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Sunday, October 02, 2022

Argument From the Religious a Priori



back to my roots in existentialism

Argument:

(1) Scineitifc reductionism loses phenomena by re-defining the nature of sense data and quailia.

(2)There are other ways of Knowing than scinetific induction

(3) Religious truth is apprehended phenomenoloigcally, thus religion is not a scientific issue and cannot be subjected to a materialist critque

(4) Religion is not derived from other disciplines or endeavors but is a approch to understanding in its own right

(5)Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms and not according to the dictates or other disciplines

In my dealings with atheists in debate and dialogue I find that they are often very committed to an empiricist view point. Over and over again I hear the refrain "you can't show one single unequivocal demonstration of scientific data that proves a God exists." This is not a criticism. It's perfectly understandable; science has become the umpire of reality. It is to scientific demonstration that we appear for a large swath of questions concerning the nature of reality. The problem is that the reliance upon empiricism has led to forgetfulness about the basis of other types of questions. We have forgotten that essentially science is metaphysics, as such it is just one of many approachs that can be derived from analytical reasoning, empiricism, rationalism, phenomonology and other approaches.

Problem with Empiricism

Is empirical evidence the best or only true form of knowledge? This is an apologetics question because it bears upon the arguments for the existence of God.

Is lack of empirical evidence, if there is a lack, a draw back for God arguments? I deny that there is a lack, but it has to be put in the proper context. That will come in future threads, for this one I will bracket that answer and just assume there no really good empirical evidence (even though I think there is).

I will ague that empiricism is not true source of knowledge by itself and logic is more important.

True empirical evidence in a philosophical sense means exact first hand observation. In science it doesn't really mean that, it implies a more truncated process. Consider this, we drop two balls of different size from a tower. Do they fall the same rate or the bigger one falls faster? They are supposed to fall at the same rate, right? To say we have empirical proof, in the litteral sense of the term we would have to observe every single time two balls are dropped for as long as the tower exists. We would have to sit for thousnds of years and observe millions of drops and then we couldn't say it was truely empirical because we might have missed one.

That's impractical for science so we cheat with inductive reasoning. We make assumptions of probability. We say we observed this 40,000 times, that's a tight correlation, so we will assume there is a regularity in the universe that causes it to work this way every time. We make a statistical correlation. Like the surgeon general saying that smoking causes cancer. The tobacco companies were really right, they read their Hume, there was no observation of cause and effect, because we never observe cause and effect. But the correlation was so tight we assume cause and effect.

The ultimate example is Hume's billiard balls. Hume says we do not see the cause of the ball being made to move, we only really see one ball stop and the other start. But this happens every time we watch, so we assume that the tight corrolation gives us causality.

The naturalistic metaphysician assumes that all of nature works this way. A tight correlation is as good as a cause. So when we observe only naturalistic causes at work we can assume there is nothing beyond naturalism. The problem is many phenomena can fall between the cracks. One might go one's whole life never seeing a miraculous event, but that doesn't mean someone else doesn't observe such things. All the atheist can say is "I have never seen this" but I can say "I have." Yet the atheist lives in a construct that is made up of his assumptions about naturslitic c/e and excluding anyting that challenges it. That is just like Kuhns paradigm shift. The challenges are absorbed into the paradigm untl there are so many the paradigm has to shit. This may never happen in naturalism.

So this constructed view of the world that is made out of assumption and probabilities misses a lot of experience that people do have that contradicts the paradigm of naturalism. The thing is, to make that construct they must use logic. After all what they are doing in making the correlation is merely inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning has to play off of deductive reasoning to even make sense.

Ultimately then, "empiricism" as construed by naturalist (inductive probabalistic assumtions building constructs to form a world view) is inadquate because it is merely a contsuct and rules out a prori much that contradicts.

