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.