As an aside, if you’re ever in Boston, you might like to meet a family that has both backyard chickens (one past henopause) living their best life, and little kids continously engaged in philosophical and other debates.
If someone puts almost no weight on a priori claims a la “your existence irrefutable proof of God”, then you would appear quite stupid. Even if a large number of people agreed with you, the reliance on a single kind of evidence could be perceived as a category error which makes you fundamentally out of touch.
And, let’s be real, the position that literally no evidence could disprove god is quite unbelievable. You shouldn’t sneer at someone for just saying that!
I don't quite get what you mean by 'reliance on a single kind of evidence '. Do you mean that you cannot believe a theory if your belief mainly hinges on one Import fact, or one line of logical reasoning? And what is it that you are out of touch with when you do so?
I mean, I think there's good reason to say: "Philosophical arguments belong in their own little tightly-guarded cage, unless there is a way to empirically test them (at which point, they become part of the more accessible and relevant field of science)." Without empiricism, all we're really doing is "shuffling definitions", and one philosophical argument can be easily and instantly undermined by another (that is, an "alternative reshuffling"). And so the question is, What use to us is this Venn-esque domain of "Philosophical and Non-Empirical" (of which, I believe God arguments are a clear representative)? In my opinion, it's simply the recreational value of constructing such arguments, nothing more. But I'm not denying the significance of recreational value, by any means, I just don’t think the beasts lurking within should be granted free range
I think that particuliarly if one relies on a priori reasoning to create an argument for God that explicitly disclaims the role of experience in determining its validity, then people are more justified in calling you confused.
You're definitely not stupid. You're probably even a "genius" by any casual sense of the term. The issue is, you've come up with a creative argument for God, and now you're proudly waving the Theism flag. Look, we all do creative things, like dressing up in drag and spending the weekend at truck stops. But come Monday morning, we stop calling ourselves Nancy. Creative solutions to abstract problems have their rightful place, but they're not always conducive to life as normal
You remind me of a bit from Lewis's "Screwtape Letters" when the arch-devil is advising his student what to do if the human he is tempting finds a logical argument for God:
" I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said “Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning”, the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added “Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind”, he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic”. He is now safe in Our Father’s house."
Well, let us consider generalization of the comment by analysis of its form:
1A (Abstract Problem) One day we get bored with women and think we could do the job better
1B (Abstract Problem) One day we get bored Theism/Atheism debates and think we could do the job better
2A (Relevant Domain) We enter the truck stop
2B (Relevant Domain) We enter into Analytical Philosophy
3A (Creative Solution) We assume the role of women and then outperform them
3B (Creative Solution) We devise a superior God argument
4A (Normal Life) What happens at the truck stop stays at the truck stop
4A (Normal Life) What happens in Analytical Philosophy stays in Analytical Philosophy
The issue with the generalization seems to be the extent to which 1 intersects with 4, and whether 3 formulated within 2 is meaningful within that intersection.
With the problem of Nazism and practical life, we have a broad intersection, and its at least plausible that solutions within the domain of Moral Philosophy could give us valuable counsel for acting (eg, assassinating Hitler) within that intersection. Same with the problem of disease and practical life, and solutions from the domain of immunology. But with God and Drag-Fetishism, there's just no intersection with regular life
I don't think that all theists are stupid, far from it, like you said, many very high IQ people and smart philosophers are theists. However, I have the intuition that the vast majority of smart theists are strong motivated reasoner in a way that the vast majority of smart atheists and agnostics aren't. I.e they start from what they want to be true, and argue cleverly to it, rather than starting from obvious premises and seeing honestly where it leads.
I still think that theism is a completely insane view to hold (given the problem of evil) and I say that as someone who studied philosophy in academia and read Pruss, Koon, Rasmussen, Aquinas, Van Inwagen etc. Theists can be very smart but theism is a completely insane view. And the best explanation for why very smart people can hold such a crazy view, is, Imo, strong motivated reasoning.
I think I'm motivated not to be a theist as I'm temperamentally pessimistic, strongly believed in atheism for my entire life, and still sometimes find theism intuitively repulsive.
