think-progress:

Trayvon Martin murals in Baltimore and Florida. 

HT Paxmachina

Got distracted by Tory politics and noted a few things that the ‘politically minded’ on here often confuse…

- Telling somebody that their opinion is incorrect is not akin to ‘oppression’ or ‘suppression of ideas’ or ‘fascism’. It’s just telling you that you are wrong.  And sometimes they might even give you a good reason.

- Contrary to popular conception, it IS possible for your opinion to be wrong.

- If there are two premises of equal evidential standing (that is to say, neither are conclusive) X and Y, rejecting X on the basis of evidence does not necessitate blindly accepting Y.  This is discriminatory by definition, and you are making a choice based on prejudice.

- Being disillusioned with the current state of affairs is a position that is NOT successfully rebuked by saying ‘go and live in North Korea if you hate it so much’.  This is plainly obvious, or it should be, and so I feel that no further elaboration is required.

- Merely because somebody else in some possible world is in a more diabolical situation than you are does not necessitate you putting up with your lot without question.  This breeds fertile ground for tyranny.

- Nobody is right all of the time.  Just have the good grace to shut the fuck up every now and again and admit you didn’t think something through.

In 1961, Leonid Rogozov, 27, was the only surgeon in the Soviet Antarctic Expedition. During the expedition, he felt severe pain in the stomach and had a high fever. Rogozov examined himself and discovered that his appendix was inflamed and could burst at any time. With a local anesthesia, he operated himself to remove the appendix. An engineer and a meteorologist assisted surgery.


Fucking unreal.  The mad bastard.

You know when you have faith in somebody more than they do in themselves?  I’m talking in terms of practicality - you know for a fact that they are better than they think they are at a given thing; they can do things they assume they can’t; pass exams they spent valuable time flapping about; go somewhere and do something alone that they never thought they could.  It’s irritating, but in a nice way.  And the most irritating thing of all is when you tell them and they argue.  I had this experience today with a young woman who is infinitely better than she thinks she is, and it mildly irked me.

I took a moment to reflect on this irksome moment and realised that I have been that person, and still probably am to a degree.  I know I’m good at some things, but others….  Not so much.  It doesn’t matter how much people tell me, I won’t have it.  And I can list a few things that this applies to right off the top of my head: guitar, my metaphysics module, not being a total cunt.  Y’know, the usual.

Aren’t we all hypocrites in this small way?  Unless I am to laud arrogance, which I am incapable of doing, such is my disdain for the trait, then I am quite happy to think we are.  It’s small things like this that unite us.  And it’s quite nice - just every now and again - to be united.  Even by something as banal as the occasional lack of self-belief.

Fuck it - ‘try owt once’.  It’s a nice maxim to live by.  Unless that ‘owt’ is something a bit shitty.  Like murdering a kitten.  In this instance, DON’T try it.  it’s messy, if nothing else.

The big Plantinga post I did?  The one that isn’t quite finished?  It came upon the exam today, as I was 90% sure it would.  Excellent.

Alvin Plantinga holds that evidentialist objections to belief in God (Christian perspective) are paradoxical and as such, fail to prove that belief sans-evidence is irrational.  To jump straight in at the deep end, so to speak, take the following premises, one  to satisfy believers, and one to satisfy atheists:

1. God exists
2. God does NOT exist

There is a well known soundbyte coined by Carl Sagan that states that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ (the Sagan Standard).  This seems fair.  With this Standard in mind, philosopher Michael Scriven argues that If there is no evidence to conclusively prove (or even strongly suggest) that P1 is true, then you are rationally obliged to accept the position of P2 - a stance that is seemingly adopted by many people in society today, and not just in relation to the concept of god.  However, is Plantinga correct in asserting that Scriven, and indeed wider society, are mistaken by following this trend?

Plantinga’s argument against this commonsense objection is thus: anybody that rejects P1 on the basis or evidence (or lack thereof) must therefore be obliged to reject (not accept!) P2 on the lack of evidence, too.  Scriven, he argues, is not treating each premise in the same manner, which is discriminatory and invalidates the point.  For Plantinga then, the evidentialist has no more cause to disbelieve the existence of God than to believe the existence of God if we are to take evidence as the only contributing factor.  Simply put - there is no compelling evidence in either direction, and asserting that rejection of P1 necessitates acceptance of P2 is to treat each premise in a different way - to privilege the second premise arbitrarily.

