Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!laura From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) Newsgroups: net.religion,net.religion.jewish,net.religion.christian Subject: Re: Logic based on different sets of assumptions (start again...) Message-ID: <5457@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Wed, 10-Apr-85 15:21:20 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.5457 Posted: Wed Apr 10 15:21:20 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 10-Apr-85 15:21:20 EST References: <886@pyuxd.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 333 Now that the superfluous brouhaha over definitions has hopefully passed, perhaps we can return to discussing the main points of this article. Probably not, Rich. I think that your definitions are embedded in your article and we will jsut find more of them. I'll include some additional wording to placate certain people who don't like certain accepted definitions of words, so that they too may answer the points in this article. Since many adherents to non-religious belief systems have claimed (1) that their belief systems are religions and (2) that I shouldn't have included them in my analysis (NOTE: I didn't, but...), let me say that if they are religions, then they weren't included in the analysis, but if they aren't then obviously they weren't included, so why are you complaining? Since such people seem to want to be included in the analysis, I will gladly do so. Because, what we perceived you as doing was setting your own definition of ``religion''. In particular, it seemed to exclude a lot of what are commonly considered religions -- but worse, it excluded many, if not most of the people who claim to have the subjective experiences that you claimed to want to talk about. I have made some significant rewrites to accomplish this (to a point). Since there is no hard evidence to support the existence of a deity or, for that matter, of any so-called "supernatural" entity, Aha. Here is Rich Rosen belief #1. This belief is definitely not shared by most of the people who claim to have religious experiences. They claim that there is a lot of hard evidence that they are having an experience. This may not correspond to what you mean by a ``supernatural entity'', though. We can now play ``what does supernatural mean'', but I warn you, there is much greater disagreement here than over ``what does religion mean''. one would normally work (in a typical analysis of a non-religious oriented phenomena) from the assumption that the thing for which there is no evidence does not exist. Wrong from the point of view of the people who have a religious experience. They think that there *is* evidence. Their problem is ``why don't you recognise it'' and ``why doesn't it happen to you as well''? Without evidence showing verifiable evidence of a thing's existence, or its observed effect on the "physical" world, via Occam people would generally assume that it does not exist until evidence of a viable nature presents itself. Again, wrong for the same reasons. I already *have* evidence, the problem is that *you* won't accept it. You are waiting for evidence that you will accept. The question becomes -- how likely is it that I will *ever* present evidence that you will accept? Currently, I think that the answer is ``extremely unlikely''. At this point, I generally pack it in. The *possibility* that it may exist is left open, but such a possibility evinces itself if and only if evidence is presented to support it. Again, this argument is only good if there in fact *is* no evidence. If there *is* evidence then in dealing with you I have a problem. Either the problem is one of communication, or the problem is that you are in some way incapable of understanding even perfect communication. However, obviously some people do believe in the existence of deities and other forms of the so-called supernatural despite the lack of realistic evidence. No. you cannot badger me into saying that my evidence is ``not realistic'' because it does not suit you. One can only assume that 1) these people have a different set of criteria for acceptability of evidence, and/or 2) they have some vested interest in believing that particular outcome of analysis that they believe to be true. The other assumption is that the people who do not accept the evidence have some sort of problem which prevents them from accepting what they normally would accept. Quite possibly both. I think we have shown endless times that the nature of the subjective evidence offered in favor of religious belief is tainted: How come your subjectivity shows a different world view than someone else's? What is so odd about that? People have different world views regardless of what experience is being evaluated. Why do some people like rock music and some people like classical and some people like both? Which one is right? Yes, you want to ask that question. A good many mystics *don't* and find it quite irrelevant. They either say ``they are all right'' or ``they are all wrong'' depending. WHY is his/hers wrong and YOURS right? If you mean in some absolute sense, then you are going to find very few mystics who say that somebody else's religious experience is ``wrong''. Misunderstood, perhaps. The reason you say that someone is misunderstanding something is that they have a