You know, erasmus, even though we are on the same side here, and I generally agree that the boundaries of the supernatural shrink as science brings more and more into the natural, thus implying the supernatural is a bogus gap category, I still have to say I find your response pretty arrogant.
That is not my assertion. That is its definition.
Come on! I won’t start playing the deuling dictionaries game, but trying to claim such a broad and ironclad meaning for such a complex word is just another way of saying “my way or the highway.”
And I don’t buy the line that the answers to questions of epistemoology or the god question are so blatantly obvious that we shouldn’t even bother discussing them. That requires just pretending that the large majority of the people in the world are just stupid or deluded and we enlightened ones should just give up on them. Sound like religious zealotry to anyone else? I know the hard atheist position these days is to be as rude and disrespectful to believers as possible (which is essentially what you suggested t-roy do to his future in-laws), but I find that a juvenile position inconsistent with humanist compassion or the simple pragmatic requirements of living in the world with other people who disagree with us. So while I think your point about the semantics of natural and supernatural is a good one, I reject your implication that there’s nothing to discuss here or that we shouldn’t bother trying to talk to people who disagree with us. If they’re talking nonsense, we ought to be able to demonstrate that clearly through argument. If we just say “ah that’s all baloney, I’m right” then we are no better than the worst of the faithful.
You know, erasmus, even though we are on the same side here, and I generally agree that the boundaries of the supernatural shrink as science brings more and more into the natural, thus implying the supernatural is a bogus gap category, I still have to say I find your response pretty arrogant.
That is not my assertion. That is its definition.
Come on! I won’t start playing the deuling dictionaries game, but trying to claim such a broad and ironclad meaning for such a complex word is just another way of saying “my way or the highway.”
You are confusing semantics with word meanings. If we don’t like the word “natural” than let’s pick another word. If we wish, we can use the word “natural” to refer to only a part of “what is” just as the word “fish” could be used to refer to a “table.” But the word “natural,” as it is used by naturalists, refers to everything that is. And to suggest that it is just part of “what is” is a nonsensical word game. It is a manner of twisting the topic within the course of the discussion.
mckenzievmd - 03 January 2008 09:32 AM
And I don’t buy the line that the answers to questions of epistemoology or the god question are so blatantly obvious that we shouldn’t even bother discussing them. That requires just pretending that the large majority of the people in the world are just stupid or deluded and we enlightened ones should just give up on them. Sound like religious zealotry to anyone else?
The answers to god questions are blatantly obvious from a rational and modern perspective. It is emotion and politics that drive people to abandon reason in embracing god nonsense. I did not say or imply that I thought that religious people were stupid. Many religious persons that I know are far smarter than many atheists that I know. Perhaps you are the one who is being intellectually condescending by repeating the same old arguments to them, as if they haven’t thought about them already.
mckenzievmd - 03 January 2008 09:32 AM
I know the hard atheist position these days is to be as rude and disrespectful to believers as possible (which is essentially what you suggested t-roy do to his future in-laws), but I find that a juvenile position inconsistent with humanist compassion or the simple pragmatic requirements of living in the world with other people who disagree with us. So while I think your point about the semantics of natural and supernatural is a good one, I reject your implication that there’s nothing to discuss here or that we shouldn’t bother trying to talk to people who disagree with us. If they’re talking nonsense, we ought to be able to demonstrate that clearly through argument.
I do not consider myself to be a “hard atheist” and I do not consider myself to be rude or disrespectful to believers. And quite naturally, I interpret it as rude and disrespectful to be called juvenile. And ir strikes me as particularly inconsistent coming from a self described moral relativist who cares about protecting christians from rudeness and disrespect.
And I didn’t say that iwe shouldn’t bother trying to talk to people who disagree with us. There is value in repeating The Emperor Has No Clothes. But there is no value in pandering.
By not allowing the back-door smuggle, I am emphatically agreeing with Brennen. It’s a hoary old technique among the obscurantist spiritualists to claim “multiple ways of knowing”; the scientist knows about the world through normal experimental methods, the fakir knows about the spiritual world through clairvoyant insight. Yep. Uh-huh. Another word for “clairvoyant insight” is (excuse the blunt descriptor) just sitting in a chair and making shit up. Harry Frankfurt dealt with this sort of technique quite well in his book on Bullshit.