Why not just dismiss the Theism vs Atheism question outright and focus on UFOlogy instead? Carl Jung, Jacques Vallee, and Diana Pasulka have cultivated rich frameworks ripe for expansion
Also, in UFOlogy you've got fresh and innovative ideas to work with. What "new" thing has happened in the God question since that Aquifina guy ripped off Aristotle centuries ago? Even the "Process God" that Bertrand Russell's Principia butt buddy came up is the same old stale and static bedrock, only buried deep within an apparently dynamic but ultimately illusory interface with our reality
The deal is that BB finds God repugnant, which I'm guessing is caused by all the moral baggage folks have forced upon the concept. But with space aliens, you've basically got yourself a blank slate
I would say that this is merely a function of theism being the starting position. Most non-theist are non-theists via conversion, and have thus put a bit more thought into it. That’s just how all convert vs non-convert dynamics work.
Motivated reasoning would only make sense for those who wished to believe in a God to begin with: yet that is not the set of all intelligent theists. Take C. S. Lewis for example; he described his conversion from atheism to theism this way:
"The real terror was that if you seriously believed in even such a “God” or “Spirit” as I admitted, a wholly new situation developed. As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its gravecloths, and stood upright and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from “the God of popular religion”. My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am”.
"People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God”. To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat. The best image of my predicament is the meeting of Mime and Wotan in the first act of Siegfried; hier brauch’ ich nicht Spärer noch Späher, Einsam will ich . . . (I’ve no use for spies and snoopers. I would be private. . . .)
"Remember, I had always wanted, above all things, not to be “interfered with”. I had wanted (mad wish) “to call my soul my own”. I had been far more anxious to avoid suffering than to achieve delight. I had always aimed at limited liabilities. The supernatural itself had been to me, first, an illicit dram, and then, as by a drunkard’s reaction, nauseous. Even my recent attempt to live my philosophy had secretly (I now knew) been hedged round by all sorts of reservations. I had pretty well known that my ideal of virtue would never be allowed to lead me into anything intolerably painful; I would be “reasonable”. But now what had been an ideal became a command; and what might not be expected of one? Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would He also be “reasonable” in that other, more comfortable, sense? Not the slightest assurance on that score was offered me. Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can be made was upon me. The demand was not even “All or nothing”…Now, the demand was simply “All”.
"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?"
I don't necessarily consider theists like Rasmussen, Pruss, or you stupid.
I just consider you to have a particularly good adaptation for arguing and rationalizing, where you come to rationalize one particularly absurd belief in a smart-sounding way. It's not surprising, given that this belief used to be extremely evolutionary adaptive until very recent times. In a way, you're playing a social status game is to see who can give the most eloquent and nice-sounding responses to interrogations about the existence of God. The perfect way of providing a "persuasive" argument for the existence of God is to be both vaporous and vaguely plausible. And that, obviously, is a very g-loaded activity, the success of which either makes or breaks perception of intelligence in your inner circle. A Facebook-meme theist fails this test and rightly is perceived as stupid, whereas a theist like Rasmussen hits the vaporous+vague sweet spot, and is perceived as intelligent, either by his fellow theists or by fellow hyper-rationalizing non-theists.
Some theists are stupid, some are intelligent, and some are average. But all of them are wrong.
My father once told me that Judaism doesn’t have a lot of patience for people who don’t believe in God, but there is ample room for debating about what *kind* of God exists. I always think of it when I encounter the kind of atheists you are describing here.
You jest in calling Scotus a "Duns," but that is actually where the insult "dunce" comes from. It was a result of the later humanist thinkers reacting against medieval scholasticism and seeing those earlier scholars as, well, dunces. So the name of one of the most prominent scholastics became a term of abuse to call someone a dummy.
Liked just for the Scotus pu
Glad I resubscribed. You are very entertaining.
As an aside, if you’re ever in Boston, you might like to meet a family that has both backyard chickens (one past henopause) living their best life, and little kids continously engaged in philosophical and other debates.
If someone puts almost no weight on a priori claims a la “your existence irrefutable proof of God”, then you would appear quite stupid. Even if a large number of people agreed with you, the reliance on a single kind of evidence could be perceived as a category error which makes you fundamentally out of touch.
