Secular Thoughts

The same god?

2012-02-03T09:10:00.000Z

I was talking to a friend the other day who teaches young children, and she told me that one of her pupils had said that there were lots of gods. My friend corrected her, saying that we all worship the same god, but in different ways. As an atheist, I can see a sense in which this is true from my point of view, since all nothings are the same. On the other hand, if there is a god, does it make sense to say that Ganesh is the same as Allah? Perhaps this is a case of "Hesperus is Phosphorus", the sentence used to illustrate the distinction between 'sense' and 'reference' due to Frege.

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

2012-01-05T11:08:00.000Z

Here's a very short version of this Billy Taylor tune played by me on a Heritage semi solid guitar through a Rivera valve combo amp.

Musical Semantics

2011-12-17T01:42:00.000Z

I used to think that music had only elaborate and emotionally evocative syntax but unlike language, no denotive semantics. Looking into recent work however, it looks like the picture is a bit more complicated. The American musicologist L. B. Meyer made the distinction between designative meaning and embodied meaning. The former involves a reference to things outside the musical domain and the latter is about the significance that a passage of music can have for a listener in virtue of its own dynamic unfolding structure and its relation to the listener's musical knowledge and expectations. This is meaning in relation to parts of musical structure referring to other parts of itself or the whole. Expectations (implications) can be created and their fulfilment can be delivered, delayed or thwarted.

I had thought the designative component to be totally parasitic on the natural language and culture of the community of listeners. Certain motifs in music come to be associated with objects or events, for example a few notes of the 'Jaws' theme and we think of a menacing shark. This is a long way from the full blown semantics of natural language, since you cannot convey novel concepts and meanings via musical syntax without a direct association first. However, recent work by Stefan Koelsh suggests that music transfers much more semantic information than was previously thought: "Our results indicate that both music and language can prime the meaning of a word, and that music can, as language, determine physiological indices of semantic processing." from Nature Neuroscience 7(3), 2004: Music, Language and Meaning: Brain Signatures of Semantic Processing.

Dogma versus Defeasible Belief

2011-11-08T20:40:00.000Z

I think this is a distinction which avoids some of the debates between atheists and believers in which the participants just talk past each other. You know how they go, the believer wants to portray the atheist as occupying a faith position. The motivation seems to be a perception that atheists are trying to argue from some kind of rational high ground. Keen to resist the portrayal, atheists sometimes attempt a distinction between a lack of belief in god and a belief that there is no god. I don't think that really works, but if instead the atheist concedes that they can't be certain that there is no god, then sometimes they are characterised as agnostic, which causes confusion. So consider the analogy with your drinking water. Assuming you live in a country where it is safe to drink, it is still the case that you can't be sure that the water supply hasn't been contaminated or poisoned without your knowledge. This doesn't mean you are agnostic about whether the water is safe, at least not according to the normal usage of the term. If you were, you wouldn't drink it. Nor are you dogmatic in your view that the water is safe, if evidence becomes available that suggests otherwise, you'll stop drinking it. So what you have is a defeasible belief that your drinking water is safe. Similarly, the atheist can argue that given a specified god, they have a defeasible belief that this god does not exist.

'Sure and certain hope'

2011-09-03T13:57:00.001+01:00

Which is it? Cetainty or hope? Does this phrase arise from Hebrews 11:1? The New International Version translates as: 'Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.' That makes more sense to me. So perhaps the sense of 'sure and certain hope' is an affirmation of faith, a declaration of assurance that things hoped for will come to pass. Does that sound right?

Spiritual Beard

2011-06-23T00:44:00.003+01:00

In the lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender community, a 'beard' was slang for acting heterosexual, it was a cover that allowed people to pass as normal. I'm wondering whether there is an analogy here for atheists who talk of being 'spiritual'. Some atheists who are friendly to religion (sometimes called accommodationists) use spirituality talk but seek to reject supernatural connotations. Is this a tenable position? Are they trying to pass as fully rounded human beings in some way, as if a 'spiritual' dimension is required not to be considered somehow shallow? If so, would a better strategy be to challenge that notion of what it is to be human and contend that there is no such thing as a spirit, and that the baggage-laden metaphor is no longer useful?