collection of inconsistent beliefs that you believe can be made consistent. You explain your consistent version. If they like it, they say ``gee, I made a mistake'' and if they don't like it they generally go along their merry way and continue to do things that you think are a result of a misunderstanding. After some time you may find that it was *you* who had the misunderstanding, or they may gradually come to see their misunderstanding themselves. If he/she is being deceived, how can you be sure it is not YOU who has been deceived? You can't be absolutely sure. But you apply the same procedure that you apply to find inconsistencies in any other beliefs that you have. By the way, your phrasing ``YOU who has been deceived'' implies that the deception is something that something else does to you. This fits into the ``my religion is correct, yours is inspired by Satan'' model which very few Christians use all across the board these days. Many Christians use it to refer to a few religions, but at least they don't seem to use it towards major religions any more. This is not the generic mystic position which is more along the lines of ``deception is something that you do to yourself''. (Not to mention the way the brain is known to impose patterns onto events/phenomena/ observations that upon closer examination are shown to be quite wrong---like "recognizing" someone at the airport and realizing that it wasn't them after all.) If you mean this as an attempt to discredit mystics experiences as happening at all, I would counter that by this logic you should not believe that you ever recognise anyone since you could be mistaken. If this is to insinuate that people who have religious experiences do not question that they could be mistaken in interpreting them, then the insinuation is wildly off the mark -- this is the second most common topic of discussion whenever 2 or more mystics get together anywhere I have been. (The first is ``comparing notes''...) With that in mind, the only other reason that such people might readily accept the notion of the existence of a god (or any other "supernatural" entity or form) is precisely because they already believe it to be so: they hold the existence of such a thing as an assumption, an axiom, and work ALL analysis of the world from there. But here you reveal the axiom that you are using -- that the reason Rich Rosen does not accept the evidence for the supernatural is that such evidence does not exist. You conclusion, ``wishful thinking'' follows from that. But what about your axiom? How can you be sure that this is not ``wishful thinking'' on your part? "Why is life full of problems? Because god designed the world that way knowing that it would be best for us not to have a perfect life but rather to struggle and learn." Contrast this with the simpler, less presumptive notion that life is full of problems because all those problems are simply a part of the natural flow of things, based on what we observe and codify as physical laws. ``The natural flow of things'' is, from my perspective, a lot less simple than ``because God wanted it that way''. What makes you say that it is simpler? We experience them as problems because they conflict with our wishes for a world ordered around our lives, and because such conflicts are inevitable in a world with trillions of organisms and objects caught up in the "natural flow". Are such conflicts *really* inevitable? If our understanding *really* grew, is it not possible that we could learn to avoid such conflicts and not act in a manner that puts one into conflict with other organisms? As opposed to assuming, for whatever reason, the existence of an ultimate "good" force that "designed" the universe to be a certain way. This assumption is characteristic of theistic religions, but not non-theistic religions. These assumptions are not confined to religions (or, if you prefer, theistic religions). The belief in so-called "supernatural" phenomena of all sorts stems from the same sort of presumptions. This statement is utterly inconsistent with religiojus belief that ``good'' and ``evil'' as such do not exist, or that teh universe was not created, or that the universe *is* God. For example, when statements are made about the similarities between experiences of "mystics" of different belief systems, this is cited as "evidence" that there is a supernatural force behind them, rather than the more likely rational ``more likely'' -- here we find the embedded axiom that the existing evidence is not good enough again... possibilities centering on simple human psychology and biochemistry---the "physical" realm that some people would claim that these experiences are (a priori) not a part of. What an incredibly small number of mystics you must have talked to, Rich. I do not know a *single* one who claims that these experiences have nothing to do with psychology and biochemistry. This leaves the big question open, though. Psychology and biochemistry are facets of the relationship that a man has with the rest of whatever-there-is -- God, the rest of the world, the supernatural, whatever. What you need is a theory of meaning. Are my religious experiences any more or any less meaningful than my expriences of a symphony, or of my friends, or of any readoing on cosmology that I happen to be doing, or watching a tv soap opera, or