Are people objective when their ideas are ‘right’, and subjective when supplanted by new interpretations?
This sort of confusion is why the questions would be so much easier if the terms "objective" and "subjective" were retired and replaced by something less ambiguous.
What we mean when we say people are objective or subjective is different from what we mean when we say a truth is objective or subjective. A person can only have a subjective opinion about an objective truth or someone's else's subjective truth. An opinion about one's own subjective truth is a truth not a subjective opinion.
You have several times said that KarlLB keeps switching from epistemological senses to ontological senses. But the two cannot be neatly disentangled. The idea of an objective ontological state is a constituent presupposition of all the intentional attitudes and activities of which epistemology treats.
One cannot make sense of a form of life in which people had beliefs and opinions but nobody cared whether or to what degree they were true of objective reality.
Whenever I watch Star Trek I experience a powerful and enduring wish that Warp Drive were a thing. That doesn't get us any closer to it being a reality.
Alcubierre stated in an email to William Shatner that his theory was directly inspired by the term used in the show and cites the "'warp drive' of science fiction" in his 1994 article.
The decision to put research into that area might be inspired by people who wish as I do, but actually creating a Warp Drive would require an awful lot of research, experimentation and hard science. And if it's fundamentally impossible, no amount of wishing will change that. The fundamental point is that the physics underlying such a thing, if it is possible, is the same regardless of whether we want to build a Warp Drive or not.
Once again I feel like two fundamentally different things - in this case the desire to do something, and the means of making it happen, are being conflated.
I think most human beings would consider them to be connected. Your desire to reason about physics (or God, or anything else) is inextricably linked to the means you have of making it (the act of reasoning) happen.
For some reason, you build your argument above on the premise that building a warp drive is fundamentally impossible. But if building a warp drive is fundamentally possible, then wishing to build a warp drive is the thing someone needs to do to see if it's possible to build a warp drive. Wishing is only futile if the thing you seek is impossible. But if it's possible, then wishing is not just useful, it's a good approach. And if you don't know whether it's possible or impossible (which is the case here), it's still a good way of maximising your chances of success.
"Once again" you are appealing to fundamental objective reality as being some kind of arbiter of human aspiration. But, to repeat a previous answer, these objective realities you seek are inaccessible to human beings. The reason people continue suggesting you try other ways of thinking is that your approach isn't working for you. And the observation that scientific advances are often made when someone changes the way they think about the problem. And the recognition that the human forces of hope and disappointment drive the scientific method just as much as they drive other human endeavours.
Whenever I watch Star Trek I experience a powerful and enduring wish that Warp Drive were a thing. That doesn't get us any closer to it being a reality.
Alcubierre stated in an email to William Shatner that his theory was directly inspired by the term used in the show and cites the "'warp drive' of science fiction" in his 1994 article.
The decision to put research into that area might be inspired by people who wish as I do, but actually creating a Warp Drive would require an awful lot of research, experimentation and hard science. And if it's fundamentally impossible, no amount of wishing will change that. The fundamental point is that the physics underlying such a thing, if it is possible, is the same regardless of whether we want to build a Warp Drive or not.
Once again I feel like two fundamentally different things - in this case the desire to do something, and the means of making it happen, are being conflated.
I think most human beings would consider them to be connected.
"Connected" and "the same thing" are - erm - two different things. Of course you're not going to achieve something you don't set out to achieve; that's the bleedin' obvious.
Your desire to reason about physics (or God, or anything else) is inextricably linked to the means you have of making it (the act of reasoning) happen
For some reason, you build your argument above on the premise that building a warp drive is fundamentally impossible. But if building a warp drive is fundamentally possible, then wishing to build a warp drive is the thing someone needs to do to see if it's possible to build a warp drive. Wishing is only futile if the thing you seek is impossible. But if it's possible, then wishing is not just useful, it's a good approach. And if you don't know whether it's possible or impossible (which is the case here), it's still a good way of maximising your chances of success.
The point I'm making is that my desire for Warp Drive to be a reality has absolutely no connection to whether it actually is a possibility or not. Similarly, any imagining or intuiting I do about God has no bearing on whether he actually exists or not or what he's like. I can neither will him into existence nor dictate his nature by my desires or thoughts, just as I can neither make Warp Drive possible by wishing it was.
"Once again" you are appealing to fundamental objective reality as being some kind of arbiter of human aspiration.
No, it's an arbiter of human achievement. If something's impossible, we can't do it. End of.
But, to repeat a previous answer, these objective realities you seek are inaccessible to human beings. The reason people continue suggesting you try other ways of thinking is that your approach isn't working for you.
I am not capable of believing that if I really, really have a good think about God I will somehow reliably discover him. I will have to live with not knowing; I do not think that "other ways of thinking" will actually demonstrate whether God exists or not.
You do not know how much I imagine, dream and hope. What I do not do is confuse my imagination with reality. And yeah, we can never absolutely know reality. Fine. That doesn't mean I should substitute imagination for it and pretend that's just as real as anything else because it isn't.
And the observation that scientific advances are often made when someone changes the way they think about the problem. And the recognition that the human forces of hope and disappointment drive the scientific method just as much as they drive other human endeavours.
This is, again, the bleedin' obvious and not what I'm getting at.
It's not binary. A source is not either adequate or not. There are sources which are completely unreliable and ones that we can place a great deal of confidence in and everything in between.
Reality is we are disposed to give more weight to sources that reinforce what we already are committed to...
Yes. I agree. I wonder what is the founation for those commitments, though.
I'm not tasking you with answering these questions for me, @KarlLB . I appreciate, though, that you're willing to talk about them from your experience.
My reason, regardless of -jectiveness, is forlorn hope, I think, that someone can give me a good reason for a stronger confidence that God actually exists.
No they can't. And look at me. Still looking. Still sniffing round the birth and infancy of the Church for unnatural scent.
How will you decide where to sniff, and how will you evaluate what you find?
If it looks odd. Like a new and most distinctive, radical, peaceful, deeply religious, inclusive, social justice movement emerging overnight, OK in fifty days on top of 1,300, in Judaism, from a martyred itinerant carpenter, born of a young woman mystic who was kin to an older woman mystic who was mother to another male mystic.
(Buddhism and Islam, also based on individuals, don't compare.)
The default position is that it is all an extraordinary natural phenomenon, a locus of several happening exponentially in less than a century, in 3 degrees of separation, in a funny little province that has had the tides of many larger cultures wash over it for over a thousand years.
We can write a goodwill natural story of the kinswomen and their sons. Can we do so of the Church's infancy after their martyrdoms?
Church 1st circle adult male populations (by the book)
AD
27 1, 12, 70
31 3,000
By history:
Starks according to Kyle Orton's excellent (he invokes Bart Ehrman) blog.
7,500 Christians by the end of the first century (0.02% of sixty million people);
40,000 Christians by 150 AD (0.07%)
200,000 by 200 AD (0.35%)
2 million by 250 AD (2%)
In its early centuries, Christianity achieved a phenomenal growth rate: it is estimated that it had hit roughly 30 million followers by AD350.
Orton's final para and it's central link are most persuasive (Brit. understatement). Of nature.
For the unnatural we have to look at 50 BCE - 40 AD Jerusalem. Elizabeth, Mary, John, Jesus, the infant Church, for the epidemic of terrifyingly theologically mandated kindness (which Islam does regressively echo, as the epidemic mutated).
"Once again" you are appealing to fundamental objective reality as being some kind of arbiter of human aspiration. But, to repeat a previous answer, these objective realities you seek are inaccessible to human beings.
I am so tempted to make a smart remark about that may be your subjective truth but it needn't be other people's subjective truth.
Instead, I'll say how would we know objective realities are inaccessible to human beings unless we have some standard by which we can know whether we can access them? (*) You can't draw a boundary and say the other side is inaccessible without reaching past where you're drawing the boundary.
You can say that our access to objective reality is always imperfect; but imperfection allows for a great deal of more or less.
...
Once again I feel like two fundamentally different things - in this case the desire to do something, and the means of making it happen, are being conflated.
I think most human beings would consider them to be connected.