It is important to note that the use of ‘rational’ by Scriven and the evidentialist objectors is used here in a normative manner - there is a prescribed way to be rational, the context connotes that there is a right way to be rational, and a wrong way to be rational.  Intuitively, this seems to be the case - very simply, if our logic does not accord with that of another, we may brand them as ‘irrational’, as they may well brand us ‘irrational’, too.  But who is correct?  Is there really a set correct manner to utilise rationality?  Plantinga postulates that we may hold certain obligations in regard to beliefs, be it obligations to act on beliefs, not to act, or even to hold or not hold these beliefs in the first instance.  These sorts of obligations, if they exist, appear to be abstract and difficult to define, but few of us would intuitively deny that we do have some obligations regarding our beliefs.

As a quick example, it is difficult to argue against the idea that if we genuinely believe in something, we should fight for it.  Inconveniently, this is dependent on a number of outside factors - social convention, acceptable norms, rule of law and so on. If I genuinely believed that all pet cats should be culled, I could not act on this belief without expecting the law of the land to punish me for my acts against it.  Plantinga make similar points regarding prima facie and ultima facie obligations. My example above would be a prima facie obligation - one that is subject to change dependent on other obligations overruling it.  In this case, the law of the land and my obligations not to hurt my neighbours by murdering their cat should overrule my hypothetically deep-seated belief that all pet cats should die. 

Similarly, the famous Nazi trooper objection to Kant’s ‘perfect duty’ of ‘one must always be honest’ in relation to his Categorical Imperative seems to produce a paradox - if a Nazi stormtrooper comes to your door demanding to know if you know of or are harbouring Jews, would not the right-minded, rational person lie, despite their deep seated belief that they should always be honest? According to Kant, this is immoral, despite the fact that it is saving human lives - reneging on your duty not to lie is a bigger problem than merely not saving somebody would would die anyway without your help (for further elaboration on this point, reading around Kant’s Cat. Imp. and the universifiability volition test is helpful). Korsgaard’s ‘inquiring murderer’ response attempts to deal with the objection from a neo-Kantian perspective, but to my mind, it does not change the basic Kantian position, which is that we have broken a moral obligation by lying to the Nazi soldier.

So then, it appears as if we can conceive of some type of obligations as regards our beliefs - even if these obligations are hierarchical and subject to change dependent on the situation.  In relation to God, Plantinga asks if we are obliged to believe that which appears to be self-evidently true.  This does not help our cause, though - it is possible that from a self-evident truth, a self-evident falsehood may appear. Based on this, we may reject the self-evident truth as illusory, and as such, we are back to breaking our prima facie obligation.  Even if we accept a self-evident falsehood, we break this prima facie obligation, because it has a negative truth value.  So, it is evident that attaching these conditions normatively to belief is problematic at best.

Further to this, Plantinga raises the interesting and rather complicated case of the religious youth - a fourteen year old that has believed in God all their life due to parental and communal belief: being told regularly that God is around us, God is with us, God loves us and so on.  I compare this scenario to a child that has been brought up to call a cat a dog.  For them, their belief is true, they know no different or, depending on your stance, no better.  Is it too harsh to suggest that this youngster is violating some epistemic principle or obligation?  On one hand, it certainly seems so: this youth is young and surely has not had the will, inclination or time to become a scholar of their religious groundings (not many of us do!), and it is arguable that children are malleable to manipulation to think in one way or another - child development experts have long accepted that a child’s formative years will set the precedent for their adult life.  So, it is feasible then to place some responsibility on the adults that have moulded the youngster in this fashion rather than on the shoulders of the youngster themselves - they may grow older and challenge their own beliefs, after all.

Progressing this idea of adult responsibility further, it is reasonable to assume that the average well rounded adult, regardless of religious persuasion, should be open to new or potentially conflicting ideas.  This is, of course, how we learn, better ourselves and progress - particularly in the sciences where the falsifiability principle reigns supreme.  With this firmly in mind, Gautama Budha’s quote from the Kalama Sutta may offer to shed some light:

So in this case, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering’ — then you should abandon them.    

