why I'm a atheist

@qualia,

qualia;171418 wrote:

Humans are intelligible, meaning and value making creatures whose values and significances need not be anchored in some wholly external authority or source.

From what point of view are you able to observe these "creatures", such that your view of what these "creatures" are, and of what they are not, is so objective, so truthful, so reliable that you can stake everything on it, even though you are yourself only one of these "creatures", and therefore, either (i) this apparently higher view of yours must in fact only be the limited view of one of these "creatures", and therefore you are obliged to take it into account and modify it from your higher standpoint, therefore it cannot remain stable as it is, and cannot bear all the trust you are putting upon it, or (ii) your higher view really can be trusted, in which case, at least some of the views of these "creatures" can be trusted, can be taken at face value, need not be taken into account in some higher view, and therefore your view of these "creatures" as merely projecting intelligibility upon the world must be false, and your higher view, which a moment ago we were accepting, refutes itself, after all?

(More "options"!) Smile

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@north,

The intelligibility of the universe is in fact a good argument for the existence of - if not God, then 'a higher order of being', as per John Polkinghorne:

Quote:

One would anticipate that evolutionary selection would produce hominid minds apt for coping with everyday experience, but that these minds should also be able to understand the subatomic world and general relativity goes far beyond anything of relevance to survival fitness. The mystery deepens when one recognises the proven fruitfulness of mathematical beauty as a guide to successful theory choice.

Science and Theology, Jon Polkinghorne, p72.

Seems to me that when you start arguing against the extraordinary efficacy of mathematics on the grounds that it is 'simply the working of the hominid brain' then science is getting dangerously near to biting the hand that created it.....

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;171481 wrote:

Seems to me that when you start arguing against the extraordinary efficacy of mathematics on the grounds that it is 'simply the working of the hominid brain' then science is getting dangerously near to biting the hand that created it.....

Especially ironic as it is only the hominid brain that is advancing this argument, and why should we believe anything it says?

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;171481 wrote:

The intelligibility of the universe is in fact a good argument for the existence of - if not God, then 'a higher order of being', as per John Polkinghorne:

Really, the trouble with that argument was made clear a long time ago by David Hume. It was that we cannot tell whether this universe is especially intelligible or not since we have no other universes for comparison. Mr. Polkinghorne, and so many like him, could benefit from reading Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion. Then they would not continue to make bad arguments already refuted 200 years ago.

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@jeeprs,

Thank you for the posts, prothero, twirlip and jeeprs. I will try to address all your points in this post, so this is hopefully in answer to what has so far arisen.

Whatever is has something to do with this idea of intelligibility, an a priori condition of understanding. It is our intelligibility which makes things make sense to us.

This intelligibility isn't a property because nothing could be intelligible without a whole set of holistic, interconnected features which must begin even before we are born, but start to take form on birth- such as our reaching out, picking up, smelling, touching, squeezing, putting into our mouths, watching, which develop into our coping skills, activities and practices. Somehow, we eventually have this capacity to make sense of things to us.

Intelligibility is the background to all and everything we do. It doesn't have to be thought about, although it can be. It is pre-cognitive. I just happened to walk through the door-way without thinking about it and without understanding the door as a door, picked up a fork without having to contemplate what exactly I was doing, talked to people facing them and in Spanish and didn't have to think about the grammar or why I faced them in that way, and I didn't walk to work backwards today. It just happened - intelligibly.

It is this kind of intelligibility we throw against the world. It is on the basis of which all other types of cognition takes place. It is the fundamental background from which anything makes sense. It is an understanding of our world but one that doesn't need theoretical concepts nor hypotheses to be 'understood' and seems to be the precondition for any type of practical or cognitive behaviour.

I'm sure I'm way of making sense here...But let's go on,

I can't understand the notion of ontologically prior to humans, because humans are the ontological condition, that is, ontology can only rise from humans. We generate, disclose, produce the modes of being. I'm sure newts do ontology, but I just don't know about it, so all I can say is that we provide the intelligibility, we already-always understand the way of being and we demonstrate this by our coping skills, our way of going about the world, taking up things and manifesting the kind of being it is through our practices. And all this we can do without having to stare and contemplate - although we can do and then we generate another kind of being, say that of subjects with predicates etc. The only way I conceive this fundamental intelligibility breaking down is that something has gone wrong with the world or with the brain.