Thin Slicing

2011-02-06T14:03:00.007Z

'Blink' is the title of a book by Malcolm Gladwell in which he explains how sometimes initial intuitions or 'gut feelings' can be a better way of dealing with information than careful analysis in some situations. 'Thin slicing' refers to our ability to find patterns based on very narrow slices of experience without being consciously aware of how we have done it.

One example given was that of the purchase of a statue (a kouros) by the J. Paul Getty museum. Despite it being subjected to careful analysis and testing and being declared genuine, it turned out to be a fake. Several experts spotted that something was amiss using thin slicing. One had the word 'fresh' pop into their head, another immediately found themselves looking at the fingernails and thinking that they didn't look right but not able to articulate quite why. One expert reported an 'intuitive repulsion' when he first saw it.

I think many people are aware that sometimes hunches give better results than careful analysis, particularly under time pressure, or when deluged with information, or when information is limited. I wonder whether religious believers who have a hunch that the universe is a 'put up job' have the feeling that they are like the intuitive experts who spotted what was going on, whereas atheists have carried out a careful, but flawed, analysis.

The Modal Scope Fallacy

2010-09-12T00:18:00.003+01:00

Does divine foreknowledge threaten libertarian free will? Or, to put it another way, is an omniscient agent incompatible with The Garden Of Forking Paths model of free will, the one in which we could have done otherwise?

I think not. But what if somebody says, the fact that god is omniscient means that god infallibly knows that I will eat cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow. God can't fail to know this, being omniscient. The idea then, is that necessarily god knows I will eat cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow. Hence, necessarily, I will eat cornflakes tomorrow and that means it is not possible that I won't eat cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow, and this implies that I can't do otherwise, which refutes libertarian free will.

However, I think this argument fails. What do you think?

Is/ought revisited

2009-10-26T22:47:00.002Z

Here is a reputedly defensible version of the famous principle that you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is', taken from a paper in defense of the principle that 'ought' implies 'can' (Peter B. M. Vranas, 2005) (this was linked by ephphatha in a previous post), although the link is now broken:

(I/O) No valid argument has a conclusion that is a singular* moral claim and premises that form a consistent set of nonmoral claims.

My question is, does the following example serve as a counter-example to I/O? (Also, if so, why? If not, why not?):

1) Jones believes that Smith ought to concede that we can derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.
2) Everything that Jones believes is true.
3) Smith ought to concede that we can derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. (from 1 and 2)

*singular moral claims are understood as moral claims expressed by asserting or denying that a specific agent S has (or does not have) a moral obligation to @.

Belief

2009-01-27T09:04:00.002Z

What does it mean to say that somebody believes something?

I think that a belief is a mental state, representational in character, taking as its content something that could in principle be stated as a proposition. To believe p is to hold that p is true.

How can we distinguish between believing that we hold that p is true and actually holding it to be true? Beliefs predispose us to certain behaviours. If we consider what people actually do, we can sometimes discern a difference between what they profess, and what they actually believe.

A predisposition to believe?

2008-12-04T14:46:00.002Z

In a recent article, Justin Barret argues that the reason belief in gods is so prevalent in human societies is that we have certain innate predispositions that tend to lead to a belief in supernatural agents.

This brought a critical response from philosopher A.C. Grayling, which unfortunately seemed to amount to little more than the ad hominem strategy of attacking Barret's faith position and funding, rather than the arguments themselves.

However, as Barrett subsequently points out, his arguments are not new and they don't come from Christians or Templeton Foundation funded researchers.