I’m with you most of the way, but let’s consider this. It’s a serious question, offered for illustrative purposes only:
How do you know you’re in love?
What implications does the answer have for this discussion?
Good question. I know it in the same way I know I’m hungry, thirsty or need to go to the bathroom. The body does have internal sensors; we share them with other animal species (many also pair bond, after all).
Certainly we have more senses than the classic five of sight, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. We also have proprioceptive senses, internal bodily senses, and emotions. Emotions are basically biologically tuned judgments about external events. E.g., fear, anger, sadness, jealousy, happiness, love, etc. We share all of these with our fellow animals, and they are beginning to be understood in a biochemical sense.
PLaClair - 03 January 2008 10:40 AM
What implications does the answer have for this discussion?
None I can tell. None of these are experiences of a different world, and none of them have any relevance to issues of supernaturalism. That is, they are different sorts of senses, but not different in ways that make a difference.
Good question. I know it in the same way I know I’m hungry, thirsty or need to go to the bathroom. The body does have internal sensors; we share them with other animal species (many also pair bond, after all).
Certainly we have more senses than the classic five of sight, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. We also have proprioceptive senses, internal bodily senses, and emotions. Emotions are basically biologically tuned judgments about external events. E.g., fear, anger, sadness, jealousy, happiness, love, etc. We share all of these with our fellow animals, and they are beginning to be understood in a biochemical sense.
PLaClair - 03 January 2008 10:40 AM
What implications does the answer have for this discussion?
None I can tell. None of these are experiences of a different world, and none of them have any relevance to issues of supernaturalism. That is, they are different sorts of senses, but not different in ways that make a difference.
Doug, I think there’s a world of difference, and that the implications are enormous. We know we’re in love through direct experience. You could even call it revealed Truth, and sometimes I do, especially if I’m trying to make a point about what revealed Truth really is. The difference between this and, say, the specific gravity of WD30 oil, is not naturalism versus supernaturalism, but subjective experience versus objective reality. The latter can be reduced quite easily to physical terms, but the former cannot, at least not yet and probably never in the same ways. No matter science tells us (I hope), our feelings are our feelings.
If neuroscientists came up with a list of criteria to determine whether you were in love,
--- and hooked you up and measured your brain waves responding to stimuli regarding the ?loved one
--- then told you either
--- that you were in love, but you thought you weren’t, or
--- that you weren’t in love, but you thought you were:
Would you believe the scientists or your feelings? Justify your answer.
It’s an important question because there are religious experiences. They don’t necessarily mean what the people having them think they mean. At the same time, they are very real to those who experience them. I don’t think we give enough attention to human experience, which is after all an essential part of any sensible values system, no?
Look, I don’t want this to become a personal conflict. I think you are making authoritative absolute statements about language, facts such as the question of god, and what is worth discussing or debating. I don’t agree with you entirely on these points, and I don’t accept that your certainty justified or that it is appropriate for you to chide others for engaging in these discussions. I stand by my characterisation of your post in this thread and your remarks in t-roy’s thread as arrogant and unecessarily confrontational. For the record, I did not call you juvenile. I identified the position of being disrepectful and unecessarily confrontational as juvenile, and I stand by that as well. And if you think the only way to discuss issues of philosophy and naturalism with theists is to repeat “the emperor has no clothes,” which is just another of your ways of saying the very discussion is pointless since they are so clearly wrong, then I think your approach shares a lot with the abrasive “New Atheist” position, and I maintain that isn’t the best strategy for secular humanists and atheists to adopt. If you can say “there is nothing whatsoever that religion has ever done that is any good,” then I don’t know how much harder an atheist you can be.
I’m happy to agree where we can and disagree where we do, but I don’t appreciate being told that the answer is so simple and obvious that I am “pandering” and wasting my time engaging in discussion about it.
