From atheism to tentative agnosticism

[fr0d0]

Are you arguing with me for asking the question Brian? Or are you having a go at the OP? I can't tell.

On the contrary, science of everything known is child's play next to the science of the unknown. Science would never progress if it was limited to your restraints.
Science of the unknowable, well that's just not science is it.

[Faith No More]

I can't decide which is worse, the profound ignorance underlying this argument or the condescending arrogance with which it is presented.

I see you glossed over my question about the sensation of pain. Pain tells us what we should and should not do. Do you also find that requires a supernatural agent?

[Whateverist]

Well, the issue for me is what is true, rather than what will or won't bother people.

It should also be noted that most atheists who argue against the substantial views of various religions are actually 'morally' outraged by such views. they are appalled by the moral misguidedness of the religious and concerned that a religous world view can inspire people to behave in appalling ways that they would not otherwise have contemplated. All, I have to say, entirely legitimate concerns. However, the atheist is inconsistent in having such concerns, for their moral outrage presupposes the existence of something that their world view disallows: morality.

But anyway, the bottom line is I am interested in what actually exists and what is actually going on. And it seems to me that Atheism may well be false. I think christianity is as well. Perhaps most atheists are more concerned to show christianity to be false than atheism to be true. So be it. The fact remains, atheism seems to be false.

Most atheists don't care either way. It's only a select number of atheists who are anti-theists (just like most theists behave perfectly normal) of whom only a small portion loose rational thought in the process.

Can atheism truly be false when viewed by itself? Maybe you are asserting that the atheists who let their prejudice of religion negatively affect their ability to live a life centered on logic and reason are living a false life.

He just refuses to think about atheism in any other way than the one he has addressed his dreary argument toward. Never mind that it is relevant to so few of us. But I am impressed with this admission of yours even if Igoramo is too dense to find it coherent. Well said, Polaris.

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Are you arguing with me for asking the question Brian? Or are you having a go at the OP? I can't tell.

Me neither but yours was an excellent question.

[Inigo]

'apophenia', you asked

"1. How would one determine that moral reality, separate from moral phenomena (the "appearance" of moral truths), actually exists?"


Let’s assume I’m correct and that morality really does require a god (that morality is composed of the instructions and favourings of a god). This, in itself, would not establish the existence of such a god. For perhaps our moral sensations constitute a hallucination and all our substantial moral beliefs are false. However, it does mean that our moral sensations are now defeasible evidence for the existence of a god. I stress the word ‘defeasible’. They are not proof of the existence of a god. But they are some evidence for the existence of a god.

The reason for this is that we should assume things are as they appear to be unless given reason to think otherwise. So, if you have the visual sensation that there is a chair in front of you, you should assume there is a chair in front of you until you have reason to think otherwise. The brute possibility that you may be mistaken is not yet positive reason to think you are mistaken.

So, I would take the existence of morality to be established if we sense the existence of morality (and we clearly do) and there is no evidence with which this sensation conflicts.

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'apophenia' you also ask (something wrong with the quote function it seems, so i'm having to cut and paste):

"4. There appears to be an unspoken but implied argument from consequences here; yes or no? ("If there is no moral reality, that would be bad; therefore there is moral reality, therefore a god must exist.") So what if there is no "moral reality" ?"

No, that is not how I am arguing. There is something incoherent in the thought that it would be morally bad if morality did not exist. Moral badness presupposes morality's existence. My argument is just that morality has certain features and that only the instructions of a certain sort of god would have those features, therefore morality is the instructions of a god of that kind.

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'apophenia' you say

"5. You use the term "hallucinatory" as another fallacious implied argument, suggesting that because something only exists in the mind, it is not "real" or genuine or meaningful; memories exist only in the mind, are they then to be considered "hallucinations" in the same sense? (See the argument from consequences.) Calling a mental phenomenon a hallucination carries an implied value judgement, this makes using it this way fallacious."

No, I did not make that argument. Some sensations are not sensations of anything external. For instance pain is like that. If you sense pain, you are in pain. Pain just 'is' a sensation. there is nothing more to it than that. And it is impossible to suffer a hallucination of pain (seems to me). For if you sense pain, you are in pain.

