Switzerland is Impossible

I just got an unexpected free moment, so I’m going to jot down a post on a topic I feel is of great importance. A unique post was recently written by Evil Bender, one of my favorite atheist bloggers. In it, he states “humans, in short, cannot escape metaphor as a means of understanding.” I think this is true, depending on how one defines “metaphor”. I think of this kind of metaphor as “worldview”, a framework by which we interpret ideas.

Though I feel it’s very self-evident, it’s important to note that “facts” are always analyzed through the interpretive lens of a worldview. There is no such thing as an unbiased position on a fact, one can’t live in an analytical Switzerland. Thomas Kuhn’s work even implies that a priori worldview assumptions must be made before one can even know where and how to look for facts.

All this being said, the questions arise, how does one compare worldviews, and how are they chosen? Is either process rational, or will critical discussions and explorations on the topic always end fruitlessly?

Karl Popper’s “myth of the framework” idea is helpful to note here. Basically, he claims that people with entirely different worldviews, or sets of fact interpretations, can have meaningful dialogue if said dialogue is embarked upon in the the spirit of good faith rational criticism. Kuhn, on the other hand, wrote about the incommensurability of various worldviews. His work implies that people take up the banner of various worldviews for entirely irrational reasons (the verdict is out on whether he believed that implication).

I find it fascinating that atheists see these problems clearly when speaking of religion, but they typically refuse to see them when discussion turns to their own worldviews. They often speak in ways that imply an atheistic worldview is the clear default.

Presuppositionalism, typically spoken of as a style of defending religious beliefs based on the acceptance of scripture axiomatically, is, I think, probably the only coherent way to discuss theism and atheism. There is, ultimately, a large circularity inherent in any worldview, because all theories must gain authority from some axiomatic source. The comment discussion in my post Who Made God between myself and Arturo is a good example. Arturo felt I didn’t understand that the discussion was about an argument about arguments, because in his worldview, it is possible to use inferential deduction to show that it is necessary that inferential deduction is not necessary. This is axiomatic on his part, and no amount of my attempts to show the self-refuting nature of this idea would ever likely breach his worldview, because that one idea makes many other ideas he holds possible and justified. I don’t blame him at all, and in fact, I think the worldview built on this foundation is quite sophisticated. My own theistic worldview also requires axioms, and I readily admit it.

So then, back to the question of choosing and comparing worldviews. I currently think that a worldview is more or less justified depending on it’s degree of correspondence with reality. I think reality can be defined by both empirical and inferential evidence. I believe that critical rationalism is one of the best tools for determining correspondence, or what Popper called the “verisimilitude of truth”. I also think, though, that one’s worldview axiom must be highly systematic from that start, because arriving at justifiably actable knowledge via Popper’s critical rationalist system of essentially random (creative-imagination-based) hypothesis generation followed by attempts at falsification would require an almost infinitely long time period.

For anyone interested in determining their worldview’s correspondence to reality, I suggest the following (obviously biased) questions:

- does my worldview deny the orderliness and reasonably accurate measurability of the empirical world?
- does my worldview deny an objective source of morality and logic that exists independently of humanity?
- does my worldview deny immateriality (ideas, meanings, morality, value, etc.)

If your worldview does any of these things, I think it’s time to go shopping.

Blog Vacation

I’ll be very busy for the next few weeks, so I’m taking a bit of time off from Digital Reason. When I return to regular blogging, I’ll be touching on the following:

- Why the force that created the universe must be personal
- Presuppositionalism
- Intellectual Humility

If there’s any pre-post points anyone would like to make about any of these, please comment away, I’ll try to take a moment to approve comments when I can.

Who Made God?

I often observe people bringing out the “who made God” question, so let me just throw this out:

The Kalam Cosmological Argument clearly explains how it is that the creative force behind the universe needs no creator but the universe does, and if someone claims they’ve found a way to disprove this argument, you can be practically assured they don’t truly understand it.

