“Perhaps the creator of the strawman and ‘you are stupid’ didn’t know/ realize he’d fashioned a strawman”
“Or didn’t even care”
Perhaps the creator of the strawman and “you are stupid” “didn’t even care” that he’d fashioned a strawman, and told somebody to his face “you are stupid.”
“Already explained”
If you say so.
“Did you miss it?”
I saw your speculations.
“Are you really so obtuse?”
I’ve been obtuse on many occasions.
obtuse
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1a: slow to understand what is obvious or simple : dense sense 2a
He is too obtuse to take a hint.
b: difficult to comprehend : not clear or precise in thought or expression
obtuse legalese
It is also, unfortunately, ill-written, and at times obtuse and often trivial.
—Shirley Hazzard
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“I’m not an atheist”
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And we are coming across as annoying.
People are literally calling themselves agnostic today even though they are atheists because they don’t want to be seen as that annoying atheist guy because we are sometimes that annoying.
So for all these reasons I just hope that atheism can do better.
Because if we are just as annoying as Christian fundamentalists to the point that people don’t want to be known as atheists, that’s a problem.
If we’ve lost our intellectual humility, then this is just another way to make you feel better than everyone else.
And if you’re not a part of the solution, don’t pretend you have the high ground because at least Christians have a plan.
It’s a bad plan and it’s a limited plan, but they have a plan and a vision that they’re working towards.
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“the current state of reality that we observe is the result of unguided contingent processes generating spontaneous order”
“Free Will is an illusion”
“ultimate ‘Truth’ is unattainable”
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So I dislike that atheists think that they are smart and religious people are dumb, because my IQ did not change.
I was smart when I was a Christian and developed incredibly complex theories of theology and apologetics.
I was smart when I let go of these theories when I got better explanations for why we are religious.
I wasn’t an idiot either time, and my IQ did not change in the process.
Also, with this one, I think there’s a lack of intellectual humility when you think you’re smarter than everyone else, because your rationality as an atheist is not grounded.
If your ability to reason came about because of evolutionary processes, and evolution does not evolve us to see according to truth but instead to see according to evolutionary fitness, then you actually have no objective ground to stand on that you are more rational anyways.
Now just because I give that point to the Christian apologists when they say your rationality isn’t grounded doesn’t mean that we go back to God.
It’s just admitting that yes, there’s a lack of ultimate groundedness when it comes to rationality.
Even so, I think atheism is a better position than pretending that you have objective rationality or objective morality.
But it’s still a problem that should take this sense of high horse that we feel as atheists.
So, take Joe… I think it’s Foley… the philosophical guy who’s always on Alex O’Connor’s YouTube channel, and they’re talking about philosophy, and he said the thing that keeps him up at night is this problem, because both sides use circular reasoning.
When you ground rationality in God or the Bible, that’s circular reasoning but it’s circular reasoning that’s self-sustaining.
But on the atheist side, it’s circular reasoning that’s self-destructing.
Your rationality continues to chip at your ability to trust your rationality at all.
And I wish there is more intellectual humility from atheists rather than the annoying peacocking that you get in these atheist, particularly philosophical male spaces.
Not to mention, when you take free will out of the conversation, there’s no high horse to stand on.
I didn’t choose that my core values are things like authenticity or honesty or truth seeking.
And my brother didn’t choose that his core values are loyalty.
And that caused us to experience religion differently.
I didn’t choose that I’m neurodivergent.
I didn’t choose the books that I read versus other books that I read, right?
And so when you break down that, if none of us have free will, then how do you have any ground to stand on when you say that you are smarter or better than anyone else?
Because if you were in their situation with all of those inputs you would be them.
…there are some spaces I go to where the religious people are much more humble and much more kind and much more available to listen to different perspectives and points of view than some atheist hangouts that I’ve been in, which are sometimes very one-dimensional and making fun about how everybody else is stupid.
Not all atheist spaces, not all religious spaces, but I have had that experience.
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“What’s the ugliest part of your body?
Some say your clothes
Some say your nose
I think it’s your mind…
– Frank Zappa”
Matthew 15 (HCSB)
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17 “Don’t you realize that whatever goes into the mouth
passes into the stomach and is eliminated?
18 But what comes out of the mouth
comes from the heart,
and this defiles a man.
19 For from the heart come evil thoughts,
murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities,
thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies.
20 These are the things that defile a man,
but eating with unwashed hands does not defile a man.”
DavidFord said
“long history of diatribes against atheists and atheism”
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot were atheists.
Atheistic ideologies played a large role in the killing of over 100 million people during the 20th century.
Ahhh…an oldie but goodie.