Barret cites Pascal Boyer's 2001 book 'Religion Explained' as one source and this reminded me that Grayling has never really understood the nuances of Boyer's position. In Grayling's collection of essays 'The Reason of Things', he mentions Boyer's arguments directly and criticises them, for failing to account for the following:

"Why, for example, have traditionally conceived deities had human characteristics of will, intention, memory and emotion, instead of being like (say) waterfalls, carrots or birds?"

Clearly Grayling either has not read or has not understood the chapters of 'Religion Explained' which deal with this precise point about what kind of entity turns out to be a suitable candidate for the role of deity.

Transcendental Logic Part II

2008-08-03T10:37:00.002+01:00

A while ago I debated with somebody who offered a proof of the existence of god on their website. You can see that here.

That same proof was recently brought to the attention of Stephen Law, so if anybody wants to see how a professional philosopher tackles this kind of argument, go here.

The Limits of Rationality

2008-03-21T15:39:00.004Z

For the purposes of this blog post, I am defining rational thought as the process of deriving valid inferences from a set of premises.
As such it has a very limited domain within human affairs but makes a very important contribution for all that.
Sometimes people seem to argue that the supporters of secular liberal democracies should educate the children of religious adherents about the logical inconsistencies in religious beliefs in order to make the decline of religious fundamentalism more likely. Ironically though, this might ignore the evidence on what religious adherence entails and what benefits it might have.

Usually when humans attempt to compete directly with evolution in terms of creating artifacts that mimic the behaviour of biological mechanisms, evolution wins against our gadgets created by rational thought. Whilst we can make things that biology has not and perhaps could not, when we have tried to build things that walk across rough terrain unaided, or things that can recognise speech or images, our attempts so far have come a poor second. (Though we are doing a little better these days.)

When it comes to trying to solve some of the problems of life or engaging in creative activity that we consider worthwhile, it seems to me we must turn to non rational means. Some problems seem intractable when faced via reason. How to deal with loss and the knowledge of our own ultimate decline and demise perhaps. Other areas seem to positively benefit from the suspension of reason:
'Of course, you could be uncompromisingly rational and try whispering in your honey's ear: "Darling, you're the best combination of secondary sexual characteristics and mental processing that my fitness calculator has come up with so far." After you perform this pilot experiment and see how far you get, you may reconsider your approach. If you think that approach absurd to begin with, it is probably because you sincerely feel, and believe in, love.' Scott Atran

Perhaps evolution and culture have equipped us with ways of thinking that are non rational in terms of the strict definition I have used here, but that solve some practical problems better than rational thought does. Here is another example from Atran taken from his reply to Sam Harris after the first Beyond Belief conference:

"A research team that I co-directed in the Maya Lowlands for more than a decade — including psychologists, biologists, linguists, and anthropologists — found that only one of three human populations that live in the same environment practices agro-forestry in a sustainable manner (measured in terms of crop diversity, canopy cover, soil nutrients, etc., as reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA). We found the most reliable predictor of behavioral differences between the three groups (Itza' Maya, Q'eqchi' Maya, Ladino) to be their respective mental models of how humans, plants and animals interact in the rainforest (reported in Current Anthropology and The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute). And the best indication of a sustainable distribution of species for the forest was the mental model held by the men of one group (computed by factor analysis from individual responses) of which species the forest spirits desire most to protect (this is reliably different from what people themselves consider most worthy of protection, as reported in Psychological Review). " Scott Atran

Read the rest here.

A Manifesto for Non-Belief

2007-12-18T08:39:00.000Z

Somebody recently pointed me in the direction of this website.
It contains 17 propositions and some quotes and links around the theme of questioning and challenging the way we think about the world.
I'd welcome any comments on this.

The Supernatural

2007-11-07T00:51:00.000Z

Is this term an oxymoron? I suspect it is. Or at least, I think the worldview it describes is incoherent.