And, let’s be real, the position that literally no evidence could disprove god is quite unbelievable. You shouldn’t sneer at someone for just saying that!
I don't quite get what you mean by 'reliance on a single kind of evidence '. Do you mean that you cannot believe a theory if your belief mainly hinges on one Import fact, or one line of logical reasoning? And what is it that you are out of touch with when you do so?
I mean, I think there's good reason to say: "Philosophical arguments belong in their own little tightly-guarded cage, unless there is a way to empirically test them (at which point, they become part of the more accessible and relevant field of science)." Without empiricism, all we're really doing is "shuffling definitions", and one philosophical argument can be easily and instantly undermined by another (that is, an "alternative reshuffling"). And so the question is, What use to us is this Venn-esque domain of "Philosophical and Non-Empirical" (of which, I believe God arguments are a clear representative)? In my opinion, it's simply the recreational value of constructing such arguments, nothing more. But I'm not denying the significance of recreational value, by any means, I just don’t think the beasts lurking within should be granted free range
I think that particuliarly if one relies on a priori reasoning to create an argument for God that explicitly disclaims the role of experience in determining its validity, then people are more justified in calling you confused.
You're definitely not stupid. You're probably even a "genius" by any casual sense of the term. The issue is, you've come up with a creative argument for God, and now you're proudly waving the Theism flag. Look, we all do creative things, like dressing up in drag and spending the weekend at truck stops. But come Monday morning, we stop calling ourselves Nancy. Creative solutions to abstract problems have their rightful place, but they're not always conducive to life as normal
You remind me of a bit from Lewis's "Screwtape Letters" when the arch-devil is advising his student what to do if the human he is tempting finds a logical argument for God:
" I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said “Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning”, the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added “Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind”, he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic”. He is now safe in Our Father’s house."
Touche! My Master has trained me well in my approach to silencing the Enemy
Your comment is well formulated but I have a hard time generalizing it to other situations.
What if a german officer, having discovered that Nazism was evil, decided to risk his life to assasinate Hitler?
What if a doctor, having discovered that vaccinations protect against small pox, decided to try to get all children in the wirld vaccinated?
Wouldn't your argument be equally efficient against those two?
Well, let us consider generalization of the comment by analysis of its form:
1A (Abstract Problem) One day we get bored with women and think we could do the job better
1B (Abstract Problem) One day we get bored Theism/Atheism debates and think we could do the job better
2A (Relevant Domain) We enter the truck stop
2B (Relevant Domain) We enter into Analytical Philosophy
3A (Creative Solution) We assume the role of women and then outperform them
3B (Creative Solution) We devise a superior God argument
4A (Normal Life) What happens at the truck stop stays at the truck stop
4A (Normal Life) What happens in Analytical Philosophy stays in Analytical Philosophy
The issue with the generalization seems to be the extent to which 1 intersects with 4, and whether 3 formulated within 2 is meaningful within that intersection.
With the problem of Nazism and practical life, we have a broad intersection, and its at least plausible that solutions within the domain of Moral Philosophy could give us valuable counsel for acting (eg, assassinating Hitler) within that intersection. Same with the problem of disease and practical life, and solutions from the domain of immunology. But with God and Drag-Fetishism, there's just no intersection with regular life
I don't think that all theists are stupid, far from it, like you said, many very high IQ people and smart philosophers are theists. However, I have the intuition that the vast majority of smart theists are strong motivated reasoner in a way that the vast majority of smart atheists and agnostics aren't. I.e they start from what they want to be true, and argue cleverly to it, rather than starting from obvious premises and seeing honestly where it leads.
I still think that theism is a completely insane view to hold (given the problem of evil) and I say that as someone who studied philosophy in academia and read Pruss, Koon, Rasmussen, Aquinas, Van Inwagen etc. Theists can be very smart but theism is a completely insane view. And the best explanation for why very smart people can hold such a crazy view, is, Imo, strong motivated reasoning.
I think I'm motivated not to be a theist as I'm temperamentally pessimistic, strongly believed in atheism for my entire life, and still sometimes find theism intuitively repulsive.
