It is almost — almost — amusing but then quite sad to see how objectors to design theory play with logic and worldviews issues, then run away when the substantial issues are taken up.
Let me clip from the FFT, AJ vs Charles thread to pick up these matters, but to avoid making this utterly too long, let me point here on for the underlying questions of worldviews, first plausibles and self-evident plumb-line truths such as the first principles of right reason.
While we are at it, let us observe from the diagram on the right, how worldviews issues influence everything we do as a civilisation, and how the issue arises, on whether business as usual is a march of folly and needs to be turned from to move to a more sustainable, more sound alternative.
In our day, it is pretty clear that evolutionary materialistic scientism and its fellow travellers rule the roost, but that such is inescapably incoherent, self-refuting, self-falsifying and amoral, opening the door to ruthless nihilist factionalism.
So, it is a service not only to the ID community but the civilisation to say what is not politically corrupt today, the unmentionable fact that A is A.
So, now, let us proceed by clipping some posts in the relevant thread:
FFT5: The implications of the familiar extraordinary.
In this thread, there are arguments [posted] that . . . as an observable phenomenon . . . show that we are capable of significant choice and reasoning, i.e. we are responsibly, rationally, significantly free, conscious, en-conscienced, morally governed, communicating creatures. (Indeed, those trying to object are operating on the implicit premise that we are urged by conscience toward the truth and the right; and if we were not, this world would descend into a dark, chaotic ruin in short order. It is a good thing that something urges us on to the truth and the right.)
Locke, in Sec 5 of his essay on human understanding (and yes, I add scriptural references i/l/o his cites and allusions), aptly comments:
Men have reason to be well satisfied with what God hath thought fit for them, since he hath given them (as St. Peter says [NB: i.e. 2 Pet 1:2 – 4]) pana pros zoen kaieusebeian, whatsoever is necessary for the conveniences of life and information of virtue; and has put within the reach of their discovery, the comfortable provision for this life, and the way that leads to a better. How short soever their knowledge may come of an universal or perfect comprehension of whatsoever is, it yet secures their great concernments [Prov 1: 1 – 7], that they have light enough to lead them to the knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own duties [cf Rom 1 – 2 & 13, Ac 17, Jn 3:19 – 21, Eph 4:17 – 24, Isaiah 5:18 & 20 – 21, Jer. 2:13, Titus 2:11 – 14 etc, etc]. Men may find matter sufficient to busy their heads, and employ their hands with variety, delight, and satisfaction, if they will not boldly quarrel with their own constitution, and throw away the blessings their hands are filled with, because they are not big enough to grasp everything . . . It will be no excuse to an idle and untoward servant [Matt 24:42 – 51], who would not attend his business by candle light, to plead that he had not broad sunshine. The Candle that is set up in us [Prov 20:27] shines bright enough for all our purposes . . . If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do muchwhat as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly. [Text references added to document the sources of Locke’s allusions and citations.]
All of that is in the context of rebuking a lazy, sneeringly supercilious selective hyperskepticism that will scorn more than adequate warrant for ethical theism, because it shuns the premise of moral government: accountability on plainly recognisable duty, before our Maker, Lord, Governor and utterly just Judge.
But, that is a bit quick off the mark.
Let’s start with computational substrates, whether mechanically or electrically analogue or digital or neural network. For instance a ball and disk integrator as was used in tide table machines or naval gunlaying computers is clearly a cause-effect, blindly mechanical system. If it has a fault or is badly programmed, it will err, and it cares not, it is just like Monadology’s Mill-Wheels grinding away blindly. Leibniz:
[P]erception, and that which depends upon it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions. Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain perception.
There is no recognition of meaning, no perception, no purpose, just blind cause-effect chains externally arranged to yield the solution to certain differential equations. GIGO, and all that. Likewise, the old Pentium chip neither knew nor understood nor cared about the wired in errors that led to the early recall. And, a neural network is not in principle any different. (BTW this points to serious design inferences on the relevant hardware and software in bio-cybernetics systems, but that is a secondary point.)
The primary point has been highlighted by Reppert:
. . . let us suppose that brain state A, which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, together cause the belief that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts . . . [But] if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and [so] we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as [C S] Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be, the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur in virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions.
In short, a physicalist account of mindedness (much less, guidance by light of conscience) faces an ugly, impassable gulch.
In effect, rocks — even refined and carefully organised rocks — have no dreams; computation is not intentional contemplation.
At this point, evolutionary materialism and its fellow travellers — and nope you cannot properly, conveniently open up rhetorical daylight between some vague agnosticism and full-blown evo mat to deflect this — face an impassable gulch.
One, that brings out what was already highlighted: mindedness, consciousness, reasoned inference and conscience’s compass-pointing alike are all reduced to grand delusion on evo mat premises.
Grand delusion would collapse responsible, rational freedom and so falls into irretrievable incoherence and absurdity. Thence, the necessary falsity Pearcey and others have pointed to.
But in reality, rational, responsible, conscience-compass bearing consciousness is our first undeniable empirical fact. The fact through which we perceive all others.
This is the familiar extraordinary phenomenon, the pivot on which the project of building a sound worldview turns. In effect, unless a worldview is compatible with our being responsible, reasonable, conscience-guided and significantly free beings, it cannot even sit to the table for a discussion of comparative difficulties. It is silenced by being inconsistent with rationality. It is patently, irretrievably absurd and necessarily false. (Evo mat and fellow traveller ideologies, I am looking straight at you.)>>
So, we have to first face mindedness and the limitations of computational substrates.
FFT6A: Last evening, in FFT5, we looked at the familiar extraordinary; it is almost amusing to see how this has been almost studiously pushed aside. One hopes that the latest focus for hyperskeptical dismissiveness, heptades, will now settle down.
At this point, we have to deal with a key conclusion in 153:
. . . a physicalist account of mindedness (much less, guidance by light of conscience) faces an ugly, impassable gulch.
In effect, rocks — even refined and carefully organised rocks — have no dreams; computation is not intentional contemplation.
At this point, evolutionary materialism and its fellow travellers — and nope you cannot properly, conveniently open up rhetorical daylight between some vague agnosticism and full-blown evo mat to deflect this — face an impassable gulch.
One, that brings out what was already highlighted: mindedness, consciousness, reasoned inference and conscience’s compass-pointing alike are all reduced to grand delusion on evo mat premises.
Grand delusion would collapse responsible, rational freedom and so falls into irretrievable incoherence and absurdity. Thence, the necessary falsity Pearcey and others have pointed to.
But in reality, rational, responsible, conscience-compass bearing consciousness is our first undeniable empirical fact. The fact through which we perceive all others.
This is the familiar extraordinary phenomenon, the pivot on which the project of building a sound worldview turns. In effect, unless a worldview is compatible with our being responsible, reasonable, conscience-guided and significantly free beings, it cannot even sit to the table for a discussion of comparative difficulties. It is silenced by being inconsistent with rationality. It is patently, irretrievably absurd and necessarily false. (Evo mat and fellow traveller ideologies, I am looking straight at you.)
What sort of world do we have to live in for there to be creatures like us?
That’s rather like a point R W Hamming made in addressing a thought exercise that counter-balances one of the mythical paradigm cases of empirical investigation, the dropping of a musket-ball and a cannon-ball from the famous leaning tower of Pisa. And yes, the very same News who so many hyperskeptics sneer at brought this to attention:
Let us next consider Galileo. Not too long ago I was trying to put myself in Galileo’s shoes, as it were, so that I might feel how he came to discover the law of falling bodies. I try to do this kind of thing so that I can learn to think like the masters did-I deliberately try to think as they might have done.
Well, Galileo was a well-educated man and a master of scholastic arguments. He well knew how to argue the number of angels on the head of a pin [–> which is actually about location vs extension], how to argue both sides of any question. He was trained in these arts far better than any of us these days. I picture him sitting one day with a light and a heavy ball, one in each hand, and tossing them gently. He says, hefting them, “It is obvious to anyone that heavy objects fall faster than light ones-and, anyway, Aristotle says so.” “But suppose,” he says to himself, having that kind of a mind, “that in falling the body broke into two pieces. Of course the two pieces would immediately slow down to their appropriate speeds. But suppose further that one piece happened to touch the other one. Would they now be one piece and both speed up? Suppose I tied the two pieces together. How tightly must I do it to make them one piece? A light string? A rope? Glue? When are two pieces one?”
The more he thought about it-and the more you think about it-the more unreasonable becomes the question of when two bodies are one. There is simply no reasonable answer to the question of how a body knows how heavy it is-if it is one piece, or two, or many. Since falling bodies do something, the only possible thing is that they all fall at the same speed-unless interfered with by other forces. There’s nothing else they can do. He may have later made some experiments, but I strongly suspect that something like what I imagined actually happened. I later found a similar story in a book by Polya [7. G. Polya, Mathematical Methods in Science, MAA, 1963, pp. 83-85.]. Galileo found his law not by experimenting but by simple, plain thinking, by scholastic reasoning.
I know that the textbooks often present the falling body law as an experimental observation; I am claiming that it is a logical law, a consequence of how we tend to think . . .
This ties back to the view that mathematics is substantially the logic of structure and quantity, which we may freely explore because we are responsibly and rationally significantly free.>>
Again: What sort of world do we have to live in for there to be creatures like us?
What sort of world do we have to live in for there to be creatures like us?
This surfaces a key issue, that two truths x and y must be such that we never have y = NOT-x; that is in a coherent world all true statements — those that accurately describe facets of reality — will be mutually compatible. I note this, fully recognising that for many, this is actually quite a difficult point today; as, various ideologies have led to a conflation of truth with perception or opinion. Hence, a conversation I had today that turned on the concept, “my truth.” Language decay is an old problem, and Orwell pointed out what could be done through new-speak and double-talk. How many are two plus two, Mr Smith?
