Star Trek: Life in the Machines?

Consider a class of robot with three components: base, arm, and controller. Suppose that each of these components comes in two types, red/green and blue/yellow, and that two robots are fundamentally the same if each of their components has the same color, or each has the complementary color. Thus, a red-based, red-armed, blue-controlled robot would be 'the same' as a red-based, red-armed, blue-controllered robot, as well as 'the same' as a green-based, green-armed, yellow-controllered robot, but not, for instance, a green-green-blue robot.

Suppose some goofball decided to plunk down one of these RRB robots in a room full of robot components (of both colors), with instructions to make more RRB robots. Now, this instance of RRB robots making RRB robots might be termed self-replication, but... really... you're just sticking three things together. There's no effort to gather resources, they're supplied externally. It doesn't count.

Or does it?

Take a look at our planet's foremost self-replicating system: strings of nucleic acids which differ by having a (G)uanine, (A)denine, (C)ytosine, or (T)hymine nucleotide on them. A GATTACA string is essentially the same as another GATTACA string, as well as a CTAATGT string, but not a GTAATCT string. These little guys do not go out in search of five parts Carbon, five parts Hydrogen, five parts Nitrogen, and one part Oxygen, they do not hand-assemble them into Guanine nucleotides, they do not actively give rise to more of themselves. When tossed into a soup with the appropriate enzymes and building blocks, however, it's hard for chemistry to resist the temptation to copy the things, so it doesn't resist. Does DNA fail to self-replicate simply because it doesn't do its own resource gathering or part assembly... because it's not even as active as a robot arm?

Well, DNA does, sort of, do its own resource gathering. In addition to providing a template that's easy to copy in the right circumstances, it also provides information which (again, in the right circumstances) produces organisms which do go out and gather the necessary resources (often by killing other organisms and taking the resources they'd amassed). It also provides information that, in the right circumstances, can be used to set up "the right circumstances". In addition to being easy to copy, DNA has information which (in the right setting) can be used to put together a setting which will both copy the DNA, and be the right setting to use its information.

Ever worked in a place with a photocopier? Ever been passed one of those office jokes that is funnier if you make copies of it and pass it to other people... especially people who work in places with photocopiers? Especially people who also think the joke is funnier if they make copies of it and pass it on? In short, have you ever had in your hands something easy to copy which had information which, in the right hands, made it more likely to both get copied and to have those copies end up in the right hands?

It makes me wonder how the United Federation of Planets is supposed to survive as depicted, given they have 'replicator technology'. It's the office photocopier, with a vengeance. Given a device that can replicate things with molecular accuracy, what are the chances that nothing will ever develop an appeal... that there'll never be a Plush-Tribble replicating fad? What are the chances that nobody will ever replicate something that the right kind of people will want to replicate and pass on to the right kind of people? And, if that happened, what are the chances that the things that were the most attractive to replicate wouldn't get replicated a lot?

Of course, there would be energy constraints. You can't replicate as much as you want for as long as you want, so eventually the constraints might be bumped into, and you could only replicate so many Plush-Tribbles, R/C Model Starships, and Novelty Nose Insignia. What are the chances that, once the limit was reached, the demand for these things would be equal... that
you wouldn't start getting more Starships being replicated than Insignia, for example... and that once more people were participating in (and helping spread) the Starship replicating craze, that the Insignia craze wouldn't get swept away for eventual lack of support? What are the chances that the Insignia craze wouldn't either go away, or change in a way that got people to start replicating Insignias more than Starship models?

Plush-Tribbles, Model Starships... there's no need to claim these things are alive. There's no need to even claim they replicate themselves, though they replicate themselves as much as DNA self-replicates. Not alive and potentially not-replicating though they may be, they are in competition with each other. Changes, even small ones, in the nature of any of them will alter which are dominant and, possibly, which continue to even exist. Not alive and potentially not-replicating though they may be, one should expect to find that, as time goes on, replicator-crazes will become more and more effective at getting people to A> replicate them and B> pass them to other people who will do parts A and B because, if nothing else, as time goes on any craze that doesn't do those things won't stick around, while any craze that does will grow. And whichever crazes are best at achieving those end effects are the ones you should expect to see clogging up replicator resources.

