On 2/6/2017 2:39 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Feb 5, 2017 at 9:21 PM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 2/5/2017 3:14 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Inconsistent? Would you have people who oppose fascism not have a
definition of fascism - so that they were just opposing some undefined,
amorphous ideology?
It is interesting that you bring this up. Are you familiar with the
essay "Ur-fascism" by Umberto Eco? He discusses precisely how hard it
is to define fascism:
http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf
Yet he defines "Ur-fascism", the eternal fascism, and is critical of it. So
are you saying I should talk of ur-theism when I mean belief in the God of
the Bible, Quran, and Torah? And leave "theism" to be used to mean the
truths of arithmetic; So Bruno and I will both be misunderstood?
My point was simply that certain things are (perhaps) surprisingly
hard to define. You mentioned fascism, and it turns out this is one of
them. Pointing this out is not the same as muddying definitions.
Further, I argue that basing an ideology or belief system on opposing
an ill-defined concept can lead to terrible things.
Which is exactly why I'm explicit in defining what the theism is that I
consider preposterous and what other god ideas I'm merely agnostic
about. Then Bruno criticizes me for "supporting" the former; rather
than help him muddy the meaning of "God" so he can call the truths of
arithmetic "God".
Terrible things
have been done in the name of god and religion, and in the name of
fascist ideologies. It is also true that terrible thing have been done
in the name of anti-religion and anti-fascism.
I was born in the aftermath of the carnations revolution in Portugal,
and was raised in a society that considered itself to be almost
religiously anti-fascist, but without a clear definition of what
fascism is. Some of these "anti-" people were as vicious, if not more,
than what they claimed to oppose. My mother received a letter from the
communist party saying that she should abandon her job, since my
father also had one. She was also told to denounce anyone speaking
against the communist party. She refused to do both, and was then
included in a list of people that were to be hanged in public. All
this was done under the label of "anti-fascism". Fortunately there was
a counter-revolution before it came to that. I am grateful to the US
for helping at that stage -- although this is an historic period that
is still not openly discussed.
And so do you think of yourself as agnostic about the value of fascism?...or
communism?
Yes, I reject simplistic views of History where one side is 100% good
and the other 100% evil.
But you seem to hold an extremist view of epistemology. You are
agnostic and can't judge anything because the only alternative is
absolute certainty. I don't believe you really think that way. Are
there not a large class of ideas that you evaluate as very likely true
and which you would certainly act on and another large class that you
reject and would not act on - in other words some you believe and some
you fail to believe.
Absolute belief leads to terrible ideas, such
as trying to bomb countries into democracy.
They did. For example, the rejection of Mendelian genetics and the
insistence on Lamarkism for purely ideological reasons in the USSR.
Marxism-Leninism was based on a belief in a specific type of social
engineering, the idea that you could gradually improve society by
changing the way people act and then wait for these behaviour to be
transmitted and accumulated across generations. Scientific theories
that implied that you cannot transmit characteristics that you
acquired after birth through purely biological processes was verboten,
and overwhelming scientific evidence resisted (just like the
creationists do).
You make my point. They had scientific rational reasons they put forth
for
their policies. It was wrong science and it was enforced by violence (as
other religions have done) - but it wasn't an appeal to supernatural
revelation and faith.
That was true in the beginning, but once you put your beliefs above
empirical evidence, like they did, I don't see where the difference to
an appeal to supernatural revelation is.
It's only a difference of degree. Theists also try to make scientific
arguments (e.g. first-cause, fine-tuning,...), but they also explicitly
appeal to revelation and faith.
If you go far enough down authoritarian rabbit holes you eventually
get to "revelation". Example: North Korea and the Kim dynasty.
Then they built monuments to science and progress, made to inspire awe
and fear, just like cathedrals. An example is the Fernsehturm in
Berlin, made to resemble the Sputnik and the be seen from afar. It was
also a powerful TV signal transmitter, in an attempt to silence the
dangerous transmissions from the west. People who like facts and
reason are not afraid of debate. They don't try to silence the
opposition.
They also don't use words to obfuscate meaning.
I don't think any of us is doing that. We are debating definitions,
which is arguably 90% of philosophy.
Then why do people feel the need to crate the word "agnostic"?
I think it's a cop out to avoid the question of whether the God of theism
exists. Agnostics were originally people who were not just uncertain
about
God, they held that the question was impossible to know anything about,
a-gnostic. So it was not a "nuanced" position - epistemologically is
was
an extreme position and so deserved a name.
Yes, I tend to agree with this epistemological extreme, because I
think it is a necessary implication of Gödel's theorems.
?? Godel's theorems are about what is entailed by axioms in a formal
logical system. As such it has nothing to do with facts in the world.
Couldn't you make the same argument about differential equations?
Yes. The relation of mathematics to facts in the world is one of
description. That a dx/dt = -x has a decaying exponential as a solution
is not a fact about the world. As any engineer will tell you, it means
that if the differential equation is a good description of something
about the world then the decaying exponential will be a good description
of something about the world. The analogy with Godel's theorem is that
if we create an AI system to prove theorems, no matter how fast or long
it runs it will not be able to prove all true theorems.
Do
you suppose juries should always vote "Innocent" because there are truths
that are unprovable from the prosecutions evidence? Do you avoid sailing
west from Portugal because we can't be sure the Earth isn't flat and has an
edge you could fall off of?
No. I do what I can with imperfect information like everyone else.
Sometimes I'm wrong. So far I've survived.
What does have to do with avoiding absolute belief?
It has a lot to do opposing nonsense. If someone says, "We should kill
all the Jews." are you going to say, "Well I must avoid an absolute
belief that you're wrong - so maybe we should."
When Dawkins, who is often castigated as
a radical atheist, was asked, on a scale of 1 to 7 how certain was he
that
there is no God, he said "6". And since you like to credence original
usage
of words over current usage you should know that agnosticism was
originally
just considered a form of atheism - since it implies not believing in
God.
I don't have such a preference. I am trying to apply reductio ad
absurdum to your argument. You accuse me of obfuscating meaning by
going against the current use of a word. If that is not permissible,
anyone who did it before me should also be denounced, so let's retreat
to the original definition.
Why does it follow that someone should be criticized for using a word to be
understood in his time and place. I'm only criticizing using in a way to be
misunderstood in the time and place it is used.
But how does usage evolve?
By a kind of Darwinian selection in usage. I highly recommend the slim
book by Craig A. James "The Religion Virus" which outlines the
development of religion from this standpoint.
And even deists, like Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, were considered
atheists because they didn't believe in the god of theism.
I get that. I wouldn't be particularly offended to be labeled "atheist
agnostic", in the sense that I do not believe in any of the gods
described in abrahamic religious texts. But I know nothing about god
in general.
Because "god in general" includes animist, deist, polytheist, and other
supernatural entities. But even such a broad category has its boundaries.
They are all agents having wills and acting unpredictably as do people.
They are all inconsistent with the idea of ubiquitous, impersonal
deterministic laws; the Laplacian worldview.
Ok, and for me the keyword here is "will". We don't know what that is,
so why not admit some ignorance?
I have an open mind on some of those things - but not so open my brains
fall out on mention of the god of theism.
Brent
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