Monday, May 14, 2012

Arguments and Choices


Having a great discussion with a guy who calls himself CD Host. It is long but I like it because he makes me think. If you don't get any quality opponents then you can get lazy in your arguments. He is not only smart but also polite. No insults. No cheap shots. So I am happy to have him.

It does make me wonder about the relationship between argument and religion. I have talked about the mutual admiration society where people just reinforce each other other and make each other more and more certain they are right and everyone else is just a bit off. There is a bunch of that happening. But then there is the argument between two people of opposing views. What is the point there? I am wondering if the goal should be to convince and win converts. There are some people who are argued into religion or argued out of it but that is rare. I am not sure that is a good thing when it does happen. I don't think God intended anyone to be coerced into Christianity. He didn't give us the evidence to be able to do it in general. We can if have a weak opponent but should we?

It became clear to me when I tried arguing from history or from sociology that evidence can quite easily be viewed multiple ways. I can look and see the hand of God plain as day. An atheist can look and see nothing remarkable. It ends up being a choice. That is how God wants it. He wants us to freely choose for Him or against Him. He does not want to force Himself on anyone.

So what is the role of argument? Argument, if it is done right, won't really produce converts by the force of logic. What it will do is clarify things. It will clear away all the grand claims and dig down to the most basic assumptions. What is the foundation of the Catholic world and life view and what is the foundation of the atheist world and life view? At that point we won't be able to say one is logical and one is illogical. They will both be valid choices. In the final analysis it won't be logic but beauty that makes Catholicism more attractive.

In the end the materialist world is possible but it is something the human heart will have trouble embracing. A world where love is mere brain chemistry. A world where nobility and greatness are illusions that gave us survival advantages at some point in our development. A world where Hitler can't be considered better or worse than Gandhi in any absolute sense. They just are. If you can strip away everything from atheism that has no foundation within the atheist worldview and make clear exactly what is being proposed then you can expose it's ugliness. You won't be able to disprove it. Some will still hold fast to it based on that alone.

Conversely the Catholic world view is not provable. Not in the absolute sense that someone who denies it will feel they are being irrational. But you can clarify it. You can clear away a lot of the mud that is thrown at it. You can correct the distortions. You can explain the alleged problems. If you do it right you will expose the true faith. People will be able to see the real beauty of the church if they are willing to look. For many, one good look and they are hooked. But that is precisely why many won't look. They feel themselves being sucked in. It is always a choice.

So what changes when you are arguing with a protestant rather than an atheist? Not much. The ugly bits of protestantism are different then the ugly bits of atheism. But they hide the ugliness in similar ways. They both borrow from Catholicism without admitting they are doing it. Atheist love to bring in morals and meaning. Protestants love to bring in the bible and Christian tradition. Things that seem obvious but they can't get them from their own belief system. They need to import them. Once you strip away the imports and you deal with naked atheism or naked protestantism then you have done all you can with logic. Then it is a matter of the Holy Spirit leading their heart to choose beauty.

There were moments like that with CD Host. Where after a few questions he was saying some things that were downright scary. An example:
in real life goods compete with one another and wrongs compete with one another. We often have to do wrongs to avoid greater wrongs. Even if I were convinced the fetus were human and the mother wanted to have the child you could still potentially justify abortion based on the energy argument. If a society needed to use infanticide to avoid massive famine and plague they would be doing the right thing, even though I have no problem considering infanticide a wrong.

This is why frankly I find Christian morality not "too hard" as you keep accusing me of but quite often destructive and evil. It starts with the assumption that moral goods are coordinated rather than understanding that in real situations moral goods are often in conflict and the moral thing to do is weigh between them and decide what is the best outcome. Achieving the greatest good for the greatest number often means doing a thing that in isolation would be wrong.
Could this be right? Logically there is nothing impossible about it. But it means absolutely everything and anything is justifiable in pursuit of the "greatest good." How is that defined? It really isn't. The closest I got was:
Stevenson , "Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" is a classic philosophical book that defines morality as purely a class of emotional reactions.
So you have emotions (or something similar to them)  being used to define the greater good. Then the greater good is used to justify anything that would in isolation be wrong. Anything ... to anyone ... on any scale ... without limit. At some point a person might see that this if this is the real world it is a pretty ugly. It is a choice.

