Bullseye on the etiological myths. A pattern readily observable in folk stories throughout history and across cultures.
_______

On the OP’s point:
The moral reality of “The Fall” or “The Disobedience in the Garden”or the “Original Sin” is central to christian theology throughout most of its history, and certainly to contemporary evangelical christianity,. Without this, there’s no need for Christ’s sacrificial atonement.

Yet, if humans had no knowledge of good and evil before “eating the fruit” then they could not have known that it was wrong to disobey God’s command. Moral responsibility and culpability, it seems to me, requires knowledge of and conscious intent to violate moral precepts. The construal of the consequences of eating the fruit as specifically as “punishment” implies a moral culpability that cannot be squared.

Easy.

In theologese the "actual thing" referenced, though not a physical thing like a chair, is a mysterious spiritual thing, like choirs of angels and legions of demons and grace and holiness and such.

Badda-bing.

People demonstrably can and do assign truth values to moral statements, just as we routinely assign truth values to claims ranging from "the cat is on the mat" to "water freezes at 0 degrees c" to "Jesus died for our sins."

If there's a philosophically interesting issue it resides in how we justify our truth value assignments--which amounts to revealing what the difference between the "true" and "false" hinges on and amounts to in someone's judgment of the issue. God-given commandment? Historically and culturally situated norms? Personal conviction or preference or emotional "knowing"? Moral imperatives hovering out there in Kantland or tucked away on a shelf in Plato's cave? Queer entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe? Instrumental or pragmatic requirement?

Surely if scientists found philosophy useful for achieving their scientific goals and purposes, they would embrace it.

Thus, anyone whose opinion it is that scientists need philosophy, or would better able to achieve their goals, or would choose better goals, needs to present compelling arguments for those opinions.

Whether a given endeavor or claim is scientific or not is a judgment call.

if the criteria centrally includes very rigorously designed theoretical and/or mathematical constructions, and/or very rigorously designed, implemented, interpreted, and replicated empirical investigations, then. rather than referring to some contentious and elusive clear and distinct line of binary demarcation, we can drop or at least bracket the term science, and judge any given endeavor or claim on a continuum according to the degree that it satisfies these or any other mutually agreed upon criteria.

What we care most about regarding claims about how the physical world works, is how reliably they allow us to interact with the world to achieve our purposes. Thus, the degree of a claim's utility is the degree of its predictive reliability across a general range of interactions. But we have found that a high degree of such predictive reliability is very hard to come by. We've found that it is most reliably achieved via very rigorous logical and/or mathematical constructions and/or very rigorously designed, implemented, interpreted, and replicated empirical investigations. The enterprises that have best and most consistently exemplify this are those we call the sciences, notably the physical sciences.

Other endeavors, such as political science, economic science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, nutrition and exercise science--as well as homeopathy, astrology, intelligent design etc.-- aspire to, and often allege, theoretical and empirical rigor, but analysis of their theories, and methodology often reveal lack of rigor, and--most centrally--their results quite often fail to demonstrate generalized predictive reliability or utility. Dismissing any given endeavor or claim as non-science--not to mention "junk science" or "pseudo-science"--strikes me as shorthand indicating a judgment that they fail to satisfy the epistemic criteria to the degree that the physical sciences do.

Dispute about such judgment can be addressed by argument that provides reason and evidence about the degree to which the endeavor did or did not satisfy the criteria, and that the claim is or is not demonstrably reliable--entirely without invoking a contentious science/non-science demarcation.

Hello everyone.

Some thoughts:

Perhaps if we differentiate understanding and meaning, we can clarify our conceptualization and use of the word ‘meaning.’

Understanding is a mental process, an embodied experience. When we are able to construct understanding from a given sample of language, we ascribe the attribute of “meaning” to that sample. We commonly say the sample “has meaning”—as though meaning somehow exists in the language itself. And if we are unable to construct understanding, we say the sample has no meaning, as though the sample just doesn’t contain meaning. But meaning or lack of it depends on whether or not we can construct understanding.