The A priori

God is not given directly in sense data, God transcends the threshold of human understanding, and thus is not given amenable to empirical proof. As I have commented in previous essays (on blogs) religion is not a scientific question. There are other methodologies that must be used to understand religion, since the topic is essentially inter-subjective (and science thrives upon objective data). We can study religious behavior through empirical means and we can compare all sorts of statistical realizations through comparisons of differing religious experiences, behaviors, and options. But we cannot produce a trace of God in the universe through "objective" scientific means. Here I use the term "trace" in the Derision sense, the "track," "footprint" the thing to follow to put us on the scent. As I have stated in previous essays, what we must do is find the "co-detemrinate," the thing that is left by God like footprints in the snow. The trace of God can be found in God's affects upon the human heart, and that shows up objectively, or inter-subjectvely in changed behavior, changed attitudes, life transformations. This is the basis of the mystical argument that I use, and in a sense it also has a bearing upon my religious instinxt argument. But here I wish to present another view of the trace of God. This could be seen as a co-detmiernate perhaps, more importantly, it frees religion from the structures of having to measure up to a scientific standard of proof: the religious a prori.

Definition of the a priori.

"This notion [Religious a priori] is used by philosophers of religion to express the view that the sense of the Divine is due to a special form of awareness which exists along side the cognitive, moral, and aesthetic forms of awareness and is not explicable by reference to them. The concept of religion as concerned with the awareness of and response to the divine is accordingly a simple notion which cannot be defined by reference other than itself." --David Pailin "Religious a pariori" Westminster Dictionary of Chrisian Theology (498)

The religious a priroi deals with the speicial nature of religion as non-derivative of any other discipline, and especially it's speicial reiigious faculty of understanding which transcends ordinary means of understanding. Since the enlightenment atheist have sought to explain away religion by placing it in relative and discardable terms. The major tactic for accomplishing this strategy was use of the sociological theory of structural functionalism. By this assumption religion was chalked up to some relative and passing social function, such as promoting loyalty to the tribe, or teaching morality for the sake of social cohesion. This way religion was explained naturalistically and it was also set in relative terms because these functions in society, while still viable (since religion is still around) could always pass away. But this viewpoint assumes that religion is derivative of some other discipline; it's primitive failed science, concocted to explain what thunder is for example. Religion is an emotional solace to get people through hard times and make sense of death and destruction (it's all sin, fallen world et). But the a priori does away with all that. The a priori says religion is its own thing, it is not failed primitive science, nor is it merely a crutch for surviving or making sense of the world (although it can be that) it is also its own discipline; the major impetus for religion is the sense of the numinous, not the need for explanations of the natural world. Anthropologists are coming more and more to discord that nineteenth century approach anyway.

Thomas A Indianopolus:prof of Religion at of Miami U. of Ohio.

Cross currents Magazine

It is the experience of the transcendent, including the human response to that experience, that creates faith, or more precisely the life of faith. [Huston] Smith seems to regard human beings as having a propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as "innate." In his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate descriptions of the lives of religious human beings than conventional uses of the word, religion. The reason for this has to do with the distinction between participant and observer. This is a fundamental distinction for Smith, separating religious people (the participants) from the detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not ordinarily have "a religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not as the participant's word but as the observer's word, one that focuses on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies, and other practices. By contrast, faith is about the nonobservable, life-shaping vision of transcendence held by a participant..."
The Skeptic might argue "if religion has this unique form of consciousness that sets it apart form other forms of understanding, why does it have to be taught?" Obviously religious belief is taught through culture, and there is a good reason for that, because religion is a cultural construct. But that does not diminish the reality of God. Culture teaches religion but God is known to people in the heart. This comes through a variety of ways; through direct experience, through miraculous signs, through intuitive sense, or through a sense of the numinous. The Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology ..defines Numinous as "the sense of awe in attracting and repelling people to the Holy." Of course the background assumption I make is, as I have said many times, that God is apprehended by us mystically--beyond word, thought, or image--we must encode that understanding by filtering it through our cultural constrcts, which creates religious differences, and religious problems.

The Culturally constructed nature of religion does not negate the a priori. "Even though the forms by Which religion is expressed are culturally conditioned, religion itself is sui generis .. essentially irreducible to and undeceivable from the non-religious." (Paladin). Nor can the a priori be reduced to some other form of endeavor. It cannot be summed up by the use of ethics or any other field, it cannot be reduced to explanation of the world or to other fields, or physiological counter causality. To propose such scientific analysis, except in terms of measuring or documenting effects upon behavior, would yield fruitless results. Such results might be taken as proof of no validity, but this would be a mistake. No scientific control can ever be established, because any study would only be studying the culturally constructed bits (by definition since language and social sciences are cultural constructs as well) so all the social sciences will wind up doing is merely reifying the phenomena and reducing the experience. In other words, This idea can never be studied in a social sciences sense, all that the social sciences can do is redefine the phenomena until they are no longer discussing the actual experiences of the religious believer, but merely the ideology of the social scientist (see my essay on Thomas S. Kuhn.