19 comments:

  1. Randy this was an insightful exploration of faith, reason, and free will.

    And thanks for dialoguing with CD-host. CD, I know you were put off by me a bit but Randy is a great interlocutor so I'm glad you guys have been chatting.

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  2. At some point a person might see that this if this is the real world it is a pretty ugly.

    And down right frightening. Just like being at the bottom of the food chain.

    Peter

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  3. Frightening is part of it. Deep down inside we know the world should not be that way. We just can't accept it. We are wired for something better. But that last leap is not one of logic. It is not illogical but it is not forced by logic. You can use some argument like Pascal's wager but that still boils down to choosing to see a world where my life matters.

    It is a bit like choosing a wife. Logic can tell you who not to choose. For example, you might logically exclude someone who drinks too much as a possible wife. But at the end of the day the final choice has to be made by love and not logic.

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  4. A world where love is mere brain chemistry.

    This seems to me a logical conclusion for the true atheist. Love, a cold spiritless biochemical response designed to trick the human in order to propagate the species. The love of a husband and wife or parent and child is no different than that of a couple of horses or monkeys. Hearing your child say "I love you Daddy" should only bounce off the true atheist. Such a person would have to respond "That's nice my progeny, but really you only have this response to me so that you stay close to me until you are old enough to take care of yourself. it is an evolutionary survival mechanism." The true atheist, forgetting himself for a moment might say "I love you son" only to have his truly atheistic child respond: "Well, Daddy, this is just a chemical response you are reacting to. It is designed to prevent you from killing and eating me to ensure your gene transmission and the propagation of our species." Such a response should conceivably make a true atheist cry with pride. "That's my boy!"

    Listen, I am making an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum. The couple of atheists I know would be horrified by such thoughts. It just seems to me that a true, materialistic atheist should eventually come to this mode of thinking.

    Peter

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  5. Devin --

    Randy has been a gracious host, agreed.

    ____


    Peter --

    Atheists aren't horrified by talking about people as machines or animals. They delight in it. Once we understand people as complex machines, then we know for sure that the problems of psychology, political science and sociology are solvable. Ray Kurzweil is a utopian atheist philosopher, his entire shtick is how close humans are to genuinely machine enhanced thought; a world where people with IQs over a thousands are the norm and what that does to building humanity.

    Christians have no delighting in viewing aspects of their lives as fulfilling divine purpose. Why would you expect atheists to be concerned that their emotions exist to fulfill purposes of their DNA? To be an atheist is to understand that everything that goes on in the brain is just a chemical response, there is nothing reductive about it.

    This model is provable. You can create feelings of love or anger through drugs or through direct electrical stimulation of parts of the brain. Of those feelings were more than brain that would be impossible. The problem you are having is for some reason you don't think chemicals are real in any meaningful sense. That if parent child love doesn't involves some sort of supernatural soul then it somehow is fake. Atheists don't have a problem with being matter.

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  6. Randy --

    I think your objection is coming from a love of authority more than a problem with atheism. When I consider a definition of good derived from an infinitely powerful being indifferent to our opinions whose definitions we are obligated to follow his orders on pain of eternal torture... I have trouble seeing that as the opposite of ugly. When I was a Christian I found Christian morality a source of dispair not hope.

    Conversely the idea of humanity owning morality hopeful. And I don't think that hope is unique to me, nor the joy in the radical freedom of understanding even unique to atheism. Buddhism has the notion of Satori, the experience of enlightenment. That moment when you comprehend emptiness. That is one of the great joyful experiences for hundreds of millions of people ... when they come to realize that meaning, all meaning, resides in their head not in the world, and the radical freedom that gives them.

    Buddha 2500 years ago talked about learning to distinguish: Corporeality, Feeling, Perception, [mental] Formations, and Consciousness. One of the 4 great truths in Buddhism to learn to distinguish between what is corporeal that is meaningless material reality and the meaning that your feelings, perceptions, ideas and overall view of life give it. Buddhism teaches its disciples the middle way, to understand that they are meaning the givers but that does not mean that life is meaningless. There is still an ethics, even though the Buddhists knows the ethics comes from within.

