Open Thread: Happy New Year!

I’d feel sorry for her, but I think that if I did she’d probably try and kick my ass. ;)

Right here.

I’ve been working on this line of reasoning for a while, and it’s really helpful to test it against a thoughtful disagreer. I really appreciate you (and this whole community, more broadly) for being able to disagree and discuss without getting hyper, personal, and incoherent.

You guys are like, the best, man.

Okay, so I’ve been playing a philosopher on TV, and it’s probably going to get me in a lot of trouble now with real philosophers who hang out on this site, but here goes nothing.

For any ontological system (in this case, consider both separately “the existence of a deity” and “physics”) you have to have either a “realist” system, or are “relativist” system. That is, there either exists a single, unknown Truth that is independent of humans and what they think. Alternatively for the relativist, there is only “constructed truth,” the sum of what we choose to say about things. The latter forms the basis for much of post-modernism. I find it riddled with self-inconsistency, and I do not believe it is what you, BubbaFan, are advocating (correct me if I’m wrong here.)

So, if we agree to be realists, then we have to be “foundationalists” or not. If we are foundationalist, then we hold some truths to be self-evident. Like, for example, that sensory evidence is a reliable guide to reality. Or, that there is a self-consistent set of rules that govern the universe.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with these assumptions being plausible — we get no bonus points for having them come out of left field. But they are truly “axioms,” or “postulates” or “foundational statements,” in the sense that they cannot be proven or demonstrated from the rest of our ontology. Once we have these statements, like Euclid, we can run off and derive a whole lot of other truth that rests, epistemologically speaking, on those foundations.

(Of course, Godel will point out that there will always exist, in any non-trivial logical system, true statements that cannot be proven. Thus the wag can claim, “Mathematics is a religion, and the only one that can prove itself to be so.”)

Now, one could try to construct a non-foundational, realist ontology. I’m not entirely sure how this would work; I personally haven’t ever heard one successfully described, but that doesn’t mean much at all. Somehow, all the true statements in such a system would rest on each other circularly (“everyone stand in a circle and sit down!”), and yet maintain a claim to be universally descriptive of Truth, rather than simply a clever fictional system.

Obviously, my sympathies run towards the foundationalist system. In both my scientific work (physics) and my religion, it is the only way that I’ve been able to construct a self-consistent view of the world. For that reason, my science and my religion are very very similar: make some postulates that seem plausible, see what follows, and if there is a contradiction with observation, go backwards through the logic chain until you find a flaw. If there is no flaw, then revisit the postulate.

This probably makes me a rather odd religionist and a rather odd scientist. My Reds fandom completes the trifecta, so here I am.

To your final point: I’ve heard atheists (some of them scientists) claim many times that Occam’s razor is proof that God doesn’t exist. Nearly all scientists agree that the laws of the universe are knowable and that they are constant — at least, they stay the same long enough for us to figure them out. Right? No one ever says, well, maybe evolution just didn’t exist in the Precambrian, and then it started again.

And there are plenty of thoughtful pastors (and priests, too, I assume — I don’t hang out in those circles) who say, “Look, there’s a whole lot more that we don’t know about God than we do, and we’re pretty silly to think we understand really anything about God at all. We should expect to be surprised a lot if and when our ignorance is worn away.”

Well, that’s pretty long. Sorry about that. And again, thanks for your thoughtful dialog on a subject that usually gets banned, and getting banned is hard to do around here.

TWHS

Who created the higher power? It’s a great question.

And I’ve got photos to prove it.

is he viewing God, now? :)