My answer was and is, that we already have perfectly adequate words for opinions and perceptions; so, there is no need to corrupt the meaning of the precious or even vital word, truth. The truth — as Ari noted long ago in Metaphysics 1011b — says of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.
This in turn brings us to the question of being and non-being, of possible and impossible being, of contingent and necessary being. Thus, of causal roots of the world, of reality. And it points to the issue of possible worlds: comprehensive enough descriptions of how things could be or are.
Impossible beings such as a square circle cannot exist in any possible world. As, core characteristics stand in mutual contradiction and cannot hold of the same thing, X, under the same circumstances. Here, squarishness and circularity.
By contrast, possible beings could exist in at least one possible world. Contingent ones would not do so in all possible worlds but would exist in at least one. I think, in 100 years there will be unicorns, as biotech will be there and people will be willing to pay to have one. Just as we seem to be seeing ever more miniature sized horses already.
Necessary beings must exist in any possible world, as they are frameworking requisites of a world existing. For instance, two-ness or distinct identity (equivalent) must be there for a distinct world to be. This is non-trivial, as distinct identity has three immediate corollaries: Law of Identity, Law of Excluded Middle, Law of Non-Contradiction.
That is, core logic is built into any possible world; including of course the logic of structure and quantity, i.e. mathematical realities. (NB: We already see here, a key reason for the awesome power of Mathematics in our world and especially in scientific work. [So much for the sneer that this thread has little or no relevance to Science.])
Back to us, as being able to significantly freely discuss our concerns responsibly and rationally, and having an inner compass-sense that insistently points to the truth and the right — conscience.
What sort of world must this be to allow such. and what must be in its frameworking structure?
First, we already saw that the denial of responsible, rational, significant freedom lets grand delusion loose and instantly ends in absurdity. Self-evidently, this is a world in which responsibly rational and significantly free, morally governed creatures are possible and in fact actual.
That’s already a huge result and it sweeps away all worldviews — their name is legion — that are incompatible with such creatures. This of course includes evolutionary materialistic scientism, its fellow travellers, radical subjectivism and radical relativism. (Cf. the chain of comments here on, above.)
Next, we face the implication of the IS-OUGHT gap, on many levels. A world with moral government has to be such that OUGHT is well-rooted in the fabric and framework of reality. Post Hume et al and post Euthyphro et al, that can only be in the very root of reality, i.e. there must be a necessary being that so fuses IS-ness and OUGHT-ness, that they are inextricably entangled in the roots of reality.
What sort of being is capable of such?
The answer is utterly challenging, and I have long thought it is best posed in light of comparative difficulties and worldview level inference to the best candidate explanation.
We need to look at serious candidates (as opposed to something like a flying spaghetti monster, which will not be a necessary being — made up from bits and pieces, i.e. composite.)
There is just one serious candidate, after centuries of debate: the inherently good Creator God, a necessary and maximally great being, worthy of loyalty and the responsible, reasonable service of doing the good in accord with our evident nature (thus, the law of our nature).
This is not an arbitrary imposition, if you doubt, simply put up a viable alternative: ________ (this is after all comparative difficulties analysis).
Prediction: hard to do.
This also has a further highly relevant implication. For a serious candidate necessary being will either be impossible as a square circle is, or else it will be possible thus would exist in at least one world. And, as it would be a frameworking reality, it would be present in every possible world, including our own — an actual world. (And yes, I am not saying THE actual world.)
The God of ethical theism as described, is a serious candidate [e.g. NB’s have no beginning or end, are eternal]. This means that God is either impossible as a square circle is impossible, or he is actual. And decades ago, the problem of evils used to be trotted out to make that argument, but that option is effectively dead post-Plantinga and in fact post Boethius.
Then, too, if one claims to be an atheist or agnostic, s/he implies knowing good reason to doubt or dismiss the God of ethical theism as impossible even as a square circle is impossible. It would be interesting to hear what such a reason is: _______ (esp. post, problem of evils as a serious view as opposed to a handy piece of intimidatory rhetoric).
So, now, we are at a very important threshold, the God of ethical theism is on the table as a serious candidate necessary being, root of reality that grounds a world in which responsibly and rationally free creatures such as ourselves are possible and indeed actual.
That is a momentous turning-point, and it would be interesting to see if we will hear of the viable alternatives, including reasons why such a God is an impossible being.>>
Of course, these two blanks were never ever filled in cogently. So:
FFT6C: It is worth noting the unresponsiveness to 219 and 178 above, especially at the points where objectors were directly invited to put up alternatives.
We can take it to the bank that UD is obsessively monitored by denizens of a penumbra of hostile sites. Denizens, more than willing to pounce when they see opportunity.
In short, the above blanks left unanswered speak to yet another hovering ghost or three in the room.
Here, first, the point that there is no necessary appeal to design inferences and debates to build a case for ethical theism adequate to ground commitment to such.
Second, that the atheistical objectors and their fellow travellers have no cogent answer to the need for a necessary being root to reality, nor to the point that the God of ethical theism is a serious candidate to be such (by utter contrast with the cartoonish flying spaghetti monster etc), nor to the onward point that such a serious candidate will be either ontologically impossible [as a square circle is impossible] or else will be actual.
Third, they have no cogent answer to the significance of the point that just to have a real discussion, we must implicitly accept that we are responsible, reasonable, significantly free and intelligent beings under moral government. Not least, conscience is the compass within pointing to the truth, the right and our duties of care towards such. Undermining this dimension of conscious mindedness by implying it is delusional lets grand delusion loose in our minds, ending in shipwreck.
So, we can see that the evo mat scientism picture of the world falls apart, and that there is no need to go out of our way to accommodate it. It is self-referentially incoherent and so self-falsifying.
Nor, should we yield to the trend to corrupt the concept, truth. (That, too, is part of the benumbing and warping of conscience, as say Orwell brought out so forcefully in his 1984.)
The astute onlooker will also note that we have had a worldviews discussion, not one pivoting on parsing Bible texts. Though, I have noted that this analysis is compatible with at least one key summary argument in Scripture, one that points to this sort of analysis as valid on the whole if soundly done.
Let me clip:
Rom 1:18 For [God does not overlook sin and] the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who in their wickedness suppress and stifle the truth, 19 because that which is known about God is evident within them [in their inner consciousness], for God made it evident to them.
20 For ever since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through His workmanship [all His creation, the wonderful things that He has made], so that they [who fail to believe and trust in Him] are without excuse and without defense.
21 For even though [d]they knew God [as the Creator], they did not [e]honor Him as God or give thanks [for His wondrous creation]. On the contrary, they became worthless in their thinking [godless, with pointless reasonings, and silly speculations], and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory and majesty and excellence of the immortal God for [f]an image [worthless idols] in the shape of mortal man and birds and four-footed animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their own hearts to [sexual] impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them [abandoning them to the degrading power of sin], 25 because [by choice] they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen . . . .
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God or consider Him worth knowing [as their Creator], God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do things which are improper and repulsive, 29 until they were filled (permeated, saturated) with every kind of unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice and mean-spiritedness. They are gossips [spreading rumors], 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors [of new forms] of evil, disobedient and disrespectful to parents, 31 without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful [without pity]. [AMP]
The passage goes on to highlight how the warping of mind and conscience ends up in a topsy-turvy world that approves evil and by implication disapproves the good. That alludes subtly to another text, from the prophet Isaiah:
Isa 5:18 Woe (judgment is coming) to those who drag along wickedness with cords of falsehood,
And sin as if with cart ropes [towing their own punishment];
19 Who say, “Let Him move speedily, let Him expedite His work [His promised vengeance], so that we may see it;
And let the purpose of the Holy One of Israel approach
And come to pass, so that we may know it!”
20 Woe (judgment is coming) to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
21 Woe (judgment is coming) to those who are wise in their own eyes
And clever and shrewd in their own sight! [AMP]
This summary rings all too sadly true as we look out across the moral wasteland of our largely apostate civilisation that has so often deliberately turned its back on the truth and has refused to endure sound instruction. Instead, we have ever so often chosen to go out in the ways of cleverly constructed errors, leading many astray into ruin.
Given an onward exchange, I think I should note from Eta Linnemann on the undermining of theology:
Theology as it is taught in universities all over the world . . . is based on the historical-critical method . . . . [which] is not just the foundation for the exegetical disciplines. It also decides what the systematician can say . . . It determines procedure in Christian education, homiletics and ethics . . . . Research is conducted ut si Deus non daretur (“as if there were no God”). That means the reality of God is excluded from consideration from the start . . . Statements in Scripture regarding place, time, sequences of events and persons are accepted only insofar as they fit in with established assumptions and theories . . . .
Since other religions have their scriptures, one cannot assume the Bible is somehow unique and superior to them . . . . It is taken for granted that the words of the Bible and God’s word are not identical . . . the New Testament is pitted against the Old Testament, assuming that the God of the New Testament is different from that of the Old, since Jesus is said to have introduced a new concept of God . . . . Since the inspiration of Scripture is not accepted, neither can it be assumed that the individual books of Scripture complement each other. Using this procedure one finds in the Bible only a handful of unrelated literary creations . . . . Since the content of biblical writings is seen as merely the creation of theological writers, any given verse is nothing more than a non-binding, human theological utterance.
For historical-critical theology, critical reason decides what is reality in the Bible and what cannot be reality; and this decision is made on the basis of the everyday experience accessible to every person [i.e. the miraculous aspect of Scripture, and modern reports of miracles — regardless of claimed attestation — are dismissed as essentially impossible to verify and/or as merely “popular religious drivel”] . . . . . Due to the presuppositions that are adopted, critical reason loses sight of the fact that the Lord, our God, the Almighty, reigns. [Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology? (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1993), pp. 83 – 88 as excerpted.]