getting drunk? How one decides on how more or less meaningful these things are depends on what values a person holds. How one gets what values one has is a good question. You and I will never agree to how it happens, however, since I think that certain values are freely chosen, and you don't believe in free will. (Again, the question always left unanswered: what is meant by "non-physical" or "supernatural", if not "beyond that which humans can perceive"?) Ah, beyond which *certain* humans can perceive. The people who claim to be doing the perceiving don't think that they are doing something which they cannot do. I contend that all such analysis of the world by religious believers, and the answers offered in such analysis, stem directly from an a priori assumption of the existence of god, or of some supernatural force of their own design. Lewis' works are prime examples. Jeff Sargent, for example, has used the phraseology "Why would you want to believe that human beings are 'nothing but' lab specimens?" (... when you have this other possibility to believe instead.) Laura Creighton has spoken in net.philosophy of how without the existence of "free will", she would find her existence meaningless, and how thus she chooses to believe in free will. No. I do not ``choose to believe in free will''. I am incapable of actually disbelieving it. There is a difference -- you (strangely for someone who does not believe in free will) imply that I *could* choose to not believe in it. But I find the effort of *trying* to disbelieve in free will produces results which are sufficient for me to extrapolate *if* I could disbelieve in free will *then* I would kill myself. "Wanting to believe", the desirability of holding certain beliefs as opposed to others owing to their intrinsic "aesthetic" value rather than their veracity, becomes a factor in forming belief systems for certain people. But I care about *both* veracity and aesthetic values. Thus my question is: why DO you presume the existence of god/the supernatural as a given (obviously I and many others simply do not), if not because you have some vested interest in believing that it is so, what I have endlessly and perhaps monotonously labelled as WISHFUL THINKING? (From here on in, please assume that phrases akin to "existence of god" refer to "existence of any presumed supernatural phenomena".) Because we think that we have sufficient evidence and for some reason you can't accept it. Perhaps you have a vested interest in not seeing it; perhaps you honestly can't see it; perhaps you *could* but just couldn't be bothered to. Given that we are dealing with two forms of logic, one of which starts off making the assumption that god exists and the other of which does not, Your claim, Rich. Your axiom. Atheists discover religion and religious people become atheists. Both religious and non-religious people would dispute that ``there is a good'' or ``there is no god'' was an axiom in their thinking. a person using one form of logic cannot possibly convince the person using the other form of logic to accept his position. This doesn't explain why people leave or join churches very well. This is not always true, because the two forms of logic and their two sets of assumptions are NOT disjoint sets. In fact, for most reasonable people, they are practically equivalent, with the addition of the a priori assumption of god being the only major difference between the two sets. Conclusions drawn from the two sets of assumptions, however, can and will (and do) wind up being radically different. The "impossibility of convincing" that I mentioned above only comes into play when the "extra" assumption has a role in the formation of some conclusion. Again -- why do conversions happen? Why do people leave the church? Religions have (individually and collectively) formed whole volumes of such conclusions and codified them. In many cases, "existence of god" and other assumptions don't even enter into certain of these conclusions, and they form viable conclusions about the world at large and life itself. (Some have devoted entire lifetimes to thinking and writing about such analysis and conclusions.) In other cases, assumptions about the nature of god and "god's word" take precedence over both scientific investigation and individual human needs. The conflict comes into play where "existence of god" assumptions (compounded by assumptions about what IS "god's word" and who is qualified to be god's authority representative on earth) are contradicted by rational inquisitive analysis and investigation of the world itself, or by individual human needs (arbitrarily?) denied/forbidden/not met by "god's word". Those who make such assumptions may deny the claims of the investigators (in "protest") solely because the claims would force them to change their whole view of the universe based on the evidence. If those people are in positions of earthly authority, we may witness repression of such ideas, and of people who hold them. We HAVE witnessed such repression in the past, and we may be witnessing it again today. Some belief systems that include notions of supernatural phenomena and even deities do not fit this mold. I am specifically talking about those that do. So, if you had made this clear 2 months ago, we wouldn't have had all of this trouble. Laura Creighton utzoo!laura