This isn't saying that the being of entities depend on us, just that the ontological understandings of the being of these entities will do. We provide the intelligibility, we are the ontological condition, and so, for example, on notions of gods, of Platonic forms-ideas, or numbers, I just cannot conceive how these things can be anything other than all too human anthropocentric constructions of intelligibility at a cognitive, theoretical level of understanding.

I hope I have been able to answer you all. If not please let me know.

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@north,

"Ontologically prior" simply means that this order had to exist for intelligent life to evolve in the first place. In the Darwinian view of the world, the higher intellectual capacities have evolved as a result of adaptive necessity. Reason along with the other foundational elements of philosophy are then made subservient to evolutionary biology. I am arguing that prior to the emergence of these higher intellectual capacities, what we now perceive as 'intelligibilty', 'order', 'law', already existed.

---------- Post added 06-01-2010 at 12:12 PM ----------

qualia;171490 wrote:

Intelligibility is the background to all and everything we do. It doesn't have to be thought about, although it can be. It is pre-cognitive. I just happened to walk through the door-way without thinking about it and without understanding the door as a door, picked up a fork without having to contemplate what exactly I was doing, talked to people facing them and in Spanish and didn't have to think about the grammar or why I faced them in that way, and I didn't walk to work backwards today.

I think you are referring to consciousness in saying this, not to intelligibility. I would suggest we reserve intelligibility for a specific domain of conscious activity, namely, 'capable of being apprehended by the intellect alone'. I guess I am harking back to the pre-modern sense of the word in this usage. Kennethamy will say that Hume has rendered this usage obsolete but I will dispute that.

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@qualia,

Even though culture forms us, I see no insurmountable practical obstacle to intercultural understanding (science, mathematics). Even though biology forms us, I see no insurmountable theoretical obstacle to interspecies understanding, should we perhaps one day meet a friendly race of intelligent fish from Alpha Centauri (and refrain from frying them). Nor do I see why the universe could not be in the process of understanding itself through the sensoria of all species of organism throughout the universe (or even only here on Earth, if that is all the life there is), and not merely projecting intelligibility upon itself. And even though each species at each stage of its evolution has its limits, I see no obvious reason why there must be a set limit to the universe's understanding of itself, any more than why that understanding must be illusory and not real, or why we as mere humans here and now may not participate in it. I even see no obvious reason why the universe might not in some mysterious way be giving a creative direction to apparently random biological evolution, in a struggle to understand itself better and better, even if never completely.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;171495 wrote:

"Ontologically prior" simply means that this order had to exist for intelligent life to evolve in the first place. In the Darwinian view of the world, the higher intellectual capacities have evolved as a result of adaptive necessity. Reason along with the other foundational elements of philosophy are then made subservient to evolutionary biology. I am arguing that prior to the emergence of these higher intellectual capacities, what we now perceive as 'intelligibilty', 'order', 'law', already existed.

Yes, that is understood. What I'm saying is that none of this would be possible without a fundamental background of intelligibility.

jeeprs wrote:

I think you are referring to consciousness in saying this, not to intelligibility. I would suggest we reserve intelligibility for a specific domain of conscious activity, namely, 'capable of being apprehended by the intellect alone'. I guess I am harking back to the pre-modern sense of the word in this usage. Kennethamy will say that Hume has rendered this usage obsolete but I will dispute that.

No, I am referring to intelligibilty as say used by the sciences of phenomonology etc. Consciousness fails to explain what is being described. To explain, for example, the instances I offered of intelligibility. Of using a fork, of walking through a door way, sitting on a chair, of facing people when we talk. Many of our most everyday coping skills and practices which are taken up without being consciously 'aware' of them. I mean, at a most basic level, people can drive their cars while not even noticing they are driving, use a fork without being aware that they are using it, talking a language without having to comprehend or be aware that they are doing so. As described, this intelligibility business is more than likely the pre-condition of all cognition and no doubt of consciousness itself which although mysterious, probably only begins to take form once the other, the object, has somehow been comprehended as such.