"Connected" and "the same thing" are - erm - two different things.
Yes - I was disagreeing with you.
Similarly, any imagining or intuiting I do about God has no bearing on whether he actually exists or not or what he's like. I can neither will him into existence nor dictate his nature by my desires or thoughts, just as I can neither make Warp Drive possible by wishing it was.
But, to repeat a previous answer, these objective realities you seek are inaccessible to human beings. The reason people continue suggesting you try other ways of thinking is that your approach isn't working for you.
I am not capable of believing that if I really, really have a good think about God I will somehow reliably discover him. I will have to live with not knowing; I do not think that "other ways of thinking" will actually demonstrate whether God exists or not.
You do not know how much I imagine, dream and hope. What I do not do is confuse my imagination with reality. And yeah, we can never absolutely know reality. Fine. That doesn't mean I should substitute imagination for it and pretend that's just as real as anything else because it isn't.
And the observation that ...
This is, again, the bleedin' obvious and not what I'm getting at.
What I believe you're getting at is your essentially dualistic (internal-subjective / external-objective) worldview. What I'm getting at is that I don't find that worldview particularly utile in relation to the issue of the existence of God, which is what I've been attempting to demonstrate.
Furthermore, you appear unwilling to give up or modify any aspect of your worldview, which is fair enough. In relation to the question of the existence of God, I don't believe that having red lines is an intractable problem.
However, it does complicate discussing the issue with people who bring other worldviews to bear on the subject.
I had to look "utile" up to check it meant what I thought it did.
Whether it's "utile" or not isn't the point - I am explaining that I cannot see how subjective thought processes are going to be any good either - given that the question I would like to answer is "Does a God entity objectively exist" any more than it helps with equally unanswerable questions concerning objective entities, such as "Do aliens exist?" or "Is there a teapot orbiting the sun?"
It seems that the reasoning is "This way of thinking doesn't answer this question; we need another way of thinking. This is another way of thinking, so therefore we will use that". However, that's the same logic as "Cats don't have six legs; dogs aren't cats. Therefore dogs have six legs".
I am sure that you can subjectively create all sorts of God models. The problem though is how you test them against reality. How do you know that what you think you "know" by this subjective process reflects an actual reality? Because if you can't, if it doesn't, then to me it is absolutely inutile.
I am unwilling to give up what you call my "dualism" because, quite honestly, it does a really, really good job with everything else I come across, to the extent that it seems to be a very, very good model of how what is inside and outside my own head relate to each other.
I also have to say, looking back on this discussion, I see an awful lot of "your thinking/worldview/model is wrong" but very little actual Explain To Me Like I'm Five description of your alternatives.
I think a dualistic point of view doesn't render theism impossible, but it tends to put God out there, as some kind of external being. I don't know how many Christians have this view. Non-dualism is found in Buddhism, some parts of Hinduism, Sufism, and elsewhere. Of course, Buddhism doesn't really do God, but there are non-dualist views of God, which obviously talk about the One, omnipresence, etc. Again, I don't know how many Christians have this view, but it's found in mysticism. And arguably in the irregular gospels, "split a log of wood, and I am there", (gospel of Thomas).
I think a dualistic point of view doesn't render theism impossible, but it tends to put God out there, as some kind of external being. I don't know how many Christians have this view. Non-dualism is found in Buddhism, some parts of Hinduism, Sufism, and elsewhere. Of course, Buddhism doesn't really do God, but there are non-dualist views of God, which obviously talk about the One, omnipresence, etc. Again, I don't know how many Christians have this view, but it's found in mysticism. And arguably in the irregular gospels, "split a log of wood, and I am there", (gospel of Thomas).
It's not so much whether God is "out there" or "in here" - I'm completely open to pantheistic and panentheistic viewpoints.
The thing is though, I am looking for a God who isn't just created subjectively by my own imagination. I don't really have a use for a God like that. I know some people do, but I don't. I think Christian Theism traditionally does indeed see God like that; God cannot create a universe if he doesn't exist until rational beings within that universe imagine him. God can be the Universe; the Universe can be an extension of his being; it can be a completely separate thing or all manner of possibilities in between, but God would still have existed before any rational beings could imagine him and would continue to exist if we all died tomorrow. That is the phase space, if you like, of possible Gods that I take an interest in.
"Once again" you are appealing to fundamental objective reality as being some kind of arbiter of human aspiration. But, to repeat a previous answer, these objective realities you seek are inaccessible to human beings.
I am so tempted to make a smart remark about that may be your subjective truth but it needn't be other people's subjective truth.
Oo - could the smart remark include an amusing reference to Popper?
Instead, I'll say how would we know objective realities are inaccessible to human beings unless we have some standard by which we can know whether we can access them? (*) You can't draw a boundary and say the other side is inaccessible without reaching past where you're drawing the boundary.
You can say that our access to objective reality is always imperfect; but imperfection allows for a great deal of more or less.
If we had that knowledge (a standard) we would have some information about whether or not they were objective realities, which in the context of the statement, is information that we don't have. Postulating the existence of an undrawable boundary on the basis of unknown information looks like a paradox/logical impossibility kind of statement.
An alternative view is that we're swimming in an ocean of non-objective realities and maybe the occasional objective reality - there is no boundary between them but we can't tell them apart. So it might be truer to say that the standard or property that distinguishes them is inaccessible.
"Once again" you are appealing to fundamental objective reality as being some kind of arbiter of human aspiration. But, to repeat a previous answer, these objective realities you seek are inaccessible to human beings.
I am so tempted to make a smart remark about that may be your subjective truth but it needn't be other people's subjective truth.
Oo - could the smart remark include an amusing reference to Popper?
Instead, I'll say how would we know objective realities are inaccessible to human beings unless we have some standard by which we can know whether we can access them? (*) You can't draw a boundary and say the other side is inaccessible without reaching past where you're drawing the boundary.
You can say that our access to objective reality is always imperfect; but imperfection allows for a great deal of more or less.
If we had that knowledge (a standard) we would have some information about whether or not they were objective realities, which in the context of the statement, is information that we don't have. Postulating the existence of an undrawable boundary on the basis of unknown information looks like a paradox/logical impossibility kind of statement.
An alternative view is that we're swimming in an ocean of non-objective realities and maybe the occasional objective reality - there is no boundary between them but we can't tell them apart. So it might be truer to say that the standard or property that distinguishes them is inaccessible.
Hmm - I have to refer back to the word which is the solution to a given day's Wordle as a mundane example of an objective reality. If that's subjective then I'd argue that (a) it's considerably closer to objective than it is to whether eg. the guitar work on Bohemian Rhapsody is better than that on Freebird, and (b) if the set of objective realities is that small we need to replace it with a rather larger set of to all intents and purposes objective realities.
How did you establish the standard you use for determining natural vs unnatural?
Evidence. No faith required. Just simple metaphysical, ontological, philosophical (antisuper)naturalism.
As we all yawningly know:
For me the Pericope Adulterae was an instance of the fingerpost as its sublimity for the time it is set in is literarily and culturally, naturally, impossible, an anachronism. Nothing compares.
I posted from a link previously that agrees. Can't find it. Everybody who is familiar with the PA agrees. Like my spiritual director.
Don't you.
And some of you mind that it's a pious fraud, sorry, pseudepigraphon. Because the rest of the story is good enough for faith without it.
If only I'd read the small print hiding in plain sight for 50 years. That there is no trace for two centuries after its setting. It is in no surviving document from around 200 BCE, for yet another two.
Why? The prudishness of all C2nd Greek and Syriac bishops prevented it from being copied from John's (and only John's - written a generation after the synoptics) original? Only the most critical Bible section for authenticating God is subject to this? It was so good it had to be repressed by conspiracy within the Church? As Augustine theorized centuries later. And the Holy Ghost let it be?
People knew the story c. 250. It was referred to later as being in gospels. And no MS of the time has it.
Oral tradition isn't worth the paper it's written on. But that's all good enough for some of you. It was in John, in a different form of course, as if he'd actually written it, then it was purged when it came time to copy his MS. But remembered and referred to a century or so later, but not restored for a couple more, by a brilliant Greek editor.
