The Official God FAQ

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Lorizael
Assumptions are the devil, JM. They ruin every argument. There is only one valid premise from which to construct a worldview, only one that does not rest on unprovable assumptions.

Everything is based on assumptions, from science to religion to capitalism. There is no way to get away from them. The important thing is to understand the assumptions you make (otherwise known as beleifs), as well as the assumptions that others make.

As an example of the assumptions that science makes (There are many more) is empericism.

If you make no assumptions, you might as well be drooling in a corner because you can't know if you are talking or feeling or existing or if gravity exists/etc.

JM

[Jon Miller]

By the way, I have been reading a bit of a layman's book on the brain. In it's description every perception/memory/etc that the brain has is created from assumptions that the brain makes about reality.

There are really people who see can't see motion, because the brain creates motion (and pretty much everything else we perceive/etc) out of assumptions based off of a huge collection of lines/colors/etc.

JM

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
As an example of the assumptions that science makes (There are many more) is empericism.

Science isn't a worldview - it's a tool. It makes assumptions based on what it needs to perform well as a tool, and that's perfectly valid.

If you make no assumptions, you might as well be drooling in a corner because you can't know if you are talking or feeling or existing or if gravity exists/etc.

You don't need to know those things in order to continue existing. My worldview makes no assumptions, but it does allow me to be pretty sure about a few things.

[Jon Miller]

No, if you don't assume empiricism you can't do science. Empiricism is a world view, and that is what science is based on. If you trust science to be correct in it's description of the world, than you have to beleive in empericism.

I don't think that you understand your assumptions, which place you in a worse position than those who honestly beleive in the flying spaggethi monster.

Even further, you can't interact with others, touch things or move things with assumptions. You can't do logic without assumptions, you can't reason without assumptions.

The existence of logic in the first place is only allowed through assumption.

JM

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
No, if you don't assume empericism you can't do science. Empericism is a world view, and that is what science is based on. If you trust science to be correct in it's description of the world, than you have to beleive in empericism.

This doesn't contradict what I said.

I don't think that you understand your assumptions, which place you in a worse position than those who honestly beleive in the flying spaggethi monster.

You are, of course, free to think that. I, as you might have guessed, disagree.

Even further, you can't interact with others, touch things or move things with assumptions. You can do logic without assumptions, you can't reason without assumptions.

I'm not sure you said what you wanted to say in this paragraph.

[DirtyMartini]

*empiricism

[Elok]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
But this assumes a rational process that is consented to by the would-be moral person, hence it begs the question. The best example which illustrates my point is that of love. Few would claim that this emanates from God, and no-one claims that it is a wholly rational process. Humans are perfectly capable of irrational constructs without the presence of God.

Well, many of us do claim that it emanates from God (ever read anything written by a Xian monk in an effusive mood?), but we'll leave that out. I assume by love you mean the feeling/complex of feelings--and that's different from morality in that it's not consciously done. You have to make a conscious effort to be the Good Samaritan and load the hurt guy on your donkey to take him to the inn (I figured I'd switch to a "positive morality" example for a change of pace; you can also read "it takes a conscious effort to pick a guy's pocket" if you like).

Love is a tyrant among the emotions that often takes you over against your will. You might find yourself feeling fond of someone you previously thought obnoxious. I suppose something similar is true of conscience pangs for morality, but people can and do fight both. In the case of love it's sometimes a good idea to do so, when you find yourself infatuated with someone with whom it would plainly never work out. Why not so with morals? And on what criteria would you decide not to go along, if the imperative were not absolutely to be obeyed?

Our fundamental conflict is that you see the question of morality as either God-given (by which I mean stems from the idea of God; whether you believe this to have any normative truth I don't know) or cognitivist. As a logical positivist I would be more inclined to look at non-cognitivist ideas of morality such as emotivism. I doubt you'd find the idea particularly satisfactory but then we're coming at the question of morality from very different angles. I'm interested in describing it whereas others are interested in prescribing it, perhaps in order to give principle to a legal system (where morality moves from governing your own behaviour to that of others).

Even if it's about your own behavior it's still prescriptive; it's just "what should I do" instead of "what should you do?"

Looked up Emotivism in Wikipedia, wound up scratching my head. Too much jargon. So, under emotivism, is there any way to compare two different ethical opinions? E.G., is it meaningful within that system to ask "Is 'thou shalt not bear false witness' better than 'thou shalt bear false witness only against that jerk Tony?'" Or is it some kind of PoMo thing?

I you must tie me down to a general humanistic moral principle it might look something like this...

