I can’t believe I sat through this whole thing — it’s two hours, and not really my cup of tea. Hitch is always entertaining, but there’s really nothing new here if you’ve read his books. Must have been a slow afternoon. I confess I got the clip from far-lefty science blogger P.Z. Myers.
It speaks well of Hitch that he’d go up against five, count ’em five, believers; though when you get into it you realize the competition wasn’t all that fierce, and Hitch has done enough of this stuff on his book tours he can pretty much phone it in. Still, I though Hitch was nonplussed a couple of times. His best moment was in the question period at the end, when asked what he thought of believers who didn’t evangelize.
I found myself thinking (and not at all originally, of course) that the Afterlife business is a really big divider. If you can swallow that, the rest of religion goes down pretty easily; and if not, not.
Weird to see that one guy keep pounding on those Scholastic word-game arguments for the existence of God. Is that stuff still current in theology departments? I thought of young Bertie Russell in Trinity Lane, throwing his can of tobacco in the air and exclaiming: “Great God in boots! — the ontological argument is sound!” He’d just been converted (though very temporarily) to Hegelianism … yet this guy says Hegel never put forward an ontological argument.
Hegel critiqued Kant’s refutation of the ontological argument. The author of the article you link to is stating that Hegel never made any sort of formalization of what he took the premises of the ontological argument to be, which is probably true, but he definitely insisted (over and over) that the ontological argument was correct.
His critique of Kant’s refutation was to state that, of course, everybody knows that existence is not a predicate of a finite being, but this doesn’t show that existence isn’t a predicate of an infinite being. If you have any idea what Hegel was driving at here (he never says), then perhaps you’ll find the rest of his philosophy to be comprehensible as well.
How did you sit through the whole thing? 2 minutes into Stroble I found myself wanting go listen to dieing yaks as an alternative…
Sorry, I can’t resist recycling Auden’s great Clerihew:
No-one could ever inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Into offering an apology
For his Phenomenology.
I was struck at Hitchen’s God–not getting bossed around. Important value, but I’m glad it’s not all I’ve got. Question: “What are you living for?” Answer: “Cuz I can do whatever I feel like, and the Boss Man can’t say shit.”
This was a really bad idea by Hitchens. No one should agree to a debate format where its 5 against 1 and one of the 5 is the moderator. I also don’t think that Hitchens performed that well. I’ve seen much more amateur people debate better than this even taking the 5 to 1 issue into account.
#4: So far as I know, Hitch is a law-abiding citizen, perfectly willing for his actions to be constrained by law and custom, by his responsibilities to kith & kin, and by consideration for his fellow human beings at large.
He just doesn’t want them constrained by prohibitions imposed by persons claiming — implausibly, in Hitch’s opinion — to be transmitting the ordinances of supernatural beings. He might be mistaken in that opinion, but if it’s sincerely held, I don’t see how he is behaving reprehensibly.
Yes, the “afterlife.” If one can believe that, one can believe virtually anything: billions of disembodied souls floating in space or wherever, putatively enjoying all the earthly pleasures (with the exception of sex, apparently, unless you’re a male Muslim)that require a body: seeing without eyes, hearing without ears, thinking without a brain, talking without a mouth and larnyx, walking without feet and legs, etc.
Think of Terry S. and other brain-dead people, languishing in a “vegatative state.” When their bodies join their brains in death, their souls leave their corpses and they regain full self-consciousness, the consciousness of self that requires both a brain and a body.
Bradlaugh, right. My point was not about Hitchen’s behavior or that he doesn’t want to be constrained by religious prohibitions. My point is that so many of Hitchens arguments were about anti-totalitarianism, it was quite a contrast to see the others’ lives motivated by a love of God and Hitchen’s motivated by a desire to be left alone. The purpose of his life seems to be political. To me that’s pretty poor pickings compared to living for God.
Those other men might be living for something imaginary, but to my eyes it’s much grander. In my life, I’ve only found one thing worthy of my genuflection. The Man Upstairs. It’s sad to kneel to George Orwell. Orwell is a chimp after all. You might respond, why kneel to anything? For some, it might be unnecessary and undesirable, but I’m one of the people Dylan was talking to when he said, you’ve got to serve somebody. I might just be a beta who needs an Alpha.