If the claim is that certain movements and individuals who were ideologically committed to atheism committed horrific crimes then, who can argue? But this doesn’t seem to be merely a claim. There seems to be a point trying to be made and that’s where, upon reflection, it gets curiouser and curiouser.
Note: I have to interject before preceding that I am not sure of the provenance of the claim that Hitler was an atheist. It is contradicted by his own statements. He was certainly not an orthodox Christian and he frequently attacked Christian organizations both within and without Germany who opposed his regime, but he is on record as characterizing atheism as an example of “Jewish-Bolshevism.” Hitler certainly exploited religion for his own purposes but his personal faith seems to have been a sort of hyper-social darwinist deism where God acts through the the brutal, unforgiving laws of Nature. The Nazi expression of this view was racial purity and warfare. But of course we must remember that as far as anyone can tell, Hitler never personally killed anyone. The horrors of the Holocaust were carried out by ordinary Germans who found some way to reconcile their horrific acts with their faith. The regular German Army wore the motto Gott mit uns on their standard uniform belt buckles during World War II. Odd if the regime was committed to atheism wouldn’t you say?
So what is the actual point of the comment about atheist mass killers?
Is it that atheists will naturally tend to become Stalinists?
But then how do you explain the fact that the least religious, most secular states in the world, with the largest demographic who identify as atheists, those of Europe, are the freest, most prosperous, least warlike, of any of the countries in the world? How do you explain people like Ayn Rand, conservative libertarian atheist and staunch anti-Stalinist? (Not to mention the Dalai Lama, whose flavor of Buddhism rejects belief in the concept of a supreme, eternal, personal Creator God.)
So it can’t be that atheism naturally tends to mass slaughter.
Perhaps there is something else going on? Something deeper than merely lack of belief in God?
What all these states had in common was ideological absolutism and totalitarianism. This they shared with historic Christianity by the way. What was more totalitarian than the Medieval Roman Catholic Church? As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, you couldn’t even escape after you were dead! So, what unites these modern states and historic Christianity but their ideological absolutism and totalitarianism? When someone hits you over the head with a club it hardly matters whether the club has a crucifix on it or a hammer & sickle.
Not to be cynical but what this argument sounds like to me is “Hey the church may be bad but at least we’re not as bad as the Nazis!” Ha! What a defense!
The real enemy of ideological absolutism and totalitarianism, whether religious or atheistic, is the Enlightenment based, secular, libertarian, democratic state. And the real enemy of the Enlightenment based, secular, libertarian, democratic state is ideological absolutism and totalitarianism, in all its guises.
“…this idea that our epistemology can become self-undermining, and that does keep me up at night… this keeps me up at night, more than why is there something rather than nothing”
How Can We Know What Truth is? Ft. Joe Folley – @AlexOConnorClips
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an extract of
9 Questions Atheists CANNOT Answer – With @unsolicitedadvice9198 – @cosmicskeptic
**Alex:** I’m not sure if there’s no answer, but I’d be curious to hear an argument for why we are able to trust human intellect and rationality as a reliable guide to truth.
**Joe:** Oh, this is a fascinating one. I’ve been thinking about this. This has been actually really playing on my mind recently. How can we trust human intellect to get us to truth? If there’s no God, there’s no divine guiding principle.
Just to sort of lay this out for the materialist: the brain is just a bunch of atoms bumping into each other, right? It’s kind of like a rock or a piece of wood that happens to have developed this weird thing called consciousness. But there seems no necessary reason why it would have to be formed in relation to truth.
We were just talking a moment ago about how it makes sense to believe certain things that are false because it’s beneficial for us right now. If it happened to be true that that actually applied writ large to things like the laws of logic and mathematical truths, we’d literally be incapable of knowing.
Because it might be the case that it’s not that 2 plus 2 equals 4. It’s that believing 2 plus 2 equals 4 is beneficial for my survival. And that’s why my rationality evolved to believe that kind of thing. And somebody will come along and say, “Yeah, but hold on. My brain just can’t conceive of the opposite. We can know it to be true a priori.” I’m like, that’s because that’s how your brain evolved. There were people who believed that 2 plus 2 is five; it’s just that believing that was not beneficial to their survival and so they died out, leaving only us.
Now people will want to say, “This is stupid. What do you mean that the reason they died out and the reason why believing 2 plus 2 equals 5 was not beneficial to their survival was because it’s not true?” Right. And do you think that that’s a good response to this?
I think this is one instance of a general problem of circular justification in philosophy. Here you’ve got two claims: one about epistemology and one about ontology. Effectively the question is how are we going to get them to play nice together?
The trouble is, on the classic Aristotelian model of philosophy you have a bunch of branches of the tree and you get to the middle and it’s metaphysics or ontology. This is why Descartes’ *Meditations on First Philosophy* is called that—because metaphysics is the first philosophy. In practice there’s an interplay, a mutual dependence between your epistemology and your ontology, because your ontology will justify your epistemology, but your epistemology has to justify why you believe in your ontology.