Is this all evidence of God playing silly buggers?
Or just nature. Period?
Meanwhile... are Elizabeth, Mary, John, Jesus, the infant Church the last hiding place of an IotF?
"Once again" you are appealing to fundamental objective reality as being some kind of arbiter of human aspiration. But, to repeat a previous answer, these objective realities you seek are inaccessible to human beings.
I am so tempted to make a smart remark about that may be your subjective truth but it needn't be other people's subjective truth.
Oo - could the smart remark include an amusing reference to Popper?
I've never been sufficiently impressed by the summaries of Popper to read him at length. So your assumption that it could is probably falsified.
Instead, I'll say how would we know objective realities are inaccessible to human beings unless we have some standard by which we can know whether we can access them? (*) You can't draw a boundary and say the other side is inaccessible without reaching past where you're drawing the boundary.
You can say that our access to objective reality is always imperfect; but imperfection allows for a great deal of more or less.
If we had that knowledge (a standard) we would have some information about whether or not they were objective realities, which in the context of the statement, is information that we don't have. Postulating the existence of an undrawable boundary on the basis of unknown information looks like a paradox/logical impossibility kind of statement.
So if you're not positing the existence of an undrawable boundary then you are retracting your statement that objective realities are inaccessible to human beings?
Let us drag the conversation away from pseudo-philosophical wheel spinning and back to a langugage game in which these terms are at home.
I believe that my daughter's lunch box is in her school bag but when I get home I find it is on the kitchen counter. The belief that the lunch box is in her school bag was less grounded in a reality independent of my beliefs and desires than the belief than my new belief that it is in the kitchen. It is of considerable importance to me that my beliefs about the lunch box match up with the location of the lunchbox independent of where I want the lunch box to be, since otherwise I am not going to be able to get the lunch box where I want it to be or more importantly where my daughter wants it to be.
Any argument has to presuppose that this sort of thing happens, and that these activities underlie the concepts used in these arguments. If the concepts did not apply to these activities - taking my daughter's lunchbox to school - we would not come up with them at all.
So we can switch from a false belief to a true belief. The switch of beliefs presupposes intentional objects of belief - in this case, the lunchbox, the school bag, the kitchen counter, etc - about which the beliefs are more or less true or more or less false. If we had no such experience we would not have the concept of beliefs. This is the language game in which the concept of belief has originally a use.
'Objective' has now (at least) two senses, depending on whether it qualifies 'reality' or 'belief'.
To be the intentional object of a belief is to be an objective reality. If the belief is false then there is a mismatch between the belief and its object. If the belief is true then there is no such mismatch.
From this we get a derived sense of 'objective' qualifying 'belief' according to which the properties of the belief are derived primarily from the intentional object of the belief, by contrast with beliefs whose properties are derived primarily from the grammatical subject, namely the believer.
An alternative view is that we're swimming in an ocean of non-objective realities and maybe the occasional objective reality - there is no boundary between them but we can't tell them apart. So it might be truer to say that the standard or property that distinguishes them is inaccessible.
How do you formulate such a view using only language games that have no moves that count as access to objective reality?
Please show your working.
You spoke before about switching from epistemological questions to ontological questions. "Reality" is a word used to signal that we are discussing ontological questions. That's its use and meaning.
Ontological questions have primacy. Epistemology discusses how we have access to ontology. As children we acquired the concepts of the things about which we know before we acquired the concepts of knowledge itself. We learn the concepts of knowledge only once we learn the need to distinguish between things we know and things we thought we knew but didn't. We only do epistemology when we think our grasp of ontology may be going wrong.
I had to look "utile" up to check it meant what I thought it did.
Whether it's "utile" or not isn't the point - I am explaining that I cannot see how subjective thought processes are going to be any good either - given that the question I would like to answer is "Does a God entity objectively exist" any more than it helps with equally unanswerable questions concerning objective entities, such as "Do aliens exist?" or "Is there a teapot orbiting the sun?"
Those questions do not look equally unanswerable to me - I would say they have varying degrees of answerability.
Your argument seems to be that subjective thought processes aren't any good because they're not objective. But it's not a hypothesis that you appear willing to test.
It seems that the reasoning is "This way of thinking doesn't answer this question; we need another way of thinking. This is another way of thinking, so therefore we will use that". However, that's the same logic as "Cats don't have six legs; dogs aren't cats. Therefore dogs have six legs".
Those two statements do not exhibit the same logic. The first statement describes a process that happens all the time in scientific methodology - people discard one paradigm because it fails to answer a question about the problem domain, and look for a different paradigm that does.
I am sure that you can subjectively create all sorts of God models. The problem though is how you test them against reality. How do you know that what you think you "know" by this subjective process reflects an actual reality? Because if you can't, if it doesn't, then to me it is absolutely inutile.
There's an assumption there that the subject of your inquiry is unaffected by the way you conduct your inquiry. Have you considered that your approach to the problem might be affecting the results you are getting? Maybe God doesn't want to be known objectively - maybe he only wants to be known subjectively.
I am unwilling to give up what you call my "dualism" because, quite honestly, it does a really, really good job with everything else I come across, to the extent that it seems to be a very, very good model of how what is inside and outside my own head relate to each other.
If you want to stick with that worldview, that's entirely up to you. But when a scientific inquiry doesn't make progress, it's normal for the person making the inquiry to change something.
One possible change would be to ask a question related to the one that you want to ask, in the hope that it sheds light on it. For example, whether God's existence is knowable subjectively.
I also have to say, looking back on this discussion, I see an awful lot of "your thinking/worldview/model is wrong" but very little actual Explain To Me Like I'm Five description of your alternatives.
You didn't seem very interested in exploring the alternate worldview(s) expressed in the consideration of building warp drives. Unless you're prepared to accept the possible utility of other worldviews, I'm not sure what useful purpose it would serve.
An alternative view is that we're swimming in an ocean of non-objective realities and maybe the occasional objective reality - there is no boundary between them but we can't tell them apart. So it might be truer to say that the standard or property that distinguishes them is inaccessible.
Hmm - I have to refer back to the word which is the solution to a given day's Wordle as a mundane example of an objective reality. If that's subjective then I'd argue that (a) it's considerably closer to objective than it is to whether eg. the guitar work on Bohemian Rhapsody is better than that on Freebird, and (b) if the set of objective realities is that small we need to replace it with a rather larger set of to all intents and purposes objective realities.
Why? Most people appear quite capable of negotiating life without contemplating the difference.
Go on. Explain to me exactly how one goes about "knowing about God's existence subjectively". Then explain how one knows whether what one now knows is actually true.
At the moment, you seem to be playing a game of "I'm not telling you how I think about this until you admit that you're an idiot and I'm right and beg me to explain".
No. You explain first. Then I can decide if it's got any usefulness to me.
"Once again" you are appealing to fundamental objective reality as being some kind of arbiter of human aspiration. But, to repeat a previous answer, these objective realities you seek are inaccessible to human beings.
I am so tempted to make a smart remark about that may be your subjective truth but it needn't be other people's subjective truth.
Oo - could the smart remark include an amusing reference to Popper?
I've never been sufficiently impressed by the summaries of Popper to read him at length. So your assumption that it could is probably falsified.
Shame. Persisting in my hope that amusing references to Popper exist, I ought to propose that they don't...
An alternative view is that we're swimming in an ocean of non-objective realities and maybe the occasional objective reality - there is no boundary between them but we can't tell them apart. So it might be truer to say that the standard or property that distinguishes them is inaccessible.
How do you formulate such a view using only language games that have no moves that count as access to objective reality?
Please show your working.
In short - you don't need to be able to access objective realities to be able to consider their existence. More wordily (but with a lack of references):
Facing any brand of skepticism regarding knowledge of objective reality in any robust sense, we should note that the notion of there being an objective reality is independent of any particular assertion about our prospects for knowing that reality in any objective sense. One should, in other words, agree that the idea of some objective reality, existing as it is independent of any subjective perception of it, apparently makes sense even for one who holds little hope for any of us knowing that there is such a reality, or knowing anything objectively about such a reality. Perhaps our human situation is such that we cannot know anything beyond our experiences; perhaps we are, each one of us individually, confined to the theater of our own minds. Nonetheless, we can conceive what it means to assert an objective reality beyond the stream of our experiences.