1 Reply

@north,

Re the subordination of reason to evolutionary biology:

Quote:

...the concept of the survival of the fittest is merely the translation of the concepts of formalized reason into the vernacular of natural history. In popular Darwinism, reason is purely an organ; spirit or mind, a thing of nature. According to a current interpretation of Darwin, the struggle for life must necessarily, step by step, through natural selection, produce the reasonable out of the unreasonable. In other words, reason, while serving the function of dominating nature, is whittled down to being a part of nature; it is not an independent faculty but something organic, like tentacles or hands, developed through adaptation to natural conditions and surviving because it proves to be an adequate means of mastering them, especially in relation to acquiring food and averting danger.

As a part of nature, reason is at the same time set against nature-the competitor and enemy of all life that is not its own. The idea inherent in all idealistic metaphysics-that the world is in some sense a product of the mind-is thus turned into its opposite: the mind is a product of the world, of the processes of nature. Hence, according to popular Darwinism, nature does not need philosophy to speak for her: nature, a powerful and venerable deity, is ruler rather than ruled.

Darwinism ultimately comes to the aid of rebellious nature in undermining any doctrine, theological or philosophical, that regards nature itself as expressing a truth that reason must try to recognize. The equating of reason with nature, by which reason is debased and raw nature exalted, is a typical fallacy of the era of rationalization. Instrumentalized subjective reason either eulogizes nature as pure vitality or disparages it as brute force, instead of treating it as a text to be interpreted by philosophy....

Max Horkheimer Materialism and Metaphysics

---------- Post added 06-01-2010 at 12:37 PM ----------

this entry was simply a footnote to support the point I was making in Post 26, incidentally, I am not introducing it as a new item.

1 Reply

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;171538 wrote:

Max Horkheimer Materialism and Metaphysics

BookBrain, Amazon and Google are all coming up blank for me, so presumably this is not a book. Got a reference?

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@qualia,

qualia;171533 wrote:

No, I am referring to intelligibilty as say used by the sciences of phenomonology etc.

I would be interested in any references from phenomenologists about that usage, I am not familiar with it.

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@jeeprs,

[QUOTE=jeeprs;171495]"Ontologically prior" simply means that this order had to exist for intelligent life to evolve in the first place. ...... I am arguing that prior to the emergence of these higher intellectual capacities, what we now perceive as 'intelligibilty', 'order', 'law', already existed.[/QUOTE] The Greeks, of course, thought that reason, order and number (logos) was a ontologically prior to sense experience and to the world itself. They thought that the structure of the sensible and material world was based on a higher level or reality which included form, order and number. The Greeks were rationalists and thought that truth was discovered not invented. They likewise would assert that the rational order and mathematical expressibility of the universe is discovered (or remembered) knowledge not a human invention.

Now we have several definitions of "truth" but the one most used in science is correspondence. How well do our conceptions or our theories or our formulas correspond to the world of sense experience. It seems to me the notion that the world is rational, ordered, intelligible and mathematically expressible corresponds very well and in fact unifying law or principle is an assumption of science.

Empiricists always talk about the silliness of the notion that "the world" or "objects" do not exist except when they are being "perceived" by human minds. The notion that reason and order and mathematical law do not "exist" without human minds to perceive them seems like an equivalently "silly" notion to me.

I am not saying that what the Greeks thought about logos is the only rational way to view the world. I am saying that the notion of a higher order of reality or structure to the universe that incorporates the Greek notion of logos is not incoherent or inconsistent with reason, logic, science or experience and the notion of logos corresponds well the world.

1 Reply

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;171481 wrote:

The intelligibility of the universe is in fact a good argument. . . .

The universe appears to be fundamentally unintelligible. And you have the traditional argument reversed; it is because god is supposed to be entirely reasonable that the universe is concluded to be amenable to human reasoning, ie the assumption of god has been used to conclude intelligibility, so how could intelligibility also be used to conclude god?

jeeprs;171481 wrote:

Seems to me that when you start arguing against the extraordinary efficacy of mathematics

There is no extraordinary efficacy of mathematics, mathematics is pretty much useless in almost all fields, except for calculating measurements. The problem of the so called unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is one of selection bias.

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@qualia,

[QUOTE=qualia;171490] This intelligibility isn't a property because nothing could be intelligible without a whole set of holistic, interconnected features which must begin even before we are born........, [/QUOTE] I do not understand why you think we invent "intelligibility" as opposed to discover it. I do not understand why you think that intelligibility is not a "property" of reality. How about order? How about creativity? Are they properties of reality? What a priori properties does reality have for you and where do they arise from?