The attempt of skeptics to apply counter causality, that is, to show that the a priori phenomena is the result of naturalistic forces and not miraculous or divine, not only misses the boat in its assumptions about the nature of the argument, but it also loses the phenomena by reduction to some other phenomena. It misses the boat because it assumes that the reason for the phenomena is the claim of miraculous origin, “I feel the presence of God because God is miraculously giving me this sense of his presence.” While some may say that, it need not be the believers argument. The real argument is simply that the co-determinates are signs of the trace of God in the universe, not because we cant understand them being produced naturalistically, but because they evoke the sense of numinous and draw us to God. The numinous implies something beyond the natural, but it need not be “a miracle.” The sense of the numinous is actually a natural thing, it is part of our apprehension of the world, but it points to the sublime, which in turn points to transcendence. In other words, the attribution of counter causality does not, in and of itself, destroy the argument, while it is the life transformation through the experience that is truly the argument, not the phenomena itself. Its the affects upon the believer of the sense of Gods presence and not the sense of Gods presence that truly indicates the trance of God.

Moreover, the attempts to reduce the causality to something less than the miraculous also lose the phenomena in reification.William James, The Verieties of Religious Experience (The Gilford Lectures):

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.
This does not mean that the mere claim of religious experience of God consciousness is proof in and of itself, but it means that it must be taken on its own terms. It clearly answers the question about why God doesn't reveal himself to everyone; He has, or rather, He has made it clear to everyone that he exists, and He has provided everyone with a means of knowing Him. He doesn't get any more explicit because faith is a major requirement for belief. Faith is not an arbitrary requirement, but the rational and logical result of a world made up of moral choices. God reveals himself, but on his own terms. We must seek God on those terms, in the human heart and the basic sense of the numinous and in the nature of religious encounter. There are many aspects and versions of this sense, it is not standardized and can be describes in many ways:

Forms of the A priori.

Schleiermacher's "Feeling of Utter Dependence.

Frederick Schleiermacher, (1768-1834) in On Religion: Speeches to it's Cultured Disposers, and The Christian Faith, sets forth the view that religion is not reducible to knowledge or ethical systems. It is primarily a phenomenological apprehension of God consciousness through means of religious affections. Affections is a term not used much anymore, and it is easily confused with mere emotion. Sometimes Schleiermacher is understood as saying that "I become emotional when I pay and thus there must be an object of my emotional feelings." Though he does vintner close to this position in one form of the argument, this is not exactly what he's saying.

Schleiermacher is saying that there is a special intuitive sense that everyone can grasp of this whole, this unity, being bound up with a higher reality, being dependent upon a higher unity. In other words, the "feeling" can be understood as an intuitive sense of "radical contingency" (int he sense of the above ontological arugments).He goes on to say that the feeling is based upon the ontological principle as its theoretical background, but doesn't' depend on the argument because it proceeds the argument as the pre-given pre-theorectical pre-cognative realization of what Anslem sat down and thought about and turned into a rational argument: why has the fools said in his heart 'there is no God?' Why a fool? Because in the heart we know God. To deny this is to deny the most basic realization about reality.

Rudolph Otto's Sense of the Holy (1868-1937)

The sense of power in the numinous which people find when confronted by the sacred. The special sense of presence or of Holiness which is intuitive and observed in all religious experience around the world.

Paul Tillich's Object of Ultimate Concern.

We are going to die. We cannot avoid this. This is our ultimate concern and sooner or latter we have to confront it. When we do we realize a sense of transformation that gives us a special realization existentially that life is more than material.

see also My article on Toilet's notion of God as the Ground of Being.

Tillich's concept made into God argument.

As Robert R. Williams puts it:

There is a "co-determinate to the Feeling of Utter dependence.

