Re: Do Agnostics and Athiests simply reject faith?
val wrote:Kuvasz
No, Pangloss did not arise.
The logical argument I used was not from "Candide" - it is always better to read an author and not what another author says about him, specially if it is someone with an opposite perspective.
Leibniz said that God created the perfect world - see "Discours de métaphysique", pages 15/16. He criticizes those who think God created the world with the least possible imperfections.
About Leibniz logical reasoning I agree with you.
But I believe that all system must start in undemonstrated premises. I accept Tarsky's theorem.
In fact, and talking about Frege, don't forget Russel's reply.
Perhaps we are talking past each other.
I think that demanding that the "perfect world" of Leibniz is not the same as "the best of all possible worlds" of Pangloss or as referenced in your post as a sort of
least possible imperfections[/b] is a distinction without a difference in this discussion. Both are displays of the error of such a singular use of deductive reasoning that Voltaire held in low regard in Candide.
And I promise, I am not beating up on Aristotle, but the use of such deductive logic
exclusive to or dismissive of the inductive logic of Bacon is a failure of Leibniz, and Aquinas (and yes, I know, Aquinas did not have a time machine to learn of Bacon's work).
I drew upon the phrase "best of all possible worlds" because it is a phrase widely used in the common vernacular, and implies that "What is, is Right."
We may disagree that such also implies perfection. Would a baseball batter who goes 4 for 4 be perfect and exhibit the best of all possible worlds, while one who goes 3 for 3, with a walk exhibit the best of all possible worlds, but is less than perfect compared to the batter who goes 4 for 4?
I do not see a distinctive difference and I would consider each batter to have performed with the "least possible imperfections," and any baseball announcer would say that they were perfect at the plate that day.
My statement
" Leibniz, Kant and Hegel never read Lobatchevski, Cantor, or Frege.[/b] is directly referenced at B. Russell's "Skeptical Essays," where, paraphrasing Russell "Lobatchevski, by inventing non-Eculidean geometry undermined the mathematical argument of Kant's transcendental aesthetic, Weierstrass, who showed that continuity does not involve infinitesimals, Cantor's theories of continuity and infinity countered the paradoxes of the Idealistics who threw discredit on mathematics by manufacturing contradictions to show that mathematics can not arrive at real metaphysical truth, and Frege showed that arithmetic follows from logic which Kant denied."
Russell was incisive enough to recognize that Frege found a third way between demands on the one hand that the objects of mathematics were not subjective and must be physical and empirical while on the other hand that they were not physical and therefore must be subjective and mental.
I think we find this in true scientific method, where one finds both induction and deduction....and combine Aristotle and Bacon.