Why not just dismiss the Theism vs Atheism question outright and focus on UFOlogy instead? Carl Jung, Jacques Vallee, and Diana Pasulka have cultivated rich frameworks ripe for expansion
What a strange thing to say. Imagine walking up to a UFOlogist type and saying "Why not just dismiss the UFO question and focus on theism instead?"
Also, in UFOlogy you've got fresh and innovative ideas to work with. What "new" thing has happened in the God question since that Aquifina guy ripped off Aristotle centuries ago? Even the "Process God" that Bertrand Russell's Principia butt buddy came up is the same old stale and static bedrock, only buried deep within an apparently dynamic but ultimately illusory interface with our reality
The deal is that BB finds God repugnant, which I'm guessing is caused by all the moral baggage folks have forced upon the concept. But with space aliens, you've basically got yourself a blank slate
I would say that this is merely a function of theism being the starting position. Most non-theist are non-theists via conversion, and have thus put a bit more thought into it. That’s just how all convert vs non-convert dynamics work.
Motivated reasoning would only make sense for those who wished to believe in a God to begin with: yet that is not the set of all intelligent theists. Take C. S. Lewis for example; he described his conversion from atheism to theism this way:
"The real terror was that if you seriously believed in even such a “God” or “Spirit” as I admitted, a wholly new situation developed. As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its gravecloths, and stood upright and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from “the God of popular religion”. My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am”.
"People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God”. To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat. The best image of my predicament is the meeting of Mime and Wotan in the first act of Siegfried; hier brauch’ ich nicht Spärer noch Späher, Einsam will ich . . . (I’ve no use for spies and snoopers. I would be private. . . .)
"Remember, I had always wanted, above all things, not to be “interfered with”. I had wanted (mad wish) “to call my soul my own”. I had been far more anxious to avoid suffering than to achieve delight. I had always aimed at limited liabilities. The supernatural itself had been to me, first, an illicit dram, and then, as by a drunkard’s reaction, nauseous. Even my recent attempt to live my philosophy had secretly (I now knew) been hedged round by all sorts of reservations. I had pretty well known that my ideal of virtue would never be allowed to lead me into anything intolerably painful; I would be “reasonable”. But now what had been an ideal became a command; and what might not be expected of one? Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would He also be “reasonable” in that other, more comfortable, sense? Not the slightest assurance on that score was offered me. Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can be made was upon me. The demand was not even “All or nothing”…Now, the demand was simply “All”.
"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?"
I don't necessarily consider theists like Rasmussen, Pruss, or you stupid.
I just consider you to have a particularly good adaptation for arguing and rationalizing, where you come to rationalize one particularly absurd belief in a smart-sounding way. It's not surprising, given that this belief used to be extremely evolutionary adaptive until very recent times. In a way, you're playing a social status game is to see who can give the most eloquent and nice-sounding responses to interrogations about the existence of God. The perfect way of providing a "persuasive" argument for the existence of God is to be both vaporous and vaguely plausible. And that, obviously, is a very g-loaded activity, the success of which either makes or breaks perception of intelligence in your inner circle. A Facebook-meme theist fails this test and rightly is perceived as stupid, whereas a theist like Rasmussen hits the vaporous+vague sweet spot, and is perceived as intelligent, either by his fellow theists or by fellow hyper-rationalizing non-theists.
Some theists are stupid, some are intelligent, and some are average. But all of them are wrong.
Sophistry is a ubiquitous human pastime, alright.
My father once told me that Judaism doesn’t have a lot of patience for people who don’t believe in God, but there is ample room for debating about what *kind* of God exists. I always think of it when I encounter the kind of atheists you are describing here.
You jest in calling Scotus a "Duns," but that is actually where the insult "dunce" comes from. It was a result of the later humanist thinkers reacting against medieval scholasticism and seeing those earlier scholars as, well, dunces. So the name of one of the most prominent scholastics became a term of abuse to call someone a dummy.
I first read the subtitle as “Rasputin” - still thought it was a good point.
All theists are stupid; all atheists are stupid; we are all stupid compared to supreme intelligence.