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From: rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Dr. Emmanuel Wu)
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.religion.jewish,net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Logic based on ... (start again again...) (CONCLUSION)
Message-ID: <899@pyuxd.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 12-Apr-85 13:10:20 EST
Article-I.D.: pyuxd.899
Posted: Fri Apr 12 13:10:20 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Apr-85 04:36:05 EST
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Xref: watmath net.religion:6630 net.religion.jewish:1818 net.religion.christian:619

> 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.

Meaningfulness to individual people is always ALWAYS subjective.  What's
meaningful to you has ONLY to do with you and your experience and
perception.  Likewise with me.  If any of us are lucky enough to find someone
who shares our particular subjective meaningfulnesses about events/things/etc.
then so much the better.  But what's meaningful to an individual may in
fact be a completely disjoint set from reality.  That doesn't make their
experience any less meaningful to them, but if they intend to live in this
physical world, and if their "meaningfulnesses" conflict head on with reality,
they're in trouble.

> 	(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.

To quote a famous philosopher:  "Huh?"  This is EXACTLY what I described
above:  the presumption that that which is perceived during the experience
MUST be explained ONLY by "supernatural" causes.  The point of my
paragraph was that the word itself has no realistic meaning:  if it means
beyond the natural, and if natural means "that which is", then it means
nothing.  If natural means "that which we can observe", then I claim that
that's a bogus definition, which changes with scientific discoveries like
the microscope.  Thus, the very concept of a "supernatural" is realistically
meaningless.

> 	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.

We've been through that in other discussions.  Your choices are made by
your internal biochemistry, and that biochemistry is influences by other
chemicals inside your own body (try thinking clearly when you have heartburn)
AND experiences outside of it.  If I could logically convince you that your
reasoning is flawed, and if you incorporate that into your knowledge base,
then you would indeed "choose" not to believe in free will.  The reason that,
as you say yourself, you are "incapable of disbelieving it", is because your
own constructs are set up so as to inhibit such reasoning from being
so incorporated.  (As with any evidence on any subject, which, when presented
to certain people, they "refuse to believe").  To change that, you have
to actually go back to altering the very patterning constructs you impose
on knowledge entering your brain.  And, maybe, to change *that*, you have to
go back further and change something deeper.  I don't know about you, but
I find the workings of the brain in this matter fascinating.  Maybe these are
the reasons why some people have to spend years in analysis.

> 	"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.

If so, then you also feel the need for rigorous standards of evidence for
analysis.  And if these standards exclude your evidence, you wouldn't blame
the standards, you'd take another look at the evidence.

> 	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.

I'd be bothered to if you offered it.  You've spent a whole article talking
about it but never offering any of it.  

> 	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.

But I've shown above that the ONLY way to get to the "I believe in god"
state is to either accept the assumption from the start, OR to say what-if
with the assumption, analyze, see that it's all consistent, but somehow
forget that the assumption was not a given in the first place.

> 	 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.

Perhaps because it has nothing to do with logic.

> 	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?

Leave the church?  If I answered that by saying "Because they saw the
erroneousness of the assumptions through some enlightening experience",
I'd be slaughtered alive for heresy, wouldn't I?  Join the church?  Religions
fulfill some people's emotional needs (I'm not using or even implying the
term usually inserted at this point---"crutch").  Needs of belonging to
a group.  Needs to feel certain things about the world.  For some people
the need is so very great that rational analysis is absolutely irrelevant
and unimportant to them at that time.  Once they are ingrained in the belief
system, in any such belief system, if you accept its consistency, and if you
choose not to ask why the assumptions are being made, you're there for good.

> 	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.

I did.  The only part of this section, I recall, that was re-written for
"the Mark III Beast" (this version of the article) was the last two sentences.
If you recall, I was talking about religion, and I think by now you know that
my definition of religion is on the strict side.  Thus, as I also said two
months ago, I wasn't talking about non-impositional belief systems of
ANY sort, regardless of their being "theistic" or "non-theistic".  This was
all in there.  You, as we've seen, chose to harp on one particular part.
Now you see why in actuality it was really irrelevant to what I was trying
to say.  You could have substituted the word "theistic religion" in there
if it made you feel better.  YOU were the source of encouragement for me
to rewrite the article to include all of the things you would refer to as
religions.
-- 
Life is complex.  It has real and imaginary parts.
					Rich Rosen  ihnp4!pyuxd!rlr