[ Edited: 03 January 2008 07:07 PM by mckenzievmd ]
Look, I don’t want this to become a personal conflict. I think you are making authoritative absolute statements about language, facts such as the question of god, and what is worth discussing or debating. I don’t agree with you entirely on these points, and I don’t accept that your certainty justified or that it is appropriate for you to chide others for engaging in these discussions. I stand by my characterisation of your post in this thread and your remarks in t-roy’s thread as arrogant and unecessarily confrontational. For the record, I did not call you juvenile. I identified the position of being disrepectful and unecessarily confrontational as juvenile, and I stand by that as well. And if you think the only way to discuss issues of philosophy and naturalism with theists is to repeat “the emperor has no clothes,” which is just another of your ways of saying the very discussion is pointless since they are so clearly wrong, then I think your approach shares a lot with the abrasive “New Atheist” position, and I maintain that isn’t the best strategy for secular humanists and atheists to adopt.
I’m happy to agree where we can and disagree where we do, but I don’t appreciate being told that the answer is so simple and obvious that I am “pandering” and wasting my time engaging in discussion about it.
I am content agreeing to disagree with you here mckenzievmd. And I will still respect you in the morning. But my statements about the obvious falsehood of said religious ideas also stands. I do have respect for theists, just as I do for non-theists, as important members of a shared human community. But I still think that you are being quite unfair, and inconsistent as I said in my last post, by characterizing my view that religious belief is intellectually bankrupt as arrogant, confrontational, or juvenile (which, for the record, was quite surely pointed at me).
If you can demonstrate how a disregard for religious nonsense equates to disrespect for a human as an individual of dignity and worth, then I will more than welcome your constructive criticism. Until then, I see it as nothing more than your problem.
And if you don’t want to make this become a personal conflict then don’t make it one.
… the word “natural,” as it is used by naturalists, refers to everything that is. And to suggest that it is just part of “what is” is a nonsensical word game. It is a manner of twisting the topic within the course of the discussion.
Respectfully, it seems to me that just the opposite is the case: to define ‘natural’ as “everything that is” is a piece of semantic sleight-of-hand that does a disservice to responsible intellectual discourse. Instead, let me suggest that ‘natural’ is best viewed as shorthand for “consistent with natural law” by which we mean “consistent with formal descriptions of observed regularities”.
Respectfully, it seems to me that just the opposite is the case: to define ‘natural’ as “everything that is” is a piece of semantic sleight-of-hand that does a disservice to responsible intellectual discourse. Instead, let me suggest that ‘natural’ is best viewed as shorthand for “consistent with natural law” by which we mean “consistent with formal descriptions of observed regularities”.
No thanks. I’d rather we held our “formal descriptions of observed regularities” as provisional. I’d hate to think that from here on out any surprising discoveries are automatically supernatural (or non- or un- or whichever prefix you would prefer).
ETA: I can understand one wanting to argue against naturalism. But the way your post comes across it seems you are arguing against what naturalism is. Was that your intent?
[ Edited: 03 January 2008 08:22 PM by the PC apeman ]
Doug, I think there’s a world of difference, and that the implications are enormous. We know we’re in love through direct experience. You could even call it revealed Truth, and sometimes I do, especially if I’m trying to make a point about what revealed Truth really is. The difference between this and, say, the specific gravity of WD30 oil, is not naturalism versus supernaturalism, but subjective experience versus objective reality. The latter can be reduced quite easily to physical terms, but the former cannot, at least not yet and probably never in the same ways. No matter science tells us (I hope), our feelings are our feelings.
We know we’re hungry through direct experience too. You only use “love” because of the implicit romantic connotations, but it’s all of a piece.
We gain our knowledge of objective reality through our eyes, which give us (using your terms) “subjective experience”. No doubt the sort of internal sensors that make us fall in love are quite a bit more complex and mysterious at this point, but not completely so. Again, other animals pair-bond regularly, and so must have similar neurochemical sensors and reactions in their brains that follow other similar external cues that we do.
I am not denying that “our feelings are our feelings” or that our feelings are important or crucial or that I love my wife. All I’m saying is that they have no bearing on the question of supernaturalism.
PLaClair - 03 January 2008 05:28 PM
If neuroscientists came up with a list of criteria to determine whether you were in love,
--- and hooked you up and measured your brain waves responding to stimuli regarding the ?loved one
--- then told you either
--- that you were in love, but you thought you weren’t, or
--- that you weren’t in love, but you thought you were:
Would you believe the scientists or your feelings? Justify your answer.