It is the original pre-theoretical consciousness...Schleiermacher believes that theoretical cognition is founded upon pre-theoretical intersubjective cognition and its life world. The latter cannot be dismissed as non-cognative for if the life world praxis is non-cognative and invalid so is theoretical cognition..S...contends that belief in God is pre-theoretical, it is not the result of proofs and demonstration, but is conditioned soley by the modification of feeling of utter dependence. Belief in God is not acquired through intellectual acts of which the traditional proofs are examples, but rather from the thing itself, the object of religious experience..If as S...says God is given to feeling in an original way this means that the feeling of utter dependence is in some sense an apparition of divine being and reality. This is not meant as an appeal to revelation but rather as a naturalistic eidetic"] or a priori. The feeling of utter dependence is structured by a corrolation with its whence.
, Schleiermacher the Theologian, p 4. The believer is justified in assuming that his/her experinces are experiences of a reality, that is to say, that God is real.

Freedom from the Need to prove.

Schleiermacher came up with his notion of the feeling when wrestling with Kantian Dualism. Kant had said that the world is divided into two aspects of relaity the numenous and the pheneomenal. The numenous is not experienced through sense data, and sense God is not experineced through sense data, God belongs only to the numenous. The problem is that this robbs us of an object of theological discourse. We can't talk about God because we can't experience God in sense data. Schleiermacher found a way to run an 'end round' and get around the sense data. Experience of God is given directly in the "feeling" apart form sense data.

This frees us form the need to prove the existence of God to others, because we know that God exists in a deep way that cannot be estreated by mere cultural constructs or reductionist data or deified phenomena. This restores the object of theological discourse. Once having regained its object, theological discourse can proceed to make the logical deduction that there must be a CO-determinate to the feeling, and that CO-determinate is God. In that sense Schleiermacher is saying "if I have affections about God must exist as an object of my affections"--not merely because anything there must be an object of all affections, but because of the logic of the co-determinate--there is a sense of radical contengency, there must be an object upon which we are radically contingent.



19 comments:

  1. Exactly. I became a Christian because of the experience of God's presence, and not the other way around. I began experiencing this at a very early age, around six or seven years old.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4:39 AM

    Joe: (1) Scineitifc reductionism loses phenomena by re-defining the nature of sense data and quailia.
    (2)There are other ways of Knowing than scinetific induction


    And real argument for a hypothesis can stand on it own two feet. The fact that you have to start off by denigrating science tells me this argument is nonsense.

    Joe: (3) Religious truth is apprehended phenomenoloigcally, thus religion is not a scientific issue and cannot be subjected to a materialist critque

    And you point 3 is claiming we should change the rules for religion.

    Joe: (4) Religion is not derived from other disciplines or endeavors but is a approch to understanding in its own right

    (5)Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms and not according to the dictates or other disciplines


    In fact there is not content here, is there? Take of the anti-science ranting and we are left with

    1. Religion is an approach to understanding in its own right
    2. Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms

    The conclusion does not follow, but that is fine, you have added enough window-dressing to hide that.

    Pix

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Kristen I knw of your experiences, I hope I didn't seem to imply it only works one way.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kristen said...
    Exactly. I became a Christian because of the experience of God's presence, and not the other way around. I began experiencing this at a very early age, around six or seven years old.

    9:49 PM Delete
    Anonymous Anonymous said...
    Joe: (1) Scineitifc reductionism loses phenomena by re-defining the nature of sense data and quailia.
    (2)There are other ways of Knowing than scinetific induction

    And real argument for a hypothesis can stand on it own two feet. The fact that you have to start off by denigrating science tells me this argument is nonsense.

    The fact that see an attack on the ideology of scientism as an attack on science tells me you are into scientism.

    Joe: (3) Religious truth is apprehended phenomenoloigcally, thus religion is not a scientific issue and cannot be subjected to a materialist critque

    And you point 3 is claiming we should change the rules for religion.


    what rules? the idea that science is the only form of knowledge is not scientific but ideological. you don't make the rules of knowing, It is not making new rules but discovering old rules.

    Joe: (4) Religion is not derived from other disciplines or endeavors but is a approch to understanding in its own right

    (5)Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms and not according to the dictates or other disciplines

    In fact there is not content here, is there? Take of the anti-science ranting and we are left with

    If science really means only one form of knowledge then science sux, I don't think it really says that, If that is science then we need to attack it. But I don't think that's science.

