Emergent System said:
JBrasington said:
Oh and if anyone wants an explanation for why we're all agnostics, I have an explanation if you really care.
Probably some pedantry about how
absolute truth is unachievable, so
for all I know I might turn out to just be part of a dreaming persons's fantasy world?
Nope, Hume presented a pretty solid argument against absolute scepticism. It's a particular argument about how the question of "do you believe in God" is unanswerable. Hume also had a good thing to say about presumptuous people.
The question of do you believe in God is perhaps one of the oddest questions to be so socially prevalent. As someone who wants there to be a God but insists on logic and reason, I've found myself in a position where I attempt to create a complicated version of agnosticism, ideally one that suggested God was more likely, or belief was rational, but this is science, and we look for the answer not our answer. My initial attempts made me arrive at Agnostic Positivism, but it occurs to me that the more complicated positions have more flaws. In fact the simple position of Agnostic was always the ideal position, as long as it was qualified correctly of course.
There are 2 camps when it comes to knowledge and certainty; the Moore/Kant intuitionists and the Logical Positivists. (If there are more please inform me, I would greatly appreciate it.) Where Logical Positivists offer 2 ways to determine the truth or falsity of a statement, the Cognitivists offer just the one, intuition. (If you want to understand the struggle to Kant's critique of pure reason, I highly recommend John Cottingham's Anthology of Western Philosophy as a start.)
I would argue that Tabula Rasa makes no sense, as it suggests that we can only be taught, which Plato made clear was not true. No, I would argue that evolution has given us a brain that can comprehend sensory experience as well as give us the "a priori concept of understanding" I suggest that the human mind can?t comprehend sensory experience without applying intuition to it.
I will explain why Intuition cannot answer the question of God in a moment. Logical positivists argue that truth can be synthetically determined by checking to establish the facts either way, or analytically by simply understanding the terms that occur in them.
None of these approaches can be used to prove or disprove God. The fundamental issue is that we can't define the term: God. And without defining God we can't observe God's phenomena. The problem that we can't define God means that analytically we can?t even attempt to prove or disprove anything (despite attempts.) If we can?t define God, we can't determine God's phenomena, and arguably God has no phenomena.
Synthetically we can disprove claims of the religious about God's phenomena, such as God created the world in 7 days. But we can't check the facts of God's existence. For one our sensors are not advanced enough, and even if we could observe the entire universe we can't guarantee that we possess the necessary sensors to detect God?s existence. Absence of fact however is not actually terms for dismissal. For a multitude of reasons, such as; scientific discovery could not function like this. But also with no facts there are two theories, that God exists and that God doesn't exist. With no facts to support the claim both would have to be dismissed or neither would have to be dismissed. But it's a polarised question so dismissal is not applicable.
So does Intuition work? I?m afraid not. From Plato to Kant philosophers have pointed out that we not only acquire knowledge from sensory experience, but we also realise knowledge. Plato used the example of a slave boy working out a mathematical problem without advice, but by the process of dismissing the incorrect answers. An intuitionist would suggest that we can observe the phenomena, such as the Earth, and our intuition would allow us to realize the truth. The obvious problem is that what phenomena? Even if there is a phenomena, where? The other issue is that we still haven't defined God, or God's 'tools'. And without that we are not in a position to understand the relationship between evolution and the big bang and God.