What seems to happen in these conversations (and @pease has also just done it) is to sidestep the actual question I'm talking about and substitute another one more amenable to the counter-argument.
I would describe your manoeuvres similarly - a shift in the grounds of debate offered, from an epistemological to an ontological focus, from how we know to what there is to be known, from a way of knowing that applies to all experience to an argument about internal vs external matters.
A reason for the short reply is wondering how much of the rest of your post is directed at one of them.
I wonder whether ‘subjectively’ and ‘objectively’ are being used differently here.
“I believe green is the most beautiful colour in the world” can be an objectively true statement about your belief, but while it is true for you, i.e. subjectively true, about the colour green, others may legitimately disagree. It is a matter of opinion and not a matter of fact.
“I believe the traffic light is green” can also be an objectively true statement about your belief. But it is either true or false in fact. Your belief can be falsified by the traffic light camera and/or the opinions of others. The colour of the traffic light is not merely a matter of opinion. The greenness of the traffic light is independent of, unaffected by, your opinion of it.
To my mind, and I suspect to KarlLB’s as well, the existence (or not) of God is in that second category where the belief refers to an external reality. Where that kind of belief is in question one looks for evidence. If you can’t find satisfactory evidence you then have to decide whether your starting point (pending evidence) is one of provisional belief or of provisional scepticism. (Notably, Pascal’s wager decides that provisional belief is the better course.)
God's existence is not in the second category, as there is a traffic light. And Pascal was a damnationist.
Martin - God existing is a green traffic light. His not existing is red. The question of his existence is in that category.
I'd reverse the colours.
The traffic light is nature, existence, to me. And it's green. Always. Well since abiogenesis (which occurs billions of times in every universe of infinite of course). Nice and natural. Nothing artificial about it. Including the natural stuff that does... artificial, intentional stuff originating with or along side harnessing fire.
How can a green traffic light also be red?
I'm sure it can be seen as red by those with a vision defect, but not colour blindness of course. Straining the metaphor.
God's existence is not in the second category, as there is a traffic light. And Pascal was a damnationist.
Martin - God existing is a green traffic light. His not existing is red. The question of his existence is in that category.
I'd reverse the colours.
The traffic light is nature, existence, to me. And it's green. Always. Well since abiogenesis (which occurs billions of times in every universe of infinite of course). Nice and natural. Nothing artificial about it. Including the natural stuff that does... artificial, intentional stuff originating with or along side harnessing fire.
How can a green traffic light also be red?
I'm sure it can be seen as red by those with a vision defect, but not colour blindness of course. Straining the metaphor.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
If God exists, then in your version there is a red traffic light. Not a green one that is red.
The green light does not represent nature. It represents God's non-existence.
The metaphor is only stretched because you changed the meaning of the non-existent God light.
Interesting. Possibly, as might Mr. Popper himself be. The obvious challenge with fiction, or accounts of any kind, is determining if there is evidence that any of the components of the account existed, much less that the events occurred at all and then in the way described in the account or story.
Sometimes it is possible to research the matter. In many cases, the final answer is that one can neither confirm nor deny the story. It's not falsifiable. I think Popper's penguins are.
The more challenging question is what to do with accounts that are not falsifiable? Are they of any use and under what circumstances. Which you, @Martin54, indicated by connecting Popper's penguins, the gospels, the Pericope Adulterae, disposition and historicity, and subjectivity and objectivity in one neat stroke.
If nothing else, the Pericope Adulterae tells us today that the author, still writing at a time when the story was strongly subversive, connected it with Jesus. Precisely why is not clear. I (am disposed to) think the author saw Jesus as the best type of subversive, as well as profoundly, unnaturally good, as many of us do or would like to. There are surely other ways to read it.
Which relates to disposition. There is a point, where one has all the information available; there is nothing left but to conclude (if that is possible) interpretation. Likewise one is probably already disposed to look for Truth/truth/something true according to one's own criteria. While our dispositions do not alter the information itself, they affect how we evaluate and interact with the information. They also affect what we are looking for, what fits our "template" of "Truth/truth/something true."
I am (for now) interested in the idea of disposition and how it affects what and how we evaluate Truth/truth/what is true. There is not one neat answer to this question, but I think a great deal goes into how each of us (differently) identifies what we call Truth/truth/what is true.
@KarlLB I think you are saying that you are an epistemological positivist, that you find neither weak not strong social constructionism useful and that you don't find qualitative or phenomenological forms of enquiry sufficiently robust.
I think the problem with that for theology, is that the existence of God is not a falsifable proposition - and therefore scientific enquiry can't answer the question.
@KarlLB I think you are saying that you are an epistemological positivist, that you find neither weak not strong social constructionism useful and that you don't find qualitative or phenomenological forms of enquiry sufficiently robust.
I'd put it rather that I've as yet not had a clear description of how social constructionist, qualitative or phenomenological forms of enquiry actually work in practice - at least in terms of discerning actual realities. For example, if God is a social construct, then that doesn't mean he exists in the sense that I am interested in establishing his existence. Similarly, I can study the phenomenon of religious belief and practice but that doesn't indicate whether there's any underlying objective truth beyond the existence and origins of those phenomena. They're not the thing itself, as it were.
I keep getting told my ways of thinking aren't good enough without anyone actually explaining how other ways of thinking actually work better, for the purposes I am interested in.
God's existence is not in the second category, as there is a traffic light. And Pascal was a damnationist.
Martin - God existing is a green traffic light. His not existing is red. The question of his existence is in that category.
I'd reverse the colours.
The traffic light is nature, existence, to me. And it's green. Always. Well since abiogenesis (which occurs billions of times in every universe of infinite of course). Nice and natural. Nothing artificial about it. Including the natural stuff that does... artificial, intentional stuff originating with or along side harnessing fire.
How can a green traffic light also be red?
I'm sure it can be seen as red by those with a vision defect, but not colour blindness of course. Straining the metaphor.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
If God exists, then in your version there is a red traffic light. Not a green one that is red.
The green light does not represent nature. It represents God's non-existence.
The metaphor is only stretched because you changed the meaning of the non-existent God light.
Whatever you say. OK. We'll use your lights. God would be a green traffic light. The traffic light is red. Naturally, 'eternally' red. Endlessly on red. Godless. Nature red in tooth and claw.
As scientific enquiry, and rationality extrapolated from it, can't make a red light green, that is no lack on its part whatsoever. There are no alternative sane methods of enquiry that can make it, the red light, so, also green.
God's existence is not in the second category, as there is a traffic light. And Pascal was a damnationist.
Martin - God existing is a green traffic light. His not existing is red. The question of his existence is in that category.
I'd reverse the colours.
The traffic light is nature, existence, to me. And it's green. Always. Well since abiogenesis (which occurs billions of times in every universe of infinite of course). Nice and natural. Nothing artificial about it. Including the natural stuff that does... artificial, intentional stuff originating with or along side harnessing fire.
How can a green traffic light also be red?
I'm sure it can be seen as red by those with a vision defect, but not colour blindness of course. Straining the metaphor.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
If God exists, then in your version there is a red traffic light. Not a green one that is red.
The green light does not represent nature. It represents God's non-existence.
The metaphor is only stretched because you changed the meaning of the non-existent God light.
Whatever you say. OK. We'll use your lights. God would be a green traffic light. The traffic light is red. Naturally, 'eternally' red. Endlessly on red. Godless. Nature red in tooth and claw.
As scientific enquiry, and rationality extrapolated from it, can't make a red light green, that is no lack on its part whatsoever. There are no alternative sane methods of enquiry that can make it, the red light, so, also green.
As someone who has colour deficient vision in the red-green area is now the time to point out that colour is subjective?
Ah. Now. This is where it gets interesting.
It depends on how you're defining "colour" here doesn't it?
If you're defining it as "what I see when I look at something that's a given colour" then it is.