There is nothing in historical-critical theology that has not already made its appearance in philosophy. Bacon (1561 – 1626), Hobbes (1588 – 1679), Descartes (1596 – 1650), and Hume (1711 – 1776) laid the foundations: inductive thought as the only source of knowledge; denial of revelation; monistic worldview; separation of faith and reason; doubt as the foundation of knowledge. Hobbes and Hume established a thoroughgoing criticism of miracles; Spinoza (1632 – 1677) also helped lay the basis for biblical criticism of both Old and New Testaments. Lessing (1729 – 1781) invented the synoptic problem. Kant’s (1724 – 1804) critique of reason became the basic norm for historical-critical theology. Hegel (1770 – 1831) furnished the means for the process of demythologizing that Rudolph Bultmann (1884 – 1976) would effectively implement a century later – after the way had been prepared by Martin Kähler (1835 – 1912).
Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) . . . reduced faith to a leap that left rationality behind. He cemented the separation of faith and reason and laid the groundwork for theology’s departure from biblical moorings . . . . by writing such criticism off as benign . . . .
Heidegger (1889 – 1976) laid the groundwork for reducing Christian faith to a possibility of self-understanding; he also had considerable influence on Bultmann’s theology. From Karl Marx . . . came theology of hope, theology of revolution, theology of liberation. [Biblical Criticism on Trial (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2001), pp. 178 – 9.]
Another text has haunted me for months as I have pondered the path of our all too patently willfully perverse civilisation:
1 John 2:15 Do not love the world [of sin that opposes God and His precepts], nor the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world—the lust and sensual craving of the flesh and the lust and longing of the eyes and the boastful pride of life [pretentious confidence in one’s resources or in the stability of earthly things]—these do not come from the Father, but are from the world. 17 The world is passing away, and with it its lusts [the shameful pursuits and ungodly longings]; but the one who does the will of God and carries out His purposes lives forever.
18 Children, it is the last hour [the end of this age]; and just as you heard that the antichrist is coming [the one who will oppose Christ and attempt to replace Him], even now many antichrists (false teachers) have appeared, which confirms our belief that it is the last hour.
19 They went out from us [seeming at first to be Christians], but they were not really of us [because they were not truly born again and spiritually transformed]; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out [teaching false doctrine], so that it would be clearly shown that none of them are of us.
20 But you have an anointing from the Holy One [you have been set apart, specially gifted and prepared by the Holy Spirit], and all of you know [the truth because He teaches us, illuminates our minds, and guards us from error]. 21 I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you do know it, and because no lie [nothing false, no deception] is of the truth.
22 Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed)?
This is the antichrist [the enemy and antagonist of Christ], the one who denies and consistently refuses to acknowledge the Father and the Son. 23 Whoever denies and repudiates the Son does not have the Father; the one who confesses and acknowledges the Son has the Father also.
24 As for you, let that remain in you [keeping in your hearts that message of salvation] which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning remains in you, you too will remain in the Son and in the Father [forever].
25 This is the promise which He Himself promised us—eternal life.
26 These things I have written to you with reference to those who are trying to deceive you [seducing you and leading you away from the truth and sound doctrine]. 27 As for you, the anointing [the special gift, the preparation] which you received from Him remains [permanently] in you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you. But just as His anointing teaches you [giving you insight through the presence of the Holy Spirit] about all things, and is true and is not a lie, and just as His anointing has taught you, [c]you must remain in Him [being rooted in Him, knit to Him]. [AMP]
In the end, that is the diagnosis, and the answer to the spirit of our age.>>
Now, why should we reject these diagnostic notes, given something like this from Plato 2350+ years past in The Laws, Bk X:
247, >>Plato, on the warping of the moral compass and where it leads a community i/l/o the collapse of Athens:
Ath [in The Laws, Bk X 2,350+ ya]. . . .[The avant garde philosophers and poets, c. 360 BC] say that fire and water, and earth and air [i.e the classical “material” elements of the cosmos], all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art . . . [such that] all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only [ –> that is, evolutionary materialism is ancient and would trace all things to blind chance and mechanical necessity] . . . .
[Thus, they hold] that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.-
[ –> Relativism, too, is not new; complete with its radical amorality rooted in a worldview that has no foundational IS that can ground OUGHT, leading to an effectively arbitrary foundation only for morality, ethics and law: accident of personal preference, the ebbs and flows of power politics, accidents of history and and the shifting sands of manipulated community opinion driven by “winds and waves of doctrine and the cunning craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming . . . ” cf a video on Plato’s parable of the cave; from the perspective of pondering who set up the manipulative shadow-shows, why.]
These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might,
[ –> Evolutionary materialism — having no IS that can properly ground OUGHT — leads to the promotion of amorality on which the only basis for “OUGHT” is seen to be might (and manipulation: might in “spin”) . . . ]
and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions [ –> Evolutionary materialism-motivated amorality “naturally” leads to continual contentions and power struggles influenced by that amorality at the hands of ruthless power hungry nihilistic agendas], these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is,to live in real dominion over others [ –> such amoral and/or nihilistic factions, if they gain power, “naturally” tend towards ruthless abuse and arbitrariness . . . they have not learned the habits nor accepted the principles of mutual respect, justice, fairness and keeping the civil peace of justice, so they will want to deceive, manipulate and crush — as the consistent history of radical revolutions over the past 250 years so plainly shows again and again], and not in legal subjection to them [–> nihilistic will to power not the spirit of justice and lawfulness].>>
But isn’t all this just an excuse to dress up right-wing fundy theocratic Christofascist totalitarianism in a cheap tuxedo?
Of Lemmings, marches of folly and cliffs of self-falsifying absurdity . . .
FFT7: But, isn’t the whole exercise of a pretended ID science an attempt to dress up dubious religion in scientific clothes, with intent to impose onward some sort of right-wing Christofascist theocratic tyranny that for instance robs women of their “rights” to their own bodies — and maybe would gaol them for even a miscarriage? Etc?
I am of course outlining a summary of trends of strawman caricature argument commonly encountered over the years.
A serious-minded glance above will rapidly demonstrate that the main discussion I have made so far under the FFT theme, has been PHILOSOPHICAL, not theological, first and foremost setting the worldviews comparative difficulties context for discussion. It is in that context that I then proceeded to show why evolutionary materialistic scientism and fellow travellers have been tried and found wanting as inherently incoherent, self-falsifying, necessarily false views. They cannot get us to a responsibly, rationally free, morally governed, warranting, knowing mind. So they fail the test of our being able to have a rationally guided discussion.
It will be quite evident above, that active objectors and those lurking from the penumbra of attack sites, have no real answer to this. That’s not new, I have seen that for years at UD and for decades elsewhere. Before me, the point traces back to the likes of Plantinga, C S Lewis and even leading evolutionary theorist J B S Haldane.
He aptly says:
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes 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.]
I invite the reasonable onlooker to scan above and see for himself, if there is a cogent answer forthcoming from the usual objectors or their backers across the Internet.
The truth will be evident, there is no non-incoherent evolutionary materialistic account of mindedness.
As for the associated amorality, radical relativism and reduction to nihilistic might and manipulation make ‘truth’ ‘right’ etc, that unanswered problem has been on record for 2350+ years, from Plato’s reflections i/l/o the collapse of Athens. If you want to see an example of the sort of misleadership that that toxic brew spews up, try Alcibiades as case study no. 1.
Resemblance to recent history is no coincidence, try out his parable of the mutinous ship of state.
Look above, to see if you can find a serious-minded grappling with such momentous issues and their implications. Try out the penumbra of attack sites. You will soon see why I have long been concerned about a civilisation-level march of ruinous folly that manipulates the public and democratic institutions only to lead us over the cliff. Luke’s real-world ship of state microcosm in Ac 27 should — should! — give us pause.
As one simple example I note that the right to life is the first, foremost, gateway right and so a civilisation that systematically dehumanises its posterity in the womb and warps medicine, nursing, pharmacy, law, law enforcement, government, education, media and more to promote and protect the holocaust of 800+ millions in 40+ years (and mounting up at a million per week now), is corrupting its soul through blood guilt, is utterly warping conscience to do so, and is wrecking the ability to even simply think straight and live by the truth and the right. It is setting itself up to be a plague upon the earth that morally taints the land, which will vomit us out.
If we do not repent of our bloody, soul-wrecking folly as a civilisation, we will ruin ourselves. And, whatever emerges from the bloody chaos and dark age to follow, will not see freedom as an important value, as liberty turned to libertinism and wicked, blood-guilty licence.
Yes, I am out and out saying we have become the enemies of sustainable liberty under just law that duly balances rights, freedoms and responsibilities.
If you want a personal motive, there it is. I come from a nation that wrecked its prospects for generations through irresponsible, wicked misleadership, agit prop, media shadow shows and blood shed. That includes a murdered auntie.
I know the hard way, that the lessons of sound history wee bought with blood and tears. Those who refuse to heed them doom themselves to pay the same coin over and over again in their futile folly.
(I have said as much, many times, but no. Those hell-bent on folly have to project garish caricatures unto those who dare stand athwart the path heading over the cliff and cry out, no.)
Anyway, the reader will simply not find a sober-minded response to such concerns.
After this, I set about a sounder foundation, several days ago now, which was of course studiously ignored. This was elaborated through pondering what sort of world has to be here for there to be creatures like us, then followed up.
All, studiously ignored in a rush to set up and knock over conveniently loaded straw men.
Let me clip key points from the last, FFT6C:
It is worth noting the unresponsiveness to 219 and 178 above, especially at the points where objectors were directly invited to put up alternatives.