1) A person who wishes to participate in society / communicate with others depends upon the theory of mind where an individual projects the perspective of another onto himself.
2) This relies (with not a small dollop of perversity) on the view that to at least some degree all people are equal
3) Stable society depends upon communication
4) 2+3 = Stable society depends on the view that people are equal
5) Fair approach to governance, i.e., one set of rules for all requires a balance of power between individuals
6) Unnecessary harm to another person violates 4. Taking into account 5, it also violates 2.
7) Much ponderous cogitation
8) Do to others what you would have done to yourself

You may find this familiar as R. Hillel's "Golden Rule". Ironically my view reaches the same conclusion using similar reasoning, but sans god. An interesting consequence is that cognitive morality only becomes relevant in the context of society, on your own it doesn't matter. This links back to my earlier point about cognitive morality being necessarily prescriptive, but I don't see morality as being necessarily cognitive.

I see a few problems. Chiefly, it depends on the assumption that all within a society behave the same way; a certain few violating the moral law would not cause collapse, nor does society collapse if everyone violates it a little. It does become less stable, but that's another thing, you assume a stable society is desired. Certain types of person actually thrive in times of societal turmoil (or as historians call them, "heroic ages"). What do you tell those people? And of course crime still pays, yadda yadda.

Also, in practice societies can be quite stable even with a tremendous amount of inequality. India was stable with certain people doomed from birth to spend their lives shoveling other people's feces and not being allowed to breathe in a brahmin's direction for millennia. It mainly changed with exposure to outside ideas, and it still hasn't changed all that much. Look at nonhuman societies, like social predators, where it's just understood that if you're bigger you get to eat first and the scrawny fellows gnaw the bones. Some human societies are stable in a similar way.

You might say that egalitarianism makes a society more stable, but it has its own form of instability. It tends to go together with democratic leanings, for one thing, and democracy is most certainly NOT stable.

Oh I don't know - let's say the albatross spending all of its life hitched with one partner even when thousands of miles apart and enduring the horrors that whatever ocean they live in is throwing at them. What of the human survival story such as the bottleneck in our population ~70K years ago and how we survived and prospered and made a royal mess of everything.

As I'm sure you can tell by my tone I don't take much stock in the idea of inspiring people by abstract examples; scriptural or otherwise. Emotion and reason are more powerful tools.

Well, if you don't take much stock in them, I won't bother to assail them.

Love the turn of phrase! You've summed up in an ill-advised use of the word "faith" pretty much my whole argument!

Snuh?

Gotta keep those cerebral juices flowing somehow.

Agreed.

[Jon Miller]

Yeah, please ignore the couple of spelling mistakes. I tried to find them all, but missed a couple. I like the firefox I have at home that flags spelling mistakes (however, would still not can't the can do one).

Jon Miller

[Zanarkand]

I like the world plenty and there are no gods.

Right.. Keep telling yourself that if you wish..

Free people don't need a god to tell them what to think and do.

And you consider people who do not believe in God free? Two years ago I was anti-christian, and I thought I knew what freedom was. But it was when I invited God into my life that I really was shown what it really means to be free.

And for all of you who keep saying "There is no God": Believe what you want, but those who do not want to hear the truth, will never hear it.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Elok

Get real. I have interests in reading but I don't sit down and read a book on the railroad tracks while a train's coming down to hit me. You have interests in things that are pleasurable to you: interest in friends because their company brings you pleasure (I assume you have 'em, and they do), interest in debate apparently because it lets you show off some big words, which gives you pleasure. You certainly don't seem to have any interest in encountering new ideas. But whatever.

It all boils down, as a matter of necessity, to self-interest under one guise or another.

Prove it.

You're making a completely ridiculous assumption that is contradicted by the evidence. Consider how people will sacrifice their own lives for causes they believe in, for their friends, or for the welfare of their children. People will often commit to projects that they will never see realized due to their own mortality. It's implausible to see this as some form of mental illness and attempts to reduce such motives to egoistic ones turn out to be implausible.

Explain these away, or just shut up and realize that you don't know what you are talking about. Your naive psychological egoism is flatly contradicted by the real behaviour of real human beings. If there is selfishness in human beings it operates at the genetic level (as Dawkins says), but it is important to realize that it is an insanely fallacious inference to then conclude that human beings are wholly self interested because their genes are (genes are quite happy to sacrifice individuals to propagate themselves).

Things that are interesting to you are by definition a form of self-interest. Likewise you are interested in avoiding things that are painful and detrimental to you. If you refuse to see how it all coheres, that's your bad faith, not mine. Not that, in a vacuum, bad faith is necessarily bad...

Nope. You are just full of ****. You are completely ignoring the argument and responding with your usual glib irrelevancies. Naive egoism doesn't fit the facts.

So people are completely immune to reasonable discussion? Quite possibly, but I'll try anyway, thanks.

Arguments that make conclusions involving values require at least one premise that is a statement of value. That means that if you want to change someone's values, you will need to use as a premise at least one value they already hold. This is unavoidable. There is nothing that prevents people from taking their altruistic values over their self interested ones, and they often do not (as in cases of personal sacrifice).