Dispute about the meaning of language arises when people construct different understandings of the language. Whole hermeneutics arise to guide such interpretations, and sometimes evidence can be presented about the author’s intent—that is, their understanding expressed in the language they generated—but this does not negate the fact that different interpretations can be constructed from that language. An interpretation’s legitimacy or illegitimacy is up for grabs, established only by subscription to one hermeneutics or another, including by generally prevailing use in the language community at a given time.

Understanding is a mental process. We can construct shared understandings and meanings because in a given language community we share mutual associations of words and expressions with experiences. We have learned which words and expressions “go with” which experiences, and our syntax tells us how to construct understanding from how the words are strung together. Note that when we are unable to construct understanding from a language sample, we say we are unable to “make sense” of it. “Make sense” is a very telling expression, revealing an embodied experience. ”Make” emphasises our active construction of our experience of understanding, and the “sense” or lack of it ultimately rests on sensory experiences we’ve learned to associate with the words and expressions.

Religious and political ideologies are so readily able to inspire violence against non-adherents because the human animal is evolved to profoundly identify with tribe and be hair-trigger hypersensitive to actual or imagined threat from anyone perceived as other. Because adherents commonly believe that their very survival literally depends on their faithful adherence to the doctrines and prescriptions, any violations are apprehended as mortally threatening.

Note that religious and political ideologies invariably characterize non-adherents as categorically "other"--not really one of us, morally inferior or downright evil, sometimes even as some other ontological category of being, and ultimately a threat to our tribe and our survival. Their elimination, sometimes sooner, sometiems later, is readily seen to be necessary. Some ideologues take it upon themselves to do the elimination of the evil others, some leave it for the End Times, when God will do it once and for all.

Islam is jist one variety of this phenomenon.

The fact that we rely on knowledge gained in the past and that we have senses for acquiring new, or updated information, must mean something. It must mean something when eyes evolved separately in different evolutionary branches of organisms (convergent evolution). Seeing (observing at a distance) must be a very important thing to be able to do. — Harry Hindu

I don't see your point here.

What is the "something" that all this "must mean"--other than the uncontroversial fact that it has worked so far?

Causality can be an idea we test for. — apokrisis

Two questions arise:

(1) Doesn't the very notion of "testing" for something presuppose the very regularities at issue in the problem of induction?

(2) When we show Hume our test data, wouldn't he simply say, "Yes, I see the constant conjunction. Where exactly is the cause?"

Hence the violence. Islam's power rests in the use and religious justification of killing. — tom

As I said earlier, I think history reveals that the problem lies essentially in intransigent subscription to any ideology, whether religious or political, that demonizes non-adherents as mortal enemies.

I suspect that given the opportunity, a large number of Christian fundamentalists, too, would once again convince themselves that God has authorized them to estanlish a theocracy and unleash much violence against non-believers, as well as against non-compliant believers in need of divine correction. Currently, such Christian fundamentalists are constrained by the larger society of which they are a subset.

One remedy for such belief, according to the so-called New Atheists, is to stop giving religious notions a free pass, and instead challenge them--especially their epistemic warrant--as we would any other propositions.

I don't understand what you mean here. Can't tell if you're agreeing or challenging.

My point is that relationships (of any kind) cannot meaningfully be said to exist in any mind-independent sense. Thus, causation is entirely mental--in this case a built-in way our minds apprehend the world--as Kant says.

I agree, opportunity lost.

I've heard it said that the establishment of the theocracy in Iran was a reactionary response to too radically abrupt a societal shift toward western ways and values. And also that there has been a continuous undercurrent of resistance to the theocracy, and pressure to reform or even replace it.

You've got to be joking! There was once an Islamic empire that stretched from the borders of China and India, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees. Also, let's not forget the Ottoman empire which lasted until 1922. — tom

Indeed.