J.B.S. Haldane said;

“Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

Which suggests to me the following hierarchy of possibilities:

1) The universe is queerer than we suppose.
2) The universe is queerer than we can suppose (Haldane)
3)The universe is queerer than we will ever be able to suppose
4) The universe is queerer than anything can suppose
5) The universe is queerer than anything will ever be able to suppose

So is 'supernatural' a contingent term, dependent on some specific time and epistemic horizon, or is it a statement of principle?

An Open Mind

2007-09-30T23:34:00.000+01:00

Recently, whilst debating on the Today message board, I have noticed a polarization between those who regard themselves as old school atheists and the so called New Atheists. The former are characterized as 'open minded' whilst the latter are seen as 'zealots'.
I am sceptical about the concept of open mindedness. It might be true that a psychometric index of flexibility of thought, or receptivity to new patterns of information might credibly be formulated and tested. I do wonder whether people can accurately assess this in the course of debate though. For example, are we swayed by irrelevant factors when deciding how open minded a contributor to a debate is? Factors like how much their position conflicts with ours and how confrontational their style of debate seems.
I wonder whether there is a direct correlation between the cognitive flexibility of a person and how open minded they seem to be. My initial thought is that there is not.
What do you think?

Meaning and Purpose

2007-08-10T16:27:00.000+01:00

For some theists, the question of the so called 'meaning of life' is related to the question 'what is my purpose'. This is because their idea of meaning is bound up with the fulfillment of god's plan.
The word 'purpose' has two distinct uses:

1) The purpose of a corkscrew is to open bottles. It was specifically designed to fulfil this purpose.

2)My purpose in opening the fridge was to get some chilled water to drink.

Some theists think that in order to have purpose in a truly meaningful sense, there has to be an overarching type 1 purpose that we have been specifically created by god in order to fulfill. My contention is that we can get along fine with type 2 purposes.

So, if we were made to fulfil some plan or higher purpose of god, would that in itself guarantee that our lives would be 'meaningful' in the sense that most people would recognise? Surely it might depend on what god's plan actually is? After all, if it emerged that god created us specifically to be food for a highly intelligent scavenging intergalactic species that were due to pass through our solar system soon, I imagine that there would be muttering in the pews.
The trouble is, Christians don't seem to be able to give us much in the way of a meaningful description of god's purpose.

Faith: Definition Creep

2007-06-28T14:27:00.000+01:00

It seems that there are still plenty of people who want to argue that there is no difference between atheism and theism with regards to the requirement and nature of faith.
Sometimes this seems to be due to a naive conception of atheism that claims absolute knowledge of the non existence of god. There are very few atheists who actually think this way in my experience though. Another common reason is the collection of arguments regarding extreme scepticism and the foundations of knowledge. It is argued that we must have faith in, say, the Uniformity of Nature in order to live our lives. Well, an argument can be put for that but it seems to rest on an equivocation to me. Faith in this sense does not seem to bear much of a resemblance to the kind of faith required to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

The basis for lack of belief

2007-05-27T23:24:00.000+01:00

I recently was asked these questions by Paul:

And you are an atheist because of the "evidence?"
You have evidence that the universe burst into existence due to some natural phenomena?
You have evidence that its delicately tuned laws of physics are a lucky roll of the dice because we are one of infinite universes?
You have evidence that life actually arose from simple chemistry?
You have evidence that a prokaryote has changed into a eukaryote, and you know the chemical pathways?
You have evidence that consciousness, will, emotion, and morality can be produced from complex chemistry?
You have evidence that Jesus didn't actually say what is claimed and rise from the dead?

And then he ended with this statement:
I think there are surely some presuppositions haunting your thinking.

Surely there must be presuppositions to thought. I don't see it as a haunting though. I do see that one presupposition is the notion of the burden of proof. A better phrase might be the burden of evidence. Some of these questions I can answer in the affirmative, others I regard as an attempt to shift the burden of evidence. I wonder if my assessment coincides with anyone else's.