Perhaps a craze becomes easier to replicate by requiring less replicator time/power. Perhaps by being cuter. Perhaps by having internal motors and controls that move the item closer to replicators. Then again, moving into the replicator would do even better. Then again, having a protrusion that hit the 'replicate' button would do even better than just getting in. If for some reason the replication process wasn't always exact (Like that episode where the coffee got replicated before the coffee cup got replicated... oops... sploosh!) then any minor difference that got something more effectively replicated (be it through direct action, or its incidental effects on human nervous systems (i.e. "OOOOh so CUTE!")) would end up becoming more and more common, and establishing a new baseline that new (or just modified) crazes would have to surpass somehow.

Superficially, at least, it would seem that it's not necessary to be alive, or even to take upon yourself the burden of replicating, to be able to evolve. All you need is a system for performing usually-accurate replication and an environment which applies that system non-uniformly... even a little amount of preference would be enough. Looking at Star Trek replicator technology, I wonder why the Star Trek universe isn't plagued by evolving replicator-fads.

M_0, basic moral approximation

Reason arises from reason as I think anyone could see it to be the more reasonable conclusion. Morals are rooted in person-hood.

Morals are rooted in reason, with special emphasis on conclusions regarding person-hood. Reason arises from awareness of reasons. Reasons arise from predictive control. Control arises from things with dynamic feedback whose continued existence is contingent on the nature of the feedback. Such things arise from any system or pattern which self-replicates. Self-replicating systems arise in all sorts of situations, including purposeless ones with no reason involved.

But you don't need to think about things that clearly (sketchy as it was) to get a basic rule of thumb: When investigating the morality of X, begin with the question "If X had been a normal, acceptable practice that most people in the last ten thousand years engaged in, where would we be now?"

Loving your neighbor? We'd be a lot better off than we are now. Love FTW!
Cannibalize your neighbor? We'd have died out. Double plus unbetter!
Eat pie? Not so much different if we did or didn't, so not a moral issue.

Now, you can certainly object that people aren't infallible in their abilities to figure out what would have happened if something had been some other way, but that doesn't mean there's no objective truth of how it would have been. It simply means that, like people aren't infallible in their abilities to speak on behalf of gods, getting a grasp on the objective stuff is hard, despite it being there.

Remember, though, this is only one rule of thumb. A first step, an approximation, not the entirety and final ending point. For some things it's entirely sufficient, but clearly not for everything. When you're dealing with simple stuff like "you and your ancestors failing to even have been able to exist", no problem. Things like "stealing and bearing false witness in order to prevent adultery" need later approximations, since teasing out whether the resulting state of things would be worthwhile or not is a lot harder. You might think it'd be good, someone else might disagree. Better tools are needed, I don't disagree.

But, looking back to reply number 7, even this simple rule of thumb is sufficient for anyone (who's mildly sentient and not psychopathic) to condemn cannibalism far, far more than they can condemn eating pumpkin pie. And it works for anyone, not just atheists. No supernatural references required.

A prayer for the immoral

Background context: In a post by Dave Pinn, as well as in this blog entry by Antipelagian, as well in a comment by "mds", it is apparent that these three people can't conceive of morality in the absence of gods. Which, if they're wrong about their beliefs, is pretty scary. End background.


I've often seen the phrase "I'll pray for you" used as a wonderfully compact shorthand for "I can see that you're in a really bad way. Bad enough that you can't see your way out of it. Bad enough you may not even be capable of realizing that it's not the only way you can be. I know that it's possible to be a better person, so I have hope for you where you don't even know there's hope to be had, and where you don't even realize hope should be had. I may not be wise enough to show you the way out of where you are, but I can hope that you'll see that there is a way, and somehow stumble along it, and perhaps by sharing these hopes with you your eyes will open just enough to accomplish that."

Technically, there are usually implications that the perhapses and the somehows will be arranged by one or more supernatural entities, but it really boils down to the stuff above.