But other senses are 'of' things. So, my visual sensation that there is a chair in front of me is 'of' a chair. A chair is not a sensation (our concept of a chair is of something 'out there' not something mental). And so if there is no chair 'out there' corresponding to my visual sensation then that sensation is a hallucination. Of course, the sensation still exists. You are not hallucinating that you are having a sensation.

the sense that an act is wrong is not analogous to our sense of pain. For instance, there is something obviously incoherent in wondering "well, I feel I am in pain, but I wonder if I actually am". But there is nothing at all incoherent in wondering "well, Xing seems wrong, but I wonder if it actually is".

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'apophenia' you ask
"6. What do you consider "real" that you know about by another means than the mind? In other words, is there phenomena and reality, or just phenomena?"

My mind is my means - I cannot use anything else - but that does not mean that all I know is my mind. Or at least, I fail to see why that follows.

Is there just phenomena? Well, no. I know with certainty that my own mind exists, for example. And my mind is not phenomena. My mind is not a sensation, it is the thing that senses.

But anyway, I take these questions to cut across this debate. I assume there is an outside world - I assume solipsism is false. And so, I think, do those who maintain that atheism is true. So this is a shared assumption and not one either side is challenging.

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'apophenia' you ask

"2. In what way would a god provide for the existence of, what in common parlance is called objective morality, and you call moral reality? (See various on the Euthyphro dilemma.)"

I take it that what you are asking here is how I would deal with the Euthyphro dilemma. My response to the Euthyphro dilemma is to say what is right is what the relevant god commands.

The supposed problem with this answer is that it makes morality arbitrary. I think there is certainly a sense in which it does, but it is a rather innocuous sense of 'arbitrary' and not one that indicates a flaw in the theory.

[Angrboda]

1. How would one determine that moral reality, separate from moral phenomena (the "appearance" of moral truths), actually exists?

Let’s assume I’m correct and that morality really does require a god (that morality is composed of the instructions and favourings of a god).

As noted in the other thread, you're equivocating. Your syllogism requires that morality "be" instruction or favoring, and that instruction or favoring "be" an agent. When you step away from that strict formulation, your syllogism and argument falls apart.

Let's make the necessary changes and see: {the original in curly braces}

1. Morality is composed of the instructions or favorings of one thing toward another thing; {Morality instructs/favours/commands}
2. Only a thing which is an agent can favor or instruct; {Only an agent can instruct/favour/command}
Therefore, morality is an agent. {Morality is an agent}

At best, this formulation is incomplete; at worst, it's an obvious non-sequitur. It isn't 'morality' doing the instructing or favoring, but the agent behind it.

(And, as noted there, the essential "moral" character appears completely missing. What makes a god's instruction to not eat pork a moral one, when his advising you to marry Batsheba is not?)

The reason for this is that we should assume things are as they appear to be unless given reason to think otherwise. So, if you have the visual sensation that there is a chair in front of you, you should assume there is a chair in front of you until you have reason to think otherwise. The brute possibility that you may be mistaken is not yet positive reason to think you are mistaken.

So, I would take the existence of morality to be established if we sense the existence of morality (and we clearly do) and there is no evidence with which this sensation conflicts.

Graham Priest suggests that our seeing the chair is reason in and of itself to believe in the existence of the chair. Perhaps not grossly compelling reason, but reason nonetheless. And there is a difference here in that other's subjectivity and other means can be used to corroborate the objective existence of a chair. Whereas intangibles, such as objective morality, or free will, or consciousness, are not seen in the first place, and there is essentially no way to independently verify their contents, or have someone else corroborate their existence and content. The perception of a thing counts as evidence for the existence of a thing, but not conclusive evidence. And the fact that we have well meaning and rational people who disagree as to whether the perception that there is a moral reality is justified, or that free will exists, or that consciousness is 'real' leave us with good cause for skepticism as there is nowhere near uniform agreement on their existence. Furthermore, there are great differences as to the content of objective morality, both across individuals and across time which leaves us with considerable cause for skepticism as to whether a stable, objective moral reality even in fact exists. Notably, different people's perceptions about what is and is not moral differ, and, seemingly equivalent scenarios can evoke moral feelings in one but not the other instance. Additionally, while a chair may or may not exist by itself, it belongs to a class of visual perceptions whose reliability is well attested; the existence of objective morality is in no such class and therefore cannot lean upon the evidence of other classes of sensations for support as to its existence. Also, moral sensations only occur when "provoked" by the thought of an act; if a chair appeared only when I thought of the taste of chocolate ice cream, I'd have a lot of extraordinary questions about the nature of the existence of that chair. So, even if I agreed with you that we should proceed on the basis of how things appear lacking other reasons, we both have those other reasons, as well as an absence of an appearance of the phenomena in question. (And I notice you ducking Rhythm's requests that you produce the subject; consider this your writ of habeas corpus.)

