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.