The Rationality of Faith

2007-05-14T09:58:00.000+01:00

I recently read a paper: The Rationality of Science and the Rationality of Faith, Theodore J. Everett, Journal of Philosophy Vol. 98, No. 1. (Jan., 2001), pp. 19-42.

It made for interesting reading. The main points were:
1) That the prevailing orthodoxy that traditional 'non-scientific' beliefs derive from non rational causes is mistaken.
2)most scientists ought not to believe their own theories.

Everett draws a distinction between 'objective rationality' and 'subjective rationality'. He then argues that it is subjectively rational in most cases for people to believe in their local traditions since for a given individual, the probability that they know better than most other people around them is small. By a similar argument, scientists or intellectuals putting forward new theories ought to realise that the likelihood of them being correct in contradiction to what most of their peers think is also small.
There are some atheists that seem to me to have a simplified view of the nature of, and reasons for belief and faith which is counter productive and hampers dialogue. Some theists also evince a stereotyped view of atheists as being amoral and smug. people like Everett, Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) and Michael Frayn (The Human Touch) are a few of the voices that might serve to counter this polarization.

Truth

2007-03-15T15:01:00.000Z

What is truth? Recently in the comment sections of this blog it was put to me that truth is a function of language. This may well be right, I suspect that it is. On the other hand this might just put the problem of the nature of truth at one extra remove, since we can say truth is a function of language and then ask: what is language a function of?
If the correspondence theory of truth is mired in circularity because we have to use language itself to describe what the truth of a proposition could correspond to, what is the alternative?

Faith and Reason

2007-02-09T15:03:00.000Z

I was wondering if anybody could shed light on what I regard as a puzzle. Do those who have faith have to arbitrarily stop reasoning beyond a certain point? In order to interpret what it is one has faith in, reason must be used but that same facility will also tell you that your faith is not based on sound evidence (by definition). So how is that delicate equilibrium maintained? Or is the situation, on closer inspection, no different to how things are for an agnostic like me?Some might want to argue that one needs faith in order to accept Reason without proof and that you can't prove the validity of Reason itself without circularity. However, rejection of Reason is self refuting, so I don't think one needs faith, in the ordinary sense of the word, to accept Reason on a rational basis without proof.
Of course, if your reason leads you to a position which you regard as compatible with your faith position there will be no risk of cognitive dissonance at the interface between faith and reason. But if, as I have, you come to the conclusion that there is no rational basis for belief in any of the religious truth claims, yet you still have faith, how does that work?

Science and Religion

2006-12-15T16:50:00.000Z

For a long time I have thought that the main reason that science is compatible with religion is that people have a high tolerance to inconsistency. Living with sets of mutually contradictory beliefs may be the norm in fact.
For anybody who is interested in the relationship between science and religion I would reccomend the downloadable mpegs of a recent conference on this topic involving many of the usual suspects (Dawkins, Joan Roughgarden, Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer and others) which you can find here.

Transcendental Logic.

2006-09-16T18:28:00.000+01:00

I came across this cute site recently. Have a go and see if you can spot any flaws in the proof.