    Buddhism has been around 2500 years. So I don't think it is the philosophy that is inherently ugly or unable to be adopted by humans.

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  7. This model is provable. You can create feelings of love or anger through drugs or through direct electrical stimulation of parts of the brain.

    You are confusing cause and effect here. Say the cause is love and you get effect X. If you can achieve the same effect X by a cause of direct electrical stimulation that does not mean love identical with that brain activity. It could be the same effect can has multiple causes.

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  8. I think your objection is coming from a love of authority more than a problem with atheism. When I consider a definition of good derived from an infinitely powerful being indifferent to our opinions whose definitions we are obligated to follow his orders on pain of eternal torture... I have trouble seeing that as the opposite of ugly.

    That is an ugly image of God. I don't think it is accurate. The most common image in Christianity for God is our father. Do see fatherhood as based on power and indifference rather than love and guidance? Fatherhood is not defined by what happens when we rebel and disown the family. It is defined by what happens when we stay. Families have rules and obligations. Is that so hard to understand?

    When I was a Christian I found Christian morality a source of dispair not hope.

    What precisely made you despair? Was it sexual morality or something else? Was it because you felt you could not follow it or that you didn't want to? God's grace is sufficient to overcome any evil but sometimes it does not come easy. We need to persist in prayer and the sacraments and really want to be holy. I will pray for you.

    Conversely the idea of humanity owning morality hopeful. And I don't think that hope is unique to me, nor the joy in the radical freedom of understanding even unique to atheism. Buddhism has the notion of Satori, the experience of enlightenment. That moment when you comprehend emptiness. That is one of the great joyful experiences for hundreds of millions of people ... when they come to realize that meaning, all meaning, resides in their head not in the world, and the radical freedom that gives them.

    This is the detachment from the things of this world. It is an important truth. But you need to attach to something real. Detaching from everything gives you freedom for nothing.

    Even attaching yourself to your own brain is limiting. What is your brain. Is there a cosmic connection or is it just a biological organ? If it is nothing more than an interesting type of human tissue then there is no meaning there either.

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  9. Buddhism has been around 2500 years. So I don't think it is the philosophy that is inherently ugly or unable to be adopted by humans.

    Buddha did a good job of trying to find God. He did it from one angle only. That is he examined the human person. He did not, for example, contemplate creation. Why is there something rather than nothing?

    Humans can arrive at much truth about God. I didn't say that all that was ugly. I don't even think all of atheism is ugly. I do think that Buddhism becomes ugly when you contemplate the lack of mission that it sees for man. Monks have their place but detachment can't be the whole answer.

    The bottom line is that man finding God is always going to be less than God revealing Himself to man as Man. You are never going to get a better revelation than Jesus and you are never going to get a better image of Jesus than His body, the Church. Many people will get some things right. Some people will get many things right. But the reality of sin means that is limited.

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  10. You are confusing cause and effect here. Say the cause is love and you get effect X. If you can achieve the same effect X by a cause of direct electrical stimulation

    Actually I was saying something stronger than that. That you can get love from the direct electrical stimulation. We know what brain center to hit with electricity to create a maternal type of caring, essentially parental love. We also know which ones to hit to create a strong immediate desire for mating, if you want to consider that a different type of love, though I'd go with lust. The cause here isn't love it is the effect of the electrical stimulation.

    If we hit someone's brain with that stimulation they'll genuine maternal caring towards a stuffed animal or even a tennis ball. Obviously this love decreases substantially if we remove electrical stimulation, but the subject during the stimulation is experiencing parental love and often has residues of attachments after. No one has ever done this experiment with an actual child in humans, though in dogs with implanted chips we can create a permanent pact bond and they don't seem to distinguish. Love is the effect not the cause.

    I guess you could say a biological child is the cause of parental love, in this setup. But Peter's point was about the love, i.e. the effect.

    The most common image in Christianity for God is our father. Do see fatherhood as based on power and indifference rather than love and guidance? Fatherhood is not defined by what happens when we rebel and disown the family. It is defined by what happens when we stay. Families have rules and obligations. Is that so hard to understand?