This idea is part of a larger one of mine that some atheists seem to argue that there are no costs to adopting atheism. That seems to me unlikely on its face. Just about any change will have costs as well benefits.
Bradlaugh,
Those arguments are tossed about in apologetics, but unless it’s a new argument since 1991, it’s pretty much dead. I say 1991 because that’s the year Michael Martin published “Atheism: A Philosophical Defense.” That book brutally charged into the current and historic ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, moral, etc. As near as I can tell, he did his honest best to present the best modern version of the arguments best regarded in scholastic circles, and then he cut them down. Then he briefly threw out a host of what he called less important epistemic arguments, and pointed out their largest flaw. I missed several of the names, but whomever spouted off tons of historic arguments (William Craig maybe?) seems to honestly believe those arguments still stand. Craig knows that Martin has directly rebutted several of his own works and arguments(I even found his response chapter to Martin in an anthology of responses to a debate Craig took part in); he simply finds the rebuttals lacking.
In all fairness to Craig, I have not read his varied responses closely, but he seems to often fall back upon a God of the Gaps to keep several of the traditional arguments alive. Naturally, how you get from the teleological argument to a God taking an active interest in human affairs has never been resolved in my reading.
I’m watching the video right now; I have MORE of a problem with “orthodox” notions of “grace” than the idea of a theistic God who permits bad things to happen.
On the German incest case, were it in fact true that this victim would, regardless of what she believes when she dies, get compensated for the horror she suffered and similarly the perp. father, would be punished for the wrong that he did, regardless of what he believed when he died, I could believe that, see it as “just.”
But the horror of orthodox notions of salvation is he could accept Christ as Lord and Savior, have the punishment wiped away and spend eternity in bliss and if she does not, she’ll get an eternity of something worse, where the devil gets to do to her what her father did for all eternity.
The fact is, whomever is to blame for the bad that happened SHE DID NOT DESERVE that. The orthodox theologians put the blame on her or on original sin and that is horrific.
This dynamic of traditional Christianity (which I think all 4 of Hitchen’s opponents believed) it seems to me is as bad as the worst that radical Islam has to offer.
Weird to see that one guy keep pounding on those Scholastic word-game arguments for the existence of God. Is that stuff still current in theology departments? I thought of young Bertie Russell in Trinity Lane, throwing his can of tobacco in the air and exclaiming: “Great God in boots! — the ontological argument is sound!”
So I’ve finally watched the entire video and now I know what you’re going on about here. Really, Bradlaugh, you’ve got to stop taking Richard Dawkins seriously.
When I first read The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, I said to myself that Richard Dawkins is a terrific popularizer of science who happens to be a bit confused philosophically. When I heard that he was going to devote himself to defending atheism, I said to myself that this is great; Richard Dawkins will brush up on his philosophy and become a worthy ally. Now. . . I would not trust that fool to mow my lawn. He has managed to thoroughly poison discourse with his ignorant ravings on the subject and created a legion of disciples who parrot his pernicious positivism, blissfully unaware, like Dawkins himself, how discredited it is.
“Word games” may, perhaps, be an accurate description of the ontological argument specifically (which is what Dawkins referred to it as on pp. 81-82 of The God Delusion, in which he gave that same quote from Russell) and I was surprised to hear that the gentleman in the video still takes the ontological argument seriously, given that I believe it was conclusively and famously refuted by both Aquinas and Kant, and the latter refutation was refined by Bertrand Russell himself. But, really, in general, what you are referring to as “word games” is mere garden-variety reasoning. Words actually refer to concepts, you see, and if we organize these words about concepts into arguments, we can come to certain conclusions. And, yes, there are theology departments, especially Catholic but also some Protestant, which do still take the efficacy of reason seriously. It’s a pity that Dawkins (and Hitchens) is helping to ensure that there are no such atheists.