We can take it to the bank that UD is obsessively monitored by denizens of a penumbra of hostile sites. Denizens, more than willing to pounce when they see opportunity.
In short, the above blanks left unanswered speak to yet another hovering ghost or three in the room.
Here, first, the point that there is no necessary appeal to design inferences and debates to build a case for ethical theism adequate to ground commitment to such.
Second, that the atheistical objectors and their fellow travellers have no cogent answer to the need for a necessary being root to reality, nor to the point that the God of ethical theism is a serious candidate to be such (by utter contrast with the cartoonish flying spaghetti monster etc), nor to the onward point that such a serious candidate will be either ontologically impossible [as a square circle is impossible] or else will be actual.
Third, they have no cogent answer to the significance of the point that just to have a real discussion, we must implicitly accept that we are responsible, reasonable, significantly free and intelligent beings under moral government. Not least, conscience is the compass within pointing to the truth, the right and our duties of care towards such. Undermining this dimension of conscious mindedness by implying it is delusional lets grand delusion loose in our minds, ending in shipwreck.
So, we can see that the evo mat scientism picture of the world falls apart, and that there is no need to go out of our way to accommodate it. It is self-referentially incoherent and so self-falsifying.
Nor, should we yield to the trend to corrupt the concept, truth. (That, too, is part of the benumbing and warping of conscience, as say Orwell brought out so forcefully in his 1984.)
The astute onlooker will also note that we have had a worldviews discussion, not one pivoting on parsing Bible texts . . .
It will then be no surprise to see that the grounding of ethical theism as a responsible worldview (by utter contrast with the radically self-falsifying and amoral evolutionary materialistic scientism and fellow travellers) does not turn on design inferences on empirical signs such as FSCO/I.
Evo mat scientism and fellow travellers are utterly incompatible with the responsible, rational freedom required to have a serious, fact and logic guided discussion seeking understanding of the truth. It rules itself out so soon as we must have a serious discussion.
We then address on comparative difficulties, how can we have a world with beings such as we are.
That takes us through the IS-OUGHT gap to issues of being and non-being and rootedness of a world with moral government. Which, repeat, is a condition of serious discussion.
That points to the only serious candidate for such a root, after centuries of debate. Candidate X was duly laid out, and the open invitation was given to put forth a comparable candidate Y that does not instantly collapse.
Silence.
Silence, for good reason: something like the flying spaghetti monster is simply not serious, never mind its appallingly common rhetorical use by those who should know a lot better.
Then, a second invitation to comparative difficulties discussion was given: part of X’s bill of requisites is necessary being. A serious candidate NB either is impossible (as a square circle is impossible) or it is actual.
The challenge was given, break X’s candidacy.
Silence, again.
So — as X = the inherently good creator God of ethical theism, a necessary and maximally great being worthy of loyalty and the reasonable, responsible service of doing the good in accord with our evident nature — it is clear that there is a very good warrant to adhere to ethical theism as a worldview.
Without even engaging design theory debates.
A point that needed to be put up on the table and warranted.
Which, it has.
That’s why at 220 and henceforth, I could freely write:
you will see the stage of argument in FFT6B just above. I wonder what our well-informed skeptical interlocutors will put up as alternatives? Especially, noting that THERE IS NO DESIGN INFERENCE in the argument to date, i.e. the design inference as such is demonstrably not an inherent, inextricable part of an argument to God as root of reality. Where, note, the case I am arguing here is not based in Scripture though it is compatible with it — truths will be compatible the one with the other. And of course, contrary to the talking points I heard today, the God of ethical theism is not automatically the devil, the author of evils and confusions.
Why then has there been such a hot debate over design, and why has it been laced with accusations about creationism in a cheap tuxedo and the like?
Simple: evolutionary materialistic scientism, from the outset in modern times [this is demonstrable historic fact], has tried to come up with a designer substitute that would plausibly put the creator-God out of a job. The idea is that if the world of life and onward the physical cosmos can be explained on naturalistic grounds, the perception of design can be dismissed while wearing the holy lab coat, and belief in God can eventually be made to seem to be the resort of the ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.
That rhetorical stratagem has worked and has become institutionalised.
But at a terrible price.
First, it is ill-founded and credibly false, erecting falsity as the yardstick for judging truth. Where, science first and foremost must seek to discover the empirically grounded truth about our world.
Ill-founded, as there are credible, empirically warranted signs of design, which are copiously found in the world of life and in the structure of the cosmos.
Design theory is the empirically and analytically grounded scientific investigation of such signs, which in fact are not too hard to find. Start with the algorithmically functional text in DNA and the execution machinery of the cell that puts it to work. (This points to OOL and OO body plans. Design is evident in the tree of life from the roots up.)
Likewise, the corruption of science from definitions and outlines of its methods on up makes blatant falsity into the yardstick to judge truth by. Truth cannot pass the test of agreement with relevant falsity, and so the ideological imposition of evolutionary materialistic scientism inherently corrupts a pivotal institution of our civilisation.
So, those who hope to build a sound future will be found on the side of needed reformation of tainted science.
In that context, freed science can then return to its true path.
Such is being ruthlessly resisted because it threatens entrenched worldviews and power interests in many institutions. But, the only way to defend institutionalised and fairly obvious falsity is by means that cannot stand the cold light of truth, facts and logic. That is why we find the distortions, strawman tactics, stalking, stereotyping and scapegoating.
All of which are utterly corrosive to liberty, not just academic freedom.
And so, the time has come to find where one stands, why, even as our civilisation descends into chaos, confusion, folly, bizarre agendas and outright blood guilt all around us.
We stand at kairos.>>
We are at kairos, in the face of a civilisation hell-bent on a march of folly. It is time to think again, soberly. END
Comments
KF @ 95: "Origines, we are not dealing with those willing to engage seriously."
This, of course, has been known for a long time. Yet you and so many others on this site continue to engage the unenlightened a/mats with compassion and kindness.
My hats off to you guys. I honestly could care less about them or their views.
By the way, has anyone heard from Born Again 77? I really miss his comments.Truth Will Set You Free
April 22, 2017
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Origenes, Heks,
Yeah I was thinking it might be keiths as well, though I never interacted with him here. He also commented at Telic Thoughts where I first participated on-line.
But I have always wondered, why keiths? Was there more than one of him/ them? Multiple personalities?
Anyway that reminds me of this movie scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u5A0H6PkqEjohn_a_designer
April 22, 2017
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Origines @93
I know keiths well. I lost all respect for him during our lengthy discussions about his 'bomb' argument. I was guessing that Armand Jacks might be Acartia Bogart (I think that was the name).HeKS
April 22, 2017
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Origines, we are not dealing with those willing to engage seriously. They are ignorant of things like the significant problem of cultural relativism that if community consensus makes truth and right then automatically the reformer who challenges the standard is by definition in the wrong. Never mind, that is a direct logical implication. As for the incoherence of the proposed world they wish to see, they already have an explanation of why it is incoherent, I think they may have seen too much sci fi about computers turning conscious, and fail to recognise that insightful ground consequent inferences are not the same sort of thing as a cause-effect pattern in a computational substrate; I suspect they have never designed or built something that has had to do computation and do not understand how such substrates work, e.g. an op amp integrator, a ball-disk integrator, a flipflop, the circuits in an ALU, or nodes in a neural network. They simply do not know the difference between insightful, meaning based inference and blind cause-effect driven signal processing. Leibniz's Mill is lost on them, too. In the end to the committed materialist or fellow traveller, conscious rationality has to emerge this way as that is all there is to reality. Minds are simply locked, regardless of the issue. So, they simply will not acknowledge or understand how different rational, responsible freedom is from GIGO driven operation of a computational substrate. Not even when satire is used or when Haldane points it out or when it comes straight from the statements of significant advocates of their system. As for the grim examples of history including the past 100 years, they refuse to attend to such. Notice, unresponsiveness to the force of self-evident truth and selectively hyperskeptical dismissals or studious ignoring of reasoned argument and evidence backed by strawman caricatures and personalities. And so forth. KF
PS: The only thing is it seems there was more of a reaction than at first seemed to me. Reaction, yes; informed cogent response, no. But I do not expect such. At this stage we need to more or less identify the fallacies and threats to reasonable civil society posed by what we are seeing. This is hostile indoctrination and cult-like programming we deal with. On which, sadly, the most effective way to get change is a crash-burn that hits rock bottom and shocks the system into seeing that something is drastically wrong. Unfortunately a civilisation scale crash-burn would be likely to trigger a dark age, following on massively destructive war.kairosfocus
April 22, 2017
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Heks:
KF answers that a world of the sort you’re proposing is an incoherent impossible world. Your response is to criticize him and say that you didn’t ask him if it was possible but asked him to describe what it would look like. And you think KF is the one with the problem here?
If he can't envision a world with no world-root IS to ground OUGHT then, yes, the problem is KF's. He has a complete lack of imagination. He didn't answer the question because he didn't want to have an honest discussion.
I can think of several possibilities. The most likely being a world just like the one we live in. Even if he disagrees with that he could have answered that a world without IS would be anarchy. Or that it would be a world without humans. And then we could discuss it. As you would.
You cannot describe what an incoherent impossibility would look like in any meaningful sense because there is nothing rationally coherent to describe.
It is not incoherent. Anyone can reason that out. Even if KF is correct that humans need a world-root IS to ground OUGHT, and that is personal flavour of god is needed for this, what does a world without humans need with an IS to ground OUGHT?
O:
Armand Jacks may very well be “keiths”.
Good guess. But wrong.Armand Jacks
April 22, 2017
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HeKS @90, KF
Armand Jacks may very well be "keiths".