    I think the most common image in Christianity is the head of a medieval manner to his serfs, "Lord" is used constantly. The word you are using "God" originates from the proto-German "Gaut" which is a tribal chieftain.

    Certainly the father imagery is present. However, Jesus who uses it the most, frequently uses it to expound upon a doctrine of how God like a father is forgiving and interested in the "lost sheep". Fathers have rules, children rebel, that is expected it isn't considered disowning the family. No one has families like this rather children grow up to accept some of their father's rules and to reject others in their own families, which is not at all the model of the type of God you propose.

    "Lord" is far closer to what you mean. Humans in this imagery become serfs bound legally and socially to a king that owed them protection in exchange for obedience and taxes.

    ____

    You are asking a good question about morality dispair. My falling away took years and it is hard for me to think of a way to summarize this using the kinds of categories we are talking in. Hopefully I'll come up with a good way to answer.

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  11. Actually I was saying something stronger than that. That you can get love from the direct electrical stimulation. We know what brain center to hit with electricity to create a maternal type of caring, essentially parental love. We also know which ones to hit to create a strong immediate desire for mating, if you want to consider that a different type of love, though I'd go with lust. The cause here isn't love it is the effect of the electrical stimulation.

    We can create a strong desire for mating by stimulating certain body parts. We know that feeling can be confused with love and can sometimes lead to love but it isn't love. It is lust.

    So why is the artificial maternal desire any different? It can create something that can be confused with love but not love. It can lead to love and really should lead to love for mother. But it isn't love.

    At the end of the day you are begging the question. You are assuming there is nothing non-material involved here. Therefore if you mimic the material things you have the whole picture. You see the fallacy in that for mating but not for motherhood.

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  12. At the end of the day you are begging the question. You are assuming there is nothing non-material involved here. Therefore if you mimic the material things you have the whole picture.

    I'd say I'm not begging the question quite I understand why you think I am. Let me clarify what I see as an issue of epistemology vs. metaphysics. Positivism, the belief that all truth can be verified by observation or modeling is a theory of epistemology. Materialism, the assertion that nothing exists but matter in various forms is a theory of metaphysics. Like chocolate and peanut butter they go great together, but you can eat either separately. I'll agree I'm asserting positivism in defending materialism.

    Say Love Potion #9 really existed which produced feelings of love in other people via. magic. That would disprove the material hypothesis. And that's what we would expect to see for a non-biological love, a method of inducing the emotion without changing biology. And this is key, were there good quality supernatural tests then believing in positivism and materialism wouldn't be the same things. Asserting they are is a key point of my argument.

    Another example would be if prayer was statistically effectual then a theory of prayer would meet the criteria for positivism but not materialism. The prosperity gospel makes non-material positivistic claims; I could conduct statistical tests of people who do or do not give money to various tele-evangelists to determine whether giving money does really have a strong short term positive impact or earnings. To go with the love example if I could cast a spell and summon Cupid and have him do things that would meet the positivism criteria without meeting materialist criteria.

    I certainly would agree they are close and travel together they come from the same mindset about the universe. You are very hesitant about subjecting Christianity to those sorts of tests. But that doesn't mean I'm question begging but rather you are making what to my mind is an essentially Gnostic claim. That Catholicism changes you in ways that are spiritual but have no discernable, testable material effects and yes I do reject such things are possible.

    So bringing this back around, if no experiment exists that distinguishes a woman's love for her child from her electrically induced maternal love for a tennis ball, they aren't different by positivism, but that is an argument for materialism not just asserting the point in question.

    You see the fallacy in that for mating but not for motherhood.

    You may have been reading me wrong here thinking this is a philosophical issue when it is simply a factual one about where we stand medically. There are about 10 emotions we know how to generate in a consistent way in mammals and humans through direct brain stimulations. The only love one we have is maternal affection. Spousal affection is not one of those 10.

    I was giving the example of the mating desire because that is also in one of the 10 and closish. This mating desire when paired with an actual potential sex partner (it won't bond to a tennis ball) can express itself as feelings of love or jealously.

