It seems to me that Dawkins is a completely different person in person than he comes off as in his books...i've never been to one, but i suspect this is the kind of revelatory experience people have at MeFi meetups.
In Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, he argues that the truth of evolution is an epistemic defeater for naturalism (i.e. if evolution is true, it undermines naturalism). His basic argument is that if evolution and naturalism are both true, human cognitive faculties evolved to produce beliefs that have survival value (maximizing one's success at "feeding, fighting, and reproducing"), not necessarily to produce beliefs that are true. Thus, since human cognitive faculties are tuned to survival rather than truth in the naturalism-cum-evolution model, there is reason to doubt the veracity of the products of those same faculties, including naturalism and evolution themselves. On the other hand, if God created man "in his image" by way of an evolutionary process (or any other means), then Plantinga argues our faculties would probably be reliable.posted by fleetmouse at 6:43 PM on December 11, 2008 [5 favorites]
The argument does not assume any necessary correlation (or uncorrelation) between true beliefs and survival. Making the contrary assumption—that there is in fact a relatively strong correlation between truth and survival—if human belief-forming apparatus evolved giving a survival advantage, then it ought to yield truth since true beliefs confer a survival advantage. Plantinga counters that, while there may be overlap between true beliefs and beliefs that contribute to survival, the two kinds of beliefs are not the same, and he gives the following example with a man named Paul:
“ Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief... Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it... Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour.[20] ”
Thus, since there is no warrant for assuming a strong correlation between truth and survival, evolution conjoined to naturalism undermines the likelihood of both concepts being true.
"...the adjective of reason in philosophical contexts is normally "rational", not "reasonable".Okay, technically this is still imprecise, since an argument can be perfectly rational (i.e., logically consistent) while still being false (because it is based on false premises)—but since no one who believes in rationalism disbelieves in the importance of accurate premises, "reason" means, for practical purposes, "a method of assessing claims which expects them to be justified by sound reasoning from sound premises".
For us, the falsity of a judgment is still no objection to that judgment — that’s where our new way of speaking sounds perhaps most strange. The question is the extent to which it makes demands on life, sustains life, maintains the species, perhaps even creates species. And as a matter of principle we are ready to assert that the falsest judgments (to which a priori synthetic judgments belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without our allowing logical fictions to count, without a way of measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, human beings could not live — that if we managed to give up false judgments, it would amount to a renunciation of life, a denial of life.posted by fleetmouse at 8:06 PM on December 11, 2008 [2 favorites]
To concede the fictional nature of the conditions of life means, of course, taking a dangerous stand against the customary feelings about value. A philosophy which dares to do that is for this reason alone already standing beyond good and evil.
Ah, others put it better than me.That review runs off down the "how dare you criticize astrology without a doctorate in Hermeneutic Geocosmics" path in the first paragraph.
Note that the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus are commercially invented, fabled creatures belonging to a segment of people who believe in one particular faith, usually within a certain age group. Bit of a false equivalency to put them on par with belief in a deity, which is about as ancient, universal and archetypical to mankind as you can get.I don't see the difference at all. Beliefs in dragons, fairies, and ghosts fit all of your criteria also (ancient, universal, archetypal), and yet I presume we agree that fairies and dragons do not exist—and that to maintain a sincere belief in them past childhood would be, well, childish. There is nothing about the age of a belief, or the number of people who hold it, or the fact that it is part of one tradition or another, which affects the truth of the belief one bit in either direction. The sole determinant of a belief's truth is its agreement with objective reality. Our tools for measuring objective reality are imperfect, of course, but the point remains that it doesn't matter whether a belief is ancient or universal or archetypal. It can still be false, and it can still be childish.
“The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.” —Sam HarrisIt doesn't matter whether the incorporeal, invisible friend in question has a fluffy cotton-ball tail, or a red suit and a sack full of toys, or a long white beard and thunderbolts—or whether his means of communication is telepathy or hair dryers. It's still ridiculous. I imagine that, like me, you'd be taken aback by a grown adult who sincerely believes in Santa Claus. I am also taken aback by grown adults who sincerely believe in Yahweh (for the exact same reasons)—except that I'm virtually surrounded by them, and they control much of the society around me and set much of the discourse and the agenda for my country. That alarms and distresses me, just as it would alarm and distress you if the majority of your countrymen held a sincere belief in Santa Claus, and conducted their affairs in consonance with his imagined (and not always wise or benevolent) teachings.
There's a bit more to religion than just "a whole lot of people believe in some imaginary being".Of course, but it's all predicated on belief in an imaginary being. If that premise falls, the whole chain of reasoning falls. Without a god, religion is just art and literature and philosophy and so forth. And those things have value (of course), but they can (and do) exist quite happily without grown adults believing in Santa Claus.
[...] For Lacan, a pervert is not defined by the content of what he is doing (his weird sexual practices). Perversion, at its most fundamental, resides in the formal structure of how the pervert relates to truth and speech. The pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other (from God or history to the desire of his partner), so that, dispelling all the ambiguity of language, he is able to act directly as the instrument of the big Other's will. In this sense, both Osama bin Laden and President Bush, although political opponents, share the structures of a pervert. They both act upon the presupposition that their acts are directly ordered and guided by divine will.posted by Crabby Appleton at 9:10 PM on December 12, 2008 [1 favorite]
The recent tide of religious fundamentalism in the US—around half of US adults have beliefs that can be considered 'fundamentalist'—is sustained by the predominance of a perverse libidinal economy. A fundamentalist does not believe, he knows it directly. Both liberal-sceptical cynics and fundamentalists share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe, in the proper sense of the term. What is unthinkable for them is the groundless decision that installs all authentic beliefs, a decision that cannot be based on a chain of reasonings, on positive knowledge. Think of Anne Frank, who in the face of the terrifying depravity of the Nazis, in a true act of credo quia absurdum, asserted her belief that there is a divine spark of goodness in every human being, no matter how depraved he or she is. This statement does not concern facts, it is posited as a pure ethical axiom. In the same way, the status of universal human rights is that of a pure belief: they cannot be grounded in our knowledge of human nature, they are an axiom posited by our decision. (The moment one tries to ground universal human rights in our knowledge of humanity, the inevitable conclusion will be that people are fundamentally different, that some have more dignity and wisdom than others.) At its most fundamental, authentic belief does not concern facts, but gives expression to an unconditional ethical commitment.
For both liberal cynics and religious fundamentalists, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept them as such, while sceptical cynics mock them. No wonder that religious fundamentalists are among the most passionate digital hackers, and always prone to combine their religion with the latest findings of science. For them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge. The occurrence of the term 'science' in the very name of some of the fundamentalist sects (Christian Science, Scientology) is not just an obscene joke, but signals this reduction of belief to positive knowledge. The case of the Turin Shroud (a piece of cloth that was allegedly used to cover the body of the dead Christ and had stains of his blood) is instructive here. Its authenticity would be a horror for every true believer (the first thing to do would be to analyse the DNA of the bloodstains and resolve empirically the question of who Jesus's father was), while a true fundamentalist would rejoice in this opportunity. We find the same reduction of belief to knowledge in today's Islam, [...] One is compelled to draw the paradoxical conclusion that in the opposition between traditional secular humanists and religious fundamentalists, it is the humanists who stand for belief, while fundamentalists stand for knowledge. This is what we can learn from Lacan about the rise of religious fundamentalism: its true danger does not reside in its threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in its threat to authentic belief itself.
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posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:35 PM on December 11, 2008 [25 favorites]