Epistemology is the study of how you can come to know things, and ontology the study of what is. So my epistemology—that’s a really good example of where somebody has put forward the argument that ontology has undermined epistemology. The idea that we are simply evolved creatures, atoms bumping together, and that’s all our brains are and that’s what our rationality is, has undermined or supposedly undermined the epistemology.
And then you have to assume the reliability of epistemology in order to come to any sort of ontology. So when the theist says, “Oh well, God would ground that,” it’s like, how do you know prior to God grounding it? What’s the preconsidered reliability of your epistemology that has allowed you to know that your reasoning chain from God existing to the reliability of your epistemology works?
This is sometimes posted as a problem for the theist, but it’s a problem for everyone. Because what we know is predicated on what we think is, and what we believe is the case is predicated on what we think we can know.
**Alex:** There’s like a circularity potentially in the God justification in saying, “Well, I can trust my rationality because God grounds it.” That’s what Descartes does. And one of the most famous criticisms of Descartes’ work is known as the Cartesian circle. It’s this circle of: if you need God to justify your reasoning ability, how do you reason that God exists in order to justify that reasoning ability? And it sort of goes around in a circle.
And so think about the atheist version of this, or the atheist problem here. It’s really put together best, I think, by Alvin Plantinga—his evolutionary argument against naturalism. He specifically makes the case that if you believe in evolution and you’re a materialist, you believe in evolution by natural selection. Natural selection selects for survivability. It doesn’t select for truth. Which means that if you believe in evolution, you believe that your reasoning faculty has not evolved to be sensitive to truth, but to survivability.
Why do you believe in evolution? Because you’ve reasoned your way into it. But the thing you’ve just reasoned your way into—evolution—has undermined your ability to trust the reasoning process that you’ve used to reason into it. So he points out that you can’t be a materialist and believe in evolution because believing in evolution undercuts the reasons you have for believing in evolution.
The thing is, one of these is a vicious circle and one of them is a virtuous circle. Because for the atheist, you’ve got this horrible problem where you’ve got this weird circle of: I believe that it’s just atoms bumping into each other that has no connection to truth, and that’s produced this belief, but it’s that belief which has caused this reasoning faculty, and you’re getting all messed up.
The theist goes around in a circle, but they say, “Okay, sure, it’s circular, but we all have to start somewhere. And everyone’s circular in some degree, but my circle is one that says, well, God justifies reason because he’s an agent who is the foundation of truth and gives us access to truth. And yeah, sure, I’ve used my reasoning faculty to get there. But that circle is consistent and self-contained and gives you this access to truth. Even though it’s still circular, it’s one that sort of gives you trust in truth.”
I think that is essentially the core difference between the two. It’s self-undermining versus self-reinforcing.
**Joe:** Yeah. I wanted to point out the epistemological-ontological thing because I think oftentimes we pretend that we can ground things more than we can. You’ve got Wittgenstein’s *On Certainty* on your shelf. He has this idea of a hinge statement, which is a statement you eventually come to where you can neither justify it nor challenge it, because you can only justify propositions with more strongly held propositions and you can only challenge propositions with more strongly held propositions. So you eventually get something that you can’t justify or challenge.
That could form a kind of theist way out of this Cartesian circle where they just say, “Well, you’ve got to start somewhere.”
I think there are a couple of potential responses that an atheist could have. First of all, I genuinely think this is a cracking problem. This is the stuff good philosophy is made of.
**Alex:** Me too. In fact, often depending on who I’m talking to, this is like my go-to challenge. If someone’s like, “What do you think is the best argument for believing in God?” I’d be like, “Just check this out. Try this on and see what you think.”
This idea that our epistemology can become self-undermining—that does keep me up at night. This keeps me up at night more than “why is there something rather than nothing.”
**Joe:** I think that there are potential routes out, but at the same time each of them is so incredibly controversial. Initial observation is that it’s not that an atheistic view implies this. It’s a materialistic view that potentially implies this, if there’s no kind of break in the reasoning.
For instance, if you like Kant—to incredibly probably butcher Kant—to say that the world is in some way synthetically a priori aligned with the particular faculties of your reasoning, then you don’t have to worry about this. But again, that’s controversial. Do you want to swallow the synthetic a priori whole? That’s a lot to take.
So each of these solutions will have massive controversies with them. One is to adopt some form of global pragmatist view. This is what Huw Price does, a brilliant Australian philosopher. He goes from object naturalism—we’re studying the world as a natural object—to subject naturalism—studying the human as a natural object. And then he says, well, if you’re studying the human as a natural object, we use all kinds of weird non-natural terminology like truth and the whole of maths. So if we’re going to be consistent naturalists we need to study the human as a subject-naturalist project.