One cannot be sure ,but what Armand is doing here is very similar to what happened during a previous encounter I had with this guy named keiths. At that time he emphatically claimed that my reasoning was based on a totally groundless expectation. What was my "groundless" expectation? I expected a relationship between cause and effect.
Could I persuade this keiths of the reasonableness of my expectation? No way. Absolutely no way. Not one inch.Origenes
April 22, 2017
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F/N: It seems that there are those who imagine that rational, insightful inference -- as opposed to cause-effect chains -- can be obtained by mechanical necessity and/or stochastic, random chance processes. That shows the problem of "I can imagine" or the like. It also points to the underlying misconceptions that lead to the further imagination that one can have a world with rational beings and no basis for morality, while avoiding amorality and nihilistic chaos. And, in the teeth of a long and a recent chilling history of the consequences of attempts to impose such ideologies, they imagine further that the burden to disprove lies with the other. In short, they are manifesting exactly the might and manipulation make right and truth pattern warned against on painful history as long ago as Plato in The Laws Bk X 2350 years past. which of course they studiously ignore. This is a case where to be forewarned is to be forearmed. KF
PS: I again point out Reppert's apt summary of the problem of substituting a computational substrate for rational inference. Of course, this has been repeatedly pointed out, just studiously ignored in the rush to dismiss and pretend there is no evidence there is no answer there is no proof they will ever accept. So, for record, again, Reppert's apt summary:
. . . let us suppose that brain state A, which is token identical to the thought that all men are mortal, and brain state B, which is token identical to the thought that Socrates is a man, together cause the belief that Socrates is mortal. It isn’t enough for rational inference that these events be those beliefs, it is also necessary that the causal transaction be in virtue of the content of those thoughts . . . [But] if naturalism is true, then the propositional content is irrelevant to the causal transaction that produces the conclusion, and [so] we do not have a case of rational inference. In rational inference, as Lewis puts it, one thought causes another thought not by being, but by being seen to be, the ground for it. But causal transactions in the brain occur in virtue of the brain’s being in a particular type of state that is relevant to physical causal transactions.
I have provided a warrant, I have no obligation to provide a willingness to understand or acknowledge the force of that warrant. And at this point I do not believe that I am dealing with a responsible interlocutor.kairosfocus
April 22, 2017
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heKS writes,
Now, you could try to challenge KF on whether or not he’s correct about such a world being an incoherent impossibility, but to claim that he didn’t provide a valid answer to you is false.
This is a good distinction. Also, the first part of the sentence above is the point I made to kf in #88.jdk
April 22, 2017
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@ Armand Jacks #81
KF -- PS: It should be evident why in 58 above, I argued that the sort of world imagined by AJ in his questioning is an incoherent impossible world, not a credibly possible world.
AJ -- If you think that is an answer to my question, you have a serious reading comprehension problem. I did not ask you whether a world with with no world-root IS was possible. I asked you to imagine what such a world would look like. A very simple question. You could answer it by saying that it is a world where anarchy reigned, or you could have answered that it would be a world where humans are indistinguishable from animals. And then the discussion could continue. But rather than do this, you repeatedly claimed to have answered the question and then accuseed me of launching false accusations your way.
Huh?
KF answers that a world of the sort you're proposing is an incoherent impossible world. Your response is to criticize him and say that you didn't ask him if it was possible but asked him to describe what it would look like. And you think KF is the one with the problem here?
If one believes that a certain type of world is an incoherent impossibility, then it is absurd to ask that person to meaningfully describe what such a world would look like. That obvious answer is that it wouldn't look like anything. You cannot describe what an incoherent impossibility would look like in any meaningful sense because there is nothing rationally coherent to describe. It would be like asking someone to describe what a 4-sided triangle or a married bachelor would look like. You can string the words together, but they represent incoherent impossibilities and so anything you might describe would not be a meaningful representation of those word groupings.
Now, you could try to challenge KF on whether or not he's correct about such a world being an incoherent impossibility, but to claim that he didn't provide a valid answer to you is false.HeKS
April 22, 2017
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jdk,
But I can easily imagine a coherent and possible world where a supreme being created our universe, with all the qualities necessary to produce the physics, chemistry, and biology that we see (that is, is the ground of IS), but who is supremely indifferent to the details of how the world goes, including the actions of the life forms within it (that is, is supremely indifferent to OUGHT).
I see no incoherent impossibility, no self-refutation, in believing, or at least being able to imagine, that this is the type of supreme IS-ness that underlies the world.
Very well put.daveS
April 22, 2017
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kf writes, "Notice, how the poi9nt by point response is sudedenly just part of the background noise? What does that tell us."
My comments were specifically addressed to AJ. I assumed kf's response, if he bothered to make one, would just be more of the same. It is just background noise.
More specifically, I didn't read it because
a) his idiosyncratic writing style is almost unreadable. He should use blockquote tags and standard punctuation sometime.
b) it is nothing more than the umpteenth reiteration of things he has said before in this and other threads,
c) it is full of idiosyncratic, hyperbolic, and repetitive rhetorical phrases, as well as dire apocalyptic accusations about people who don't see things his way.
d) and so on.
But, I will address this comment to kf:
But I can easily imagine a coherent and possible world where a supreme being created our universe, with all the qualities necessary to produce the physics, chemistry, and biology that we see (that is, is the ground of IS), but who is supremely indifferent to the details of how the world goes, including the actions of the life forms within it (that is, is supremely indifferent to OUGHT).
I see no incoherent impossibility, no self-refutation, in believing, or at least being able to imagine, that this is the type of supreme IS-ness that underlies the world.
Can you imagine such a supreme being? More importantly, can you explain why such a being, and thus such a world, would be incoherently impossible. Even more importantly, could you do so in simple sentences, perhaps avoiding some of the reasons I listed above as to why your posts have a way too small signal to noise ratio?jdk
April 22, 2017
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KF:
2 –> The discussion already is heading off the rails, as it fails to recognise that what is at stake is first that genuine rationality requires responsible freedom.
That is an untested assertion.
3 –> Precisely because, people generally recognise themselves to be morally governed...
Nobody is arguing this. What is being debated is the source of these moral values.
and though we struggle with being finite, fallible, morally weak and too often ill-willed, we do not let loose with full-free irresponsible conduct.
A young child does this all the time. Our behaviour becomes more conducive with that required to live in a gregarious society because we are indoctrinated from a very young age by parents, teachers, church leaders and peers to adobt these behaviours. Conditioned responses, if you would like. These are supplemented by our experiences and our ability to predict the outcome of our actions.
4 –> Yes, and you need to address what happens when the yardstick of truth and right is replaced by one of error and evil. Note above.
No we don't right and wrong, evil and good are subjective terms.
6 –> Notice, that grand delusion is actually pivotal to what I have long argued and to what appears in the OP. if it is ignored, you are setting up a strawman target.
If it is pivotal to what you argue then you have already lost. Your "grand delusion" is itself a big flaming strawman. Our subjective morality and how we perceive things are judged on their stability within society and our ability to survive and thrive. Not on any self evident truths or objective moral values. Sometimes our perceptions don't actually match up with "reality", but if they do not negatively impact us as individuals or the society we live in, this misperception is not important to our lives. For example, whether the solar system is geocentric or heliocentric has no impact on the vast majority of people.
7 –> Here comes the predictable cultural relativism, failing to address the problem of error being a fact that can be imposed as a yardstick.
A non answer.
8 –> Bf social consensus or at least that of the dominant elites atop the seven mountains becomes the definition of truth and right,...
Nonsense. They have nothing to do with truth and right, they only have to do with the rules that we agree to live under, or the rules that are imposed on us. Nothing more, nothing less.
...the immediate issue is that the reformer is instantly a lawless, evil person.
Only if you subjectively label them as that. Much like you label abortion doctors as murderers. And abortion as a holocaust.
A Wilberforce is drastically and instantly undercut.
Nonsense. He will meet with resistance, but that is human nature. Same sex marriage prooonents met with stiff opposition and demonization, but they still prevailed because our subjective morality sees no harm in it.
9 –> As predicted, and utterly blind to the issue of imposed error.
Which simply means that our current idea of morality towards multiple wives, child brides, working on Sunday, etc. May be equally in error. Since that must be the case, what is the purpose and where is the value of an objective morality when we are totally dependent on our subjective interpretation of it?
Well, that's enough for now.Armand Jacks
April 22, 2017
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My position can be stated very succinctly. For example earlier @ 22 I wrote:
Our regular interlocutors are motivated by either ignorance, delusion or dishonesty. There are no other choices. Whichever it is, there is no evidence that our interlocutors are here to engage in honest debate or dialogue.
To enter into an honest debate one must be able to give honest arguments. An honest argument begins with premises which are, in some sense, either self-evidently true (as in mathematics,) probably true or at the very least plausibly true. In other words, your argument is a waste of everyone’s time unless there really is something or some things which are really true. That begins with the idea of truth itself. Notice the absurdity of the argument the Pomona students are making (see #10 above.) They are arguing that there is no “truth — ‘the Truth’ — “. But that is self-refuting, because their claim, there is no truth, is a truth claim-- a universal truth claim. You can’t even begin to talk rationally about something like universal human rights (as they are trying to do) until you recognize there are moral truths that are universal. Indeed, the idea of truth itself is universal-- it must be.
Please notice, the implications this has for atheism. If atheistic materialism/naturalism is “true”* [*something a subjectivist can’t rationally argue] then is does not provide any grounding for human rights. So our atheist interlocutors do not, indeed cannot, support human rights. And it does not matter whether they believe that or not, they cannot rationally argue otherwise.
(emphasis added.)
Truth and honesty, which requires the idea of objective truth, cannot be rationally defended or demanded by moral subjectivists. Incredibly they don’t seem to comprehend this.
