause" the other, the other can "cause" the one, or there can be a third thing that is the "cause" of both. ...

Don't make the assumption that mental and physical events are disconnected and then contemporaneously is not an issue.

It took me a bit to make sense of this reply, but I'm thinking you left the quotation marks off "contemporaneously," and thus you meant to contest that concept: is that correct? Or did you attempt to characterize me as presuming that they are disconnected? I can't tell.

If it's the former, my response would be that the rejoinder misses the point. Perhaps I was unclear. The "contemporaneity" of events is generally assumed to favour the view that says one *causes* the other, not my view; so you'd be undermining your own standing by questioning it. Yet that assumption is wrong, of course, as anyone who knows what the Causal Fallacy is can realize. Two events happening at the same time does not necessarily suggest causality between them. Causality must be proven with reference to more than contemporaneity.

If you were attempting the latter, I would say I was not assuming any causal connection, nor any disconnect either. I was simply pointing out that until it was demonstrated that one actually caused the other, there was no sense in supposing such a thing at all.

Thus, those who say, "Consciousness is only a brain state" take on themselves thereby the burden to prove their point. As for those who think that it's not merely a brain state, their view is the "common sense" one that everyone naturally believes until they find it disproven; for all of us instinctively think of ourselves as conscious or rational beings, and imagine that our opinions and judgments are genuine, and act every day as if they are. None of us behaves, or thinks of ourselves, as merely Materially predetermined drones.

This observation simply points out that Materialism is counterintuitive when it comes to consciousness, and the burden falls on the Materialist to prove that the intuitions most people have are wrong.

[Immanuel Can]

Yes it does. It's that you don't like the answers. Of course consciousness is not a property of all material objects, its a property of a subset of living objects.

I'll ignore the ad hominem, for it adds nothing to your case.

Your response answers nothing at all, and in fact, simply reiterates my view that persons are not objects. So now you're agreeing?

What do you mean by "property of a subset"? How does an object which, according to your view, is purely material suddenly acquire a totally new, non-physical property like consciousness? It's not Theists who struggle with this problem, but rather Atheist philosophers. Witness Thomas Nagel: Nagel really struggles with the question, though he (rather like Dawkins) refuses to accept the obvious conclusion because it would undermine his Atheism.

You really should read up on the "supervenience" problem in philosophy. You'd find it very interesting and challenging to your thought. Just use that key word and do an internet search of reputable academic sites. You'll soon see you cannot dismiss it so lightly as you do here. In fact, PN has a good article that should start you off well...

http://philosophynow.org/issues/87/Phil ... n_Overview

[Immanuel Can]

Arising_uk wrote:

Rand thinks this opinion one of the great failures of moral philosophers and she does not go from 'is to ought' but from 'ought to do'. I agree that she thinks only humans have moral values but she does not think that the having is what justifies them, its what the values are that justifies them.

That's silly. Values do not justify themselves, nor does the quality of what they are contain within it some intimation of whether they are good or bad. In her world, there is no way to avoid moral nihilism, but Rand herself was either oblivious to the problem or dishonest in her treatment of it.

With Rand, a lot of people (such as one of the minor political parties in my region) make the mistake of thinking that because they *like* her moral or economic conclusions her premises must have been solid. But "liking" has nothing to do with it; even if we decide her conclusions were right, they were not adequately defended by any rationale she provided. She knew enough about the is-ought problem to mention it, but she blew by it with no real consciousness of how to deal with it at all. I think she just wasn't astute enough to see it; otherwise, she was simply being dishonest.

The nice thing about her system is that it does not need some fanciful external agency to support it.

No, that's her problem: no authority for affirming her views. There is no property of objective reality that renders a person morally responsible to become an Objectivist, or a Randian, for that matter. Her views are strictly rhetorical, and lack any grounds of moral compulsion. That a certain subset of people have, for personal reasons, clung to her conclusions despite her lack of legitimative grounding is the only reason her work is still read. It's not for its philosophical rigour: it is very poor in that regard.

...gone for a bit...will be back....

[Ginkgo]

"You haven't told us anything about what goodness actually IS".

That's because the question makes no sense from a Theistic perspective, Harry. How can "good," which is inherently an adjectival property, be described in the absolute absence of reference to any primary thing that bears that quality? We have to use some grounds of reference. But from whence comes our referent for the quality "goodness"?

Unless I misunderstand, you appear to derive it from some conception human beings have. For how else could we, so to speak, drag the Supreme Being before the bar of our concept "goodness" for evaluation? But if so, it would raise the question, "From whence do humans derive it?" Not so, of course, with the eternal Source of Being, who would necessarily be the "original" from which all right-thinking elements in our human conception of "goodness" would be derived.