    Let's take a less complex example. If you were in a room with just a bottle of Coca-Cola and I blasted your brain the with the electrical signals for rage even after the electrical stimulation had ceased you would most likely have residual feelings of both contempt and hatred for Coke. If you continued to rationalize this you might begin to develop a mental model consistent with these emotions. You might be a strong Pepsi guy for the rest of your life or a guy who hated all soda and really loved fruit juices.

    The question for spousal love is whether it is like the residue of rage, with regard to mating drive (lust), or whether there is an actual love biology there that we don't know how to trigger.

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  13. I'd say I'm not begging the question quite I understand why you think I am. Let me clarify what I see as an issue of epistemology vs. metaphysics. Positivism, the belief that all truth can be verified by observation or modeling is a theory of epistemology. Materialism, the assertion that nothing exists but matter in various forms is a theory of metaphysics. Like chocolate and peanut butter they go great together, but you can eat either separately. I'll agree I'm asserting positivism in defending materialism.

    Interesting. I do think you are asserting more than positivism. Not just that truth about love can be verified by observation or modeling but that this particular method of modeling and observing is adequate.

    Positivism would still be self-refuting because it's truth cannot be verified by observation. Just on that basis alone it should be rejected.

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  14. Positivism would still be self-refuting because it's truth cannot be verified by observation. Just on that basis alone it should be rejected.

    All empirical systems are not verifiable by themselves. The best one can hope for is that they are consistent with themselves, i.e. given epistemology E you can prove E. Some epistemologies allow you to bootstrap them from less complex epistemologies. That is if epistemology E1 is true then from within E1 you can prove E2 and within E2 you can prove E2. I'm going to claim that Positivism meets this criteria.

    There is a theory called "Empirical Adequacy". This epistemology doesn't have true or false but rather "empirically adequate" and "falsified" statements. A statement is empirically adequate if every observable statement it makes is not observably falsified. A statement is falsified if such an observation exists.

    For for example 1+1 = 3 is falsified by observation.
    1 + 1 = 2 is empirically adequate because I don't know of an observation falsifying it.

    My claim of a proof for positivism is that:
    1) from Empirical Adequacy one can bootstrap up to Positivism.
    2) Conservative Catholic Epistemology implies Empirical Adequacy.

    Assuming Empirical Adequacy under other circumstances i.e. when discussing this with someone else could be a problem For example I'm a bit sympathetic to the Marxist critique (perspectivalism) that observationally falsified is highly dependent on the psychology of the observer and so what sounds like an objective criteria isn't. What instead you have is "observationally falsified by X", where X is a person and possibly a culture. In arguing for objective material reality and subjective moral reality it is entirely possible that I end up with almost everything on the subjective side. But that acid eats positivism and (conservative) Catholicism equally, an argument that both material and moral reality are subjective doesn't advance the case against relativism.

    To be honest while I like talking about this direction I don't have a strong opinion, I'm a wishy washy moderate on perspectivalism vs. verificationalism. Derrida's question on this topic "What does God’s knowledge consists of?" is a great one that Liberal Catholics have done a lot to explore. But I don't see an obviously better solution.

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  15. Let me just make a comment to lurkers since it looks like the thread / debate is over with.

    The definition I actually gave for morality had to do with the common interest of genetic similarities. I.E. those actions which lead to the greatest long term (hundreds of generations) replication of the greatest number of your DNA strands. In short those things which prote your family, species, genus... up the line. The emotion stuff is the mechanism by which our psychology is influenced to get us to act in ways which advance the interests of our DNA, that is why we like the moral.

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  16. Again you try and have it both ways. Is morality something outside of our minds that our minds point to? Or is morality totally inside our minds and any absolute moral principles are just an illusion? Every time I think you have committed to one option you say something that points the other way.

    Here it seems you conflate "good" in an evolutionary sense with "good" in a moral sense. It would explain how our minds might have arrived at a certain state. But that absolute good that our minds would be pointing to would be an evolutionary good. It would not be an absolute moral good. The "replication of the greatest number of your DNA strands" is something evolution does by its nature. But that does not make it good or bad in an absolute sense. Maybe it would be "good" for humans to be extinct. Some environmentalists make it sound that way. Who is to say? Humans?

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  17. Hi Randy --

    Part of the difficulty is because I'm trying to layer Christian language onto an entirely non Christian conception of morality. Part of it is because you are objecting to my definition.