If you're defining it by its wavelength or collection of wavelengths as measured by a colorimeter or spectrometer, then no, it isn't.
It's almost like a subjective means of measurement gives you a subjective answer, while an objective one gives you an objective answer.
Fortunately, we traffic lights we can also refer to "the one at the top" and "the one at the bottom".
I'm reminded of Locke's observation that a bucket of water can feel hot or cold depending on who's testing the temperature with their hand. My inner scientist responds almost instinctively "well get a bleedin' thermometer then!"
God's existence is not in the second category, as there is a traffic light. And Pascal was a damnationist.
Martin - God existing is a green traffic light. His not existing is red. The question of his existence is in that category.
I'd reverse the colours.
The traffic light is nature, existence, to me. And it's green. Always. Well since abiogenesis (which occurs billions of times in every universe of infinite of course). Nice and natural. Nothing artificial about it. Including the natural stuff that does... artificial, intentional stuff originating with or along side harnessing fire.
How can a green traffic light also be red?
I'm sure it can be seen as red by those with a vision defect, but not colour blindness of course. Straining the metaphor.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
If God exists, then in your version there is a red traffic light. Not a green one that is red.
The green light does not represent nature. It represents God's non-existence.
The metaphor is only stretched because you changed the meaning of the non-existent God light.
Whatever you say. OK. We'll use your lights. God would be a green traffic light. The traffic light is red. Naturally, 'eternally' red. Endlessly on red. Godless. Nature red in tooth and claw.
As scientific enquiry, and rationality extrapolated from it, can't make a red light green, that is no lack on its part whatsoever. There are no alternative sane methods of enquiry that can make it, the red light, so, also green.
God's existence is not in the second category, as there is a traffic light. And Pascal was a damnationist.
Martin - God existing is a green traffic light. His not existing is red. The question of his existence is in that category.
I'd reverse the colours.
The traffic light is nature, existence, to me. And it's green. Always. Well since abiogenesis (which occurs billions of times in every universe of infinite of course). Nice and natural. Nothing artificial about it. Including the natural stuff that does... artificial, intentional stuff originating with or along side harnessing fire.
How can a green traffic light also be red?
I'm sure it can be seen as red by those with a vision defect, but not colour blindness of course. Straining the metaphor.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
If God exists, then in your version there is a red traffic light. Not a green one that is red.
The green light does not represent nature. It represents God's non-existence.
The metaphor is only stretched because you changed the meaning of the non-existent God light.
Whatever you say. OK. We'll use your lights. God would be a green traffic light. The traffic light is red. Naturally, 'eternally' red. Endlessly on red. Godless. Nature red in tooth and claw.
As scientific enquiry, and rationality extrapolated from it, can't make a red light green, that is no lack on its part whatsoever. There are no alternative sane methods of enquiry that can make it, the red light, so, also green.
Go on. Explain to me exactly how one goes about "knowing about God's existence subjectively".
A possible line of inquiry: If God exists, and made your brain, then he also made your imagination. For what purpose? Purely for your own entertainment and the internal processing of memories and other brain functions?
A large number of people say they find their imagination a way of apprehending God. There are a wide variety of disciplines and techniques. Are you prepared to try any of them, as an experiment?
Then explain how one knows whether what one now knows is actually true.
Until you conduct the experiment, how will you know what the results are or whether they shed any light on the question you want an answer to?
At the moment, you seem to be playing a game of "I'm not telling you how I think about this until you admit that you're an idiot and I'm right and beg me to explain".
No. You explain first. Then I can decide if it's got any usefulness to me.
Maybe God doesn't want to be known objectively - maybe he only wants to be known subjectively.
Whether God can be known objectively or subjectively is a very different question from whether God exists objectively or subjectively.
I do keep wondering whether the words 'objective' and 'subjective' are actually useful. They have different meanings when applied to different concepts; but people keep switching between the different meanings in argument.
Kierkegaard says in the beginning to the Concluding Scientific Postscript that faith is a subjective passion. And I think he makes the useful point that no amount of evidence could amount to a proof that Jesus was God. But if I remember correctly - I would have to reread it - Kierkegaard doesn't think that faith is knowing subjectively.
Things that are known subjectively may include my gender, possibly whether I am in pain, and so on. The point is that in each case other people may offer input or help me think through it, but I am the final arbiter. But if God exists then I am not the final arbiter; if God exists for me God also exists for the whole creation and I am not the final arbiter of whether God exists for the whole creation.
How do you formulate such a view using only language games that have no moves that count as access to objective reality?
In short - you don't need to be able to access objective realities to be able to consider their existence.
That's just asserting that you haven't accessed objective realities in considering their existence.
In order to consider the existence of something you have to have formed a concept of that something, either by access to that something or by adapting some other concept that you have use for.
We can consider the existence of dragons without ever having 'accessed' a dragon. That's because we have uses for the concepts of reptiles, fires, dangerous animals, and so on, and we can develop the concept of dragons from them.
But my contention is that we cannot form the concept of an objective reality without at least some access to that objective reality. All prior concepts from which the concept is constructed depend in some way on the process of learning that the world is sometimes not as we believe it to be. I believed that the lunchbox was in the school bag; I learned that I was wrong.
Even if the access is imperfect, it is still access. (If it were perfect, we again would not have the concept.)
Go on. Explain to me exactly how one goes about "knowing about God's existence subjectively".
A possible line of inquiry: If God exists, and made your brain, then he also made your imagination. For what purpose? Purely for your own entertainment and the internal processing of memories and other brain functions?
A large number of people say they find their imagination a way of apprehending God. There are a wide variety of disciplines and techniques. Are you prepared to try any of them, as an experiment?
I need to know more about them. Specifically how the outcomes are validated. It is entirely possible, I am sure, to apprehend God through the imagination. Why would it not be? But it is also possible to imagine complete invention. How do you tell the one from the other?
I've had to deal with people suffering profound delusions. I am aware of how powerful the mind is at creating apparent realities. And I am aware of the massive gulf that can exist between these mental constructs and anything existing outside them.
A cynic would say that it's hardly surprising that imagination is needed to apprehend God because he doesn't exist anywhere else. Again, how do you know that those people are wrong and that your imagined God is actually externally real?
Then explain how one knows whether what one now knows is actually true.
Until you conduct the experiment, how will you know what the results are or whether they shed any light on the question you want an answer to?
Until I know the success criteria, how can I know what any results would mean?
At the moment, you seem to be playing a game of "I'm not telling you how I think about this until you admit that you're an idiot and I'm right and beg me to explain".
No. You explain first. Then I can decide if it's got any usefulness to me.
@KarlLB I think you are saying that you are an epistemological positivist, that you find neither weak not strong social constructionism useful and that you don't find qualitative or phenomenological forms of enquiry sufficiently robust.
I'd put it rather that I've as yet not had a clear description of how social constructionist, qualitative or phenomenological forms of enquiry actually work in practice - at least in terms of discerning actual realities.
A huge part of the problem here is that paradigms or philosophical perspectives like social constructionism and phenomenology understand ‘reality’ differently from positivism (which seems to be the philosophical position you are coming from, as @Doublethink wrote).
I think the wikepedia pages on these paradigms and associated methods are the minimum description that you might find helpful, since shorter descriptions have not proven to be useful to you. You can get the jist of the main points in a few minutes in each case:
Long story shorter, here are some key quotes from the positivism page linked above:
“Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—meaning a posteriori facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience. Other ways of knowing, such as intuition, introspection, or religious faith, are rejected or considered meaningless.
[…]
Generally, positivists attempted to introduce scientific methods to their respective fields. Since the turn of the 20th century, positivism has declined under criticism from antipositivists and critical theorists, among others, for its alleged scientism, reductionism, overgeneralizations, and methodological limitations.”
Most of your interlocutors here are phenomenologists (and/or) social constructionists and would align with the critics of positivism. Where people are committed to different paradigms, despite best efforts, they often end up talking past each other. No-one can offer a defence of phenomenological reasoning in positivist terms, for example, because the paradigms are incommensurable.
Hope that helps - at least you can’t say I haven’t tried!
