Reality from the view point of theists

@Fil Albuquerque,

Fil Albuquerque wrote:

...any sort of denial of objective reality is left floating on air as the denial itself cannot be objectified...what else should be needed to make a case for the insanity of such reasoning's I wonder...

We can say we know something of the objective world because we have objects we can understand apart from the infinites of existence, and it is just as much a fallacy to say, given what we think we know, that we have before us an ordered and objective reality which we can understand as to say we can understand nothing if not subjectively because all is infnite including the perspective of life with which we experience existence... I prefer to say that every thing we understand will be understood more or less subjectively or objectively, and not as though these antipods were absolutes... They are both relative terms only as good as they help us to classify our reality in a coherant fashion...

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

I like the way you compare yourself to Gallileo and Einstein. I wonder if anyone else has noticed the similarity.

They were unlike all their contemporaries, but we are all like them... At one point, their ideas were theirs alone, but now they belong to all of us, and we are, and identify ourselves by, the ideas we hold true...

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@izzythepush,

Quote:

No, just making you aware of some of the things you suggest. I don't think you know you do it

Izzy is this true or is this something you "believe" to be true?

Quote:

If I can see it, so can someone else.

If it is a belief I am sure that others will believe it as well. many people will believe because it is psychological "normal" to do so.

I would consider Fresco to be closer to Galileo or Einstein than myself.

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@reasoning logic,

i think it's pure labelling - if you can name it, it exists

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@reasoning logic,

reasoning logic wrote:

Izzy is this true or is this something you "believe" to be true?

It's not called belief, it's called deduction.

Quote:

This reminds me of other great minds {scientist} of the past not agreeing with each other or people like Galileo and Einstein. Some people would go as far as to call them fools when they were not able to understand the other person's understandings.

This also reminds me of how theist can not understand how I see God and Satan as merely man made concepts.

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@izzythepush,

Quote:

It's not called belief, it's called deduction.

I am not sure if I would call that deductive reasoning but I guess it could be seen as deduction, "because it does not seem to add up. Have you considered using addition when trying to add things up?

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@Frank Apisa,

Frank, I agree that there is something we call (an objective fact of) Reality, but this applies to its bare existence, not its CHARACTER. It does not come to us with labels; it is not "objective" in the sense of the guy who asked the astronomer how his discipline learned the names of the planets they discovered. The character of the world (including "reality") is, as any cultural anthropologist might agree, a product of a historical process of negotiation and competition resulting in significant thresholds of consensus. The world is CONSTRUCTED and language is the major tool for that achievement. Indeed, that is the very process you, I, Set, Fresco and others are doing now.

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@jeeprs,

Jeepers, I was so pleased to note your return to A2K. Please consider sticking around at least for the philosophical issues to which your buddhist background lends an important dimension.

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@reasoning logic,

You're right, why on Earth should I think you're comparing yourself to Einstein and Gallileo when you mention them in the same breath? I must have been having a drunken, over emotional, socio/psychopathic episode. That must be it.

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@JLNobody,

You and Fresco have the same problem here. You say the world is constructed by language. That's not true. The world is there whether or not we discuss it. What we construct is a description of the world, a description of realtiy--for better or worse, of varying degrees of accurasy. But that we use language to describe reality is not evidence that reality only exists because we discuss it.

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@Setanta,

You need to think a little deeper than that Setanta.

We and "the world" are inextricably bound together. So although for pragmatic reasons we project the concept of "an external world" (what you might call "objective" or "external reality") and we reify (aka construct) that concept with socially acquired language, what constitutes "reality" is always a dynamic interaction between internal and external states.

A simplistic analogy is one of a board game like "Monopoly" in which the state of the board (internal) interacts with the state of the dice (external). The dice state has no significance in its own right except with reference to the board. If the board is receptive, the dice state can change the board state, such that another dice state may become significant, or indeed the original dice state might lose its significance. By analogy, external states of "the world" have no significance of their own (there are no Dings-an-Sich) -except by reference to dynamic physiological states of the observer, or sociological states of the observer's consensus group. Evidence abounds from comparative biology, cognitive science and anthropology, that this dynamic interaction both operates and can be manipulated.

(For further extensive discussion of this please refer to my posting history on this forum)

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@fresco,

You need to think, period. Was there no world before humans existed to describe it? Will there be no world when humans cease to exist? You really don't at all canvass the contradictions and the just plain silliness of this thesis of yours. I don't dispute what you have to say about ontological perception, but you have no basis upon which to allege that human cognition is the only reality--and you never offer any substantiation for that usually implicit and sometimes explicit claim.

I note that you have still failed to respond to Farmerman's post.

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@Setanta,

Your "receptive state transition mechanism" has clearly atrophied.
I truly sympathise, but will waste no more time.

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@fresco,

Good, don't waste any more of my time. Apparently, you are so facile, that you cannot accept that anyone would understand you and yet not agree with you. So you display your typical civility by implying that my understanding is defective. That's par for the course with you. RL wanted to bait the theists, who, to their credit, are themselves not so facile as to rise to the bait. But he doesn't need them, he's got you. You imagine an anthropocentric cosmos in which nothing exists unless it is perceived by humans--you may as well be a creationist.

All you ever offer is ipse dixit maunderings, in which you resolutely ignore any contradictory claims or evidence. You continue to fail to address Farmerman's post. I take that as evidence that you have no reasonable response, because all you're doing is flailing us with more of your typical chin music.

Did the world exist before there were humans? Can the world exist in the absence of humans? These are two very simple questions which you have also failed to address. There are others which i posed to JLN, but you haven't even had the decency to address those tow.

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@Setanta,

I think we are all capable of being wrong about many issues. I myself view the world from the eyes of a naive realist but sometimes I will stop and listen to what other people have to say and try to walk in their shoes, "so to speak" in order to have the best understanding of their perspective.

Quote:

RL wanted to bait the theists, who, to their credit, are themselves not so facile as to rise to the bait. But he doesn't need them, he's got you. You imagine an anthropocentric cosmos in which nothing exists unless it is perceived by humans--you may as well be a creationist.

If theist have an ability of getting many people together and believing in something that does not exist, " Do you think it is possible for people like you and I to be believing in things that are not true as well?

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@izzythepush,

Quote:

I must have been having a drunken, over emotional, socio/psychopathic episode. That must be it.

Now you are on to something.

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@reasoning logic,

There is a profound flaw in your thesis, which is the assumption that you and i have any beliefs in common--unless you believe that you would like to have a meatloaf sammich.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

unless you believe that you would like to have a meatloaf sammich.

Meatloaf does make an excellent sandwich.

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@reasoning logic,

Like goldy or silvery.

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@reasoning logic,

You might note that I have stated, either here or elsewhere, that "existence" requires "an observer" (not necessarily "a human one"). Heidegger on the other hand suggested that Exitenz only had meaning with respect to a Dasein (loosely a "self") which contemplated itself.

Your responses here clearly indicate that you are not (or no longer) here to "bait theists". You have started thinking from different perspectives, which might give you an understanding of how theists might view the concept of "reality". In particular, I suggest that we "atheists" need to account for our own satisfaction,why such a significant number of humans hold "a deity" to be "significant", and why some of them are clearly of above average intelligence. The constructivist account which I have outlined, leaves room for "a deity" for those who have need of it.

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Reality from the view point of theists

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