[QUOTE=qualia;171490] Intelligibility is the background to all and everything we do. It doesn't have to be thought about, although it can be. It is pre-cognitive. [/QUOTE] You are close to saying that we have some form of non sensory perception or non empirically derived knowledge. I think the idea that all knowledge is "sense perception derived" is in fact incorrect but it does not seem consistent with your other positions. I think the world is filled with perception (experience) which is precognitive and non sensory. This would be what Whitehead would call prehension. Of course in process; reality in space time (the temporal world) is fundamentally composed of experiential events which try to actualize ideas or forms derived from the eternal logos. Reason is derived from the universe and thus discovers (or remembers) the truth. It does not invent it. IMHO

[QUOTE=qualia;171490] We provide the intelligibility, we are the ontological condition, and so, for example, on notions of gods, of Platonic forms-ideas, or numbers, I just cannot conceive how these things can be anything other than all too human anthropocentric constructions of intelligibility at a cognitive, theoretical level of understanding. [/QUOTE]Why do you think "these all too human constructions" which so accurately correspond to and describe independent reality are any less real or independent than the objects they describe? Or at least why do you think the notion that numbers, math, reason, intelligibility exist independent of human perception is in any way illogical, irrational or unwarranted speculation?

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@ughaibu,

ughaibu;171570 wrote:

TThere is no extraordinary efficacy of mathematics, mathematics is pretty much useless in almost all fields, except for calculating measurements. The problem of the so called unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is one of selection bias.

Oh yes. And how do you think the modern world would get along without it? I reckon we would be communicating by smoke signals. Computer science depends upon quantum theory, and quantum theory is only possible because of mathematical abstraction.

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@north,

north;171147 wrote:

because it is Natural to make ones being more important than any other

especially a concept , such as any god

This is actually pretty deep. Much said with few words. I especially like your suspicion of concepts. We always get trapped in concepts. But I think the "self" is a difficult concept. Where does the self end and the world begin? And what is being? Smile

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;171592 wrote:

how do you think the modern world would get along without it?

Okay, show me how mathematics is extraordinarily efficacious in any science other than physics and in any way other than calculation of measurements.

jeeprs;171592 wrote:

You are so determined to believe that the world is devoid of meaning

Quote at least one post written by me in which I state a belief that the world is devoid of meaning.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;171481 wrote:

The intelligibility of the universe is in fact a good argument for the existence of - if not God, then 'a higher order of being', as per John Polkinghorne:

Science and Theology, Jon Polkinghorne, p72.

Seems to me that when you start arguing against the extraordinary efficacy of mathematics on the grounds that it is 'simply the working of the hominid brain' then science is getting dangerously near to biting the hand that created it.....

You make a good point. No matter how we choose to name reality, it does indeed have a mathematical structure. I do think the details involved are complicated. Our natural laws on the macro-level are expressed in terms of continuities, if I may use the word, for things like F = ma. But strange indeed that zooming in closer gives us true quanta, or is this correct? We get a perfect match up with whole numbers....And yet I still think it's arguable that whole numbers are intuited. If they are both intuited and in Nature, this is strange indeed. ...

---------- Post added 05-31-2010 at 11:07 PM ----------

prothero;171563 wrote:

The Greeks, of course, thought that reason, order and number (logos) was a ontologically prior to sense experience and to the world itself.

I think there's a good case for this view.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;171592 wrote:

quantum theory is only possible because of mathematical abstraction.

Balaguer has demonstrated that this is not true.

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@qualia,

qualia;171490 wrote:

I can't understand the notion of ontologically prior to humans, because humans are the ontological condition, that is, ontology can only rise from humans.

Excellent point! I would only add that our human abstraction of ourselves, the abstraction "humans" is shaped by something ontologically prior. I think I know what you mean by intelligibility. Concept is.

There's something irreducible about thought. I have argued about 3 million times that concepts are unities. We touch the limits of abstraction with notions like Being. It is just about as indeterminate as one can go. There are other words like this. All we have to do really is look at what all intelligible beings have in common, which is existence (what is this?) and singularity (which can only be defined redundantly by synonyms).

This is already a strong argument that any mere concept is a false god.

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