For example on an earlier thread Armand Jacks @ 49 responded to Origenes :
“O, thank you for engaging in an honest discussion. I do not get that from WJM or KF.”
To which I commented:
Based on materialism how can someone like Armand even talk about honesty? Honesty based on what standard? Whose standard? Some of our other atheist interlocutors insist that moral values and obligations are totally subjective. But how do they know this? How can they prove this? But if they are subjective, whose moral standard is everyone else obligated to follow?
Ironically, we can’t even have an honest discussion about honesty with these people.
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/quote-of-the-day-24/#comment-629358
How did Armand Jacks respond? If you are interested see his comment @ #65 of that thread.
Again, please notice, you can’t have honesty without some kind of interpersonal objective standard that everyone recognizes. How can a subjectivist even talk meaningfully about honesty? That itself is an honest question that deserves to be addressed.
Also I on that same thread I wrote:
I see most of our regular interlocutors as being motivated by smugness, an arrogant self-centered belief that what they believe is true. Why? Because they believe it and whatever smug people believe must be true.
After eleven years of participating in on-line discussions I can spot these people from their very first posts. They always start from a contrarian even hostile stance and a condescending tone, from which never back off. And they never ever try to establish any kind of common ground. They appear to believe that high-minded but otherwise vacuous rhetoric is equivalent to good reasoning. Apart from a few occasional glib comments I no longer engage with people motivated by smugness. You cannot reason with people who do not understand what reasoning is.
Unfortunately, too many people on my side (and you don’t need to be an ID’ist to be on my side) enable these peoples smugness by trying to reason with them. Like I said above, they aren’t interested in truth, reason or establishing any kind of common ground. For them winning is being able to shut down the discussion and debate. So when you try to reason with them they don’t see it as an offer to play fair but an opportunity to obstruct and obfuscate. Again if they are able undermine the discussion in any way they see that as winning.
Notice that I haven’t named any names or given any specific examples. Why? Because that is one of the things that plays into their hands. Smug people crave being noticed, even if it’s negative. If nothing else they can feign being offended and that gives an opportunity to counter attack with sarcasm, mockery and ridicule… which causes frustration on the ID side… which cause retaliation, which then gets the discussion going in the direction they want it to go-- downhill.
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/quote-of-the-day-24/#comment-629282
As I have said before, for me truth trumps faith. I am open to having mind changed with truth and reason. Moral and epistemic subjectivism, however, does not lead one to truth and reason. It leads nowhere.john_a_designer
April 22, 2017
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Notice, how the poi9nt by point response is sudedenly just part of the background noise?
What does that tell us.
KFkairosfocus
April 22, 2017
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Jdk:
But I can easily imagine a coherent and possible world where a supreme being created our universe,...
That is because you have an imagination and a degree of honesty that some others don't. :)Armand Jacks
April 22, 2017
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AJ, your question is
If we assume that there is no world-root IS to ground OUGHT, what type of world would you expect us to live in?
kf's answer, as you point out, is that
the sort of world imagined by AJ in his questioning is an incoherent impossible world, not a credibly possible world.
But I can easily imagine a coherent and possible world where a supreme being created our universe, with all the qualities necessary to produce the physics, chemistry, and biology that we see (that is, is the ground of IS), but who is supremely indifferent to the details of how the world goes, including the actions of the life forms within it (that is, is supremely indifferent to OUGHT).
I see no incoherent impossibility, no self-refutation, in believing, or at least being able to imagine, that this is the type of supreme IS-ness that underlies the world.jdk
April 22, 2017
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WJM:
One wonders why a moral subjectivist would expect anyone else to behave the way they prefer and why they would be outraged when those people don’t behave the way they prefer. It’s like AJ expects others to abide some objectively binding rules of behavior.
We have been over this ground before. Many, many times. Just because morality is subjective doesn't mean that I can't expect others to behave in a manner that a subjectively derived society expects them to. But that doesn't mean that they will.
The truth is, both you and KF respond in exactly the way I have come to expect you to. I expect you to raise strawmen like this so that you can derive misguided pleasure in knocking them down. I expect KF to take offence at every criticism of his arguments and try to obfuscate with long incomprehensible rants, liberally salted with Plato, Lewontin, the IS/OUGHT gap, and accusations of strawmanning, oil of red herring and enabling those who are leading us over the cliff. And I expect that you have a fairly good expectation of how myself and others will respond. We are all creatures of habit.Armand Jacks
April 22, 2017
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KF:
Why do they then take umbrage at the thought that after a certain degree of warning, someone is going to step in ans say, stop, maybe give a chance, then on seeing refusal to amend ways, step back in to address disruptive and counter-productive behaviour?
I am only taking umbrage at someone repeatedly making false accusations about me. A perfectly justified response.
PS: It should be evident why in 58 above, I argued that the sort of world imagined by AJ in his questioning is an incoherent impossible world, not a credibly possible world. KF
If you think that is an answer to my question, you have a serious reading comprehension problem. I did not ask you whether a world with with no world-root IS was possible. I asked you to imagine what such a world would look like. A very simple question. You could answer it by saying that it is a world where anarchy reigned, or you could have answered that it would be a world where humans are indistinguishable from animals. And then the discussion could continue. But rather than do this, you repeatedly claimed to have answered the question and then accuseed me of launching false accusations your way. That is not the behaviour of someone who claims to encourage honest debate.
But, I will accept the possibility that you were simply incapable of understanding my highly complex request and let sleeping dogs lie.Armand Jacks
April 22, 2017
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One wonders why a moral subjectivist would expect anyone else to behave the way they prefer and why they would be outraged when those people don't behave the way they prefer. It's like AJ expects others to abide some objectively binding rules of behavior.
Oh, the irony. Moral outrage from a moral subjectivist. It's like being outraged and throwing a tantrum in a restaurant because the people at the table next to you didn't order your favorite dish even after you informed them it was your favorite dish. How self-centered do you have to be to expect others to behave as you personally wish, and then complain when they do not?
Every post AJ makes reveals his moral objectivist behavior even while he argues that it doesn't exist.William J Murray
April 22, 2017
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PS: It should be evident why in 58 above, I argued that the sort of world imagined by AJ in his questioning is an incoherent impossible world, not a credibly possible world. KFkairosfocus
April 22, 2017
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F/N: I now proceed to a point by point live action response on points raised by JDK, something I now only rarely do as it has become quite clear that those needing that will as a rule only respond to isolated points and go off on tangents rather than to the full balance of the case. I write for record:
>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>1. You asked, “If we assume that there is no world-root IS to ground OUGHT, what type of world would you expect us to live in?
I think the common answer to your question given by many here is that ultimately you would expect a world where might makes right, and where anyone who truly followed the logical implications would be a nihilist for which anything is permitted.>>
1--> And/or a world in which rationality has collapsed into blindly mechanical and/or stochastic computaiton on substrates governed by GIGO, as was repeatedly discussed and as is highlighted in the OP to the point of being illustrated.
2 --> The discussion already is heading off the rails, as it fails to recognise that what is at stake is first that genuine rationality requires responsible freedom. Computational substrates of whatever architecture are NOT rational entities, but instead are blind, programmed cause effect systems that hopefully have been properly tested to be sufficiently reliable for good use.
>>Clearly, the world is not like that.>>
3 --> Precisely because, people generally recognise themselves to be morally governed and though we struggle with being finite, fallible, morally weak and too often ill-willed, we do not let loose with full-free irresponsible conduct.
>> Of course, there are places and times where brute power can force itself upon the world, and there are at times where some people psychopathologically appear to have no moral sense at all.>>
4 --> Yes, and you need to address what happens when the yardstick of truth and right is replaced by one of error and evil. Note above.
>>But for the bulk of humankind, across history and across cultures, human beings strongly feel, and willingly act in accordance with, moral and other cultural norms.>>
5 --> You recognise that we act as morally governed but set up radical relativism and failure to address the implications of moral governance of our mindedness being a grand delusion, a false perception of reality that pervades our whole project of being minded.
6 --> Notice, that grand delusion is actually pivotal to what I have long argued and to what appears in the OP. if it is ignored, you are setting up a strawman target.
>> On the other hand, as has been one of your main points, these moral and other cultural norms vary tremendously.>>
7 --> Here comes the predictable cultural relativism, failing to address the problem of error being a fact that can be imposed as a yardstick.
8 --> Bf social consensus or at least that of the dominant elites atop the seven mountains becomes the definition of truth and right, the immediate issue is that the reformer is instantly a lawless, evil person. A Wilberforce is drastically and instantly undercut. Slavery and its trade are supported by the majority, you are out of order, sit down or be escorted out by the Sergeant at Arms, Mr Wilberforce.
>> Furthermore, even in our own culture, things which we now consider immoral (slavery, multiple wives, child brides, working on Sunday) were not considered immoral in the past>>
9 --> As predicted, and utterly blind to the issue of imposed error.
>>My take on this is that human beings have some common biological foundations: the ability to talk and think, the ability and need to make moral judgments, the need to have a social group to have positive feelings for and with whom to be inter-dependent, etc.>>
10 --> In short the delusion of morality and that of rationality are to be replaced by the obvious computational substrate and the blind chance and mechanical necessity that have shaped and programmed it. here is JBS Haldane [a co-founder of the modern synthesis, yet again, warning and as has been systematically, willfully ignored:
"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes 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. (NB: DI Fellow, Nancy Pearcey brings this right up to date (HT: ENV) in a current book, Finding Truth.)]
>>However, being dependent upon learning and culture and relatively free of instincts, and finding ourselves in radically different environments (physical, social, technological, etc.), we have had to create in our culture social, moral, and intellectual solutions that satisfy our basic underlying needs and abilities as well as the particular needs of the world we live in.>>
11 --> The poof-magic of somehow emergent mindedness and morality, failing utterly to address the incoherence of such a scheme.