He comes up with an idea of truth which is the same-boat principle. He takes the things that are useful to humans and then abstracts truth away from that as the principles of how we come to have truth—the principles of the stuff that will be useful as a general rule. And sure, it will sometimes break with utility, but it’s kind of the best fit we’ve got. And that’s how he gets at it.
Of course the difficulty with that is it’s a fundamentally anti-realist conception of truth. It is almost idealist in the way that it sets up the human investigative project. But it is a definition of truth that means we can be pretty sure that our reasoning is true because we’ve defined truth relative to the human.
This touches upon an interesting point regarding a pattern that I noticed between atheist and theistic reasoning. Often the theist wants to have something human grounded in metaphysics, and the atheist will often take something that is purportedly metaphysical and attempt to ground it back in the human.
The classic one is: how does math work? Metaphysically minded people will say math works because it’s grounded in these Platonic eternal truths. Less metaphysically minded people want to say math works because we’ve designed it to work. It’s a tool, and if the world was different, maths would be different. And maybe truth kind of works in the same way.
That would illustrate general explanatory differences between competing philosophical tendencies or predispositions. Those that are very sympathetic to explaining the metaphysical in terms of the human will love something like Price’s idea of truth, because it connects something weird and a bit fuzzy and seemingly immaterial like the truth relation back to naturalism. But you’ve lost hardcore realism about truth.
**Alex:** I’ve, in part because of this consideration, just sort of been committed recently to this kind of view of truth—that it becomes a sort of anti-realist view of truth. That truth is not as traditionally thought of, that there is just this reality that our minds latch on to. Maybe at least that’s the case; it’s just that you can’t know that that’s the case. And so the way that you’re in practice using words like “true” and granting assent to propositions and saying “I believe this is true”—recognizing as a materialist what my brain is, how it evolved, how it functions—I don’t think I so much have to abandon truth as rethink what truth means.
**Joe:** Yes. But then you hear a theist saying something like, “Those who don’t believe in God, they’ve abandoned truth,” and you’re sort of like, maybe.
It’s also worth noting this type of anti-realism about truth doesn’t have the same implications as somebody saying truth is relative, because here truth is not relative and here truth is not subjective. As anti-realist theories of truth go, this is not a bad one, but it’s still an anti-realist theory of truth. And that is such a massive pill to swallow.
Depending on how good your grounding of truth is in naturalistic principles, you can get truth to still do lots of the same things that you’d want it to do anyway. But again, some of these questions are an issue of philosophical predisposition. If I was more metaphysically minded, I would just reject that out of hand. I’d say, “What do you mean? How is this anti-realist definition of truth useful if not because it’s true? You’re saying truth is abstracted utility. Why is it useful? What is ontologically grounding that?”
And I think that is that philosophical instinct to ground something human in something metaphysical. And again, it is those competing intuitions clashing in this debate around the grounding of truth.
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“this is an offensive post”
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“‘If anybody’s feelings were hurt by: [Dodson]’ …
I don’t know if anyone’s feelings were hurt, I doubt it, mine certainly weren’t since I’m not an atheist”
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“of the regular posters at this forum I’m the only one who positively takes on the signifier ‘Atheist’ to describe my position.
…when I hear comments like those from Mr Dodson I am not offended”
THIS THREAD IS NOT ABOUT G0&&∆MN 9/11!!!
Sorry Robert but please move posts discussing 9/11 elsewhere. I may have missed one but I think it is #95, #97, #99.
David, providing links to relevant videos is fine but lengthy quotes of transcripts is unnecessary and probably exceeds the terms of Fair Usage. Why don’t YOU watch the video and YOU think about it and then YOU provide YOUR opinions. That’s how actual conversations get started. You may think you’re holding up your end but all you’re really doing is showing your a$$.
“Why don’t YOU watch the video and YOU think about it and then YOU provide YOUR opinions”
I heard both “5 Things I Hate About Atheists (As an Atheist)”
and
“How Can We Know What Truth is? Ft. Joe Folley” (an extract of “9 Questions Atheists CANNOT Answer”).
I have thought about them.
They seem fine to me.
My mind-reading abilities have been slighted.
I will never be the same again.
How may I ask, can I be expected to read a mind that even AI is unable to penetrate?
“Bruce doesn’t understand because David’s replies don’t answer the question Bruce actually asked, and David never says what point they are meant to make.”
My working assumption isn’t that David is as ** you do not have permission to see this link **but rather is like those politicians who instead of answering a question respond with a talking point.
“Why did you post something you didn’t believe?”
“Atheists can be as offensive to theists as theists are to atheists.”
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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