No, that is not how I am arguing. There is something incoherent in the thought that it would be morally bad if morality did not exist. Moral badness presupposes morality's existence. My argument is just that morality has certain features and that only the instructions of a certain sort of god would have those features, therefore morality is the instructions of a god of that kind.

Coherence is a property of systems. Keep that in mind. What specific features did you have in mind? (You used a phrase about something being rationally compelling and universal, both of which appeared impenetrable jargon, especially since you qualified that a universal prescription can be individualistic. I notice you have a whole "syllogism" following the above syllogism, which I have yet to analyze other than to note that, at first glance, it seemed incredibly weak and runs afoul of the Euthyphro dilemma. Perhaps I will have more once I have considered it in depth.)

Some sensations are not sensations of anything external. For instance pain is like that. If you sense pain, you are in pain. Pain just 'is' a sensation. there is nothing more to it than that. And it is impossible to suffer a hallucination of pain (seems to me). For if you sense pain, you are in pain.

But other senses are 'of' things. So, my visual sensation that there is a chair in front of me is 'of' a chair. A chair is not a sensation (our concept of a chair is of something 'out there' not something mental). And so if there is no chair 'out there' corresponding to my visual sensation then that sensation is a hallucination. Of course, the sensation still exists. You are not hallucinating that you are having a sensation.

the sense that an act is wrong is not analogous to our sense of pain. For instance, there is something obviously incoherent in wondering "well, I feel I am in pain, but I wonder if I actually am". But there is nothing at all incoherent in wondering "well, Xing seems wrong, but I wonder if it actually is".

This may be true of pain, but that it is true of one specific intangible does not show that it is true of all such intangibles such that it is diagnostic. (And as a person who suffers chronic pain as a result of having my fingers amputated, and from knowing other chronic pain sufferers, I think you are mistaken on this. But to get away from pain, I can wonder if I am remembering the face of a dead lover correctly, or whether I'm dreaming, or whether I'm experiencing cryptamnesia; that the coherence you specify is not veridical for pain does nothing to make it so for all intangibles. Moreover, as a person with chronic mental illness, I can tell you that the situation is considerably more ambiguous than your simplifications allow. (While I'm not going to go into it, I also contend that consciousness is, in your terms, a "hallucination," so yes, you are essentially hallucinating having a sensation. I won't bring that aspect in at this time, so I'll absent my justification or argument for it, but I reserve the right to do so in future, and, if you're going to introduce notions about what this or that property of a mental event "means," be prepared to back it up with something.)

6. What do you consider "real" that you know about by another means than the mind? In other words, is there phenomena and reality, or just phenomena?

My mind is my means - I cannot use anything else - but that does not mean that all I know is my mind. Or at least, I fail to see why that follows.

Is there just phenomena? Well, no. I know with certainty that my own mind exists, for example. And my mind is not phenomena. My mind is not a sensation, it is the thing that senses.

But anyway, I take these questions to cut across this debate. I assume there is an outside world - I assume solipsism is false. And so, I think, do those who maintain that atheism is true. So this is a shared assumption and not one either side is challenging.

