Victor Reppert, Edward T. Babinski, Philosophical Problems of Knowledge & Communication
Victor Reppert recently left me a comment at his blog that began with an invitation for me to return to kindergarten, and concluded that my replies were full of "sound and fury," and my questions "signified nothing." My reply appears below.
Vic,
Since you wish to take me back to kindergarten, then let's do so. No evasions, let's begin from scratch.
Tell me all that you know about God, all that you've seen of God, touched of God, heard of God, tasted of God; and then tell me all that you know about the world you see and taste and touch and hear, the people you see everyday, and the cosmos where you see all things die.
The "God" knowledge appears relatively more "hidden" to me than the knowledge I have of the cosmos we all live in together.
I am not saying that the problem of evil has ceased being problematical any more than I am saying it is impossible for anything other than nature to exist. I'm simply telling you what I know with some degree of certainty compared with beliefs that I am less sure about.
I have also pointed out what I consider to be flaws in philosophizing about the Big Questions. Anyone may philosophize all they wish, and argue for whatever "God" or "force" they believe exists or doesn't.
However the more I read such arguments, the less convincing I find them. "Words" themsevles do not appear to provide absolutely accurate descriptions of the realities they are supposed to parallel. "Words" are stuck having to describe things that can also be understood as lying along spectrums of change. Words and concepts appear to be distilled from experiences within this cosmos where words/concepts and their opposites co-exist, or intermingle along spectrums of change. Neither am I of the opinion that verbal analogies constitute proof. Poetry yes. Proof no. I suspect the human mind of also being flexible enough to come up with counter analogies and counter arguments aplenty concerning all the BIG questions.
So I have simply come to trust direct experience a bit more than idealized philosophical arguments purporting to explain the answers to all the Big Questions. I also have grown more patient, not less, with living life day to day, and with the experimental process on both a personal level and in terms of humanity's groping toward greater knowledge. I choose patience even to the point of admitting I will very probably grow old and die with the same questions we have discussed, being debated still among philosophers.
Let me put it this way, I don't even know nor can I prove in a strictly philosophical fashion whether or not death ends "me" permanently, or, whether I or bits of me might survive after I die in a "ghostly" fashion, or, whether bits of me might not merge or join with others or bits of others that have died to form something new that begins again in a cosmos like ours or continues in some another dimension, or, whether I or bits of me might not "come back" in a reincarnate fashion, or, whether bits of me might survive after death for a long time and THEN even those bits die eventually, or, whether I have an immortal individual "soul" that can never die, or, perhaps I will die and an exact duplicate of me will be CREATED with the exact same knowledge and memories I had right up to the instant of my death (I don't know whether or not such a thing could be done by beings of super-intelligence from the future or past or parallel cosmoses, or by a demi-god or infinite Being who kept a copy of me in their "memory" and so could recreate me in some other place time or cosmos even if the "me" that lives here "dies"). Christian philosophers of mind also can't agree on the later two options, an immortal soul, or recreation after death by God. Some of them even use the Bible to argue that human beings don't "have" souls, they "are" souls. So, they agree the mind could be a function of the brain and the summation of experiences and knowledge each brain takes in as it grows and develops and becomes enculturated. Purely philosophically speaking, any or all of the above options might be true. It's even possible philosophically speaking to argue that what we call "consciousness" does not include our particular memories and knowledge and lives which might accrue and gather round "consciousness" and interact with it, so "consciousness" might be something that is more basic even to the cosmos itself, malleable and universal rather than individual. (Note, I'm not saying I view all options as equally appealling.)
There certainly are many weird things I've read about when it comes to consciousness, including mystical experiences, and weird visions people claim to have experienced which vary depending on one's culture. Though unfortunately, most people whose heart stop during surgery, or for long periods, and they are revived, recall nothing. And most sleep during the night is unconscious, dreamless. And there's questions that result from split-brain experiments, and there's cognitive science that is teaching us some of the many ways we each are influenced by items around us, or by others, unconsciously, and there's phermonal influences as well (scents we can't even consciouslly smell that affect us). Recently I read about how certain bacteria might be affecting people's brain/minds. Other experiment indicate that the brain/mind is an excuse generator, even a belief generator (as indicated in some-split brain experiments).
It also seems to me that humanity is young as an intellectual species. Heck we're still stuck on the cradle planet.
So tell me Vic, what do you really know? How much do you think you know about "God the universe and everything?" What percentage of that knowledge consists of philosophical conundrums that have remained unresolved for millennia? While just how much more do you interact with and know about the cosmos in which you live, move and have your being, and in which everything dies? I think you'd have to agree with me that you know more about the latter than the former.
P.S., By the way, your recent post about the Deity's "right to choose" as a possible reply to "evil," appears like you're thrashing blindly about for answers nearly as much as I am. I don't know how you can continue to believe you are building up "proofs" when you sink back in that post to relying on total mystery and faith in whatever "God does," which is close to relying on the mystery of "whatever will be will be." Are you honestly considering no longer even asking WHY "God" might "choose" the things "God" chooses, or what the definition of "good" is? Is it simply whatever God chooses? Whatever exists? Again, mystery. Didn't Aquinas and Barth also sink back into total mystery in the end and admit all of their philosophizing wasn't quite the point, or didn't provide the ultimate proofs they'd hoped to present?
I know you're not a fundamentalist Vic, and you DO admit uncertainties. I simply admit more than you do. By the way, there's a book about kindergarten that I enjoyed reading once, titled, Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
1 comments:
If you read the "deity's right to choose" entry carefully you will find that I unendorse the argument there. I was pointing out that an argument of the same form as is used to defend a woman's right to choose can be used to deep-six the argument from evil. I ended it by saying that it's a mistake to try to get a good argument out of bad rhetoric.
This is what you do that turns people off. I've gotten a little tougher and less tolerant of late because there are things about the way in which you respond to these matters that makes people think (and not just me, believe me!) that you are responding out of a bitterness toward Christianity and do not really listen to Christians when they think things through. We are expected to read through long diatribes with long quotes, which often stray from the topic, but then when we say something you misread it completely.
And while it looks as if you aren't saying that the argument from evil is a good argument against theism, this response is lost in a stream of words. The theistic defender in the debate about evil is trying to rebut a claim that the non-theist knows that God does not exist because of the evil in the world. if philosophical arguments don't work then this one doesn't either, and you are on the side of the theistic defenders. Many theistic defenses against the problem of evil emphasize what we don't know, and yet you like to quote Voltaire, who seems to be implying that we do know a lot more philosophically than the theistic defenders are suggesting. Go figure.
I've been trying to show you that you can't have it both ways. You must apply your views on philosophical arguments to the argument from evil, or modify you views on philosophical arguments to admit that one exception. There is no escape from these conclusions.
Let's put it in terms of numbered premise argument:
1. No philosophical proof about BIG questions proves its conclusion.
2. The argument from evil for atheist is a philosophical proof about a BIG question.
3. Therefore, the argument from evil does not prove its conclusion.
Since this is a valid argument, to reject the conclusion you must reject one of the premises. Which? No. 2 seems obviously true. You've stated No. 1 over and over and over again. Therefore, you must accept the conclusion, and I would like you to be big enough to explicitly state that you accept that conclusion. That's what I have been pushing you for, and that's what I haven't gotten yet.
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