Is it a cop-out to say the physical world needs a cause, but the same doesn’t apply to the creative force behind it? Well, no: the physical world is such that to claim it’s origin is inherent within itself is to claim actual infinite regresses can physically exist, which is illogical, even if one posits cyclical universes. Even quantum virtual particles, the popular basis for the atheist version of “creatio ex nihilo”, are effects that require prior causation. It’s clear that the cause of the universe must not be bound by the universe’s temporal and causative constraints, and thus must exist “outside” of it, perhaps in another dimension of some sort. Far from being a dodge or an argument from convenience, it’s simply the only logical assumption (at this point in human knowledge).

That this creative force is likely the Judeo-Christian God is fodder for a different post, but the Kalam Cosmological Argument link does touch on certain reasons as to why this is probable.

Who made God? That’s like asking what the color blue smells like, or how many married bachelor’s are there, or from where do atheists derive their objective morality.

The Purpose-Driven Strife

I’ve been thinking much lately about how Naturalism could possibly account for humanity’s well-documented desire for purpose. I think this topic is pretty central to the tension between Naturalists and Theists, so it makes sense that discussion about meaning between the two camps tends to get ugly fast. I’ll try to make this post as open as possible considering it comes from a Theist.

I assume most Naturalists would begin their argument from the point of view of evolutionary adaptation, perhaps even describing this desire for purpose as a spandrel. In trying to imagine what environmental factors could cause a species to develop an overwhelming desire for a meaningful existence, though, I’m pretty lost.

Perhaps this desire for meaning could possibly be related to an instinctual drive to continue humanity’s gene pool, in a “selfish gene” (Richard Dawkins) sort of way. In seeking meaning, humans desire their everyday efforts to contribute to something greater than and outside of themselves, which may be an expression of their genes attempting to gain maximum reproduction. This doesn’t seem quite resonant with experience, though, in that there are manifold instances of human desire for purpose being satisfied by situations not only quite harmful to gene replication, i.e. war, setting records in extreme sports, etc., but even utterly neutral to said replication, i.e. Dawkins himself saying he finds meaning in feeling “privileged to be allowed to understand why the world exists”.

There are some who say it’s futile to seek purpose in life since there really is none beyond self-created existential purpose. However, this flies in the face of the beliefs and actions of such a great majority of history that it seems to me ignorant or prejudiced. Meaning seems to be one of the major driving forces of human history, and this doesn’t make much sense in a Naturalistic world.

Theists, however, can speak of purpose quite comfortably. It’s a cornerstone of their beliefs, and is woven throughout much of their arguments.

The question comes down to, as usual, to what does the available evidence point? And as usual, I’m pretty convinced the experiential arrow points to Theism, but I’m open to other ideas.

Keep them coming!

Open Letter to Suby

The following is in reaction to a commenter on my last post:

Suby, I first off must say your lack of vitriol is refreshing. Thanks.

You mention the Bible, so I’ll speak specifically of Christianity.

I’ll readily admit that most Christians have conclusions created before they see evidence. I’d add that most atheists, scientists, researchers, etc., also do this. Welcome to the true scientific method, which is: conjecture, refutation, conjecture, refutation…

Note that Christians have specific conjectures that are generally systematic; there’s not a great preponderance who claim that God is evil, or that green men run around rooms when no one’s looking. To say so is to show an ignorance (which is commonplace) of the systematic, logic-based quality of Christianity. Logic doesn’t make something true, but Christianity does have concrete barriers of possibility, so it doesn’t have the mark of utter randomness one sees in, say, Greek mythology.

You spoke of “stringent measures” taken by scientists, but you seem to have more faith in the lack of human fallibility than do other scientists and atheists. For instance, Karl Popper, atheist scientist, said “All scientific statements are hypotheses, or guesses, or conjectures, and the vast majority of these conjectures … have turned out to be false. Our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement; … our knowledge, our doctrine, is conjectural; … it consists of guesses, of hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths.” Bertrand Russell, the old-school king of atheism himself, said “All inductive arguments in the last resort reduce themselves to the following form: ‘If this is true, that is true: now that is true, therefore this is true.’ This argument is, of course, formally fallacious. Suppose I were to say: ‘If bread is a stone and stones are nourishing, then this bread will nourish me; now this bread does nourish me; therefore it is a stone, and stones are nourishing.’ If I were to advance such an argument, I should certainly be thought foolish, yet it would not be fundamentally different from the arguments upon which all scientific laws are based.”