    1. Religion is an approach to understanding in its own right
    2. Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms

    The conclusion does not follow, but that is fine, you have added enough window-dressing to hide that.

    how could that not follow? You are saying if A then B, A therefore B is wrong, think about how ideological that is to deny basic logic because it threaten your ideology;

    ReplyDelete
  5. His scientism is really showing, He thinks examining any alternative form knowledge is an attack on science. It seems like proof of my old observation, that science functions as God for the atheist. Like their view of religion one is not permitted to reason about the role of science in knowing.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I like to say that it's never one unequivocal demonstration of scientific data that ever proves anything. Convincing data does not exist in a vacuum. It's always being compared to other data, and it's the strength of the collected argument according to an ongoing Bayesian analysis against all other possible explanations that bears out the likelihood of its accuracy. This is the only reason I changed my mind from being an atheist to a theist. Not one single point of data could do this for me, which I would freely admit.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Internal religious phenomenological analysis does stand out to me as a possible valid source of data, but it would only ever appear to me as such if there were several other naturalistic lines of evidence that supported it. The best kind of abductive reasoning should bring as many different types of possible evidence into consideration as it can. The God hypothesis is the hypothesis of that which should be relevant to all spheres of existence and all types of evidence, and I've found through considering all of these that there are more connections between these than can be reasonably denied. If you try to leave any part of this out then it stands to weaken the overall picture in favor of it - the gestalt if you will.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous11:42 AM

    Joe: The fact that see an attack on the ideology of scientism as an attack on science tells me you are into scientism.

    No Joe, it shows I have been debating with your too long, and know you conflate the two.

    Joe: what rules? the idea that science is the only form of knowledge is not scientific but ideological. you don't make the rules of knowing, It is not making new rules but discovering old rules.

    So why bother to say it? Your points 1, 2 and 3 are irrelevant - they are there purely to hide how vacuous your argument is.

    Joe: how could that not follow? You are saying if A then B, A therefore B is wrong, think about how ideological that is to deny basic logic because it threaten your ideology;

    The conclusion does not follow. If you want evidence of that, look at any religious belief that is wrong. How about the existence of Thor? If your argument is right, then the belief that Thor controls thunder "is justified on its own terms". Do you really think that is the case?

    Joe: His scientism is really showing, He thinks examining any alternative form knowledge is an attack on science

    No, Joe, I think your argument is nonsense.

    I would be less scathing of it if you could present it without mentioning science. However, it is clear that you need to attack science to distract from the simple fact that your argument is just nonsense. Seriously, Joe - see if you can present your argument without mentioning science. I predict you will not be able to.

    Pix

    ReplyDelete
  9. Cody first we can now study mystical experience in a controlled fashioned and use more scientific methods, we study the effects of the experience not the content, WE can't study a subjective feeling but we can study the effect of having the feeling,

    Second we have modal logic such as Hartshorne's modal argument.

    We have hard scientific data that proves the fine tuning argument.

    We can make use of logic i analyzing cosmological evidence.

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  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Joe said: "Hey Kristen I knw of your experiences, I hope I didn't seem to imply it only works one way."

    On the contrary, I think the fact that it worked this way for me is evidence that supports your argument. You quoted Schleiermacher and said: "S...contends that belief in God is pre-theoretical, it is not the result of proofs and demonstration, but is conditioned solely by the modification of feeling of utter dependence. Belief in God is not acquired through intellectual acts of which the traditional proofs are examples, but rather from the thing itself, the object of religious experience."

    Very well, then. I am a case in point. My belief in God was clearly acquired not from traditional proofs, but from the "object of religious experience."

    ReplyDelete
  12. Pix said: "How about the existence of Thor? If your argument is right, then the belief that Thor controls thunder "is justified on its own terms". Do you really think that is the case?"

    This question has to do with the cultural constructs of religion, which are different from the direct experience of the divine which is the source of religious belief. What Joe said (and quoted) was: "The Culturally constructed nature of religion does not negate the a priori. 'Even though the forms by which religion is expressed are culturally conditioned, religion itself is sui generis .. essentially irreducible to and undeceivable from the non-religious.'"

    Thor is a cultural construct of a certain religion. Religion itself is not about answering questions like "what makes thunder?" It's about the sense of the numinous, the "feeling of utter dependence," that lifts the human above the mundane. "What makes thunder?" may once have been answered in religious terms because of a lack of knowledge-- but that doesn't mean that religion is reducible to such conjectures.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Anonymous said...
    Joe: The fact that see an attack on the ideology of scientism as an attack on science tells me you are into scientism.