(http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.than.html)

Far from being a nihilistic concept, this is a rigorous statement of intent for Buddhists: analysis, self-awareness and the importance of being aware of people around you; testing theories and beliefs out in practice and by putting them to people who are ‘wise’.  This does not simply mean picking and choosing people who’s ideas correspond with your own, but conferring with learned people of all backgrounds and disciplines.  Obviously, the extremes of this cannot be fulfilled by your average person in modern life, and it is not, a straightforward refutation of an adult’s belief.  It can be used as a principle to reject belief, but it can also be used to confirm it.  The point at hand is that the principle is used at all.  Allow me to elaborate - if this fabled adult that is teaching Plantinga’s fourteen year-old about the love of God has indeed reflected on their experience of God, their doctrinal philosophy and their religious tradition and has still got this belief, then according to Gautama (and I suspect Mr Plantinga would concur), then this belief is justified.  If they have not, and hold their belief in spite of reflection, education and experience, then this is surely a problem for both believer and non-believer.  If it is not, then it should be.  The fourteen year old would not yet have any responsibility for justifying or modifying their beliefs - this would come with age and experience.

It is here that I part company with Plantinga - for a short while, at least.  He holds that a person who cannot accept a central religious doctrine but accept the wider umbrella engulfing it is still rationally holding a belief.  For me, this is not always the case, although it is indeed plausible in some examples, as I shall show. The example given is the man who cannot reconcile, on a personal level, that God was within Christ, but still espouses the doctrine as factual and representative of his beliefs - an unbelieving believer, if you will.  This is not a philosophical point whereby we could logically say ‘well, I take this part of the argument, but this part seems intuitively irreconcilable’, it is a central tenet of Christian theology.  If this man can not accept that God was within Christ, then he is surely not a Christian in any recognisable way, and his ‘commitment’ to this belief is not much more than a lie.

Obviously, this does not apply to all aspects of theology - it is, to my mind, perfectly fair to say that one does not for a second find the Church’s account of creation satisfactory, but one still believes that there was a creator God.  Or, it is fair to say that one does not believe in the metaphysical transformation of wine and bread during transubstantiation of the Eucharist, but one wholeheartedly believes in the system the metaphor is reflecting - the small amount of one’s disbelief is counteracted by the masses of belief one has in the rest of the system.  These seem different on a fundamental level - although they are very important to the Christian faith, I contend that their omission from it should not be damning.  Holding that God was not within Christ is an entirely different matter, for if Christ was not one with God, then the religion seems vacuous. 

Another example is that of Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism Without Beliefs.  Batchelor states that he holds karma not as a corporeal or metaphysical agent, but as a metaphor.  He also claims that reincarnation taken any further than the natural redistribution of energy upon death (there will be bits of me in all sorts of entities (sentient or otherwise) after I die!) is a fallacy. Both of these points strike massive blows to central tenets of Buddhism - but he also convincingly argues that the Buddhist mission can continue without these beliefs.  For his part, the Dalai Lama has repeatedly stated that where science trumps religious conviction, religious conviction should be abandoned.  Plantinga gives no similar argument because he thinks his example does not pose a problem for the theist.  It does, and I think that Plantinga chose his argument poorly on this count - he has inadvertently highlighted a case whereby the believer would be obliged to renounce their belief - if indeed they had any belief to begin with.

So far, we have seen some of Plantinga’s ideas regarding obligation of belief and how difficult it may be to define and deal with these strange things.  He has provided some good arguments and some not-so-good arguments, but the overriding theme for me is that it is not irrational to believe in God under some conditions, whereas it arguably is irrational under others.  I do not think that this is too much of a problem for Plantinga - he is, after all, writing to philosophically (specifically epistemologically) justify a person’s belief in God.  He is not writing a normative essay aimed at converting people who do not believe, and as such, I do not see that there is any major contradiction aside from the issue outlined with the unbelieving believer.

Moving on with Plantinga’s justification, it is prudent to discuss what I consider a central theme to the article: everybody apprehends God’s presence at some point in their life.  This point is, I think, pure conjecture.  Plantinga appears to be equating the phenomenon of religion as some sort of evidential argument for God’s existence (strange, considering the remit of the article).  A feeling of wonderment or awe, the apprehension of ‘something bigger’ and so on: we have all read about this, felt this and seen this in movies.  To assert that this is down to God, though, seems to be a leap of quantum proportions.  Of course, it is logically possible  that these phenomena are down to God making God’s presence felt, but I would like to outline the reasons that lead me to contest this stance.