All this is not to attack science; I’m simply pointing out that faith in the accuracy or completeness of science is just that, faith; it wasn’t that long ago that scientists thought friction was caused by “interlocking asperites” instead of chemical bonding (and that’ll probably be proven false also). My recommendation is to avoid Scientism, and to embrace true knowledge wherever it may be found and whatever ramifications it may have.

Regarding the Bible, with all due respect, you mention many “facts” that are false. For instance, you say that it has been “changed so many times” as if it has been a linear translation, but in actuality, most objective scholars are very impressed with the level of accuracy between modern translations and the earliest manuscripts, which are, as you may not know, still the source of modern translations. The common idea of the Bible as a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy is just erroneous.

Regarding Biblical interpretation, again, with as many Christians as there are in the world, there’s a significantly narrow range of interpretation that makes up orthodoxy. There’s little evidence of “convenient” interpretation (not that it doesn’t exist, just like there are scientists who conveniently intepret tobacco study data, for instance).

I just googled “atheist errors” and quickly found a site that listed pages and pages of them, but that doesn’t mean they’re accurate. Many religious people slander atheists without a concern for accuracy, just as many people say the Bible is full of contradictions without concern for accuracy. The Bible is a complex book, and requires contextual reading for an accurate understanding. If you can show me any true contradictions, I’d love to hear about them, I’ve been looking for one for about ten years now.

My main point is that atheists often have preconceived conclusions and hold fast to them through faith despite contradictory evidence, and claim a monopoly on truth, yet this is the behavior of which they accuse Christians. Lets all stop pretending that we’re not fallible, stop smearing those who think differently than us as less dedicated to logic and reason, and have real conversations that could lead to profound conclusions to which we would otherwise never come.

I’m open-minded and ready to truly take in the substantive arguments you may have; I hope you feel the same.

Embrace the truth; unless…

Based on a comment on my last post, I’ve been thinking much about how fascinating it is that many people superficially urge truth-seeking without committing to embracing the truth when it’s found. I myself am guilty of this at times; everyone pays lip service to the truth, but it’s hard to hold your views loosely enough to allow for frequent personal paradigm shifts. It’s a very human thing to do to pick out patterns from our experiences and learning, and it’s easy to become trapped by these patterns. Karl Popper illustrated this by the idea of a single black Australian swan falsifying the European hypothesis that all swans are white, which might have been based on thousands of observations.

Having said this, though, it also must be noted that while one must seriously take in counter examples to one’s world views to remain intellectually honest, one must also have realistic thresholds and categories for what one will accept as evidence. This is the argument at the heart of the tired old Russell’s Teapot spiel, and it’s modern, much less subtle variant “The Flying Spaghetti Monster”. One can never have any solid intellectual existence if one constantly engages in breaking down one’s world views in reaction to every absurd counter example that comes along. Whitman may have famously said he had the freedom to contradict himself because he “contained multitudes”, and Emerson denigrated a foolish consistency as “the hobgoblin of little minds”, but in everyday existence it’s a mark of mental instability to never have any constancy or pattern in one’s ideas.

This issue of realistic evidence categorization and threshold is at the heart of atheism, I believe. One can easily switch from atheism to theism and vice versa depending on which set of reality “filters” one chooses, and everyone has these filters. This is the foundation of what’s being spoken of in the term “worldview”.

So how does one go about analyzing the reasonableness of one’s reality filters? I personally think it comes down to explanatory power. If my worldview fails to explain much of the human experience, if it fails to explain aesthetics, the existence of the universe, morality, etc., then it may be time to examine my thresholds for accepting evidence contrary to my current beliefs.

In my experience, while atheists are often admirable in their congniscence of the necessity of explaining these aspects of reality, they accept evidence that’s far too flimsy and too much of an intellectual stretch to support their already unstable house of worldview cards. As an example, a helpful (but incomplete) analysis of some of atheist poster-boy Richard Dawkins’ intellectual canyon leaps can be found at this link.

As usual, I’d like to end this post with a reminder that though I feel pretty confident in my Christian worldview, I always welcome counter examples which may change my mind. In respect to my own reality filters, though, I ask that such submissions be pretty compelling. No lame, disrespectful divine pasta metaphors, please.