    Let me give the easy definitions again.

    Absolute statement = principles that apply under all situations. For example:

    Force = mass x acceleration.
    A process generates entropy if and only if it is irreversible.
    Via. natural selection organisms adapt to their environment.
    The speed of light is a constant measured at approx 300km/s


    Situation statement = principles that apply in some situations but not all, examples:

    You should turn left at the next corner.
    You should carry extra cash tomorrow.


    A morality is a collection of rules for determining proper behaviors often tied to one or more philosophies, religions or cultures.

    An absolute morality if such a thing could exist would thus be a collection of rules for determining proper behaviors that apply to all times, all places, all beings. It would apply to a rock, a fungus our sun and a human. If it turns out that all beings are subject to evolution then evolutionary goods are absolute moral goods. If not, for example if evolutionary goods don't apply to sentient computer then evolutionary goods are not absolute moral goods. We don't know yet. But for purpose of argument I'll call the morality that applies to being that evolve absolute evolutionary morality, without taking a position as to whether this is identical to absolute morality or not. Most likely though, at these levels of generality there is going to be no distinction at all between does and ought.

    Let me introduce a slightly different term: absolute human morality which would be a morality that would apply to all humans in all times and places. I was using this as a working definition for "absolute morality" since generally we talk about morality we want something that applies to all humans regardless of whether it applies to fungi or some form of alien life. But I'll keep this distinction in place...

    Absolute human morality, natural law, contains stuff that is built into the nature of humans. Such a morality would, have any content from absolute evolutionary morality made more specific. For example the principle of propagation of DNA; would become rules for preserving children and societies. And here we would see some distinction between does and ought, a distinction that didn't exist when we generalized to all life or all beings.

    Note that from this construction, any religious morality, because it is more specific than natural law, would need to be specific either to a group of people, to a time or both. Taking that another way, all religious moralities are situational moralities that change depending on the situation. Ultimately to determine whether a morality is "right" or not for a given situation is to appeal back to natural law.

    Maybe it would be "good" for humans to be extinct. Some environmentalists make it sound that way. Who is to say?

    Taking the environmental argument. It would be good for humans to go extinct if their environmental pollution had reached a level that was likely to so endanger human reproduction that the best thing human DNA could hope for was to survive very near proxies: primates then mammals then vertebrates.... Humans themselves would ultimately have to make that choice whether that level had been reached. Yes those are precisely the sorts of questions morality can deal with.

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  18. Absolute human morality, natural law, contains stuff that is built into the nature of humans.

    Now you are going back the other way again. So we have stuff built into our nature. Does this mean we were designed? If this stuff just showed up randomly then we would not be obliged to be true to it. But if it was designed then we might want to respect the designer.

    Taking the environmental argument. It would be good for humans to go extinct if their environmental pollution had reached a level that was likely to so endanger human reproduction that the best thing human DNA could hope for was to survive very near proxies: primates then mammals then vertebrates.

    It is statements like this that make me sure your moral reasoning has gone off the rails. A kind of self reductio ad absurdum.

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  19. If this stuff just showed up randomly then we would not be obliged to be true to it

    What do you mean by "obliged"? For example gravity just showed up, that doesn't mean you aren't obliged to follow it. The moral concepts work similarly. Most of them you won't even consider as optional. It would never occur to you a language could exist without nouns, so you wouldn't try and create one. There is a tiny fraction of these rules, like the ones against stealing which you would be tempted to break. And your society is going to need to try and create disincentives for you to break those rules. The more you internalize the morality of your society the more the other members will trust you with positions of leadership, etc...

    But if it was designed then we might want to respect the designer.

    Of course you are designed, you were designed by your DNA which was grouped and designed via. natural selection. You don't seem to want to respect that designer.

    It is statements like this that make me sure your moral reasoning has gone off the rails. A kind of self reductio ad absurdum.

    Is it immoral for a person to lose their life to save others? Is it anything other than immoral for a terminal person to let others die when they could have saved them at the expense of their own life? If you can agree with those two why not scale up? The morality of a society is not too much different than the morality for individuals, its just the scale is much larger and the impact of the choices much greater.

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