Darwinian Debating Device #13: Distorting or dismissing self-evident truths

In the Denying the truth is not the same as not knowing it thread, we see the Darwinist tendency to distort or dismiss self-evident truth (and, behind this, to deny first principles of right reason) in action. Another noteworthy DDD, no 14 by count so far.

This starts in the very first comment:

TT, 1: Barry, you wield self-evident truths as if they were weapons. Declaring that something is a self-evident truth does not make it so. Is it a self-evident truth that the sparkling point of light in the night sky is a star? 99% of the time (or more, I don’t really know), this extrapolation may be correct. Except when it is a plant or a galaxy.

In many cases, what somebody calls a self-evident truth is nothing more than opinion. For a theist, the presence of god is self-evident; the ultimate nature of morality is self-evident, the uniqueness of man is self-evident. But they aren’t.

By no 9, BA laid out:

. . . anything that is even remotely close to esoteric [–> or which is significantly rooted in inferential steps] cannot possibly be a self-evident.

Here is the classic example: 2+2=4. A person perceives the truth of the proposition merely by understanding it. Interestingly 587 X 264=154,968 is not self-evidently true.

Here’s another: I am conscious. If I deny that statement I have descended into patently absurd self-referential incoherence.

By 11, he added:

It is called the “hard problem of consciousness” for a reason my friend. Actually, for theistic dualists such as Box and myself, the problem is not hard at all. For materialist it is well-nigh insoluble.

You experience subjective self-awareness. That cannot be denied. Yet a materialists’ metaphysical premises utterly exclude the possibility of a “real” subjective self that is not a “physical” thing. It is called a “hard problem” because there is no good answer to how a “physical thing” can have subjective self-awareness. How can a bag of chemicals have subjective self-awareness? This does not mean that materialists don’t try to answer the question. Indeed they do. And their answers are stupid. Just this week News has highlighted a materialist spewing the hoary “we only think that we think” idiocy. The other dodge is to say that “consciousness” is an “emergent property” of the brain system, as if that is an explanation instead of a confession of ignorance.

So yes, the professor who is the subject of this post is denying that he exists (in the second sense of the word).

By 26, MF weighs in:

In 27, TK adds:

And to a savant, 587×264= 154,968 might be just as obviously true as 2+2=4 meaning what is self evidently true depends on the individual.

So, in 28, I intervened (and here take advantage of OP capacities to add figures), primarily addressing MF but also others:

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>> It has long been discussed in and around UD (and long before that, elsewhere . . . ), that self evident truths, ON UNDERSTANDING such, are directly seen as true, and as necessarily true; typically on pain of PATENT absurdity on attempted denial. Notice, not merely a synonym for obviousness . . . a very common caricature or misunderstanding that easily becomes a strawman set up to be knocked over.

As you know there are results in say logic calculus, that can be shown to be so on pain of self contradiction (and others that subtly self-refer and contradict), but such will be seen only after significant effort. These are not self-evident. Self evidence will require actual truth, necessary truth easily seen based on our experience of the world as rational creatures, and patent absurdity or error on attempted denial.

Aquinas long ago gave the refining point that such may be so in themselves, but for one not in a position to understand, they will not be seen as such. (IIRC, he gave as an example, truths of Plane Geometry.)

For the cases above, something like 2 + 3 = 5 is simply seen once the direct substitution from the Indo-Arabic numerals to representative “stick” counters is made:

|| + ||| —> |||||

But in your attempted objection, no such direct simple process is at work.

First, there is a complex involvement of the place value notation system, which when I had to teach it for digital electronics, showed itself very involved. Second, the operation of multiplication (repeated addition) is so involved that people usually simply memorise — with considerable effort — the times tables over the course of a few years in school. This is taken basically on authority.

Then, in the attempted undermining case, the feasible mechanism is one or more of the long multiplication algorithms, again usually accepted on authority with maybe a simple example or two to make it palatable.

In short, your attempted counter example is haring away on a tangent, after a red herring.

The point is brought out in BA’s second case:

I am conscious. If I deny that statement I have descended into patently absurd self-referential incoherence.