The question was more epistemological than specific; your entire argument stands or falls on establishing that we have reliable justification for presuming the existence of an objective moral world; so far you haven't given us adequate reason to suppose it exists, so I'm asking for the procedure you used to determine it exists. If your entire argument is that it "seems like" there is, then it's no argument at all; there are many things which seem to be which aren't, so unless you have some way of supporting its existence, I see no compelling reason to conclude that it exists.

2. In what way would a god provide for the existence of, what in common parlance is called objective morality, and you call moral reality? (See various on the Euthyphro dilemma.)"

I take it that what you are asking here is how I would deal with the Euthyphro dilemma. My response to the Euthyphro dilemma is to say what is right is what the relevant god commands.

The supposed problem with this answer is that it makes morality arbitrary. I think there is certainly a sense in which it does, but it is a rather innocuous sense of 'arbitrary' and not one that indicates a flaw in the theory.

This is generally considered an unsatisfactory account. While you may consider the arbitrariness innocuous, most would not. The main reason being that "fairness" appears to be a universal moral principle (likely a result of our being a social species), and arbitrary moral instruction results in gross and systematic unfairness. For example, if we punish someone for mowing his lawn on a Tuesday, but not for mowing it on Thursday, even though there is no reason to differentiate, we would consider that punishment unjust and immoral. Likewise, if a god were to punish one act which is arbitrarily distinguished from another act, and has no compelling justification for the distinction, we would view the apportionement of punishment of that god as unjust and immoral. (Incidentally, this points up another flaw in your formulation, as the instruction of a god as to what should be considered moral cannot in and of itself compel us to accept it as moral; he can treat us as if it was moral or immoral, but only we can make it so. This theme comes up again and again in the history of nations and cultures: the laws do not make something moral or immoral without the people's consent.)

If you don't have a better answer than that it's moral by virtue of the fact that "God wills it," then you have no answer. A tyrant may will the services of maidens in his bed chamber, it doesn't make such commands moral, no matter what his power over us. (And I'll note, if you're going to bring in an afterlife, that requires support; given that there is, admittedly weak, evidence for reincarnation, and perhaps, even weaker evidence for an afterlife, it would seem to favor the Hindu account of morality.)

[Inigo]

As noted in the other thread, you're equivocating. Your syllogism requires that morality "be" instruction or favoring, and that instruction or favoring "be" an agent. When you step away from that strict formulation, your syllogism and argument falls apart.

Let's make the necessary changes and see: {the original in curly braces}

1. Morality is composed of the instructions or favorings of one thing toward another thing; {Morality instructs/favours/commands}
2. Only a thing which is an agent can favor or instruct; {Only an agent can instruct/favour/command}
Therefore, morality is an agent. {Morality is an agent}

At best, this formulation is incomplete; at worst, it's an obvious non-sequitur. It isn't 'morality' doing the instructing or favoring, but the agent behind it.

You can't show my argument to involve an equivocation by writing down a different argument. Show how the original argument equivocates, don't replace it with one of your own.

Here's one argument:
1. Morality instructs
2. Only an agent can instruct
3. Morality is an agent

There's no equivocation in that argument. Perhaps you dislike 'morality instructs' and prefer 'morality is composed of instructions'. Fine.

1. Morality is composed of instructions and favourings
2. Only an agent can instruct and favour
3. Morality is composed of the instructions and favourings of an agent

Neither argument establishes that morality is a god, or is composed of the instructions of a god. What these arguments establish is that morality - or the instructions constitutive of morality - need an agent in order to exist.

So your next point - that the argument does not capture what is different about a moral instruction as opposed to some other one - is just tedious. I know! It wasn't supposed to. Morality has more than one essential feature! One of them is that it instructs. Another is that those instructions have inescapable rational authority. It is satisfying that SECOND feature that requires positing a god.
You can show anyone's case for anything to be incomplete if you just wilfully ignore or overlook large parts of it!!

[The Grand Nudger]

It is satisfying that SECOND feature that requires positing a god.

Not even in the vicinity of correct, as has been explained to you in two threads - at length.