Quantum Ethics

2006-07-16T22:42:00.000+01:00

Are moral values things that are part of the universe itself in the sense that they would exist even if all sentient lifeforms had ceased to exist? One of the pillars of the theist worldview is that some moral values express things that are objectively true. But wait a minute, haven't we all learned that you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is' ? Yet people experience the world as if some things are objectively right or wrong. If this cannot be because of the way the world is, theists conclude that the guarantor of these objective moral truths must be God. There is a well known problem with this: it is the Euthyphro dilemma. Is something good because god commands it, or does God command it because it is good? If the former, then what if God had commanded otherwise? It makes morality seem arbitrary. If the latter, then 'good' already existed and God cannot be its guarantor.
So how would a secular account look? Does secularism entail moral relativism in the sense that what is 'right' or 'wrong' is just a matter of cultural preference or societal sanction? I think not. I think that evolution by natural selection has provided us with the ability to track certain aspects of the world. Part of our world is the social nexus. We have a theory of mind. We can predict what somebody else will do sometimes because we can imagine what it is like to be them. This has consequences in terms of which sets of behaviours will maximise survival. Go around arbitrarily killing and stealing and you won't last long enough to reproduce. So we are equipped with a set of 'ethical drivers' which profoundly influence our perception and emotions about our possible behaviours. There is no guarantor in the sky, but just as Noam Chomsky speaks of 'universal grammar' such that humans have a predisposition to develop language, I am postulating (I'm sure I'm not the first) a universal ethics. Does this analogy fit? Well different societies have different ethical codes, but there are some invariant properties. There are no societies where murdering your firstborn is considered 'good'. Similarly English and German are very different but they both have verbs, adjectives and nouns.
So in order to function within a viable ethics, moral values must have certain invariant principles and in this sense there is an objective component. If humans went extinct tomorrow, the scavengers and saprophytes would feast on our corpses without any moral qualms and in this sense morals are subjective on a species level.

Evolution and the Soul

2006-07-09T23:57:00.000+01:00

Pope Pius XII in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, recognised the following problem and it applies to the majority of Christians of all denominations who accept evolution. It is this: at what point in the continuum of the evolution of humans did God decide we should all get souls and why then? The standard christian defense is that we cannot know the mind of God. This catch all seems unsatisfactory though. Have any of you theological Ninjas out there got a patch for this bug?
Ideas are welcome.

Formal Proof of 'ought' implies 'can'

2006-06-12T00:56:00.000+01:00

I have been looking into this problem since posting on ephphatha's blog philochristos.
I must admit I have found nothing satisfactory so far. Deontic logic seems beset with problems. Can anybody help?

Free Will

2006-05-01T15:25:00.000+01:00

While I am getting to grips with the control interface I want to put forward one of the main difficulties that I see with the traditional Christian worldview. It is the Problem of Evil. I will state this briefly now.

If God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenificent, how can there be suffering in the world?
This topic has been dealt with at length by philosophers and theologians and is still debated on blogs and message boards to this day. What really makes me curious is this:
What is it that makes people find the argument that suffering is a result of us having free will convincing?
I know that all the predicates such as omnipotence have limitations such as avoidance of logical contradictions. It does not follow from this, however, that the world we see is the best of all possible worlds given those necessary parameters.
It just does not seem credible, whether you take this metaphorically or not, that God should create a universe bounded by the categories of time and matter in order for it to be a habitat for humans. Further why, foreseeing every move that the feckless, weak willed and covetous creatures would make, He nonetheless created them only to be outraged by their sin? The notion that He would then sacrifice part of Himself to Himself in order to atone for sins which are breaches of moral absolutes that He encoded into the universe in the first place is counter-intuitive. All this so that despite a lack of good evidence for His existence, we, as rational beings could have the free will to chose to have a relationship with Him via his sacrificed son? Why is the concept of atonement morally acceptable anyway? How does somebody else's sacrifice influence the moral status of what I have done? Nor does the suffering seem related in a simple way to free will and sin. Malaria, earthquakes and the like are morally indiscriminate, they kill innocents and guilty alike. The remark that we are all sinners after the 'fall' seems an outdated and morally abhorrent concept. Why did God not create us to enjoy eternal bliss, without the wish or predisposition to do evil? Would any loss of free will that this would entail be a bad thing? I think not.
So as a whole picture, the Christian solution to the Problem of Evil seems incoherent.

Secular Thoughts

2006-05-01T15:19:00.000+01:00

Secular Thoughts

Control of the interface for my own blogs is the first priority so I hope you will bear with me while I figure this out as I am a complete noob.

Evidence

2006-04-14T17:02:00.000+01:00

These posts will consider some of the arguments for a rationalist worldview as well as some of the philosophical problems that this entails.