I can see how subjective phenomenology or social constructivism can be useful for studying subjective phenomena and interpersonal social phenomena.
What I cannot see is how it can address questions of fact. Does Dafyd's God of all creation exist? What is the composition of Venus' atmosphere? What is the solution to today's Wordle? - apart from denying that they exist at all. Which, frankly, seems barmy. Before there were rational beings, where did reality exist if not in an objectively existing material universe?
Do you think, for example, that the existence of God has a yes/no answer that's true for everyone regardless of what they think?
I wonder whether ‘subjectively’ and ‘objectively’ are being used differently here.
...
“I believe the traffic light is green” can also be an objectively true statement about your belief. But it is either true or false in fact. Your belief can be falsified by the traffic light camera and/or the opinions of others. The colour of the traffic light is not merely a matter of opinion. The greenness of the traffic light is independent of, unaffected by, your opinion of it.
To my mind, and I suspect to KarlLB’s as well, the existence (or not) of God is in that second category where the belief refers to an external reality. Where that kind of belief is in question one looks for evidence. If you can’t find satisfactory evidence you then have to decide whether your starting point (pending evidence) is one of provisional belief or of provisional scepticism. (Notably, Pascal’s wager decides that provisional belief is the better course.)
Following on from the cognitive science of religion, there's some recent research suggesting that religious "credence" and factual belief are cognitively distinct - that we think about them in different ways.
I argue that psychology and epistemology should posit distinct cognitive attitudes of religious credence and factual belief, which have different etiologies and different cognitive and behavioral effects. I support this claim by presenting a range of empirical evidence that religious cognitive attitudes tend to lack properties characteristic of factual belief, just as attitudes like hypothesis, fictional imagining, and assumption for the sake of argument generally lack such properties. Furthermore, religious credences have distinctive properties of their own. To summarize: factual beliefs (i) are practical setting independent, (ii) cognitively govern other attitudes, and (iii) are evidentially vulnerable. By way of contrast, religious credences (a) have perceived normative orientation, (b) are susceptible to free elaboration, and (c) are vulnerable to special authority. This theory provides a framework for future research in the epistemology and psychology of religious credence.
Which is by way of saying I was having doubts about how much traffic lights can tell us about belief in God. Also to identify some of the concepts potentially relevant to the way we think about (or discuss) belief and even just the observation that people are conducting research in this area.
Comments
If everything's subjective, we're both arguing about whatever we think we're arguing about.
That seems to be evident in this conversation. QED.
Yet you seem to think I'm getting it wrong. How can that be if it's all subjective?
I misinterpreted your last remark as indicating a sense of humour and sought to respond in kind. Thank you for the clarification.
What we mean when we say people are objective or subjective is different from what we mean when we say a truth is objective or subjective. A person can only have a subjective opinion about an objective truth or someone's else's subjective truth. An opinion about one's own subjective truth is a truth not a subjective opinion.
You have several times said that KarlLB keeps switching from epistemological senses to ontological senses. But the two cannot be neatly disentangled. The idea of an objective ontological state is a constituent presupposition of all the intentional attitudes and activities of which epistemology treats.
One cannot make sense of a form of life in which people had beliefs and opinions but nobody cared whether or to what degree they were true of objective reality.
For some reason, you build your argument above on the premise that building a warp drive is fundamentally impossible. But if building a warp drive is fundamentally possible, then wishing to build a warp drive is the thing someone needs to do to see if it's possible to build a warp drive. Wishing is only futile if the thing you seek is impossible. But if it's possible, then wishing is not just useful, it's a good approach. And if you don't know whether it's possible or impossible (which is the case here), it's still a good way of maximising your chances of success.
"Once again" you are appealing to fundamental objective reality as being some kind of arbiter of human aspiration. But, to repeat a previous answer, these objective realities you seek are inaccessible to human beings. The reason people continue suggesting you try other ways of thinking is that your approach isn't working for you. And the observation that scientific advances are often made when someone changes the way they think about the problem. And the recognition that the human forces of hope and disappointment drive the scientific method just as much as they drive other human endeavours.
"Connected" and "the same thing" are - erm - two different things. Of course you're not going to achieve something you don't set out to achieve; that's the bleedin' obvious.
The point I'm making is that my desire for Warp Drive to be a reality has absolutely no connection to whether it actually is a possibility or not. Similarly, any imagining or intuiting I do about God has no bearing on whether he actually exists or not or what he's like. I can neither will him into existence nor dictate his nature by my desires or thoughts, just as I can neither make Warp Drive possible by wishing it was.
No, it's an arbiter of human achievement. If something's impossible, we can't do it. End of.
I am not capable of believing that if I really, really have a good think about God I will somehow reliably discover him. I will have to live with not knowing; I do not think that "other ways of thinking" will actually demonstrate whether God exists or not.
You do not know how much I imagine, dream and hope. What I do not do is confuse my imagination with reality. And yeah, we can never absolutely know reality. Fine. That doesn't mean I should substitute imagination for it and pretend that's just as real as anything else because it isn't.
This is, again, the bleedin' obvious and not what I'm getting at.
If it looks odd. Like a new and most distinctive, radical, peaceful, deeply religious, inclusive, social justice movement emerging overnight, OK in fifty days on top of 1,300, in Judaism, from a martyred itinerant carpenter, born of a young woman mystic who was kin to an older woman mystic who was mother to another male mystic.
(Buddhism and Islam, also based on individuals, don't compare.)
The default position is that it is all an extraordinary natural phenomenon, a locus of several happening exponentially in less than a century, in 3 degrees of separation, in a funny little province that has had the tides of many larger cultures wash over it for over a thousand years.
We can write a goodwill natural story of the kinswomen and their sons. Can we do so of the Church's infancy after their martyrdoms?
Church 1st circle adult male populations (by the book)
AD
27 1, 12, 70
31 3,000
By history:
Starks according to Kyle Orton's excellent (he invokes Bart Ehrman) blog.
Auntie
Orton's final para and it's central link are most persuasive (Brit. understatement). Of nature.
For the unnatural we have to look at 50 BCE - 40 AD Jerusalem. Elizabeth, Mary, John, Jesus, the infant Church, for the epidemic of terrifyingly theologically mandated kindness (which Islam does regressively echo, as the epidemic mutated).
How did you establish the standard you use for determining natural vs unnatural?
Instead, I'll say how would we know objective realities are inaccessible to human beings unless we have some standard by which we can know whether we can access them? (*) You can't draw a boundary and say the other side is inaccessible without reaching past where you're drawing the boundary.
You can say that our access to objective reality is always imperfect; but imperfection allows for a great deal of more or less.
Furthermore, you appear unwilling to give up or modify any aspect of your worldview, which is fair enough. In relation to the question of the existence of God, I don't believe that having red lines is an intractable problem.
However, it does complicate discussing the issue with people who bring other worldviews to bear on the subject.
Whether it's "utile" or not isn't the point - I am explaining that I cannot see how subjective thought processes are going to be any good either - given that the question I would like to answer is "Does a God entity objectively exist" any more than it helps with equally unanswerable questions concerning objective entities, such as "Do aliens exist?" or "Is there a teapot orbiting the sun?"
It seems that the reasoning is "This way of thinking doesn't answer this question; we need another way of thinking. This is another way of thinking, so therefore we will use that". However, that's the same logic as "Cats don't have six legs; dogs aren't cats. Therefore dogs have six legs".
I am sure that you can subjectively create all sorts of God models. The problem though is how you test them against reality. How do you know that what you think you "know" by this subjective process reflects an actual reality? Because if you can't, if it doesn't, then to me it is absolutely inutile.
I am unwilling to give up what you call my "dualism" because, quite honestly, it does a really, really good job with everything else I come across, to the extent that it seems to be a very, very good model of how what is inside and outside my own head relate to each other.
Surely you've seen this useful informational video? https://i.imgflip.com/10ppde.gif
I also have to say, looking back on this discussion, I see an awful lot of "your thinking/worldview/model is wrong" but very little actual Explain To Me Like I'm Five description of your alternatives.
