Existentialism

[Istvan]

Now you see why my long posts are unpopular. 

No need to apologize, you put a lot of thought into that post and it shows. I wholeheartedly agree that the existentialists are part of a tradition of skepticism of the philosophy of Objective Truth.

I had read about the anti-Enlightenment philosophers in one of Isaiah Berlin's essays. It's too bad so many were kooks or anti-Semites, because they were articulating a worthwhile idea: that truth is a human creation, not sitting out there waiting for humans to discover it.

I've been all over the atheist blogosphere and it seems like a whole lot of folks don't realize that they've been fed a warmed-over positivism by folks like Dawkins and Harris. The party line seems to be that science tells us how reality is in a completely objective way, our perception-consciousness-free will-yadda yadda are all illusions, all our joys and passions are mere squirts of neurochemicals, and anyone who thinks there's anything but atoms and the void must be a religious nut. I don't consider it unreasonable to question this nostalgic reductionism.

I'm by no means claiming that nothing would exist without humans to perceive it. However, the extent to which we're creating reality as opposed to discovering it is still an open question in the philosophy of science. Scientific inquiry is a for-us-by-us construct that aims to make the chaos of reality comprehensible to human consciousness. It's a human endeavor, and like all human endeavors it's influenced by the culture that uses it. And there's no way to tell how closely our knowledge corresponds to "reality" because the only access we have to it is the modes of inquiry we've devised to study it. 

I find that the assumption that there's objective reality leads to intellectual complacency in the same way religious belief does: once you think you have a magic portal to the eternal and unchanging truth, epistemic humility gets hard to come by. I prefer acknowledging how culturally constructed our truths are.

Thanks again for the thoughtful response.

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Saying that you're obeying God's word or that you're just following the evidence is dodging responsibility for your perspective and behavior.

I don't see how saying you're just following the evidence is dodging responsibility. It's just good to just follow the evidence.

If you're in a lab or a courtroom, it's a good thing. But as Belacqua mentioned, here in the com-box it's invariably a bad faith ploy.

Evidence is subject to interpretation, after all. It's easy for a crackpot or conspiracist to demand evidence from his online foes, then handwave it away on whatever basis is convenient and claim no one has presented any evidence.