The reason why the man was banging on about his arguments is because Hitchens carefully evaded refuting them. I suspect this is because Hitchens was unable to refute them. There are multiple times through the debate when the theologians put Hitchens’s back up against the wall and he wriggled free by evading the question. He never said how he distinguishes between “Behavior A,” those behaviors caused by evolution which he calls moral and “Behavior B,” those behaviors caused by evolution which he calls immoral. He never explained how rationality is possible in a materialist universe. He latched onto morality rather than answering the audience member’s question about how any laws, such as mathematics, physics, and morality, can exist without God. And so forth.
Take heart, Bradlaugh. All of that guy’s arguments can in fact be refuted. None of them are sound arguments for the existence of God. Just because Hitchens and Dawkins don’t know how to refute them doesn’t mean that no refutation is possible. More seriously, the whole tone of that paragraph is “I don’t care what the best argument is. I’m going to stoutly believe whatever I have already made up my mind to believe and assume that I’ll be proven correct in the end.” Correct me if I’m not accurately describing your position, but that’s definitely the vibe you give off. I’ve never seen you even acknowledge the possibility that any argument could possibly change your mind about anything. For what it’s worth, I think a lot of people are like this, and so I actually give you many points for your refreshing honesty about it. However, for those of us who take reason seriously, our allegiance is always to the best argument. If the gentleman managed to come up with an argument for the existence of God which, upon careful and close reflection and study, I was unable to refute, then I would agree with him that he had proved the existence of God. Not the God of Christianity, mind. The best such arguments can do is prove something like the God of Aristotle, an Uncaused Cause who does nothing but think about thinking and plays no active role in the universe.
My post was written before I managed to read Curious Reader’s response. Michael Martin is an atheist who, unlike Dawkins and Hitchens, should be taken seriously philosophically. And I agree that Martin’s book ought to be required reading for any atheist who takes reason seriously.
From the intro to his Atheism: A Philosophical Justification:
“The aim of this book is not to make atheism a popular belief or even to overcome its invisibility. My object is not utopian. It is merely to provide good reasons for being an atheist. My object is to show that atheism is a rational position and that belief in God is not. I am quite aware that atheistic beliefs are not always based on reason. My claim is that they should be.”
It’s a pity that Dawkins didn’t read Martin and decided to rely on pseudo-arguments like referring to “The Courtier’s Reply” to justify his abject inability to engage the arguments instead.
Stevens: “And I agree that Martin’s book ought to be required reading for any atheist who takes reason seriously.”
“The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.” Thus spake (wrote) Unreasonable Albert, without having read “A Philosophical Justification.”
Andrew: You are quite right. I have a slovenly mind, with little power of following close arguments on topics that don’t engage my interests.
That’s not quite the same as having no respect for reason, though. My inclination is to math and the sciences, where the application of reason to observation is fruitful. Now here is a reader telling us about Michael Martin, who by scrupulous reasoning debunks all the old scholastic arguments for the supernatural. No doubt by this time some supernaturalist has produced a book refuting Martin, with equal rigor. There is simply nothing fruitful here, and I am quite shameless in ignoring the whole business, except as a form of light Saturday-afternoon entertainment.
Possessed of a lazy mind like mine (and mine is, by the psychometric standards I know, a good bit better than average) any person left in a room with Martin for a couple of hours would, I am sure, come out a convinced atheist. But then, put in a room for a couple of hours with a really deft theologian, he would likely come out a convinced deist. In either case, what would he have gained? Deism does nothing for one. The psychic benefits of faith only kick in when you’ve convinced yourself of the miracles, angels, afterlife, magic wafers, golden tablets, and the rest; and to anyone of an empirical cast of mind, that is all just preposterous.
I’m a big fan of reason when it uncovers new and true facts about the world. Reasoning about invisible spirits and such seems to me a waste of intellection.
It follows that this of yours:
is all wrong. I would never “believe whatever I have already made up my mind to believe” about anything that mattered to me. If I had gone along believing the number of primes to be finite, and then been shown Euclid’s argument to the contrary, I would have changed my mind at once. It’s just that the supernatural stuff doesn’t matter to me. Why should it? It doesn’t impinge on the real world in any way — by definition!