    No Joe, it shows I have been debating with your too long, and know you conflate the two.


    show mw where? just because I don't genuflect when I see a white lab coat doesn't mean I don't appreciate science.

    Joe: what rules? the idea that science is the only form of knowledge is not scientific but ideological. you don't make the rules of knowing, It is not making new rules but discovering old rules.

    So why bother to say it? Your points 1, 2 and 3 are irrelevant - they are there purely to hide how vacuous your argument is.

    Your reaction demonstrates the need to say that

    Joe: how could that not follow? You are saying if A then B, A therefore B is wrong, think about how ideological that is to deny basic logic because it threaten your ideology;

    The conclusion does not follow. If you want evidence of that, look at any religious belief that is wrong. How about the existence of Thor? If your argument is right, then the belief that Thor controls thunder "is justified on its own terms". Do you really think that is the case?

    Only if you have a comic book understanding of religion. You think religion is a big bully boy in the clouds and you better do what he says then know nothing about religion. My statement boils down to there is ultimate transformative experience that resolves the issue in the human problematic and gives meaning to existence. One such example of this transformative experience is the feeling of utter depdnece. That feeling justifies the need to resolve the problematic,


    Joe: His scientism is really showing, He thinks examining any alternative form knowledge is an attack on science

    No, Joe, I think your argument is nonsense.

    you don't understand it

    I would be less scathing of it if you could present it without mentioning science. However, it is clear that you need to attack science to distract from the simple fact that your argument is just nonsense. Seriously, Joe - see if you can present your argument without mentioning science. I predict you will not be able to.

    obviously it's the atheist use of science as the religion slayer that creates the need to mention it.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Anonymous11:40 PM

    Joe: show mw where? just because I don't genuflect when I see a white lab coat doesn't mean I don't appreciate science.

    This discussion is you doing just that.

    Joe: Your reaction demonstrates the need to say that

    My reaction is that you should drop points 1, 2 and 3 because they are irrelevant. If you want to argue that there are alternatives to science, do so, but do not make it part of your basic logic, because it is irrelevant to that.

    Joe: Only if you have a comic book understanding of religion. You think religion is a big bully boy in the clouds and you better do what he says then know nothing about religion. My statement boils down to there is ultimate transformative experience that resolves the issue in the human problematic and gives meaning to existence. One such example of this transformative experience is the feeling of utter depdnece. That feeling justifies the need to resolve the problematic,

    So why does your post not say that right at the top, instead of your points 1 to 5?

    Joe: you don't understand it

    Right, because I looked at you points 1 to 5 at the top of your post. You have just admitted that what your post boils down to is "ultimate transformative experience that resolves the issue in the human problematic and gives meaning to existence", which is very different to the logic you presented.

    And yet I can guarantee that in a year or so you will trot out this argument yet again with those same five points at the top.

    Joe: obviously it's the atheist use of science as the religion slayer that creates the need to mention it.

    I am not saying do not mention it, I am saying it should not be part of the logic at the top, because it has no place there.

    Pix

    ReplyDelete
  15. Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...
    Cody first we can now study mystical experience in a controlled fashioned and use more scientific methods, we study the effects of the experience not the content, WE can't study a subjective feeling but we can study the effect of having the feeling,

    We have defined frameworks for categorising and cataloguing "mystical experience".
    It gets us no closer to understanding the source of those experiences.

    Yes it does. The source is God since the content is God.

    Second we have modal logic such as Hartshorne's modal argument.

    Internal logical consistency proves nothing. Mental game play only.

    Modal logic does. It doesn't seek to understand the myteries of God, just the fact that God exists and it does prove that.


    We have hard scientific data that proves the fine tuning argument.

    We really don't. We may have scientific data that life would likely not have arisen if the characteristics of our universe were other than they are. We have nothing to show purposeful creation of those conditions.

    It does. Obviously the game has to be fixed since it's so improbable. I am will to be yo never base anything on unreasonable, I am betting you live in accord with reason why should this be different?
    do you play on the freeway because you don't trust probability?

    ReplyDelete
  16. Anonymous Anonymous said...
    Joe: show mw where? just because I don't genuflect when I see a white lab coat doesn't mean I don't appreciate science.

    This discussion is you doing just that.

    ???