But the individuals and societies they were interacting with were not evidencing or demanding the widely established liberal values that interactions with present day individuals and societies do--the very values that could influence reform. There was none of the pressure on them to reform that I spoke of.

Isn't causation a conceptual relationship--a mental construct, an explanatory model, a way of thinking about the world that has no actual independent existence outside the mind doing the thinking, the explaining, constructing the model?

I'm better at playing the violin than a dog. — Marchesk

Yeah, me too.

It's really hard to get the damn dog to hold still even when I tune him, let alone when I try an arpeggio.

If reform of Islam was possible, it would have happened by now. — tom

Muslim societies have not had anywhere near the external interrelationships and pressures that are currently in play. It is these that can and do provide influence for possible reform.

On the other hand, perhaps it is too late, and there indeed will ensue a great violent Clash of Civilizations on an apocalyptic scale, as predicted in the texts.

It's part of a philosophical conversation. It's an "Oh Shit!" moment between British Empiricism and Kant. I actually don't quite understand the significance anybody finds in Kant sans that oh-shit experience. — Mongrel

Seems to me that the lesson we might take from the problem of induction is that our ability to construct rational grounds for our behavior has hit a limit.

And our demonstrably pragmatic success in assuming that the past is a reliable guide to the futire reveals that rational grounding is not at all necessary.

It's an "Oh Shit!" moment only for those who mistakenly believe that rational grounding is somehow necessary. Seems to me that the observable evidence is that rational grounding is neither suffucuent nor even necessary. Even when rationally grounded, our conjectures, theories, hypotheses, explanations sometimes fail, and even when not rationally grounded, they can succeed.

Indeed, given that different hypotheses all assume that the past is a reliable guide to the future, we obviously have found that those with the most rigorous rational foundation are more likely to provide reliable predictions. So rational foundation is a very useful tool or method. But this does not entail that it is necessary to achieve our purposes.

If, as Kant says, our experiences are structured by features of our minds, such as time, space, cause, effect ... and our expectation that the past is a reliable guide to the future is an evolved feature of our minds, then the fact that we are not able to construct rational support for such a belief is irrelevant.

Indeed. As Sam Harris has said, it may increasingly be the case that the only people who are willing to honestly confront the problem of radical Islam are far-right xenophobes and racists. The left has simply become totally complicit on this issue, making a bizarre set of bedfellows with religious theocrats who hold decidedly anti-liberal views on many issues (so long as said theocrats come from a place where the people are poorer and browner than most people in the West - Christian theocracy would never be tolerated, of course). — Arkady

Yes.

Indeed, Christian theocracy is no longer tolerated--it is constrained by the larger society in which those with such a goal are a subgroup without the power to execute any such plans. But Islamic fundies have the power to establish and execute theocracies in their societies. There's not enough pushback to constrain them. Yet. As Harris often has said, it will require moderate Muslims to constrain the fundies, and it is such moderates that we non-Muslims would do well to encourage and support. The very damn least we can do is acknowledge that fundamentalist Mudlims are a threat, and they are inspired and motivated by their intransigent subscription to the their text. And, as I said earlier, what is needed is for enough Muslims to become cherry-picking experts tendentiously selecting, ignoring, emphasizing, explaining away, and re-defining the text, just like Jews and Christians do. This will result in a large enough subgroup to constrain the fundies.

Would that give us confidence or just be an expression of our confidence? — Mongrel

Confidence, except when stipulated as in statistics, is psychological, a state of mind not necessarily consistent with the logic or even the facts of the matter.

I think that our predilection for expecting and behaving as though the past is a reliable guide for the future is essentially an evolved trait--"hard-wired" if you will, into not only human, but also the vast majority of the animal kingdom that have much neurology. We are automatically predisposed simply to imitate, a very efficient and successful way of learning to negotiate our way around the world. And imitation presupposes that what has worked previously will work again.

That we cannot come up with one of our post facto confabulations couched as "rational support" for this pattern of behavior might indicate the irrelevance of such an explanation for demonstrably pragmatic success, not only for humans, but across species.

Embracing this assumption is a fine, upstanding thing to do. All the cool kids do it. That was never in question. — Mongrel

Well, if the question ia "how can we logically support the asaumption?" then we know the anawer ia that we can't.

Or maybe Bayes?

But if a Muslim holyman wanted to preach pacifism... how would he go about doing that? That's the question that puzzled me for several months. How does religious authority work in Islam? — Mongrel

Muslims simply need to become cherry-picking experts tendentiously selecting, ignoring, emphasizing, explaining away, and re-defining the text, like Jews and Christians.

Again, there's wisdom in pragmatism, assuming contiguity past to future. — Mongrel

And since that assumption is all we've got, it "makes sense"--pragmatically, if neither deductively nor inductively--to go with it.

Logic is not the basis of this faith. Obviously it isn't observation. So what is the basis of it? — Mongrel

Pragmatism.

It occurs to me that intransigent adherence to an ideology, whether religious or political, that demonizes non-adherents as mortal enemies is what motivates wide-scale violence.

20th Century Nazis and Russian and Chinese communists killed more innocent people than Christians, Jews, and Muslims killed throughout their entire histories.

Seems to me that even in the last couple of decades, let alone the last century, Christian societies have killed. maimed, and hurt a WHOLE LOT MORE innocent people than Muslims have.

If Smith truthfully asserts "I am certain that P" or "P is certain," what is anyone else to make of such assertions other than (1) Smith's mental or psychological state is such that he has no doubt that P, and/or (2) Smith has determined that P is warranted by whatever explicit or tacit epistemic standards he deemed sufficient?

It seems to me that what the rest of us normally care about is whether or not we also should accept P (given that we care about the truth or falsity of P at all.) And whether we also accept P is determined by whether or not we ourselves judge there to be sufficient warrant for P. The weight we assign to Smith's endorsement of P would vary considerably depending on the context--such as our trust in Smith's judgment about such a thing as P, including what we may know about the standards he applied.

In the end, I think someone's reported "certainty" amounts to little more than playing a rhetorical role (conveying their strong endorsement of the proposition at issue), and perhaps implying that a certain tacitly understood epistemic standard was satisfied.

Sure, physics and math can demonstrate more progress and more promise, but this does not imply that philosophy is harder.

Perhaps philosophy can't demonstrate such progress because it's just wasting its time asking questions that can't be answered, or that don't even make sense in the first place. And, of course, there's the fact that physics was spun off of "natural philosophy." That is, it was philosophy until enough people figured out a way to pose and actually answer certain categories of questions, largely leaving the meta speculations behind for the philosophers to amuse themselves with.

I don't know if philosophy is harder than physics or math.

Not clear to me what the metric for such a comparison would be.

It seems to me that they don't even think very many other philosophers are very good at it.

Jesus.

My first post in months, and the first response is a complete non seq.

Which, I might note, supports my assertion that rational thought is very difficult for humans to sustain even for short intervals.

Much philosophy is the record of the human predelection for posing engaging questions, speculations, arguments, and counterarguments that seem to be important, and even profound, but which as often as not are muddled confusions, and sometimes even unintelligible nonsense.

Rational thought is very difficult for humans to sustain, let alone express coherently, even for short intervals (as this or virtually any other forum or Comment section on the internet evidences.)

So, humans are not bad at philosophy--they are terrible at philosophy.

Most people just skip the effort altogether. And, as discussion sessions even at professional philosophy conventions attest, there is virtually unanimous agreement among those who try to do philosophy, that there remains much muddled confusion and unintelligible nonsense.

Yes, categories have fuzzy bounfaries. (I don't think imaginary nymbers is anywhere near such a boundary, btw.)

A major indicator of the categorical difference between established math, logic, and science claims on the one hand, and moral claims on the other, is that dispute about the truth or falsity of a math, logic, science claim, is readily resolvable by appeal to the clear, universally agreed-upon rules and standards, but there is no resolution, even in principle, for dispute about the truth or falsity of whether or not most actual instances of given behaviors are moral or immoral.