In that spirit, Antipelagian, I'll pray for you and Kevin Underwood and Dave Pinn and mds like I prayed for Jeffrey Dahmer and like I pray for everyone like all five of you.

Anyone who after deep and honest and searching thought, firmly believes that without gods there can be no solid basis for moral judgement... that's someone who's in a very bad place indeed. That's someone who, for all that they may limp along by relying on instinctual reactions or following codified rules or acting out of fear of punishment, is fundamentally without morality.

I don't know where exactly to lay the blame for the situation you're in, and it may be different in each case. Sometimes it seems that people are there because that is where their chosen religious authorities say they should be. Sometimes it seems to be a case of someone being stupidly shortsighted or willfully ignorant. Sometimes people are just lazy. I don't know why you and Dahmer and Pinn and Underwood are the way you are, and I know it's a sufficiently bad place that you probably can't even realize how bad it is, but I'll pray for you.

I'd dearly love to give you some much needed hope, and help you realize that morality can rest on truth without being propped up by law or punishment or instinct. I'd love to play a part in helping you, or anyone else like you or Dahmer, get your feet on a moral foundation so solid you could change religions a thousand times and no pronouncements from any gods would shake you, because they would either be telling you to do what you already did, or they would be wrong.

Alas, I don't think I'm equipped to do that... not from where you are now... and the risk of leaving you without either a moral foundation or religiously derived moral crutches would be too great. You may think like Underwood and Dahmer, but at least for now you have reason not to act like them. Getting your thoughts out of their bad place requires would require abandoning your reasons as well, and while you wouldn't need those reasons if you had a solid moral foundation, leaving you without any reasons at all would be too great a risk.

So, much as I'd love to lay out how morality can exist without gods, please don't bother asking. I will, however, pray for you. That's all I can do.

Returning the Question

An initial and important concession: When he gets rolling on the follies of religions, Dawkins's politeness is sometimes lacking. I have no trouble seeing that there's a definite and large component of mockery in his response in that clip.

That said, it's not pure mockery. The guy in the video (James White, I assume?) is right in saying there's mockery there, but anyone saying it's nothing more than mockery is clearly missing some important points.

For this to make sense, imagine that you've just read a book that someone loaned to you, and when you give the book back, they ask "Well?" Nothing more, that's their entire question.

Chances are, you know (or at least think) that they've got some particular question in mind, such as "Well, did you enjoy the book?" or "Well, has your opinion about the wood-construction issue changed?" or "Well, how did that make you feel?" or "Well, did you find the plot well developed and the characters believable?" Indeed, most people would, given the question "Well?", answer one of the expanded questions instead. "I really liked the book" or "That made me think differently about wood-construction" or "Wow, what a sad book!" or "That author sure can write!"

Then again, perhaps you're not confident in what the person's "Well?" is asking. You could try to get clarification by asking them to kindly expand their question but that often just confuses people, because they know what they were asking and it's not clear how you couldn't know, so your question doesn't make sense. Alternately, you can figure out what question they were asking by requesting that they give you their answer to their own question. If they say "I thought it was sad", then their question was probably "How'd it make you feel", for example.

So: there are times when asking someone's question back to them can be useful to figure out what they're asking.

Don't leap to conclusions yet.

Sometimes, however, it may be the case that you know that I know all your opinions about the book. There's nothing I could ask you to answer about the book (including your own question) that I don't already know, so it would be rather awkward to turn the question directly back on you.

I still may want to know which question you were asking, though, so if I knew we'd both read some book (say "The Logger") but hadn't discussed it, I might shift the perspective a bit and say "Hmm... imagine I'd just lent you The Logger, and you were handing it back, and I asked 'Well?' What would you say?" Your response from that should illuminate which variety of "Well?" you had in mind, and then I can ask the question you meant to ask, rather than one of the many many questions you didn't.

So: there are times when asking someone's question back to them, with the perspective appropriately shifted, can be useful to figure out what they're asking.

Please continue to avoid jumping to conclusions.

Suppose you like chocolate ice cream far more than any other flavor, and I feel the same way about strawberry. We're hanging out on a hot sunny day, talking about stuff, and in the course of things you ask me "Is there anything that wouldn't be worth doing to get some chocolate ice cream?"