[Inigo]

'apophenia', you say "Graham Priest suggests that our seeing the chair is reason in and of itself to believe in the existence of the chair. Perhaps not grossly compelling reason, but reason nonetheless. And there is a difference here in that other's subjectivity and other means can be used to corroborate the objective existence of a chair. Whereas intangibles, such as objective morality, or free will, or consciousness, are not seen in the first place, and there is essentially no way to independently verify their contents, or have someone else corroborate their existence and content. The perception of a thing counts as evidence for the existence of a thing, but not conclusive evidence. And the fact that we have well meaning and rational people who disagree as to whether the perception that there is a moral reality is justified, or that free will exists, or that consciousness is 'real' leave us with good cause for skepticism as there is nowhere near uniform agreement on their existence. Furthermore, there are great differences as to the content of objective morality, both across individuals and across time which leaves us with considerable cause for skepticism as to whether a stable, objective moral reality even in fact exists. Notably, different people's perceptions about what is and is not moral differ, and, seemingly equivalent scenarios can evoke moral feelings in one but not the other instance. Additionally, while a chair may or may not exist by itself, it belongs to a class of visual perceptions whose reliability is well attested; the existence of objective morality is in no such class and therefore cannot lean upon the evidence of other classes of sensations for support as to its existence. Also, moral sensations only occur when "provoked" by the thought of an act; if a chair appeared only when I thought of the taste of chocolate ice cream, I'd have a lot of extraordinary questions about the nature of the existence of that chair. So, even if I agreed with you that we should proceed on the basis of how things appear lacking other reasons, we both have those other reasons, as well as an absence of an appearance of the phenomena in question. (And I notice you ducking Rhythm's requests that you produce the subject; consider this your writ of habeas corpus."

I'm entirely unclear what your point is here. I said, quite clearly, that if my view is correct, then our moral sensations are defeasible evidence for a god. All you have done here is point out that sensations are defeasible evidence. I know! I said that!!

You then say 'absence of the phenomena in question'. Er, are you denying the existence of a moral sense? Are you denying the existence of moral beliefs? That's absurd. MOral sensations certainly exist and the evidence for it is millennia of humans trying to make sense of such reports.

YOu then point out that there may be reasons to think a god does not exist. I know!! The point is that if no god exists then the reports of our moral sense constitute a hallucination just as if no chair exists my visual sensation that there is a chair in front of me is a hallucination.

you point out that different people sense different acts to be right/wrong. Yes, so? Where in any of my premises to I assume that everyone's substantial moral views (their views about which acts are right etc) will agree?

You point out that when it comes to our moral sense we have no other sense to corroborate its reports. Well, that's partly question begging as if morality is composed of the instructions of an agent then it is in principle possible that one could have corroborative evidence. But anyway, I'm entirely unclear what your point is. My sense of sight can only corroborate the reports of my sense of touch if my sense of sight is allowed to have some probative force all of its own. For instance, if two people just guess who is guilty of a crime - say they just randomly put their finger into a phonebook - and independently point at the same person one is not corroborating the other. For neither person's evidence that this person is guilty is worth anything. So for one sense report to be allowed to corroborate another one has to assume them to have independent clout. And thus the reports of one's moral sense have clout. But note, I do not claim - and I have been explicit about this - that the reports of our moral sense establish the existence of a god, rather they constitute some evidence - defeasible evidence - for the existence of a god.

[The Grand Nudger]

But note, I do not claim - and I have been explicit about this - that the reports of our moral sense establish the existence of a god, rather they constitute some evidence - defeasible evidence - for the existence of a god.

They do not even amount to this, unless you can tie the two together, which you have not yet been able to do.

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I'm feeling generous, what either formulation is missing is an assertion that amounts to "a god is an agent capable of such instruction/ a god is the only agent capable of such instruction". Not that either would redeem the argument, mind you - but because otherwise (without such inclusion) one can give you the argument whole cloth and it won't have anything to say about gods.

[Searching4truth]

'And it is hard - hard for me, anyway - to make sense of how such features could really exist unless a god exists. This is not to say that a god exists, just that morality - if it is to be real - requires a god.
Because I think morality is real, this raises a doubt about atheism.'
[/quote]
What if this sense of morality exists due to the indoctrination of what is thought to be right or wrong from a societal majority standpoint, sort of the way indoctrination plays a part in religious beliefs?