    Joe: Your reaction demonstrates the need to say that

    My reaction is that you should drop points 1, 2 and 3 because they are irrelevant. If you want to argue that there are alternatives to science, do so, but do not make it part of your basic logic, because it is irrelevant to that.

    You missed the whole thing. Science is not the only way to know things. period. that means religion has its own form of knowledge what science says says about that is unimportant,


    Joe: Only if you have a comic book understanding of religion. You think religion is a big bully boy in the clouds and you better do what he says then know nothing about religion. My statement boils down to there is ultimate transformative experience that resolves the issue in the human problematic and gives meaning to existence. One such example of this transformative experience is the feeling of utter depdnece. That feeling justifies the need to resolve the problematic,

    So why does your post not say that right at the top, instead of your points 1 to 5?

    It did.

    Joe: you don't understand it

    Right, because I looked at you points 1 to 5 at the top of your post. You have just admitted that what your post boils down to is "ultimate transformative experience that resolves the issue in the human problematic and gives meaning to existence", which is very different to the logic you presented.

    Not a bit you just don't the same associations I do.

    And yet I can guarantee that in a year or so you will trot out this argument yet again with those same five points at the top.

    they are not in contradiction to the UTE thing.

    Joe: obviously it's the atheist use of science as the religion slayer that creates the need to mention it.

    I am not saying do not mention it, I am saying it should not be part of the logic at the top, because it has no place there.

    It's an extension from the five points. point 5 says: "
    (5)Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms and not according to the dictates or other disciplines." These ae its own terms. UTE is the justification pf which point five speaks.

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  17. Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...
    Yes it does. The source is God since the content is God.

    No. The content has been defined as mystical/God. The source is unknown.
    It could be God. It could also just be our own brains/minds.



    Modal logic does. It doesn't seek to understand the mysteries of God, just the fact that God exists and it does prove that.

    Within the structure of Modal Logic, were God to exist, God would be necessary. What requires all necessary things to exist?



    It does. Obviously the game has to be fixed since it's so improbable. I am will to be you never base anything on unreasonable, I am betting you live in accord with reason why should this be different?
    do you play on the freeway because you don't trust probability?

    No. It’s not obvious the game has been fixed. Improbable is not the same as impossible.
    We don't know that ours is the only game in town. We could be one in a multiverse or one of an endless regression of universes. We have no way of knowing the probability of the main physical forces, that are the basis of our universe, being other than they are.
    It sounds like the puddle argument. You are conflating the serendipity of our existence with intention.

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  18. Anonymous2:46 AM

    Joe: You missed the whole thing. Science is not the only way to know things. period. ...

    I agree. But clearly you need to fight this strawman to hide how vacuous your argument is.


    Joe: You missed the whole thing. Science is not the only way to know things. period. that means religion has its own form of knowledge what science says says about that is unimportant,

    Okay. But nothing there suggests religious knowledge is true or has any value. I am not saying religious knowledge is necessarily false and has no value, only that the argument presented here does not tell us it is true.

    Pix: So why does your post not say that right at the top, instead of your points 1 to 5?

    Joe: It did.

    Are you looking at the different post to me? What I see at the top of this post is your points 1 to 5.

    Joe: they are not in contradiction to the UTE thing.

    I never said they are. I only said that if your argument boils down to the UTE thing, then that is what should be at the top of your post.

    Joe: It's an extension from the five points. point 5 says: "
    (5)Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms and not according to the dictates or other disciplines." These ae its own terms. UTE is the justification pf which point five speaks.


    But point 5 says nothing about the UTE! Read it carefully Joe. I amnot saying they contradict or even they are unrelated. I am saying if the point of your post is the UTE, you should have that at the top, rather than your straw man rant against scientism.

    I think the reason you presented your 1 to 5, rather than the UTE, was to disguise the lack of actual argument. And I therefore predict that next time you trot this out it will still have those points 1 to 5 at the top, and not the UTE thing.

    Pix

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  19. Anonymous2:01 PM

    Joe (in a subsequent discussion): Religion being justified on it own terms does not mean anything one believes is true just because one believes it. It means the truth of religion as a whole has to be jugged by issues related to existentialism not science.

    So your "Argument From the Religious a Priori" is that the truth of religion as a whole has to be judged by issues related to existentialism not science.

    Not actually an argument at all.

    Pix

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