Being more than a little smart, I probably realize that, if you were to answer your own question, the answer would be 'no' (keeping in mind we're just hanging out, and not having a semantically nuanced debate). But, not being that great a lover of chocolate, my answer is... well... just the same as your answer would be if I'd asked the question about strawberry instead of chocolate. So, I could say "yes, plenty of things wouldn't be worth it", or I could say "not for you, perhaps" or I could give you the answer that most accurately answers your questions for all perspectives at once: I could ask you "Well, is there anything that wouldn't be worth doing to get some strawberry ice cream?"

So: there are times when asking someone's question back to them, with the perspective appropriately shifted, can be useful to answer the question in the clearest way possible.

Please remember that I'm not claiming Dawkins was the epitome of politeness in his response before jumping to conclusions, but at this point you may be able to jump safely.

"What if you're wrong?" is a hugely open-ended question. It's not so much a question as a giant swath of questions and, without the question being any more specific, the only appropriate answer would be "In that case, I'm wrong." End of story, that's all there is to say. And it's very unlikely that the question whose answer is "In that case, I'm wrong" was what the girl in the audience meant to ask.

So, what did she mean to ask? Given the setting, probably something like "How would your behavior, morality, and means of pursuing truth change if you were wrong about the non-existence of Yahweh, and what manner of apologies would you need to make?" I can imagine other questions, but hopefully everyone will consider that a fair approximation of what she probably had in mind (if not, I'd love to hear what else people think she was asking!)

Well, perhaps that's what she meant, perhaps it wasn't... perhaps she didn't even know what she was trying to ask. However, for Dawkins and many others, the answer to what she probably meant to ask would be... well, it's rather complicated and hard to explain in a sound bite. It's quick to say that it's the same answer to "How would your behavior etcetc change if you were wrong about the non-existence of the Hindu pantheon", and (whether you can imagine it or not) it would be the same answer to the question "How would etc etc wrong about the non-existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster". Answering any of those questions is complicated and hard to explain quickly, but they all fundamentally have the same answer.

And that's useful, because chances are that the girl who asked the question probably has essentially the same answer to the Hindu version of the question, and the [insert Central African religion] version of the question and, if she could bring herself to not feel mocked, probably even the Flying Spaghetti Monster version of the question. (That's an if that I think Dawkins guessed badly about. I think he should have stuck with nonsynthetic religions like Hinduism or the Greek Pantheon. Bad call on his part, it raised the mockery level at the expense of making the point harder for theists to see. Net loss.)

The point is, if the girl has the same answer to the Hindu question as Dawkins does, and Dawkins has the same answer to the Hindu question as to the Yahweh question that the girl probably meant to ask, and all of those questions are pretty darn hard to answer concisely... well, it makes sense to answer by asking the question back with an appropriate shift in perspective. Once the girl answers Dawkins' question, she has found the answer to her own question.

He's still a dink for digging up undersea Ju-ju's rather than sticking with something straightforward, less prone to bad reactions, and classically buff like Zeus, though.

revelation vs Revelation, trustworthyness, reliability of senses, and falsifiability

I've seen it claimed that Theists and scientists alike work off Revelation, requiring things to be revealed. Forgive me if I'm leery of sentences that use a word once (especially a Capitalized One), and then essentially (re)define it in a later clause, but I've seen many trains driven through the logical holes created by such sentences.

The revelations (I'll use small 'r' here) that scientists require are of a rather particular and restricted nature which, because of its restrictions, benefits from a relevance not shared by personal, divine, transcendentally introspective, or Theistic Revelation (big 'R'). Big-R Revelation can be privately accessible to only those special few to whom it is Revealed. Big-R Revelation can be contingent on holding certain beliefs, conducting your life in certain ways, or somehow getting yourself into the appropriate relationship with the appropriate supernatural entities. Big-R Revelations can be incorrect (as you say: there can certainly be "false revelations"). There's a lot of things that are able to be big-R Revelations, and the more different things something can be, the less you can say about it.