That’s sort of like asking, “What if a scientist hooked you up and measured your brain and found you were dead, what would you do then?” Or, “What if a scientist took an MRI of your skull and found out you had no brain?” It’s a silly exercise. Clearly if that sort of thing really happened, either there would be something wrong with the machine, or something fundamentally wrong with the scientific theory. But it’s not going to happen. Or at the very least, wake me up when it does. Then things might get interesting!
PLaClair - 03 January 2008 05:28 PM
It’s an important question because there are religious experiences. They don’t necessarily mean what the people having them think they mean. At the same time, they are very real to those who experience them. I don’t think we give enough attention to human experience, which is after all an essential part of any sensible values system, no?
Nobody denies that religious experiences are very important to those who experience them. That is almost tautologous. The question is why they are having them and what they mean. VS Ramachandran has some interesting data on temporal lobe epilepsy that shows that at least some such experiences appear to be wholly neural in origin, and are in fact signs of brain illness. This does not mean that all claims of religious experience are brain illnesses (some are pious frauds as well, others involve creative memory or may be different sorts of hallucinations, etc.)
Put another way, there are people with claimed experiences of alien abductions, ghosts, bigfoot, devils, witches, the evil eye, spiritual possession, astral travel, past-life regression, and on and on. Some may take these to mean that there are huge realms of supernatural reality out there for us to discover. But using Occam’s razor it is much simpler simply to see them as monuments to the creativity of the human brain, since there is simply no external evidence for any of it.
If you can demonstrate how a disregard for religious nonsense equates to disrespect for a human as an individual of dignity and worth, then I will more than welcome your constructive criticism.
I think it is difficult to balance the need to challenge bad ideas with the need to treat people kindly. You don’t seem to feel it’s an issue. I think when you refer to someone’s central and sustaining beliefs and “nonsense” and “intellectually bankrupt” and unworthy to even debate, and when you advise people to place challenging those beliefs above establishing good personal relationships with their in-laws, then you are being unecessarily confrontational and valuing your convictions above other people. As you have seen in this and other threads, I am comfortable challenging bad ideas and labeling them as bad. Humility and consideration for the feelings of others is not weakness or “pandering.” I saw nothing humble or constructive about your original post in this thread, and that is a trend I see in your remarks generally. Clearly, we won’t agree here, so I’ll leave it alone and we can stick to our own styles of expressing our beliefs.
FWIW HERE is The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on naturalism, which begins,
The term ‘naturalism’ has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed ‘naturalists’ from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit’ (Krikorian 1944, Kim 2003).
So understood, ‘naturalism’ is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized—that is, they would both reject ‘supernatural’ entities, and allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths about the ‘human spirit’.
Even so, this entry will not aim to pin down any more informative definition of ‘naturalism’. It would be fruitless to try to adjudicate some official way of understanding the term. Different contemporary philosophers interpret ‘naturalism’ differently.
I still disagree with your assertion than “nature” and “naturalism” have simple, obvious, slam-dunk definitions that you can assert and we all need to accept. Of course, you only commented on the former term, but given the topic of the thread I am assuming you meant to define it in order to comment on the debate (meaningless, in your mind) about the second.
[ Edited: 03 January 2008 09:06 PM by mckenzievmd ]
Respectfully, it seems to me that just the opposite is the case: to define ‘natural’ as “everything that is” is a piece of semantic sleight-of-hand that does a disservice to responsible intellectual discourse. Instead, let me suggest that ‘natural’ is best viewed as shorthand for “consistent with natural law” by which we mean “consistent with formal descriptions of observed regularities”.
No thanks. I’d rather we held our “formal descriptions of observed regularities” as provisional.
Respectfully, it seems to me that just the opposite is the case: to define ‘natural’ as “everything that is” is a piece of semantic sleight-of-hand that does a disservice to responsible intellectual discourse. Instead, let me suggest that ‘natural’ is best viewed as shorthand for “consistent with natural law” by which we mean “consistent with formal descriptions of observed regularities”.
No thanks. I’d rather we held our “formal descriptions of observed regularities” as provisional.
As do I.
Excellent. What then shall we do when we next observe something that is not consistent with our formal descriptions? How will we determine if it is supernatural or if our descriptions need revising? I suggest the humbler path is to assume that everything observed is natural and our previous provisional descriptions have shortcomings.