You're the one who's talking about nature here. Humans are not bound entirely by a preset nature; that's one of the distinctive things that makes us human. We're not meerkats, or ants, or wolves (though if you're going to talk about nature, our nearest relatives are chimps and they're not "naturally" very nice, social animals or not). We can choose our own way, and many of us do, and to assume that they're all wrong or secretly feeling terrible inside or in some other way missing out is just a bald assumption to make your worldview work.

There are some things we can't choose due to our natural constitution. That's common sense and not really worth arguing about.

Look at the deep political divide in America today, or at the Dubai Ports nonsense a couple of years back, or in your own fear and hate of the bourgeois and its fear and hate of folks like you. Xenophobia reduced? Nuh-uh, we've just switched targets. THEY are still out there, only now they're swarthy Arabs out to kill you, or bible-thumping lunatics out to take your rights away, or crazy ivy-league liberals conspiring to destroy the church and establish a police state (that last one's not really paranoia in your case, but it's usually unwarranted). We have a modern capitalist economy of fear, where you can choose for yourself who's out to get you and send e-mails to your friends about how this corporation or that nonprofit has just made another clear move towards its goal.

First off, you have confused intrinsic properties that people may have (such as race or skin colour) with beliefs they may hold.

Secondly, despite all this there is still much less xenophobia than there used to be, which was my point.

Yes, I know what you prefer. Actually, I'd rather not know too much. I disagree with you, obviously, but I want to more or less stay on the threadjack I've already started. I will rest on the retort that you are by your own logic the dogmatic slave of whatever brand of communism you have, and of the methods of philosophical inquiry your professors taught you. You thought that absurd line about circularity made sense, and that sounds like fettered thinking to me. So it seems slavery is in the eye of the beholder.

The problem here is that you're an ignorant **** who doesn't know what he is talking about. The questions you seem to think are so profound have been gone over in detail from pretty much every conceivable angle by people much smarter than you or me. Your naive psychological egoism doesn't fit with the facts, and without that your entire position goes down the toilet. Them's the facts and nothing you say can change them.

Just accept that you know nothing about this, and stop wasting people's time by posting bollocks.

Try reading about it. This is a good start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism

[DaShi]

Calm down people, it's just God you are talking about.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Zanarkand


Well, if you mean inspired as in that God has guided the writers, than I'll say that there are no scriptures or other books than the Bible where the writers have been guided.

What you are saying is that before the bible god had no interest in the world and relgious scriptures before that was pure human imagination. Ok, an argument could be that humans was becoming so bad that they needed guidance, so jesus was created, but isn't that a bit patetic move considering what was going on on this planet ? Planting him in israel wasn't exactly optimal - somewhere in the east would have been way more effective.

Btw, you forget the quoran wich certainly, according to evidence, is written guided by god and thereby is a more updated version of gods wishes.

[Elok]

Of course people do not always act egoistically. They often display altruism. I did not say that it does not exist, in case you have reading difficulties. I said that it is impossible to make a logical imperative out of it. At the base this is a very simple, if paradoxical, argument: altruism in its purest form is nonsensical. There is no way you can make an agent acting contrary to its own interests make sense from the agent's perspective. The only way it will work is if altruism is an illusion--if there is something (not necessarily a God or Gods) binding our fates together.

Such is the case with social contract altruism ("you scratch my back, I scratch yours," as I believe CH put it), since each individual pitches in with the understanding that others will do so in kind, so it's a corporate effort. Altruism is an illusion.

But does anyone contest the nobility of helping with no expectation of gain in return? Nobody I know, except Randroids, who we're pretty much all agreed deserve to fall into wood chippers. Is that a worship of stupidity? It is unless in some sense there is gain in the act of giving. And that, I think--not some condescending theory about Freudian father figures or oppressive patriarchies or whatever's in fashion in douchebag circles--is at the root of religion. It's an attempt to explain our own madness.

I realize that you're upset that I didn't get a degree in thinkology and lose my ability to communicate, become a sort of cognitive eunuch like you did. Perhaps it's the fault of the circles from another dimension. But it's your problem, Aggie, not mine. Quit trying to browbeat me, and if you find my style so terrible I don't care in the slightest if you put me on ignore. Go ahead, do it.

[Kuciwalker]

As I tried to say earlier, the flaw in your argument is that you assume that "self-interest" is a logical imperative. To make that true, you have to define self-interest so widely that it would include altruism.

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by Agathon


Personally, I rather prefer that God doesn't exist and that there is no final judgement, because every single religious person would be in for a horrible shock.

Really?

I prefer that God doesn't exist because if he did it would mean he is a HUGE *****!