12 --> We already pointed to the problem of the computational substrate, let us now point out from Plato, the socio-cultural import as further informed by 2350+ years of onward history (especially the past 100 years and the ongoing holocaust under false colours of rights and law) on where this predictably ends:
Ath [in The Laws, Bk X 2,350+ ya]. . . .[The avant garde philosophers and poets, c. 360 BC] say that fire and water, and earth and air [i.e the classical "material" elements of the cosmos], all exist by nature and chance, and none of them by art . . . [such that] all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants, and all the seasons come from these elements, not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only [ --> that is, evolutionary materialism is ancient and would trace all things to blind chance and mechanical necessity] . . . .
[Thus, they hold] that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.-
[ --> Relativism, too, is not new; complete with its radical amorality rooted in a worldview that has no foundational IS that can ground OUGHT, leading to an effectively arbitrary foundation only for morality, ethics and law: accident of personal preference, the ebbs and flows of power politics, accidents of history and and the shifting sands of manipulated community opinion driven by "winds and waves of doctrine and the cunning craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming . . . " cf a video on Plato's parable of the cave; from the perspective of pondering who set up the manipulative shadow-shows, why.]
These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might,
[ --> Evolutionary materialism -- having no IS that can properly ground OUGHT -- leads to the promotion of amorality on which the only basis for "OUGHT" is seen to be might (and manipulation: might in "spin") . . . ]
and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions [ --> Evolutionary materialism-motivated amorality "naturally" leads to continual contentions and power struggles influenced by that amorality at the hands of ruthless power hungry nihilistic agendas], these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is,to live in real dominion over others [ --> such amoral and/or nihilistic factions, if they gain power, "naturally" tend towards ruthless abuse and arbitrariness . . . they have not learned the habits nor accepted the principles of mutual respect, justice, fairness and keeping the civil peace of justice, so they will want to deceive, manipulate and crush -- as the consistent history of radical revolutions over the past 250 years so plainly shows again and again], and not in legal subjection to them [--> nihilistic will to power not the spirit of justice and lawfulness].
13 --> All of this has long been pointed out, Pointedly, it is not engaged responsibly. What should we conclude about those who would lead us yet again down this predictably ruinous garden path?
>>Also, because of our dependence on learning, once a culture gets established it tends to perpetuate itself (especially when outsides forces, such as contact with other cultures, technological advance, environmental changes) don’t change the dynamics.>>
14 --> So, what happens when error and evil are imposed as yardsticks? What happens to the reformer, to what principles of correction can he appeal? What does justice mean? [Other than the DUE balance of rights, freedoms and responsibilities.]
15 --> Notice also how the issue of grand delusion is ignored and the emergence of rationality per magic computational substrate is assumed.
16 --> And all along, as one who has been in the classroom, the premise of growing responsible rational conduct is pivotal to successful education. What happens if students have been indoctrinated that our sense of right and wrong, truth and false is an arbitrary imposition of an oppressive patriarchate, on the strength of the new magisterium dressed up in lab coats?
>> Thus people tend to grow up thinking that their perspective is “right”, and they teach their children that, and on it goes.>>
17 --> In short, the grand delusion of moral government is a matter of socio-cultural relativism.
18 --> the issue of grand delusion is ducked, again.
>>Education about the variety of human cultures can help someone being able to step out of their cultural upbringing, but only to a degree.>>
19 --> Oh yes, the William G Perry model of educational progress is fine [haven't you thought through the sources of what you imagine is the gospel truth not yet another even subtler social imposition?], until it ends in cultural marxist power games, agit prop and media shadow shows that lead to ruin.
>>This appears to be the big issue that the people here fail to address.>>
20 --> Blatantly false. So, too, you haven't even done the courtesy of reading what was cited from Plato as annotated, endless times over the course of years.
22 --> Strawman duly set up and knocked over. Notice, the actual argument that addresses these and linked concerns has not been addressed cogently. Just the projection that we who differ from the yardstick must be ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.
23 --> And yes, the assumption is there.
>> All the philosophy about the logical consequence of not believing in the is-ought connection are really pretty irrelevant to the lives of real people.>>
24 --> Supercilious dismissiveness on the significance of phil as addressing the critical hard questions underlying what we commonly think and do.
>> The anthropological/sociological/psychological/biological perspective is really where the truth about human beings lies.>>
25 --> And, said Pilate, what is truth, and stayed not for the answer.
26 --> In short, again, the substantial issues are dismissed without serious consideration.
27 --> And at the end there, lo and behold, there is slipped in the presumption that WE have cornered the market on truth. [O/Night, I forgot to add, there is also an implicit appeal to duty to respond to big-T Truth -- in short, there we have moral government i/l/o the received worldview narrative presented as truth on the grand scale.] Precisely the reaction to be expected of those caught up in the substitution of a crooked yardstick.
28 --> And where is the discussion of what predictably, repeatedly has happened and is ongoing when this sort of imposition is made? Nowhere, poof, vanished, perish the thought.
29 --> Sorry, there are 100+ million ghosts who need to have a world with you about what happens when amoral might and manipulation makes right and truth etc factions seize power. So also the souls of 800+ million unborn children slaughtered under false colours of rights and law, medicine etc.
30 --> Weep for a civilisation that has lost its way and is hell-bent on a march of suicidally ruinous folly that parasites off the inheritance of the Christian world they despise, not knowing that sometime, the moral capital built up over centuries is going to be all eaten up.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
In short, fail, as predicted.
Sad, but inadvertently this brings out the force of the concerns we have had.
KFkairosfocus
April 22, 2017
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JDK,
It seems to me that your pivotal error above is to fail to recognise the requisites of rationality, i.e radical freedom governed by moral considerations of responsibility appropriate to that order of being. This is in my view further compounded by the failure to recognise that as a matter of fact error exists [it is also a self-evident, necessary, absolutely knowable truth] and as a further matter of fact, error can be imposed on a community or an individual as a twisted yardstick of truth and right, leading to a case where the real truth and right that fit the world will never agree with the yardstick. The resulting topsy-turvy confusion, growing evil, folly and chaos heads for the cliff of social collapse. The past century or so is replete with cases, including Venezuela's current collapse.
Above, I pointed out that just to get to a rational, coherent, organised world that is predictable and lawful, fine tuned for C-chemistry, aqueous medium cell based life, already points to great power guided by responsible rational action. That is a point that Plato himself long since highlighted in The Laws Bk X, in responding to the follies of Alcibiades et al and the impact of evolutionary materialism in his own day.
Which, you would be well advised to read and ponder, since presumably you will refuse to read Rom 1 - 2 or take it seriously. Cicero's responsive discussion in the introductory part of De Legibus, would also be quite helpful in clarifying what a world looks like when we have significantly free and responsible, rational creatures governed by the evident law of our nature in it.
In that sense, I am hardly saying anything new, I am just highlighting how the evolutionary materialist and fellow traveller schemes parasite off the fact that our civilisation was not built on their foundation of ideas, and as they succeed in imposing error and evil as yardsticks of truth and right, locking out the real truth and right that will not agree, they will have to impose by force and intimidation backing up fraudulent rhetoric, and they will then face a march of ruinous folly. There are endless cases in point, especially over the past 100 years so no reasonably educated person has any excuse of ignorance on this.
This is the sad pass our civilisation has come to.
KFkairosfocus
April 22, 2017
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JAD, indeed we face the issue of the evident law of our nature as evidently responsibly and rationally free creatures, just to be able to have a reasoned discussion. It is the refusal to recognise such and the attempt to impose a yardstick of error and evil in its place that so clearly marks the failures of evolutionary materialistic scientism and fellow travellers. KF
PS: Notice, above, that none of the objectors have seriously engages the issues from the OP on, but come waltzing in imagining tha they have a right to impose a tangential agenda, igfnore the issues and project to us the worst of motives etc? Do they not see that in a serious discussion, there needs to be a measure of disciplined focus and mutuality that will at least show common decency and courtesy? Why do they then take umbrage at the thought that after a certain degree of warning, someone is going to step in ans say, stop, maybe give a chance, then on seeing refusal to amend ways, step back in to address disruptive and counter-productive behaviour? (Has not AJ seen that there is a reason why his behaviour has crossed a threshold that that of others has not? Even, though the others have in some cases resorted to enabling and in one case piling on by deceit? [As in pretending that when one tacks on a comment on a faded thread that will not even be spotted in the flow of current comments, that is a mark of willful ignoring of a contribution by refusal to answer.])kairosfocus
April 22, 2017
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William J. Murray writes,
Existentially, subjective morality = no morality, just as compatibilist free will = no free will. Existentially, subjective morality = “Do as I will is the whole of the law.” That may not be what anyone’s personal, subjective morality claims, but that is the root authorization of any subjective morality. You get to adopt a particular subjective moral rule or discard a particular subjective moral rule because do as I will is the whole of the law. You get to pick and choose because you can because it’s all subjective.
Why even bother with the pretense that you are discussing morality, when all you are really discussing is how you prefer yourself and others to behave?
In an article entitled, “Morality Requires God ... or Does It?” Theodore Schick, tells this humorous joke to illustrate what he thinks are the weakness of “divine command theory.”
‘To better understand the import of the Divine Command Theory, consider the following tale. It seems that, when Moses came down from the mountain with the tablets containing the Ten Commandments, his followers asked him what they revealed about how they should live their lives. Moses told them, “I have some good news and some bad news.”
“Give us the good news first,” they said.
“Well, the good news,” Moses responded, “is that he kept the number of commandments down to ten.”
“Okay, what’s the bad news?” they inquired.