Buddhism (the philosophy which most closely reflects my own worldview) sees no need for a creator deity.  It does not explicitly rule one out, and a lot of Buddhists will tell you that they believe in a God.  Contrary to popular belief, the Buddha is not a god, he is an agent for change, a teacher and scholar, so it is inaccurate to assert that Buddhist is monotheistic, polytheistic or whatever - nor is it explicitly atheistic - it remains neutral on the stance, being deistic if anything at all (acknowledging the necessity of a creative and destructive  force or forces).  That being said, some great Buddhist thinkers have largely ignored the concept of God, stating the irrelevance of any deity to a practical, normative philosophy that aims on improving both the here and now and the future for all sentient beings in existence in all possible worlds.

Reality as most humans apprehend it is, according to classic Buddhist scripture from all schools, delusory.  What this means in very simple terms is that the average person’s conception of the world - what is important, what ‘is’, what obtains - is deluded and incorrect.  This delusion comes from attachment: attachment to material things, passions, people, mindsets and so on.  This attachment causes suffering in various ways; when we cannot get what we want, we suffer mentally; we cause other beings suffering in our endeavours to attain our attachments; other beings cause us suffering for the same reasons, and so on and so forth - this idea is very simple.  So, taking the basic tenet that reality is an illusion, that we perceive things incorrectly, we can begin to deconstruct Plantinga’s argument from a Buddhist perspective - this delusion need not be metaphysical (although there is certainly this aspect to it), we often mistake corporeal objects and entities.

Consider the following: you enter your garden shed to fetch a tin of varnish.  Upon opening the door, you think you see something move in the corner of the shed, and so you do a double-take and glance at a coiled thing in the corner - a snake!  You recoil, collect yourself and pluck up the courage to have a second look - what on earth is a snake doing in the garden shed?!  Upon a very cautious closer inspection, perhaps with a broom handle and a torch, you laugh as you realise your mistake - there is no snake, only a precariously coiled hosepipe.  Tutting at your silliness, you ponder how you couldpossibly have mistaken your hosepipe for a snake.  This trick of the mind, a lapse in sensory experience, a delusion.  So then, is it not possible that these brief moments when some endorphin is released and we become ‘aware of God’ is merely a mental delusion based on willpower or empirical physiological chemical changes in the brain?

Plantinga asserts that we become aware of God through our senses - I can only assume he is following the Cartesian model of God appearing as a clear and distinct (or self-evident) idea in the mind of thinking beings, because as Descartes himself noted in his famous Meditatiions, and as I have demonstrated above, our senses are frequently and easily deceived.  If Plantinga takes the same ontological tack as Descartes, this is not necessarily a huge problem for him, as God is the best of all things, the single most clear and distinct idea, and as God has perfect moral goodness (an argument for another day, I fear) - God would not deceive us on clear and distinct ideas.  And other delusion is a result of human error and cannot pertain to a clear and distinct idea.  For me, this is a major cop out, and it is oft referred to as the Cartesian Circle: God exists -> Clear and distinct idea tells me that God exists -> Clear and distinct ideas come from God -> God exists.  Needless to say that I do not think this holds too much water, and whilst my criticism may not be much of an issue for the ontological proponents, it is certainly a problem for those of us who do not subscribe to it.

Thus far, then - we have seen some pros and cons of religious belief: Plantinga’s convincing refutation of the evidentialist objection, some philosophical responses to the concept of obligation regarding beliefs and the argument for sensory experience of God’s presence as well as some arguments against it.  I wrote a lot of this primarily as revision for an impending philosophy of religion exam, but I hope you have enjoyed reading it (if indeed any of you have lasted this long).  I intend to pick up the rest of the article in another post at some point in the next fortnight.  For those of you that made it to the end - well done and thanks!

tithenai:

wizasaur:

-prettyprettyplease:

ultraball:

paranoidrobot:

…Do the Presbyterians think Rocks are animals?

ALL ROCKS GO TO HEAVEN

CONVERTING TO CATHOLICISM DOES NOT MAGICALLY GRANT YOUR DOG A SOUL.

 WOW. EPIC CATHOLIC WIN.

I LOVE THIS.