It's not so much whether God is "out there" or "in here" - I'm completely open to pantheistic and panentheistic viewpoints.
The thing is though, I am looking for a God who isn't just created subjectively by my own imagination. I don't really have a use for a God like that. I know some people do, but I don't. I think Christian Theism traditionally does indeed see God like that; God cannot create a universe if he doesn't exist until rational beings within that universe imagine him. God can be the Universe; the Universe can be an extension of his being; it can be a completely separate thing or all manner of possibilities in between, but God would still have existed before any rational beings could imagine him and would continue to exist if we all died tomorrow. That is the phase space, if you like, of possible Gods that I take an interest in.
That'd be nice. Convenient though innit? "You've not experienced God directly? Must be your ego mate!"
Well, it interests me, as it's found in different religions. I know that isn't a guarantee of anything. See for example Ramana Maharshi.
Well, most of our life is ego. I don't think that's a problem. I think you can clear some of it away.
An alternative view is that we're swimming in an ocean of non-objective realities and maybe the occasional objective reality - there is no boundary between them but we can't tell them apart. So it might be truer to say that the standard or property that distinguishes them is inaccessible.
Hmm - I have to refer back to the word which is the solution to a given day's Wordle as a mundane example of an objective reality. If that's subjective then I'd argue that (a) it's considerably closer to objective than it is to whether eg. the guitar work on Bohemian Rhapsody is better than that on Freebird, and (b) if the set of objective realities is that small we need to replace it with a rather larger set of to all intents and purposes objective realities.
Evidence. No faith required. Just simple metaphysical, ontological, philosophical (antisuper)naturalism.
As we all yawningly know:
For me the Pericope Adulterae was an instance of the fingerpost as its sublimity for the time it is set in is literarily and culturally, naturally, impossible, an anachronism. Nothing compares.
I posted from a link previously that agrees. Can't find it. Everybody who is familiar with the PA agrees. Like my spiritual director.
Don't you.
And some of you mind that it's a pious fraud, sorry, pseudepigraphon. Because the rest of the story is good enough for faith without it.
If only I'd read the small print hiding in plain sight for 50 years. That there is no trace for two centuries after its setting. It is in no surviving document from around 200 BCE, for yet another two.
Why? The prudishness of all C2nd Greek and Syriac bishops prevented it from being copied from John's (and only John's - written a generation after the synoptics) original? Only the most critical Bible section for authenticating God is subject to this? It was so good it had to be repressed by conspiracy within the Church? As Augustine theorized centuries later. And the Holy Ghost let it be?
People knew the story c. 250. It was referred to later as being in gospels. And no MS of the time has it.
Oral tradition isn't worth the paper it's written on. But that's all good enough for some of you. It was in John, in a different form of course, as if he'd actually written it, then it was purged when it came time to copy his MS. But remembered and referred to a century or so later, but not restored for a couple more, by a brilliant Greek editor.
Is this all evidence of God playing silly buggers?
Or just nature. Period?
Meanwhile... are Elizabeth, Mary, John, Jesus, the infant Church the last hiding place of an IotF?
Not wittingly so.
So there is no known rational basis for faith.
Is there.
Like a fool I still want there to be.
So if you're not positing the existence of an undrawable boundary then you are retracting your statement that objective realities are inaccessible to human beings?
Let us drag the conversation away from pseudo-philosophical wheel spinning and back to a langugage game in which these terms are at home.
I believe that my daughter's lunch box is in her school bag but when I get home I find it is on the kitchen counter. The belief that the lunch box is in her school bag was less grounded in a reality independent of my beliefs and desires than the belief than my new belief that it is in the kitchen. It is of considerable importance to me that my beliefs about the lunch box match up with the location of the lunchbox independent of where I want the lunch box to be, since otherwise I am not going to be able to get the lunch box where I want it to be or more importantly where my daughter wants it to be.
Any argument has to presuppose that this sort of thing happens, and that these activities underlie the concepts used in these arguments. If the concepts did not apply to these activities - taking my daughter's lunchbox to school - we would not come up with them at all.
So we can switch from a false belief to a true belief. The switch of beliefs presupposes intentional objects of belief - in this case, the lunchbox, the school bag, the kitchen counter, etc - about which the beliefs are more or less true or more or less false. If we had no such experience we would not have the concept of beliefs. This is the language game in which the concept of belief has originally a use.
'Objective' has now (at least) two senses, depending on whether it qualifies 'reality' or 'belief'.
To be the intentional object of a belief is to be an objective reality. If the belief is false then there is a mismatch between the belief and its object. If the belief is true then there is no such mismatch.
From this we get a derived sense of 'objective' qualifying 'belief' according to which the properties of the belief are derived primarily from the intentional object of the belief, by contrast with beliefs whose properties are derived primarily from the grammatical subject, namely the believer.
How do you formulate such a view using only language games that have no moves that count as access to objective reality?
Please show your working.
You spoke before about switching from epistemological questions to ontological questions. "Reality" is a word used to signal that we are discussing ontological questions. That's its use and meaning.
Ontological questions have primacy. Epistemology discusses how we have access to ontology. As children we acquired the concepts of the things about which we know before we acquired the concepts of knowledge itself. We learn the concepts of knowledge only once we learn the need to distinguish between things we know and things we thought we knew but didn't. We only do epistemology when we think our grasp of ontology may be going wrong.
Indeed they are, but are they falsifiable??
And bugger,
Your argument seems to be that subjective thought processes aren't any good because they're not objective. But it's not a hypothesis that you appear willing to test.
Those two statements do not exhibit the same logic. The first statement describes a process that happens all the time in scientific methodology - people discard one paradigm because it fails to answer a question about the problem domain, and look for a different paradigm that does.
There's an assumption there that the subject of your inquiry is unaffected by the way you conduct your inquiry. Have you considered that your approach to the problem might be affecting the results you are getting? Maybe God doesn't want to be known objectively - maybe he only wants to be known subjectively.
If you want to stick with that worldview, that's entirely up to you. But when a scientific inquiry doesn't make progress, it's normal for the person making the inquiry to change something.
One possible change would be to ask a question related to the one that you want to ask, in the hope that it sheds light on it. For example, whether God's existence is knowable subjectively.
No.
You didn't seem very interested in exploring the alternate worldview(s) expressed in the consideration of building warp drives. Unless you're prepared to accept the possible utility of other worldviews, I'm not sure what useful purpose it would serve.
Go on. Explain to me exactly how one goes about "knowing about God's existence subjectively". Then explain how one knows whether what one now knows is actually true.
At the moment, you seem to be playing a game of "I'm not telling you how I think about this until you admit that you're an idiot and I'm right and beg me to explain".
No. You explain first. Then I can decide if it's got any usefulness to me.
In short - you don't need to be able to access objective realities to be able to consider their existence. More wordily (but with a lack of references): Not I. All mentions of those words were in the exchange of posts between Cameron and KarlLB: A reason for the short reply is wondering how much of the rest of your post is directed at one of them.
“I believe green is the most beautiful colour in the world” can be an objectively true statement about your belief, but while it is true for you, i.e. subjectively true, about the colour green, others may legitimately disagree. It is a matter of opinion and not a matter of fact.
“I believe the traffic light is green” can also be an objectively true statement about your belief. But it is either true or false in fact. Your belief can be falsified by the traffic light camera and/or the opinions of others. The colour of the traffic light is not merely a matter of opinion. The greenness of the traffic light is independent of, unaffected by, your opinion of it.
To my mind, and I suspect to KarlLB’s as well, the existence (or not) of God is in that second category where the belief refers to an external reality. Where that kind of belief is in question one looks for evidence. If you can’t find satisfactory evidence you then have to decide whether your starting point (pending evidence) is one of provisional belief or of provisional scepticism. (Notably, Pascal’s wager decides that provisional belief is the better course.)
Martin - God existing is a green traffic light. His not existing is red. The question of his existence is in that category.
I'd reverse the colours.
The traffic light is nature, existence, to me. And it's green. Always. Well since abiogenesis (which occurs billions of times in every universe of infinite of course). Nice and natural. Nothing artificial about it. Including the natural stuff that does... artificial, intentional stuff originating with or along side harnessing fire.