“The bad news,” Moses replied, “is that he kept the one about adultery in there.” The point is that, according to Divine Command Theory, nothing is right or wrong unless God makes it so. Whatever God says goes. So if God had decreed that adultery was permissible, then adultery would be permissible.’
https://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/the_rational_response_squad_radio_show/freethinking_anonymous/670
Of course, Schick is describing a caricature view that would be rejected by most Divine Command Theory proponents, who argue that God’s commands are based on God’s good character-- God is good or as the Platonists would say “the Good.” In other words, we should see goodness as God’s essential nature along with His omniscience and omnipotence.
Nevertheless if we go with what Schick is describing we end up with a kind of moral subjectivism on the divine level. He goes on to reject Divine Command Theory (at least the only version he knows) because it would, in his view, make the basis for human morals and ethics arbitrary. But if subjectivism on the divine level, involving just one moral agent (God), makes morals and ethics arbitrary, what happens when we multiply it by 300 million moral agents for a country like the US, or 6-7 billion moral agents for the world?
From the standpoint of moral subjectivism, where by definition morals and ethics must be arbitrary, what basis do we have for universal human rights? Would a country like the US even be possible without a concept of universal human rights? Even though our concept of human rights at the founding of our country was very imperfect (slavery, mistreatment of native people, unequal rights for women) there is absolutely no basis for such universal rights from a moral subjectivist point of view.
While not infallible the morality of western civilization is based on Judeo-Christian thought. There is no historical evidence that a society based on moral relativism can endure for very long. To suggest that moral subjectivist view would be an improvement over a moral objectivist view is completely irrational. Any kind of moral progress requires moral standards. Moral subjectivism which is an utterly arbitrary approach is the rejection of all standards.
Schick, who rejects religion as a basis of morality agrees that society cannot be based on moral subjectivism.
Fundamentalists correctly perceive that universal moral standards are required for the proper functioning of society. But they erroneously believe that God is the only possible source of such standards. Philosophers as diverse as Plato, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, George Edward Moore, and John Rawls have demonstrated that it is possible to have a universal morality without God. Contrary to what the fundamentalists would have us believe, then, what our society really needs is not more religion but a richer notion of the nature of morality.
Nevertheless, a transcendent law-giver is the only sufficient basis for morality. But that is another discussion for another time.john_a_designer
April 21, 2017
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TROLL: Continues to impose his amorality on the expectation of our adhereing to moral governance principles, showing the principle of the reprobate mind at work. KF
JDK:
I’ve been tempted to respond to your question to kf, but was able to resist, but now that he has brought your participation to a close, I have a few things to say.
To paraphrase Mark Twain , 'the rumours of my demise are greatly exaggerated'.
Thank you for answering my question. I can't think for the life of me why people like KF and WJM refuse to do so. Why one of them would repeatedly lie about not answering, something so easily disproven, is inexplainable.
I realize that the non materialists (theists) believe that if there is no IS (objective truths/morality) then societal morality would be akin to a preference for vanilla ice cream. This is just absurd. They don't take into account the impact of societal cohesion, cooperation, indoctrination, etc. These create a subjective moral assemblage within each of us that is every bit as strong and powerful as the objective morality that they rail on about.
When there is general agreement on these moral values (eg., not killing, not stealing, NOT LYING) the society is brought closer together. Where there is less agreement (eg., abortion, same sex marriage, Donald Trump), there is dissent. If the disagreements are serious and numerous enough, society can fall apart. History is rife with examples of this.Armand Jacks
April 21, 2017
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TROLL: The rhetorical imposition and assumption that we are bound by the moral government that he refuses to acknowledge, continues. KF
Mung:
I didn’t hit rock bottom. Assume it had to do with my expectations. Or lack thereof.
That's where you and I obviously differ. I expect someone who claims to own the discussion thread to be honest and display some level of integrity.Armand Jacks
April 21, 2017
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JDK
"I think the common answer to your question given by many here is that ultimately you would expect a world where might makes right, and where anyone who truly followed the logical implications would be a nihilist for which anything is permitted."
I think your wrong. As WJM pointed out in 48 and pay particular attention to "However"
"If moral subjectivism is true, then at a fundamental level I have no logical reason to care about morality per se at all, but rather only care about how my actions are perceived by society and how such actions might best benefit me. If I feel a pain or conscience or empathy against doing a thing I reason will ultimately benefit me, I have every rational reason to justify the behavior and calm and benumb my disquiet and carry out the action best suited for my benefit. Also, I have no logical reason to worry about any actions that society or others will not ever be aware of, leaving me free to do anything at all as long as I’m relatively sure it won’t be observed."
However, that’s not how good, sane humans actually act in the real world. We do what is right regardless of if anyone is watching and do it even if think it will ultimately not benefit us. We will do what we know is right even if society disagrees and it will cause us social problems. We will even violate the law if for our moral duties if they are clear enough. Some of us will actually sacrifice our own lives for the cause of what is right, even in the teeth of public disgrace and humiliation. Good, sane humans always act – and must act – as if morality is objective in nature, as if by promoting the good they are serving something greater than themselves, their society, or even the majority of humanity if the majority of humanity is doing what is wrong."
It seems to me that AJ confirms WJM's observation and my position as well. Dishonesty is wrong , period, end of story regardless of our subjective opinion otherwise why the outrage? Hypocrisy is wrong regardless of our subjective opinion otherwise what's the problem? It is hardly a compelling appeal if its just based " Oh dear me you are violating my personal sense of acceptable behavior"
My reaction to the whining based on that appeal is "Yawn , who cares" But I am more interested in how AJ acts and he acts as if dishonesty and hypocrisy is objectively wrong.
Vividvividbleau
April 21, 2017
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Armand Jacks:
I hit rock bottom when I expected you to have an honest discussion.
I didn't hit rock bottom. Assume it had to do with my expectations. Or lack thereof.Mung
April 21, 2017
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TROLL, left standing to show the anything but focus on the pivotal issues for the thread or those revealed by earlier misconduct. KF
Mung:
Have you checked the trolls per capita figures?
Don't blame us for being more computer literate than the average American. After all, Joe is yours. But, Denyse is ours. So let's call it even.Armand Jacks
April 21, 2017
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TROLL, left standing to document the onward refusal to reconsider ways. KF
KF:
JAD, sadly so, but just maybe this thread can help him hit rock bottom...
I hit rock bottom when I expected you to have an honest discussion. Let's examine your honesty:
1) I asked you a question and you repeatedly claimed that you answered it. A claim that anyone here can see is a lie.
2) I asked you a completely different question. Again you refused to answer and then repeatedly lied that you had answered. Another lie that all observers can confirm.
3) You asserted that I claimed to have made a knock down argument that refuted ID. A claim that I never made.
All of these facts can be confirmed by anyone here.
Sadly, it is not my reputation on the line. And how has Gordo decided to respond? Delete my comments and threaten to ban me.
KF, none of this is showing you in a good light. If you will take a suggestion from an atheist, which we know you are not capable of, admit your mistake.Armand Jacks
It is almost — almost — amusing but then quite sad to see how objectors to design theory play with logic and worldviews issues, then run away when the substantial issues are taken up.
FFT5: The implications of the familiar extraordinary.
In this thread, there are arguments [posted] that . . . as an observable phenomenon . . . show that we are capable of significant choice and reasoning, i.e. we are responsibly, rationally, significantly free, conscious, en-conscienced, morally governed, communicating creatures. (Indeed, those trying to object are operating on the implicit premise that we are urged by conscience toward the truth and the right; and if we were not, this world would descend into a dark, chaotic ruin in short order. It is a good thing that something urges us on to the truth and the right.)
Locke, in Sec 5 of his essay on human understanding (and yes, I add scriptural references i/l/o his cites and allusions), aptly comments:
All of that is in the context of rebuking a lazy, sneeringly supercilious selective hyperskepticism that will scorn more than adequate warrant for ethical theism, because it shuns the premise of moral government: accountability on plainly recognisable duty, before our Maker, Lord, Governor and utterly just Judge.
But, that is a bit quick off the mark.
There is no recognition of meaning, no perception, no purpose, just blind cause-effect chains externally arranged to yield the solution to certain differential equations. GIGO, and all that. Likewise, the old Pentium chip neither knew nor understood nor cared about the wired in errors that led to the early recall. And, a neural network is not in principle any different. (BTW this points to serious design inferences on the relevant hardware and software in bio-cybernetics systems, but that is a secondary point.)
The primary point has been highlighted by Reppert:
In short, a physicalist account of mindedness (much less, guidance by light of conscience) faces an ugly, impassable gulch.
In effect, rocks — even refined and carefully organised rocks — have no dreams; computation is not intentional contemplation.
At this point, evolutionary materialism and its fellow travellers — and nope you cannot properly, conveniently open up rhetorical daylight between some vague agnosticism and full-blown evo mat to deflect this — face an impassable gulch.
One, that brings out what was already highlighted: mindedness, consciousness, reasoned inference and conscience’s compass-pointing alike are all reduced to grand delusion on evo mat premises.
Grand delusion would collapse responsible, rational freedom and so falls into irretrievable incoherence and absurdity. Thence, the necessary falsity Pearcey and others have pointed to.
But in reality, rational, responsible, conscience-compass bearing consciousness is our first undeniable empirical fact. The fact through which we perceive all others.
This is the familiar extraordinary phenomenon, the pivot on which the project of building a sound worldview turns. In effect, unless a worldview is compatible with our being responsible, reasonable, conscience-guided and significantly free beings, it cannot even sit to the table for a discussion of comparative difficulties. It is silenced by being inconsistent with rationality. It is patently, irretrievably absurd and necessarily false. (Evo mat and fellow traveller ideologies, I am looking straight at you.)>>