At this time of year it’s very easy to be bogged down in either gratuitous Christmas uproar that irritates every sane human entity within a ten yard proximity of you, or to be the grinch that despises the rampant consumerism associated with this period and similarly pisses of the same amount of people.  I have to confess, I probably do fall into the latter - at least sometimes. There is of course, another type of miser.  Another seasonal hermit that shuns the festive period and denigrates those that join in the celebrations, and these types are the anti-religious types - we all know at least one.  ‘I’m not celebrating Christmas because I’m not a Christian!’ ‘Well’, you might say, ‘that is fair enough, given that Christmas is a Christian holiday’.  But is it?  Let me expand…

Christmas (the festive period - I shall continue to refer to it as Christmas for ease of reading) has been a ‘Christian’ event for centuries, but it is well acknowledged that the original festival at this particular time of year was indeed pagan, celebrating the winter solstice - indeed, the well-known word ‘Yule’ was not always synonymous with Christmas, instead referring to the Scandinavian winter festival that preceded European and Scandinavian Christian conversion (Christianity never quite took off in Scandinavia as it did in Europe).

So, most of us accept that there were other festivals occurring across the Western world at this particular time of year.  That Christianity adopted this particular date to host their own festival seems coincidental, and there are, of course, many theories that argue this was a deliberate move by the Church to make it a little easier for pagan conversion - ‘You can still have your winter pissup, just instead of worshipping the Sun, you can worship the birth of Jesus’.  This seems perfectly feasible (even likely!), and to be frank, it is my own particular position - the Church has a solid history of shrewd, well-considered acts designed purely to further its influence.  From the Council of Nicaea under Constantine (the Bible was effectively designed and compiled here, the creed of the Catholic faith universalised) to the Spanish Inquisition to the covering up of child abuse - these have all been self-serving, considered and deliberate acts.  It would seem a given that the Church would borrow a populace’s existing holidays and attach their own dogma to them - people don’t like change, surely making the change as effortless as possible would ensure easier transition?

Largely, though, whilst I can see and accept the historical fact (perhaps too strong a word, but I am lost for a more suitable one) and impetus, this seems to me largely irrelevant.  The Catholic faith placed Christmas on this day for whatever reason - it is considered historically inaccurate that the historical Jesus would have been born anywhere near December, but again, this seems to be a by-the-bye. The importance lies in the message behind the holiday itself - and this too, transcends religion in a way that is quite beautiful.

Whatever the tradition, this winter festival seemed to involve a bit of singing, drinking, eating and having a nice time in a rough season - winter kills hundreds of pensioners every year.  Babies die due to lack of heat.  This is NOW.  HERE.  In one of the most developed nations on earth.  Imagine the toll winter had on humans populating these lands 1000 years ago, it must have been a pretty harsh time of year, and this one big festival is a lovely way of getting families, clans, villages together and enjoying something.  Eating well, staying warm and keeping spirits up.

THIS, for me , is the importance behind Christmas, or whatever you want to call it. 

There are a seemingly ever increasing amount of people deriding the religious sentiment attached to the time of year, and this is, although, irritating, the prerogative of any commentator, of any human.  I can’t help by think, though, that they miss the point.  A friend put to me recently that it seems immoral to indulge ourselves and our families so heartily at a time when there are people starving all over the world, and to be totally honest, I agree - to a point.  But with this in mind, it seems illogical to assert that we all must live as ascetics because there are people in the world living with nothing.  Must we feel guilty at our luxury - yes.  To a point.  This guilt might just force our hand to give something or do something that can assuage the suffering of people less fortunate.  Should this guilt equate to us never indulging or having a nice time?  What a ridiculous idea.  Wouldn’t it be better for us to indulge a little bit and give something (by whatever means you deem applicable) to these people that have shit all?  If we can club together to bring everyone else UP instead of lowering ourselves DOWN, does this not seem the most desirable and virtuous course of action?  I am yet to see an argument that convinces me otherwise.

As for people that complain the Christian message has been lost, well - maybe from your perspective it has.  But remember the history behind the festival to begin with, and then remember that the event is cultural, it’s bigger than the religion now, and it was bigger than religion then.

Personally, I like to see other people having a nice time at Christmas.  Whatever their religion, lack thereof, or any other contributing factor, the overriding message is surely setting some time aside to be nice.  In whatever way.  See your family, make an effort, see old friends, have a lovely time and just enjoy the world we populate a bit more than usual.  If this isn’t important to our existence in some way, then I honestly do not know what is.  You are welcome to your religious Christmas, but you should also let people be welcome to their own celebration of the festival.

And hey - I don’t even like Christmas that much! ;-)