TT tried to assert emergence of consciousness as a known effect of brain chemistry, not realising — thanks to today’s ever so pervasive indoctrination in unreflective, lab coat clad a priori evolutionary materialism — that in fact this view is not only not warranted by any chain of scientific evidence, but that it ends directly in self-referential absurdity. As famed evolutionary theorist J B S Haldane pointed out over eighty years ago:

“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes [–> including of course self-aware, perceiving, rational, reasoning, warranting, knowing, understanding consciousness] are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” [“When I am dead,” in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]

Oops.

(Cf here on in context, especially the sections on the Smith model and the challenge to evolutionary materialism. The onward note on grounding of morality will help also.)

Of course, the longstanding root problem for you MF and others of like ilk is, that self evidence is a grounding issue, setting limited, certain start-points for reasoning that serve as plumbline tests for worldviews, cf. here on.

Here, there be dragons — FIRST PRINCIPLES OF RIGHT REASON and CORE KNOWABLE, UNDENIABLE TRUTHS (such as the classic one from Josiah Royce via Elton Trueblood: Error exists).

Long time UD regulars know all about the vapours ever so many materialists get when we start, behold, a bright red ball on the table (or in the sky . . . ), A,

such that we see the world-partition:

W = { A | NOT_A }

Hence, identity, A is A, not NOT_A, and hence the immediate concomitants LNC that (A AND ~A) = 0 and LEM (A X-OR ~A) = 1. And no, Q-mech is not an out (it rests on these first principles), and no you are not free to go on demanding turtles all the way down or in a circle.

The buck stops here.

And, such first principles of reason do great execution across the various post-/ultra-modernist schemes of thinking as well as to a priori evolutionary materialism, as such turn to deny self evident truth and land in absurdities.

Denying the patent truth is not the same as not knowing it, or having a duty to acknowledge it. (And no, per the same patent absurdities in moral form, might and manipulation do not and cannot make ‘right.’ which points like a compass needle where so many would not go, the only serious candidate for an IS capable of grounding OUGHT at world-foundations level, is the inherently good creator God who is a necessary, maximally great being the root and sustainer of reality. Not a proof beyond all doubts and hyperskepticism, but a strong indicator as to the nature of a reality in which we find ourselves inescapably governed by ought.)

It is high time for fresh thinking.>>

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No, self-evidence of truths is not at all  a matter of obviousness or being strongly believed.

We speak here instead of actual truth, seen as necessarily true once properly understood in light of our conscious rational experience of our world, necessarily true on pain of immediate descent into patent, absurd error.

Where also, that E = error exists is undeniable, warranted credible self-evident truth no 1.

That is, first, we all know it, starting with vivid memories of red X’s across our sums in primary school. Second, we know from our habit of arguing and quarreling, that this is a generally known consensus. Third, it is undeniable, as to try to deny it directly demonstrates it: E –> ~E, (E AND ~ E) = 0, so necessarily E.

Which points to the hard core of reason, its first undeniable principles — the plumbline we use to test our thinking.

As well as to first truths that expose the utter incoherence of ever so many modernist or post-/ ultra- modernist views that deny the reality of truth [or assert that truth is merely relative] or dismiss the possibility of objective, well-grounded knowledge of truth beyond reasonable doubt, or resort to selective hyperskeptical dismissals, etc etc.

One last thing: to the one who has had a life-changing, transformational encounter with the living God, the reality of God is no more open to doubt than his or her own consciousness, or the reality of his or her mother as a loving, caring parent (and not some silly zombie).

It is time for fresh thinking. END

PS: Re WJM in 4, dirt pile (one, not made by human hands, sitting oh about 6 mi due S of where I am):

. . . and, a Sand Castle:

On seeing and understanding, the two seem to me undeniably disparate, though both are piled up dirt. The difference between the two being manifest in the functionally specific complex organisation of the latter, with associated information; pointing to intelligently directed configuration or contrivance, aka design. The challenge is to extend what we know about FSCO/I in the here and now to the unobserved actual past of origins, based on best current causal explanation of traces we can observe in the present.

 PPS: The FSCO/I origin challenge: