Atheism and agnosticism

[drunkenshoe]

You really are impossible.

No, I am not. Try to get close, try to engage with me if you are interested in what I have to say at all, you'll be amazed how easy I am. I can't do it otherwise, noone can. I'm sick of people trying to look 'cool', trying so hard to disagree with anything that comes alone without even having a conversation about it, standing in distant and pitcihing "myeh, me thinks not". Everything is so polarised and atomised, no conversation can occur. Disagreeing everything that is possible is not a sign of intelligence.

These subjects are not the fields anyone can have a conclusion on and have some score against each other. This is something we can talk about, and echange information or opinion. It's a long standing thing. We produce questions, I write something, you write something. We try to add information or some piece of knowledge that has been put out there before. And it goes on.

[drunkenshoe]

I was going to try to start a conversation about Foucaldian discourse on power, society, LABELS...how labels are created, WHY most labels don't actually carry the meanings we think they do; and why they are collective inventions by social contract to CONTROL PEOPLE. Not to convince anyone about anything, because it is relevant. It is an herculean task that will end in 'I don't agree with you's and one liners. Anyone who is interested in the subject, you get the key words.   

[Baruch]

i am also wondering how any kind of god cannot exist according to linguistic...

The Logos.  This goes back to ancient Greece, and Johannine theology.  But of course that is not a universal metaphysics, there are many other alternatives.  Zen would tell you that the truth cannot be spoken.  I am tactical on metaphysics ... I lean on whatever works in a given situation.

Shoe - "Foucaldian discourse on power, society ..." ... most posters here don't bother with philosophy, you dig?  The idea that American (language) could be New Speak is ... inconceivable for most (also English (language) for our British friends).  That only happens in old political tomes.

[Nonsensei]

I have to admit, agnosticism always struck me as a cop out. Usually "I don't know" is a valid position to have. Whats the square root of 65,227? I don't know. FINE! Its ok not to know that. Who is in the other room? I don't know. NO PROBLEM.

But then we get to "Does God exist?". I don't know. Not really acceptable.

In all other areas of life your lack of knowledge can be remedied by the search for knowledge. I can go find out who is in the other room. I can get a calculator and figure out the square root of whatever.

But there is no evidence to collect on the question of God's existence. There never has been. The lack of an ability to confirm or deny the existence of something through evidence gathering leads to only one inevitable conclusion: that thing does not exist. If it existed, some evidence of its existence would be available as proof. The assertion of God's existence must be dismissed in exactly the same manner that all other unsupported assertions are dismissed.

When someone says "I don't know" to the question of whether or not God exists, I feel like asking them "why not? Are you confused? Can I help?"

[drunkenshoe]

Shoe - "Foucaldian discourse on power, society ..." ... most posters here don't bother with philosophy, you dig?  The idea that American (language) could be New Speak is ... inconceivable for most (also English (language) for our British friends).  That only happens in old political tomes.

The funny thing is English is the language that we have the most research and so knowledge in this aspect, lol.

But what I was talking about a bit different than just philosophy in a traditional sense. Why labels get created and how they are tools of controlling people is pretty much about daily life and social relations. We discuss them all the time. Faggot, nigger, commie, dyke, slut...countless others are about to keep the traditional norms of gender, race; hierarchy.

[Baruch]

I consider the label "Logical Positivist" as a cuss word.  But then I admire Popper (who actually wasn't a Positivist or Logical Positivist, but a Post-Positivist).  So Post-Positivist is an anti-cuss word ;-)

Since it seems you are in the Philosophy of Language camp, and the Philosophy of Social Sciences camp ... you might be unaware how alien that is not just to Anglo-American culture, but to Anglo-American philosophy over the last 100 years.  The anglophone camp hasn't chosen to address these concerns since the 19th century (William James and Josiah Royce for example).  Analytic-Philosophy and Cognitive Science have each had their day here.  What was useful to the Deep State, to support their anti-Communist ideology and support of lumpen plutocracy ... was encouraged.

I like people who come from a line similar to mine, but from a different angle.  What do you think of Slavoj Žižek?  A Left version of Nietzsche?  We need a few good Marxists.

[drunkenshoe]

I consider the label "Logical Positivist" as a cuss word.  But then I admire Popper (who actually wasn't a Positivist or Logical Positivist, but a Post-Positivist).  So Post-Positivist is an anti-cuss word ;-)

Since it seems you are in the Philosophy of Language camp, and the Philosophy of Social Sciences camp ... you might be unaware how alien that is not just to Anglo-American culture, but to Anglo-American philosophy over the last 100 years.  The anglophone camp hasn't chosen to address these concerns since the 19th century (William James and Josiah Royce for example).  Analytic-Philosophy and Cognitive Science have each had their day here.  What was useful to the Deep State, to support their anti-Communist ideology and support of lumpen plutocracy ... was encouraged.

I like people who come from a line similar to mine, but from a different angle.  What do you think of Slavoj Žižek?  A Left version of Nietzsche?  We need a few good Marxists.

I have never seen linguistics -or language analysis- as a method and I'll never -I'm always with Popper on that; 'neither language analysis nor logical analysis can be a method' - but as an 'evidence' in historical sense or a 'force' in both historical and organic sense. My relationship with social sciences comes with my own field. Studying art history as it is actually a still born discipline, I'm immune to traditional social sciences aspect -I think they call as 'anthropologically minded" (vs philosophically minded) - and to me philosophy is just a tool to produce the right questions when it is necessary. It's the soil mixture to hold the bricks -scientific knowledge- together. Other than that the traditional monologues do not mean much to me and I do not attach myself to a school. I can't. Neither reasonable nor rational.

Marxism is very important as it is the often crucial ground for the critical thought. I think more than linguistics aspect of philosophy that is alien to American culture. See, the thing is Marxism is not working as being 'marxist' as the ideology anymore -has been for a long time by the way. This is the distorted view in the American side. When we say Marxist, we mean marxist criticism of something as opposed to the common crude sense of history, nationalism, politics...modernity... etc. Not a political or social set of rules or a base for a regime -lol- as it is often understood.

Zizek...Don't know him very well. If I am not confusing him with someone else, when I read the name all I remembered was something like defining the state as 'the symbolic power that determines masses' behaviour patterns?' Could be wrong. Satyed back in the Saddle period?

Anglo-American philosophy cannot be cut out from the rest of the Western philosophy though. As you cannot 'make' philosophy ignoring German Idealism, you cannot do it with ignoring its criticism.

Philosophy is needed to carry the knowledge on, not to shape it. It can't. We are not living in the 19th century, but unfortunately we still need to deal with the garbage it left. Once when I was drunk, I said "We are lying in the open graves that were dug back in the 19th century" it became a kind of joke and I think it fits here.   


About my persistence in seeing langauge as a force -therefore socio-linguiscts crucial to history itself- is that our subject here has NOTHING to do with scientific methods, knowledge or its growth, but purely what stands out of it as human evidence for anthropology-history which can explain the need to invent religious way of thinking; gods and religions. That makes language more than relevant, esp. concerning the modern state, it's a centripetal force. How we label ourselves, others, our opinions and thoughts and others' do not depend on brand new ideas or the accumulation of scientific knowledge as we modern kids like to think. That's a delusion the age of knowledge and mass communication created. They are very ancient categories constantly gets brushed up with 'new colours'.

[Baruch]

Preaching to the choir ... here is a great Zizek vignette on why it takes an ex-Christian to make a better atheist ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C16eiQH06RE

To Anglo-American prejudice ... the Anglo-American POV is the most evolved (thanks Darwin) ... and paying attention to any Continental form of Western philosophy would be going backward.  So it's criticisms can be safely ignored.  Now that the Soviet Union fell, and China has gone capitalist-retard ... Marxism as a criticism is much more relevant now than it ever was, because it is the only "other consciousness" that would warn us of going over a group-think cliff.  Unless you want to be a Buddhist monk anyway.

I totally agree, on a great number of things, that scientism as an ideology is simply idiot savant-cy.

[trdsf]

I have to admit, agnosticism always struck me as a cop out. Usually "I don't know" is a valid position to have. Whats the square root of 65,227? I don't know. FINE! Its ok not to know that. Who is in the other room? I don't know. NO PROBLEM.

But then we get to "Does God exist?". I don't know. Not really acceptable.

I don't really have this objection to agnosticism, although I agree that if you can conceive of a world that does not involve a deity, Occam's Razor should compel one to adopt the atheist position rather than the middle zone.

That said, the atheist position is not necessarily one of a positive statement of knowledge that there is no god.  It is a statement that there is no compelling evidence to consider the god hypothesis in the first place.  I am not required to be agnostic about the luminiferous aether or phlogiston or the caloric theory of heat -- there isn't evidence supporting their existence, therefore I am permitted to say they don't without having to keep an "open mind" about them.

The same holds for the god theory of the organization of the universe: until there is some evidence that this theory needs to be taken seriously, I am perfectly justified in rejecting it without further explanation.

[Hakurei Reimu]

Please excuse the delay. Since the forum's complaining about lenght, I'll just hit the core points.

I don't think you understand what the quote refers to. It's not about Aristo or his logic. People who offered that anology are perfectly aware that Chinese have their own philosophy, Dakotans have their own mythology and that Aristo's logic is a product depended on schools that preceedes his. This is EXACTLY what they are saying in a higher level of a category. They are pointing out that they are all as results, strictly bound to their respective linguistic development in their own circumstances.

No, I got the point. I just think those people are talking out of their asses. How are they supposed to prove such a thing? How are they supposed to show that, of all the factors to influence the development of Greek philosophy, it is their language that enabled them to develop? They can't. It's bullshit.

The truth is that Greek was being spoken for a long time before Aristotle, yet formal logic evaded them. What we call classical philosophy can trace itself to a very restricted region of Anatolia, the Ionian region. This is where some Greeks settled after the fall of their own civilization back home, and here, cut off from support from the mainland, they had to develop their own life here. In order to surivive, they had to take a hard-nosed look at everything around them and figure out how things worked. Their old culture and myths would be of little use here, for their familiar patterns of life would not suit their new environment. The culture that developed was at the same time recognizably Greek yet quite different from both their contemporaries on the mainland, and from the Achean culture they came from in the past.

They had to. Their circumstances â€"their environmentâ€" forced them. Their very surivival depended on being able to tease apart the world around them to find out how it worked.

It puzzles me greatly how anyone can say that the Greek language was the enabler of logic when the rest of the mainland was still steeped in the same old religion and ways of life. No, it the language was involved at all, it was but one part of a very large set of circumstances present in Ionia.

Parmenides just left a poem opening with a dedication to a goddess -as it was the custom- and just the description of the chariot is enough to analyse his extreme diffculty to 'express' his complicated, distinguished perspective compared to his contemporaries. Because the Ancient Greek used in his time is no where near enough to do that, he tried to make it, but at the same time he used Homer phrases -naturally- because that's the only available narrative to think in. Forget Aristo, without Parmenides you don't have Plato, so no Socrates in written form.

If Homer's narrative was the only one available at the time, how did Parmenides have such difficulty expressing his thoughts in them? The observation that you can have difficulty expressing a thought in your language is prima face evidence that there is a difference between the two. When the respresentation is the same, serialization is dead easy. Parmenides shows the opposite of what you intend to prove here.

Art is an example I can speak more confidently. It's not a coincidence or a matter of taste or the result of the religion why Egyptians depicted human body in a certain way. First of all, they were far advanced about human anotomy compared to any other culture,

What? The Egyptions didn't even know that the brain was a vital organ. That's why they threw it away when embalming. No, every culture figured out what the basic parts of the human body are (that's why we have words like "brain," "stomach", "lungs" etc. in the first place) â€" they just didn't know what they did.

Also about myths. From your posts I sense that when you see the word 'myth' you automatically think of obscure ancient fairy tales echoing from thousands of years ago. OK. But you were born into a world with huge accumulation of knowledge. For example, you have learned how to count, read and write when you were a toddler. But forget being literate and have the simplest undersanding of numeracy, I want you to imagine how would be like to be born in a world that the only piece of 'information' -other than the ways of fighting with the nature to survive- is just what old people tell to others around a hearth. Myths; their characters, plots...etc. This is a language. The ultimate context. Those fairy tales are the basic norms of language which we evolved it by contrasting, criticising, inflating/deflating them. That's why I said we are thinking in Homer with a much better vocabulary. 

I have read Joseph Campbell, DS, and no, that's not how myths work. The basic skills of life are taught just like anything else: by rote or discovery. Myths are signposts guiding you through the transformations in one's life, and to act as a context for which rituals to carry one from one stage to the other. This can be from season to season, or rites of passage and so forth. Myths are catagorically not the only piece of information available to a primitive person. There was no myth to tell you that you how to cook meals (although there may be myths of why you cook those meals), or that one ear of corn and another ear of corn is two ears of corn.

Hell, Egypt had not only myths, but a whole bureaucracy held together by numbers, and even diplomacy. We have the letters and the records to prove it.

No, it is the other way around. The language is the core of logic.

What 'other way around' are you talking about? I did not say that logic was the core or seed of language. I said that the two have the same core. No matter what language you are talking about, they all have at their core formal rules of being put together at all levels: from phonetic formants to syntax. Language follows rules; formal logic follows rules. Anyone can look at their own language and discover that it follows rules. The potential for that insight is always there, no matter what language you speak.

Anyway, in many ways you are preaching to the choir here, to borrow a theistic expression. We know that the 'theological knowledge' of god's existence is not even comparable to scientific knowledge, regardless of what theists claim. We only entertain the idea in arguments against theism.

So the 'theological knowledge' of god's existence is not knowledge. But you know what is also not knowledge? The 'theological knowledge' of god's non-existence. You can't prove that assertion any more than you can prove god's existence. It, too, is a statement that is not knowledge. Hell, there's a lot of statements about the real world that are not knowledge, either, even though we know that one of the alternatives is definitely true.