This is almost a good response. If you argued that, “I have no interest in whether or not God exists. I refuse to consider the arguments at all and I withhold all judgment on the matter due to my lack of interest,” this would be a fine and perfectly justifiable response. (I have often argued that even if God did exist, the fact of his existence would make no difference at all.) However, you’re not doing this. You are asserting a position based on no argument that you care to relate. I see no distinction between your position and those creationists who refuse to engage the evidence for evolution because of lack of interest – the material world after all is just the world of shadows and the real stuff is up there in Heaven. Who cares about progress in mathematics and science when God already has all this stuff figured out and we’ll know all the answers when we go to our reward?
F. le Mur, I recommend Martin because he is one of the best contemporary atheist philosophers, though by no means the only one. If I seemed to imply that it was not possible at any point in the past (or even in the present) to be a justified atheist without having read Martin’s books, this was not my intent. Indeed, I have often criticized Dawkins for his claim that “one could not have been an intellectually fulfilled atheist before Darwin.” When his “atheist philosopher friend” brought up Hume, he thought Hume’s position was silly because he could not explain organized complexity. These are the words of a man who irrationally privileges his own specialty, biology. Once biology had figured out the big problems without reference to God, then he was happy to be an atheist, but only then.
Yes, Hitchens can be entertaining. But it takes no particular courage to voice his opinion of religion on either side of the Atlantic. In England, of course, Hitchens’ contempt for Christianity is shared by all the bien pensants. It’s shared by many of our bien pensants, too. I suspect that Hitchens has never had an article rejected, a TV appearance cancelled, or a cocktail party invitation withdrawn because of his hatred of Christianity. Quite the contrary. And American Christians are, generally speaking, so polite that Steve Sailer commented that my review of “God is not Great” was one of the few rude reviews Hitchens’ error-filled atheist tract received.
In my view, politeness is not the proper response to a man who praised Lenin’s murderous suppression of Russian Orthodoxy and has said of Mother Teresa, “I wish there was a hell for the bitch to go to.” But my view is clearly a minority one. Michael Novak even labelled Hitchens a “Treasure” in his review of “God is not Great” for NRO.
Clearly Hitchens thought he was going on safari. And I tuned it to watch. But the hunter was lazy and the lion nipped his leg when he wasn’t looking.
There was no need for Hitchens to avoid so many questions. Many were easily and directly addressable.
Why group all religions together?
I am not. Today I attack Christianity and that alone. The target is large enough and made of glass.
What do you think of Christians who are certain of their beliefs and yet do not evangelize?
Certainly that shows their lack of empathy or their impotence, but all that is irrelevant because it is all based on a faulty premise. Just take a second to answer the kid’s question before calling everyone present a delusional idiot! Especially in debates, the avoidance of a question is often taken as an implicit defeat (of course, sometimes mistakenly). Keep in mind that the purpose of Hitchens’ presence is not to win the argument (that argument was won long ago), but for the edification of the audience (if not to sell books).
But Hitchens really fell down in two instances.
The first was when the amiable and admiringly honest moderator asked him from where the poor, sick, downtrodden, etc. would replenish the hope and dignity lost to them with their disavowal of Christianity. Hitchens’ response (after first avoiding it) was essentially – Truth is king! We must accept unwelcome conclusions. Don’t be a baby. – No doubt truth is the highest value to Hitchens and to many others, but must it be to everyone? Why does truth get this special status? Are we really going to fault those who put the quality of their own personal lives – their happiness – as first priority? Of course not. What is ultimately important here? Hitchens then goes on to say something like – well, it’s not that bad really. This after giving strong examples himself of instances where reality really *is* intolerable and must be negated in the mind of the victim for their own psychological well-being – to make life itself tolerable. As Lovecraft put it, were one were to piece together actual reality, the view may very well be so terrifying that one could be driven to madness. Here truth is the victim, but the reward is life.
The second case was Hitchens’ failure to defend his moral stance. He declares the golden rule something of a tautology (!) while at the same time professing no love for his enemies and makes no attempt to reconcile the contradiction. For some reason he brings racism into it and talks about “our survival” and “our childrens’ sake” which brings to my mind the is-ought problem and how whether one should be racist or not (let us say a gentle racist) is contigent on the existence of – or let us be more honest – significance of racial differences. But not to get side-tracked, the immorality of racism follows from the golden rule and therefore it is in its justification that Hitchens would have better have spent his time. Not this – Christ said it (cross that out), the Rabbe said it, Confucious says! Well, jolly good then – that’s settled.
Forgive the hasty prose.
“But it takes no particular courage to voice his opinion of religion on either side of the Atlantic.”
Exactly. Sam Harris goes on endlessly about how the ONE taboo left is religion, and then he, Hitchens, and Dawkins sell millions of books calling religious people frauds, hucksters, madmen, psychotics, idiots, children, etc.
Right, these guys can’t put food on the table because of privileged religion, while Steve Sailer earns millions on race realism.
I don’t begrudge them their success, but they need to stop whining about how you can’t speak your mind on these issues.
Ron Guhname
you’ve got to serve somebody. I might just be a beta who needs an Alpha.
Yes, the very stuff of society!
Religion is a perversion of social emotions just like fetichism or pedophilia (or coprophilia, LOL) is a perversion of sexuality.
Too bad evolution hasn’t had enough time yet for a finer tuning of all this.
I don’t begrudge them their success, but they need to stop whining about how you can’t speak your mind on these issues.
I agree with this. Dawkins once said, “The status of atheists in America today is on par with that of homosexuals fifty years ago.” This is nonsense. I’ve been an open atheist for many years and have said so in the South, the Midwest, and the Northeast, and nobody cares. Religious people never have a problem with me and are usually quite interested in what I have to say on religion, morality, and why I’m an atheist. I have always been treated with nothing but respect and politeness, though perhaps this is because I treat people with politeness and respect myself (not calling them “delusional idiots” or “babies,” for example, simply for believing what their culture has believed for a couple thousand years). Americans like atheists just fine; they just don’t like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. And, honestly, who can blame them?
I beg to differ that there are no consequences of speaking one’s mind. Employment comes to mind. I once worked for a wonderfully, open-minded geophysical scientist. We had wonderful conversations on religion and atheism. My job there was not in jeopardy due to religious beliefs.
Being a fool, I left that job for one that paid almost twice as much, but one where I was ultimately fired for complaining that a co-worker’s habit of listening to recorded sermons played rather loudly interfered with my ability to work efficiently.
While my complaint was that any recorded speech would interfere, it was taken as a complaint against Christian sermons, and soon a reason was found to “eliminate my position”. I discovered during the process of finding a reason to fire me, that any “dissing” of religion or display of religion, especially evangelical Christianity was Not Allowed. Strange that it was “left-wing” evangelical Christianity also.
In some circles, you cannot speak your mind on religion and still be “accepted”.
I think that the first thing one might understand about Hitchens is that thinking of him as a ‘thinker’ is more than a bit crazy. Hitchens is in show biz and the referred to debate is a fine move for someone in a certain type of show biz career to make. In addition, if one analyzes Hitchens and the Mother Teresa type stuff, it’s best to think of it analogically with Madonna kissing Britney Spears on MTV, he’s shocking people who his ‘fans’ would enjoy being shocked, therefore it’s a good career move. Gotta give one’s fans what they want. Bertrand Russell did the same too.
Thinking of Hitchens as some guy who possesses an intellect to be reckoned with is, well. not something one should do. He obviously likes to think, he has a passion for ideas, but equally obviously, he isn’t all that good at thinking, he’s got passion but not much in the way of talent. I guess this is a rude place to make this observation, but he’s in sort of an optimal occupation for him, when one also considers his talent for producing mountains of excellent prose at the drop of a hat. Being a magazine writer is the perfect fit for such a guy, if Hitchens were in some sort of job where much blood and treasure rode on him thinking well instead of merely passionately, disaster would ensue.
Question for Andrew Stevens (and forgive me if I could have figured out the answer from your comments): what philosophical arguments persuaded you that atheism was the logical and rational choice?
As to atheism being a matter of indifference to most people, my experience has been that this is more or less true among the educated, but it’s still the better part of wisdom to maintain a discreet profile in most situations. The believers have spent thousands of years making lists of and devising torments for doubters and skeptics, and there’s no law of history that says they can’t revert to type at a moment’s notice.
Indeed, the last two hundred years of what I’ll call Western civilization may be little more than an anamolous blip in this regard.
Five to one, baby
One in five
No one here gets out alive
Amazing… 23 comments and no one else had come up with this, the perfect song lyric to commemorate the occasion. 😛
Bradlaugh: I found myself thinking (and not at all originally, of course) that the Afterlife business is a really big divider. If you can swallow that, the rest of religion goes down pretty easily; and if not, not.
It’s like I said a few threads ago: Religion (or at least one that involves an eternal afterlife) changes the game completely, as Blaise Pascal so famously observed, by raising the stakes from merely the duration and quality of your existence in this life, to your salvation or damnation for all eternity. If you really were to embrace such a belief, and accept those basically infinite stakes, wouldn’t achieving eternal salvation naturally become your #1 priority in this life – and wouldn’t your lower-level beliefs and priorities, and even reason itself, then have to be
compromisedadjusted accordingly?That’s why I can’t foresee religion ever dying, in America or anywhere else; for all its reliance on reason, secularism has yet to come up with a motivational mechanism that can compete with the threat of burning in hell, or the promise of singing in heaven, forever after.
for all its reliance on reason, secularism has yet to come up with a motivational mechanism that can compete with the threat of burning in hell, or the promise of singing in heaven, forever after.
Well, if you reason on it a bit, you’ll realize that “singing in heaven, forever after”, is hell.
That was cute, Ivan (you are aware, aren’t you, that Ivan’s creator was a practicing member of the Russian Orthodox Church, aren’t you? Ivan served as a foil for the justification of theodicy), but not an accurate depiction of the view you are denigrating.
First, what’s with the discourse on my handle? Should I ponder, before replying, whether you are Daniel of “Daniel and the lion” fame? Or are you perhaps the Daniel who “is traveling tonight on a plane” to Spain? I mean, good grief. Enough already.
In any event, it does not take long to realize that “never ending” is a horrific state of affairs, not far from torture and slavery, so even the “nice bits” about religion are over-rated.
Narr, which religion are you interested in the arguments against? If we’re talking about the god of the philosophers, then I believe the Problem from Evil has never had a satisfactory theodicy advanced. The theologians in the above video carefully ducked this challenge of Hitchens’s, defending evil with the free-will defense, which cannot justify natural evils, such as children suffering hideously from leukemia, hurricanes, tornados, etc.
Either God is not omnipotent (God knows evil exists and wants to stop it, but lacks the power), God is not omniscient (God wants to stop evil and can do so, but doesn’t know about it), God is not omnibenevolent (God knows evil exists and could stop it, but doesn’t care), or God does not exist. I reject as implausible on its face the possible solution that evil does not exist, though most theodicies attempt to argue it. If you take either of the first three solutions, you have made the existence of your conception of God vastly more plausible, but lost something fairly crucial to the god of the philosophers.
Thank you, Andrew Stevens, for the thoughtful reply. Am I wrong in thinking that the arguments against the existence of god are good for (that is, against) all religions?* I’m quite familiar with the argument you adduce, btw, and don’t spend much time contemplating the god of the philosophers, anyway.
Are you familiar with Victor Stenger’s recent book? If so, what is your opinion?
*Theistic religions, that is. I know that Sam Harris has some sympathy for non-theistic variants of Buddhism, but I don’t believe that non-theistic spirituality makes any more sense than the theistic kind, so he loses me there.
I personally doubt that there’s a “magic bullet” argument which defeats all conceptions of a god or gods. Enlightenment deism or Spinozist pantheism make far fewer commitments and are much more difficult to falsify (if it’s possible at all). I agree that no rationalist should take Buddhism seriously which, unlike Christianity, has never made a concerted effort to rationalize itself.
Atheism is a fairly easily defended worldview, and the New Atheists tend to do a half-way decent job of it. The real problem with the New Atheists, though, is they make a very large number of other metaphysical commitments, such as materialism, moral anti-realism, and nominalism, which they cannot defend, but feel that they must in order to defend atheism simpliciter. This tends to get them in trouble since they are on much less certain ground now (and usually ground that they don’t even understand since, to a man, they are all proud of their ignorance of philosophy). Dawkins more or less entirely subscribes to logical positivism, as one can see when he insists that every belief must be tested by scientific evidence though he gives no scientific evidence which led him to this belief. Dawkins isn’t interested in annihilating religion; he wants to replace it with his very own religion, complete with forbidden subjects of study (metaphysics, theology) and a whole system of moral commandments (Dawkins preaches morality as fiercely as any Baptist), despite the absence of any moral ontology in his philosophy. Science is not a religion, of course, but Dawkins wants to erect one based around his own peculiar philosophy.
I haven’t read Stenger’s book, but perhaps I’ll give it a read.
Bradlaugh appears to be channelling Dawkins:
“I’ve never actually heard a sophisticated theologian say anything that I regarded as worth discussing, to be quite honest, but I’m always ready to be disabused of that, meanwhile my hands are full dealing with the Jerry Falwell’s of this world who are hugely influential and hugely rich and who have vast followings in the US and elsewhere.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBsk8WFdy7E&feature=related
Dawkins at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday, August 11, 2008.
What about the ones that reject the concept of ‘metaphysics’ completely?
What about the ones that reject the concept of ‘metaphysics’ completely?
A clear metaphysical commitment which must be defended. I.e. I would require a defense of all the metaphysical problems and how the non-metaphysical worldview purports to resolve them. Most importantly would be the defense of nominalism. E.g. as Quine pointed out, all of our best scientific theories have an ontological commitment to predicates such that the predicate is only satisfied by objects whose existence is incompatible with nominalism. This seems to knock nominalism completely out of the ballgame unless we wish to claim that almost all scientific theories are incoherent. The metaphysical anti-realist would have to explain why this is mistaken.
If their argument for metaphysical impossibility is in the strong form, it is almost certainly “self-referentially incoherent.” (One cannot consistently make the charge that metaphysical knowledge is impossible, since the claim is self-refuting.) If the argument is that it is not self-referentially incoherent, I would like to hear why.
If the charge is in its weak form (something like claiming that the human mind is not capable of reaching metaphysical conclusions in any reliable way), then this isn’t automatically invalid, but it needs an awful lot of defending, since it must be based on factual claims about human cognition. I believe such a claim would also be obliged to present its empirical support, though so far no such support has ever been forthcoming.
In all of this, there is a further dubious epistemological assumption – that science never uses non-empirical arguments (it does) and that metaphysics never draws on empirical premises (it does). I am just as opposed as any New Atheist to metaphysical obscurantism of the type found in Hegel. One can recognize that metaphysics and science are not opposed to one another and still reject extravagant metaphysical arguments with little evidence or logic (or even meaning) behind them.
The real reason that the New Atheists make such extravagant metaphysical claims themselves, I believe, is because they are afraid that if they don’t deny moral realism, realism about universals, and all other metaphysics, that they are opening the door up to “anything goes.” But this is simply due to their own ignorance about modern philosophy and is entirely unjustified.
You don’t seem to have understood my question. But then, perhaps that was your intention.
What was your question then? I can only suppose that it’s the positivist claim that metaphysics is meaningless. This claim is covered in my answer. The positivist claim is self-referentially incoherent.
Let us take a hypothetical anti-metaphysician whom we shall call Richard. He argues that any proposition which does not pass some test he specifies is defective (it is self-contradictory or meaningless or some such). And he argues that any metaphysical proposition must fail this test. It will, I believe, invariably turn out that some proposition which is essential to Richard’s argument itself will fail his test, making his claim self-referentially incoherent. Needless to say, most anti-metaphysicians disagree with me and claim that their own arguments are not self-referentially incoherent, but I’ve been waiting in vain for any rigorous argument which isn’t. If you would care to present one, please do. I’ll be happy to evaluate it for you.
Andrew Stevens
I can only suppose that it’s the positivist claim that metaphysics is meaningless
It is not that metaphysics is meaningless, it is that your metaphysic is old fashionned and bunk.
For a wannabe philosophy wonk you are quite a bit out of date, see Agustín Rayo’s Towards a Trivialist Account of Mathematics to find out why Platonism v/s Nominalism is irrelevant.
Kevembuangga, that may be true, of course. But why do I doubt that you have any kind of standing or authority to say anything of the kind? Really, this is the problem with so many of the New Atheists. Their propensity for supremely confident yet utterly incompetent pronouncements about philosophy is startling.
By the way, for those who did not go to the link, the article he linked to was published just over one month ago. I am apparently “quite a bit out of date” because I don’t read within a month every paper published by every philosophy PhD in the world.
As it is, the paper in question is just a sketching out of Mr. Rayo’s views. Mr. Rayo is not in fact making the extravagant claims that Kevembuangga is making for him. And Mr. Rayo’s theories, being extremely new, have obviously not yet overturned what Mr. Rayo himself refers to as “the conventional wisdom.” I will refrain from critiquing Mr. Rayo’s work since I would prefer to allow him to fully flesh out his ideas in book form first.
Addressing people who reject the concept of metaphysics, they would say that their claim isn’t a metaphysical one. What arguments do you offer in favor of the concept of metaphysics itself?
Andrew Stevens
Mr. Rayo is not in fact making the extravagant claims that Kevembuangga is making for him.
Here is the beginning of the relevant passage from the linked paper at pages 5-6:
They must either claim that the logical structure of mathematical statements shouldn’t be taken at face value, or claim that the information conveyed by mathematical assertions is very different from what the sentences asserted literally say.
The problem with this way of approaching the issue is that it is based on a questionable picture of the workings of language: the idea that there is a certain kind of correspondence between the structure of language and the structure of the world. More specifically, what is presupposed is this:
(1) there is a particular carving of the world into objects which is more
apt, in some metaphysical sense, than any potential rival — a carving that is in accord with the world’s true `metaphysical structure’;
(2) to each legitimate singular term there must correspond an object carved out by the world’s metaphysical structure; and
(3) satisfaction of the truth-conditions of an atomic sentence requires that the objects corresponding to singular terms in the sentence bear the property expressed by the sentence’s predicate.
…/…
This conception of language is a close cousin of the `picture theory’ that Wittgenstein defended in the Tractatus.2 And it seems to me that it ought to be rejected for just the reason Wittgenstein rejected the picture theory in his later writings.
IOW, there is NO true `metaphysical structure’ of the world.
Though this is in itself a “metaphysical statement” it means that ANY special, privileged, preferred, etc… metaphysical structure is BULLSHIT!
The world doesn’t actually contain objects, concepts or “moral values” it is only OUR DISCOURSE about the world which contains such things, and being a discourse (a model!!!) it MAY CHANGE over time and there is no definite, eternal “truth” about anything.
Kevembanggua, this is at least the fourth time you’ve stepped outside of civilized discourse in just the last two threads I’ve read with you in it. A selection:
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know that religionists do not understand the basic principles of evolution and the gradual built up of complexity.
No surprises here, dumb is as dumb as dumb can get.”
“So you think that religitards deserve more than ad hominems?
Counter arguments to your nonsenses are all over the place since a long time now and yet none of the religitards seem to grasp any.”
“It is not that metaphysics is meaningless, it is that your metaphysic is old fashionned and bunk.
For a wannabe philosophy wonk you are quite a bit out of date”
“Though this is in itself a ‘metaphysical statement’ it means that ANY special, privileged, preferred, etc… metaphysical structure is BULLSHIT!
The world doesn’t actually contain objects, concepts or ‘moral values’ it is only OUR DISCOURSE about the world which contains such things, and being a discourse (a model!!!) it MAY CHANGE over time and there is no definite, eternal ‘truth’ about anything.”
I appreciate that you think you’re so clever that you can talk with absolute certainty on subjects you don’t know anything about. We all have gathered that about you by now. I also appreciate that you have shown strong enough Google-fu skills to find an obscure paper written within a month which is congenial to your philosophical worldview and that you sincerely believe that this paper will come to revolutionize philosophy and make your own peculiar philosophy acceptable again.
I also love that you feel entitled to make, without embarrassment, statements like “the world doesn’t actually contain objects” and “there is no definite, eternal ‘truth’ about anything” (including, presumably, that statement itself).
But I have a limited amount of time to spend educating the uneducable and breaking butterflies upon a wheel.