"Objective" goodness, then, would be that which is in step with the character of God, and God would also be rightly described as "good." It's not circular: it's just that by speaking of "ultimate goodness" and "the character of God," we're speaking of precisely the same item, just using different words.

I think a definition of "goodness" is an important prerequisite.

God is a perfect Pixmas Space.

The statement makes no sense unless we know what a, "Pixmas Space" is. The first question anyone is going to ask is, "What on earth does that mean?"

In order to create an understanding one needs to know what an adjective is. In other words we want to know why 'x' can be looked at in terms of 'y'. In a similar fashion it is helpful to know what "good" means from a human point of view.

If not we are forced into a position whereby our definition of "goodness" is the ultimate character of God (as you say) and it can be used without references to any primary thing (as you say). But this attempt must end up in a tautology because we are describing goodness in terms of itself.

God is perfect Pixmas Space and a Pixmas Space is God. Or, God is God and a Pixmas Space is a Pixmas Space.

[uwot]

Well, I admit, of course, that the data is somewhat ambiguous in the limited sense that one can *choose* to see or not see what is there -- which is true for both religious and irreligous folks, of course.

The data is ambiguous because there may be any number of coherent theories to explain it, but I think you have to be clear; it is not what you see that you choose, it is how you interpret it.

But I would suggest as well that complexity (if by that we mean merely a more sophisticated arrangement of parts rather than one with fewer, unarranged parts) does at least incline the initial instinct of the observer to perceive a design at work.

Right, everyone back to the Intelligent Design: a Catechism thread! viewtopic.php?f=23&t=10204 To a degree, philosophy is about challenging those initial instincts, science is about testing them. The world is the way it is, even if some of the more whacko interpretations of QM turn out to be true and, perhaps, we actually do choose what we see.

For example, you could *choose* to see these symbols you are decoding right now (i.e. my words) as random collision of non-symbolic lines produced by chance over many millennia, or you could choose to interpret them as intentional symbols arranged by an intelligence.

There is a difference; I can arrange my own intentional symbols. There is no ambiguity, as you suggest, because there is no feature of the natural world that can be confused with writing.

There's no necessity you can only see it one way, but should we not choose the more obvious one, unless reason presents countervailing proofs that such is not the right way to see it?

Depends what you understand by obvious. It is obvious that there is a world of matter, whatever that may be; it is much less obvious that there is a god pulling the strings. I don't know what the truth is, but in terms of parsimony materialism wins. There is nothing in the world that persuades me that Occam's Razor should be set aside and that entities must be multiplied of necessity. (Thinks: There he goes with 'proof' again. Maybe I'm on his ignore list.)

He (Richard Dawkins) brackets the data with his preset worldview...

Nobody has a preset worldview. We arrive at some axioms, god exists/god doesn't exist, for example and justify them post hoc. The data is the same for everybody, the fact that we can interpret it so differently is proof of ambiguity, but as I was saying to Harry Baird, there is no evidence for god. Perhaps I should add 'and only god'.

[Immanuel Can]

Oh, charming!

I was taking issue with uwot (and, admittedly, doing a bit of chuckling as well) on another thread because he had the temerity to state he had the "core meaning" of all religions in hand (including my own beliefs, I suppose). Rather than daring to answer there, he immediately pops up to be gratuitously contentious here.

And he thinks I won't ask again.

Okay, uwot: let's hear it...what's your "core meaning" to all religions. I'm dying to be enlightened. And now you've got a fresh audience for your claim.

[uwot]

Okay, uwot: let's hear it...what's your "core meaning" to all religions. I'm dying to be enlightened. And now you've got a fresh audience for your claim.

I think you mean thedoc.

[Immanuel Can]

Yes, I probably should have added a few more qualifiers, Just as valid, just as corrupted, just as misunderstood, as the others. But if you dig deep enough, strip away enough of the crap, you'll find the same or a very similar message.


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thedoc
Post subject: Re: Is religion guilty of moving the goalposts?Posted: Thu Dec 12, 2013 3:42 pm


Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2012 4:18 pm
Posts: 966
I should add that I don't really consider Buddhism a religion even though the core message is very similar to Christianity and other religions. Buddhism falls short of being a religion because there is no clearly defined concept of a god, just some vague references to something beyond ourselves and life. This 'No Mind', 'One Mind", or 'Universal Mind' or whatever you choose to call it, can be interpreted as a reference to God, but it is not clearly stated as such.

My apologies if I've in any way slandered you, uwot, because I certainly wouldn't want to accuse you of making such an absurd claim if you did not, in fact, intend to indicate that you shared thedoc's view...but is this not the exchange you had with him?