Small-r revelation... the stuff which scientists depend upon to be revealed in the course of their inquiries... is terribly constrained by comparison. Small-r revelations cannot depend on your beliefs or supernatural relationships. Small-r revelations must be publicly accessible, in the sense that any criteria one must satisfy to observe the revelation are objectively verifiable ("you must have access to a 520nm laser" is ok, "you must be in a truly prayerful state of mind" is not).

There's a lot of things that aren't able to be small-r revelations, which means there's more that can be said about them. In particular, by virtue of their publicness, we can distinguish whether something is a true revelation or a false Revelation (i.e. "Yes, yes, we're sure that it has been Revealed to you that by mixing soap and ballpoint pens with a potato masher, you initiated Cold Fusion. Please forgive us for not funding your research after it turned out your discovery could not be repeated when anyone aside from yourself was able to observe the process.")

In that regard, at least, I agree with the point that "it is not impossible to distinguish between one revelation or the other as being true or false." That only holds for small-r revelations, though... the kind that, yes, scientists work off.

Big-R Revelation, though, the kind that scientists don't use (except in the same manner as daydreams, science fiction, and off-the-wall questions from their occasionally surprising mother-in-law: as inspiration for a direction of inquiry) and which a number of Theistic positions depend upon, does not have the benefit of having a way that one can distinguish between true ones and false ones.

Or, rather, there are Revealed ways to make such distinctions, and naturally those Revealed ways confirm themselves to be true Revelations, but they also are confirmed to be false Revelations by other such Revealed ways. If, contrary to what I suspect you believe, the ways which had been Revealed to you (or those whose authority you submit to) for distinguishing between true and false Revelations were actually false... how would you discern that? How could you discern that?

This also relates to moral relativism or "agreeing-to-disagree". Consider yourself fortunate if you haven't heard anyone say something like "well, there's what's true (Revealed) for me, and what's true (Revealed) for you, and they're not the same thing, so the best we can do is live and let live, and agree to disagree." Statements like that can only be based on big-R Revelations, which can differ from person to person, and without any non-Revealed means for anyone to discern the truth or falsity of a Revelation, you really are stuck treating them all on equal footing.

Well, except for things that have been Revealed to you, of course, because even though those may be false Revelations, it's been Revealed to you that they aren't. And, even though that may have been a false Revelation, it's been Revealed to you that it isn't. And, even though that may have been a false Revelation, it's been Revealed to you that it isn't. And, even though that may have been a false Revelation, it's been Revealed to you that it isn't. And even though it's clear that you never actually can get into the clear with this line of reasoning, most people will stop after finitely many steps and conclude that, yep, their Revelations really are true and are have been adequately confirmed.

Being stuck treating almost all Relevations on equal footing is where one becomes mired in the neighborhood moral relativism, since you're stuck dealing with the situation that, even if not all claims are true, most claims are equally true, and that's a bad place to be in and a hard one to get out of.

But that's the price of giving big-R Revelation a role in arbitrating truth.

Comments to the effect of "one can similarly point to Theists in regards to the truth of an immaterial reality", are not unwelcome comment, because it's a false similarity that runs afoul of the difference between little-r revelation and big-R Revelation.

Scientists, confined to little-r revelation, have a limited ability to disagree. Now, I'm not saying they don't disagree! I wouldn't deny some of the terrible and unfortunate rows in the history of science, nor would I sweep under the rug the incidents where conflicting positions benefited from a dialectic resolution that led to understanding superior to either initial point of view. That said, the publicness and commonality of little-r revelations does put a severe damper on the extent to which honest scientists (be they be Muslim or Infidel) can disagree.

Theists, on the other hand, manage to generate more and more disagreements as time goes on, thanks to their centering on big-R Revelations. Whether it's how the Catholic church isn't orthodox while the Orthodox church isn't catholic and the Mormons are Christians who aren't Christian (depends on which Christian Theists with sufficient training and experience you ask), or it's how the truth of immaterial reality that the sufficiently trained and experienced Hindus have a consensus on fails to match up with the truth of immaterial reality that the sufficiently trained and experienced Jews have a consensus on, it's decidedly not the case that there is consensus among all trained and experienced Theists as to the truth of immaterial realities.