This is why agnostic atheism is a viable position: it is the acknowledgement that the statement 'god does not exist' is not knowledge any more than the statement 'god does exist' is. It doesn't matter why the possibility is there. Once proposed, the genie is out of the bottle and remains a technical possibility until proven otherwise â€" and a proof is unlikely.

The absence of something in an ocean of that something looks like a something itself. In a culture steeped in religion as a background, the absence of same looks like it is something rather than nothing, in the same way the absence of an electron in the Dirac sea looks like a positron. The only reason I call myself an atheist is a begrudging acceptance that the religious are going to call me one whether I like it or not.

[Baruch]

Epistemology is a many splendored thing.  But reductionistic physicalism or materialistic pythagoreanism is an answer, not a question.  It is very useful, if you want to calculate how many BTUs might exist in a thunderstorm.

Aristotle used language analysis for part of his work ... but forget him, he was just a dumb Greek ;-).  Out of all Greek philosophy, I think being a founder of the science of biology ... is a pretty impressive CV.  Of course he biology work was purely empirical.  His physics less so (Greeks didn't have good instruments to measure dynamic things ... it took Archimedes a few decades later to get serious about that.

I would agree that the cause/effect of why the Greeks (some of them, not the hoi poloi) were more creative than most.  Bronowski is most illuminative:

https://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/jacob-bronowski-the-grain-in-the-stone/

There are links within to the similar commentary on other Ascent of Man episodes ... but not to the programs.

Machu Picchu as an exemplar of pre-Greek civilization ... authoritarianism under a god-king, usually a representative of the Sun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdN7Goz3Zdo&index=5&list=PL68DD81C715973B62

But the Greeks were intensely verbal ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAkLTWQUbG8

On democracy ... another Greek invention ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VelFkGje-Tw

Archimedes was an exception ... he was the first genuine physicist, and builder of engines of war ...

http://archimedespalimpsest.org/about/history/archimedes.php

Geeks are the Greeks who are maniac about Archimedes ;-)

[FaithIsFilth]

You are right, OP, that you can't just be agnostic. You're either an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist. A lot of atheists will just say agnostic because that word is less scary to religious people. My brother is atheist, but his Facebook says agnostic. Even here in Canada, you still have to worry about not getting a job because you call yourself atheist.

[facebook164]

I put metaphysics above physics ... I put holism above reductionism.  It is a choice.

Ok... So you can stop anytime?

Of course it isnt a choice. You are forced to have that opinion. (By the feeling of being right)

[Baruch]

Ok... So you can stop anytime?

Of course it isnt a choice. You are forced to have that opinion. (By the feeling of being right)

Of course, I am a free-will guy, not a determinist.  For example, monism, dualism and pluralism are POV taken in metaphysics.  I can use whichever I want ... I am not wedded to just one breakfast cereal.  For example monism would be the usual stance in Mahayana Buddhism ... but in Mahayana Buddhism is "skillful means" ... which means that in metaphysician doctoring, you apply based on the diagnosis, you don't do the "only have a hammer, so everything is a nail" ... if monism is a "problem" then apply dualism or pluralism.  I can believe in Santa Claus if I want, and when I was little, I did.  My inner child probably still believes.  People are like ogres, we have layers.

[GSOgymrat]

Theists claim to know God; atheists claim God is impossible. As an agnostic I don’t know whether “God” exists because don't understand the nature of my own existence or even understand that which I consider to be my “self”.  We each exist in an internal world of thoughts, emotions and physical sensations that no one else will ever experience. The things that comprise my “self” -- ideas, memories, my cells, my relationships-- are all created, transformed and eventually lost. My subjective reality changes as my perceptions and internal responses constantly, and often without conscious control, shift. What I consider “I” is in a constant state of flux; “self” is an illusion. I can’t completely understand how my consciousness works because the moment I think about my thoughts I change them and when I focus on one sensation I lose the others. I can't even remember when I first became my "self".  For me the question of God is: Are my thoughts and perceptions solely my own, am I forever alone in my head, or is there something else beyond what I perceive to be my "self"? When I cease to exist did something know my "self"? Is denying anything other than "self" narcissism or is the idea of something more than "self" a fantasy? This is impossible for me to know. If a "God" exists I believe it is unknowable because if I cannot perceive all that is “I” then God, which is more than “I”, is inherently beyond understanding. If a God exists it is unknowable and therefore I live my life like an atheist, however unlike a strong atheist I don’t accept that just because I can’t comprehend something it doesn’t exist; I can’t fully comprehend my “self” yet it is the one thing in the universe I am certain exists.

(This is probably my worst post ever but these are my thoughts at the moment.)