How can a green traffic light also be red?
I'm sure it can be seen as red by those with a vision defect, but not colour blindness of course. Straining the metaphor.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
If God exists, then in your version there is a red traffic light. Not a green one that is red.
The green light does not represent nature. It represents God's non-existence.
The metaphor is only stretched because you changed the meaning of the non-existent God light.
Interesting. Possibly, as might Mr. Popper himself be. The obvious challenge with fiction, or accounts of any kind, is determining if there is evidence that any of the components of the account existed, much less that the events occurred at all and then in the way described in the account or story.
Sometimes it is possible to research the matter. In many cases, the final answer is that one can neither confirm nor deny the story. It's not falsifiable. I think Popper's penguins are.
The more challenging question is what to do with accounts that are not falsifiable? Are they of any use and under what circumstances. Which you, @Martin54, indicated by connecting Popper's penguins, the gospels, the Pericope Adulterae, disposition and historicity, and subjectivity and objectivity in one neat stroke.
If nothing else, the Pericope Adulterae tells us today that the author, still writing at a time when the story was strongly subversive, connected it with Jesus. Precisely why is not clear. I (am disposed to) think the author saw Jesus as the best type of subversive, as well as profoundly, unnaturally good, as many of us do or would like to. There are surely other ways to read it.
Which relates to disposition. There is a point, where one has all the information available; there is nothing left but to conclude (if that is possible) interpretation. Likewise one is probably already disposed to look for Truth/truth/something true according to one's own criteria. While our dispositions do not alter the information itself, they affect how we evaluate and interact with the information. They also affect what we are looking for, what fits our "template" of "Truth/truth/something true."
I am (for now) interested in the idea of disposition and how it affects what and how we evaluate Truth/truth/what is true. There is not one neat answer to this question, but I think a great deal goes into how each of us (differently) identifies what we call Truth/truth/what is true.
I think the problem with that for theology, is that the existence of God is not a falsifable proposition - and therefore scientific enquiry can't answer the question.
I'd put it rather that I've as yet not had a clear description of how social constructionist, qualitative or phenomenological forms of enquiry actually work in practice - at least in terms of discerning actual realities. For example, if God is a social construct, then that doesn't mean he exists in the sense that I am interested in establishing his existence. Similarly, I can study the phenomenon of religious belief and practice but that doesn't indicate whether there's any underlying objective truth beyond the existence and origins of those phenomena. They're not the thing itself, as it were.
I keep getting told my ways of thinking aren't good enough without anyone actually explaining how other ways of thinking actually work better, for the purposes I am interested in.
Whatever you say. OK. We'll use your lights. God would be a green traffic light. The traffic light is red. Naturally, 'eternally' red. Endlessly on red. Godless. Nature red in tooth and claw.
As scientific enquiry, and rationality extrapolated from it, can't make a red light green, that is no lack on its part whatsoever. There are no alternative sane methods of enquiry that can make it, the red light, so, also green.
@Kendel. Later!
If God exists, then he does not not exist. Similarly, if he does not exist, then he does not exist.
There is no situation in which the red light is required to be also green. If God exists, the light is green and not red.
Ah. Now. This is where it gets interesting.
It depends on how you're defining "colour" here doesn't it?
If you're defining it as "what I see when I look at something that's a given colour" then it is.
If you're defining it by its wavelength or collection of wavelengths as measured by a colorimeter or spectrometer, then no, it isn't.
It's almost like a subjective means of measurement gives you a subjective answer, while an objective one gives you an objective answer.
Fortunately, we traffic lights we can also refer to "the one at the top" and "the one at the bottom".
I'm reminded of Locke's observation that a bucket of water can feel hot or cold depending on who's testing the temperature with their hand. My inner scientist responds almost instinctively "well get a bleedin' thermometer then!"
He doesn't
Theism requires a red light to be green.
Theism says that the perfect red light is green.
A large number of people say they find their imagination a way of apprehending God. There are a wide variety of disciplines and techniques. Are you prepared to try any of them, as an experiment?
Until you conduct the experiment, how will you know what the results are or whether they shed any light on the question you want an answer to?
I do keep wondering whether the words 'objective' and 'subjective' are actually useful. They have different meanings when applied to different concepts; but people keep switching between the different meanings in argument.
Kierkegaard says in the beginning to the Concluding Scientific Postscript that faith is a subjective passion. And I think he makes the useful point that no amount of evidence could amount to a proof that Jesus was God. But if I remember correctly - I would have to reread it - Kierkegaard doesn't think that faith is knowing subjectively.
Things that are known subjectively may include my gender, possibly whether I am in pain, and so on. The point is that in each case other people may offer input or help me think through it, but I am the final arbiter. But if God exists then I am not the final arbiter; if God exists for me God also exists for the whole creation and I am not the final arbiter of whether God exists for the whole creation.
That's just asserting that you haven't accessed objective realities in considering their existence.
In order to consider the existence of something you have to have formed a concept of that something, either by access to that something or by adapting some other concept that you have use for.
We can consider the existence of dragons without ever having 'accessed' a dragon. That's because we have uses for the concepts of reptiles, fires, dangerous animals, and so on, and we can develop the concept of dragons from them.
But my contention is that we cannot form the concept of an objective reality without at least some access to that objective reality. All prior concepts from which the concept is constructed depend in some way on the process of learning that the world is sometimes not as we believe it to be. I believed that the lunchbox was in the school bag; I learned that I was wrong.
Even if the access is imperfect, it is still access. (If it were perfect, we again would not have the concept.)
My mistake. You're still switching between them as if they're parallel. And they are not parallel.
I need to know more about them. Specifically how the outcomes are validated. It is entirely possible, I am sure, to apprehend God through the imagination. Why would it not be? But it is also possible to imagine complete invention. How do you tell the one from the other?
I've had to deal with people suffering profound delusions. I am aware of how powerful the mind is at creating apparent realities. And I am aware of the massive gulf that can exist between these mental constructs and anything existing outside them.
A cynic would say that it's hardly surprising that imagination is needed to apprehend God because he doesn't exist anywhere else. Again, how do you know that those people are wrong and that your imagined God is actually externally real?
Until I know the success criteria, how can I know what any results would mean?
A huge part of the problem here is that paradigms or philosophical perspectives like social constructionism and phenomenology understand ‘reality’ differently from positivism (which seems to be the philosophical position you are coming from, as @Doublethink wrote).
I think the wikepedia pages on these paradigms and associated methods are the minimum description that you might find helpful, since shorter descriptions have not proven to be useful to you. You can get the jist of the main points in a few minutes in each case:
social constructionism
phenomenology
positivism
Long story shorter, here are some key quotes from the positivism page linked above:
“Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—meaning a posteriori facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience. Other ways of knowing, such as intuition, introspection, or religious faith, are rejected or considered meaningless.
[…]
Generally, positivists attempted to introduce scientific methods to their respective fields. Since the turn of the 20th century, positivism has declined under criticism from antipositivists and critical theorists, among others, for its alleged scientism, reductionism, overgeneralizations, and methodological limitations.”
Most of your interlocutors here are phenomenologists (and/or) social constructionists and would align with the critics of positivism. Where people are committed to different paradigms, despite best efforts, they often end up talking past each other. No-one can offer a defence of phenomenological reasoning in positivist terms, for example, because the paradigms are incommensurable.
Hope that helps - at least you can’t say I haven’t tried!
What I cannot see is how it can address questions of fact. Does Dafyd's God of all creation exist? What is the composition of Venus' atmosphere? What is the solution to today's Wordle? - apart from denying that they exist at all. Which, frankly, seems barmy. Before there were rational beings, where did reality exist if not in an objectively existing material universe?
Do you think, for example, that the existence of God has a yes/no answer that's true for everyone regardless of what they think?
What a day!
Abstract from article snippets (and refutation snippets for balance...) Which is by way of saying I was having doubts about how much traffic lights can tell us about belief in God. Also to identify some of the concepts potentially relevant to the way we think about (or discuss) belief and even just the observation that people are conducting research in this area.