So, mentions of consensus, Theists, and immaterial realness do well to highlight a corollary to my objection to big-R Revelation: while small informed consensus can be useful for approaching truth in the context of little-r revelation, it becomes useless in the context of big-R Revelation. Since, as I said before, searching for truth is important to me both in itself and as a necessary path to discerning "The Good", I'm loathe to see potentially useful truth-seeking tules rendered useless!

Shifting gears.

In bringing up trustworthyness, I admit that irrationality does not prevent someone from holding a true position: there's an... interesting... character in this area who is known for ranting down streets spouting general nonsense punctuated by the occasional exclamation of "...and therefore Lincoln is DEAD!" It's a rather disconcerting tirade but, all other things aside, I can't fault the correctness of his conclusion.

In his public proclamations, at least, the guy is certainly irrational. With the exception of loaning him money (you can't give him money unless you're ready to avoid him henceforth, he WILL remember you and eventually return anything you send his way), it's pretty safe to not consider him trustworthy... at least as far as communication goes. I'm not under the impression that his irrationality or the untrustworthiness of his reasoning are grounds to claim that Lincoln is still alive and well, and that neither age nor gunshot wounds have slowed him down much at all.

All that said, if he exclaimed about one of those American presidents that most Americans never learn about (let's say Wuggie, for example) and you were an American like most, I think you'd be wise to take the position: "I don't know who Wuggie is, whether Wuggie even exists or not, and given existence, whether Wuggie is dead or not... and a proclamation that Wuggie is real and really dead that comes from an irrational and factually untrustworthy person does not serve to persuade me of any such things."

In discussions about atheists accusing Theists of irrationality, it seems that sometimes the concerns is less with how Theists related to what they thought was true, and more with how atheists relate to what theists think is true. As such, while irrationality and untrustworthiness would not preclude a Theist from having randomly stumbled upon the truth, such conditions would preclude other people from taking them seriously. Not knowing whether they've actually got the truth or not, and knowing that a broken clock is more than twenty thousand times more likely to be wrong than to be right, if you're going to leap to any conclusion other than "I don't know", it's wiser to conclude that the irrational person is wrong, rather than right.

Changing gears again.

Stage magic such as sawing lovely assistants in half, which step far outside the constraints that reason imposes on truth, can be properly distinguished from the truth. For those not steeped in Revelations of the truth of ESP, mind-reading tricks can be distinguished from truth as well, despite the senses and intuition continuing to insist that there's not room for other explanations. Hidden-information legerdemain tricks, however, can only be properly distinguished from the truth by A> cracking the trick, or B> running it enough times in a controlled manner to demonstrate that the appropriate statistics are wrong. A> is obstructed by taking advantage of known unreliabilities in perceptions, and B> isn't relevant to this issue. Unless I've accidentally constructed a false dichotomy, this is a setting where, no, you can't properly distinguish the illusion from the truth.

Gear shift.

What is entailed by 'falsifiability'? 'The truth' is, unless you subscribe to irrationality, necessarily not falsifiable. There aren't just certain truths about the world which are not falsifiable: if you think you can find a truth which is falsifiable, I'll show you that what you've got isn't a truth.

No, it's not truths which anyone ought to try to falsify. That's a fool's errand. It's assertions of truth. It's claims of truth. There are certain claims which are not falsifiable. Lots of them, actually. Solipsism's a perennially annoying one. Claims that the world came into existence half a second ago, and everything burst into being in such a way that there appears to be a historical record and memories and, in general, a "past". Assertions that every time someone pats a kitten, four invisible intangible green monkeys who are powerless to interact with anything in any way spring into existence. These are claims about what is true, and they're not falsifiable.

Yes, of course the monkey thing could be true and, if that were the case, you couldn't prove otherwise. That's not the complaint, though. The issue is that we have no way (not even in principle) of knowing whether the monkey-claim is correct or not.

One can certainly say something doesn't have to be falsifiable in order to be true... and that's weaker than could be said. One can even say that something must not be falsifiable in order to be true, since what is true is (to those indulging in rationality) not false. If you want to say that a claim doesn't have to be falsifiable in order for the claim to be correct... yeah, you can have that one too. The negation of the kitten-monkey claim is equally unfalsifiable, and that doesn't mean that such monkeys do spontaneously manifest, any more than the original claim's unfalsifiability means they don't.

The problem is that whenever you have a position which depends on the truth or falseness of the content of a claim, and that claim's correctness with respect to the world cannot, even in principle, be established, then you're saddled with a position whose relevance to the world cannot, even in principle, be established. You can claim it's relevant until the cows come home, but there's no possible way to demonstrate that it actually is, because such a demonstration would serve to confirm or falsify the unfalsifiable claim, and that's not an option (it violates the assumption that the claim is unfalsifiable, and unless you're irrational, that's not a tenable situation.)

In other words, if unfalsifiable claims form part of a foundation, then everything that truly depends on them for support can have no impact on any aspect of the world, in any way, whatsoever. They cannot make anyone's lives better, or make anyone happier, or lead to more peace, or endow every young girl with a kitten that she wouldn't get anyhow, because if they did, those differences would serve to make the unfalsifiable claims falsifiable.

In short: Unfalsifiable claims can't help to justify a set of beliefs, because the truth or falsity of what they assert is necessarily irrelevant.

Disjointed Reply

In response to http://atheismsucks.blogspot.com/2008/02/atheism-from-eastern-mind.html

That wouldn't have been the distinction I'd have drawn between East and West, but it's an interesting and important distinction and I'm happy to run with it. A concern I have about revelation-based truth acquisition is similar to what strikes me as poor about solipsism: when two (or more) people are the recipients of mutually exclusive revelations, you may know that at least one of them (if not all) are wrong, but you don't have any firm ground on which to establish which is which. A Prophet of the Five Powers has had a truth revealed to her, and a Pirate of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has had a conflicting truth revealed to him, and of course they both have further revelation that theirs was the true revealed truth... it seems like if Revelation is the arbiter of truth, you necessarily land in a world of agreeing-to-disagree which is only a tiny step away from moral relativism and, well... that's no good!

I, personally, hold "The Good" as a central object in my searches for truth. There's a whole lot of truth out there. Some of it is almost certainly unimportant (The most common shoe color in London during January, three hundred and twelve years ago). Some of it is very likely "The Bad", if anything (The truth of how to build a bomb that will maximize the number of man-hours spent in agony). The particular parts of the truth I'm most interested in, though, are the ones like "What is The Good" and "How can that be achieved?"

You say it's a common claim among atheists that Theism runs afoul of either bad logic or lack of evidence. You then dismiss (rightly, I think) the bad-logic angle. Yeah, it happens, and it's pretty bad sometimes (I've seen too many false dichotomies to say otherwise), but on the whole, I'm happy to give people credit for generally reasoning decently. Then there's the evidence issue.

Here I think you're being too 'fairly general' to be useful. You seem to implicitly treat evidence as an overly simple thing. Given some observation, it either is evidence or it is not, and if it is evidence, it is only evidence for one thing. That's the level of evidence it seems you're dealing with and I think it's far too coarse-grained. Observe the sky for a while, and you'll get all sorts of evidence. Some things will be evidence for both "the sun revolves about us" and for "we orbit the sun". Some things are strong evidence for a point, while others are only weak evidence for that point (though perhaps strong evidence for a different point).

I certainly would agree and not say that it is "incumbent of rationality to dictate what is true"... flowers do not grow to support the sun, as you say... but it does place constraints on what can be true... given flowers whose growth depends on the sun, it is not an option to have "no sun has ever shone". Even if someone is irrational, they could be right... a broken clock is right twice a day... but they are not trustworthy on the subject of what is right, for all that they could be. The broken clock is wrong 43,198 times a day.

I'm confused when you're expressing your preference for false explanations over a true claim of "I don't know". Admitting no knowledge about the nature of some thing does not imply that one has no knowledge about one's (lack of) knowledge about the nature of that thing. Do you prefer making up false explanations of what color clothes I wore yesterday to simply admitting the truth, that you don't know? Why is that preferable?

You say you we may have faith that what we perceive correlates with reality... and that makes me worry that you put too much trust in the mechanisms of perception. I will grant that when we perceive things which are related to our immediate survival, that should correlate with reality: If it didn't, our ancestors would have died right quick and we wouldn't be here imagining such things. That the occupation of stage magician continues to this day, however, should be a warning sign that not all perceptions are reliably in tune with reality. Perhaps they match up a good deal of the time, but not enough to be able to just wave off the troublesome question of "What if you have stumbled into one of your perceptual blind spots?".

On 'purpose', it looks like you're essentially saying "you cannot truly say 'ought', you must always say 'ought, in order to'". Be it "You ought to pray five times facing Mecca, in order to obey the Creator's will" or "You ought to eat, in order to stay alive". In that regard, "you cannot acquire an ought from an is" because there's no such thing as a raw ought, but you certainly can acquire all "ought, in order to"s from is. And, being that's the best one can do whether or not one's employing deities, it doesn't seem that atheists or Theists have any particular advantage or disadvantage here.

On a tangent born of curiosity: Concerning the objection you have (the one that's "mostly against the Agnostic"), what objection (if any) do you have against those who aren't Theists who have a foundation whose conclusions are true regardless of the existence of gods but which does not provide conclusions for all questions, who admit to the existence of that foundation, and who admit to their ignorance on matters which that foundation does not supply answers?

Where you speak about "it is claimed within scientific circles that a general consensus is necessary...", I think the earlier issue of being too general in your treatment of evidence comes up. In this case, the people needed to form a general consensus are visibly not "a majority of all people". When it is said that "the general consensus is that the spin blah blah of particle foo bar has a waka waka property of gadzooks" (in much more precise language, of course!) it is not expected that, around the world, from children to old men, more than half the people agree on this esoteric particle property interaction thing. Rather, what is required is a general consensus -among those with sufficient training and experience to understand and contribute to the field-. As a rule, that body of people will always be a miniscule minority of the world.

Indeed, "scientific consensus" is an excellent example of where revelation/intuition-based truth arbitration falls apart. You say "We believe the minority to be wrong not on the basis of numbers, but on intuition" and, indeed, that is how people behave, and when it comes to verifiable facts about "what is", that intuition-driven belief of the masses has been highly wrong again and again and again. I'm not saying that all minorities are automatically right, but history is far too littered with the majority being egregiously wrong... on the level of "a sort of "delusion""... for the majority to be given special status when it's the majority among the informed -and- the ignorant, rather than the majority among the informed. And this isn't just a matter of details. I'm loathe to drag out such tired old examples, but... Geocentricity? Flat Earth? Spontaneous generation of maggots? Uniform acceleration due to gravity? The Five (or Four) Elements?

Finally, with regards to your closing about "I don't know" or "I deny" requiring explanations: aside from convert-atheists (You know, like the formerly Catholic atheist whose new creed is "There is no God, and Mary is not His Mother") the non-knowing or denying of atheists is uniform: they don't know the Five Powers, they don't know Zeus and Family, they don't know Yahweh, they don't know the Catholic god, they don't know the Orthodox god, they don't know Allah, they don't know the Demiurge or the Father, they don't know the Baptist god, they don't know Mithras, they don't know any of the Pharoahs (at least, not in their allegedly divine aspects), they don't know Amaterasu, they don't know Rama... the list goes on and on. Once they've been given a description of one, such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they may shift from "I don't know what you're talking about" to "I deny that such a thing could be as you claim it to be", but to date, I've not heard of atheists making any odd exceptions in need of particular justification.

Theists, on the other hand, are essentially defined by making exceptions to their list of supernatural beings which they either don't know or explicitly deny the possibility of. If an atheist is called upon to justify their denials (not an unfair call) and their ignorances (I think that's asking a bit much, as there's an infinitude of possible supernatural beings to explain one's ignorance of), so too is a Theist called upon to justify their denials, and their ignorances, and why they're making an exception, and why that exception doesn't apply to any others among the infinitely many possible supernatural beings.