The fact that some moral prescriptions and proscriptions, such as murder and stealing, are found across many societies does not provide a way to judge whether a given instance of killing counts as "murder" or not, whether the killing was justified or not, whether there are there are mitigating factors that reduce the immorality or obviate it entirely or not, whether a preventive strike is morally warranted or not, whether a revenge murder is immoral or not, whether an instance of the taking of property counts as stealing or not, whether such taking is morally permissible or not, the cobditions under which it is morally permissable to take without permission.

Furthermore, there is unresolved dispute about whether the remedy for such behaviors is moral or not. Is it mroal to cut off the hand of a thief? Put him in prison? For how long? Hang him? Transport him to the wilds of America or Australia? Is it moral for the murderer to surrender a daughter to the family of the victim in recompense?

Dispute about any of this is not resolved by invoking a univrsally established set of rules and standards, such as those used to resolve dispute about the truth or falsity of established claims in math, logic, science.

I like that Trump is somewhat flippant – he strikes me as someone looking to win, and looking to have the biggest and best legacy he can. What that means is that where there is public outcry against a suggestion, he'll wheel it around and give people what they want. — The Great Whatever

What Trump will run into, though, that he's never had to deal with previously, is that he needs Congress to do what he wants, and can't fire then when they don't give it. They have their own game, and their own political survival via re-election trumps Trump. Government is like business in some ways, but is an entirely different animal in others.

I don't see the difference which you are claiming. Mathematical principles come into existence, they have in the past come into existence, and from the point that they come into existence, they spread from acceptance amongst a small group of people to a large more widespread group, then they may persist, onward into the future. Moral principles, such as the abolishment of slavery, and the abolishment of stoning adulterers and homosexuals, have come into existence in the past, they start from a small group of people, then spread to a larger group, and may persist onward into the future. Where is the basis for your claim of a "false equivalency"? — Metaphysician Undercover

The conventions by which we judge the truth or falsity of established math, logic, and science claims are universally agreed upon and once established persist. The conventions by which we judge the morality or immorality of behaviors are not universally agreed upon, but rather are situated historically and culturally, and are disputed between social groups, and demonstrably can evolve from being moral to immoral and vice versa.

If some mathematical principles are cross-cultural, and persist through time, and some moral principles are cross-cultural and persist through time, how does this proposal provide a valid method for differentiating between the two? — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a false equivalency.

Saying that some math principles persist through time sidesteps the fact that the vast majority of established math principles persist, and will continue to persist. That new math knowledge such as zero, calculus, non-euclidian geometries, etc are added to the math corpus is not the same phenomenon as the demonstrable evolution of moral conventions (such as slavery, divine right of kings, stoning adulterers and homosexuals, burning heretics at the stake ... .)

As I've argued, there are clearly specified, universally agreed upon criteria for judging the truth or falsity of established math, science, and logic claims independently of culture, religion, race, gender, social status ... But not for moral claims.

Moral conventions demonstrably are culturally and historically situated.

Historically situated means operant in a given culture during a given time span.

On the other hand, the conventions for judging the truth or falsity of arithmetic, as well as other well-established math, logic, and science operate cross culturally, and are not likely to change, precisely because these conventions are clearly specified and universally agreed upon.

So if the subject here is this judgement process itself, whereby we judge between right and wrong, not the judgements being made, then these two, objective and subjective judgements should be classed together.

Yes, so that's the point, all judgements are inherently subjective. That is why we can class all forms of judgements in one category, as human judgements. Objectivity, we can see, comes about through producing conventions and adhering to them. It is through this adhering to the meaning of the symbols "2", "+", "=", etc., that mathematics gives us objectivity. And other forms of logic operate in the same way, there is a need to adhere to conventions. So we can extend that need, to adhere to conventions, right down to issues of human behaviour. — Metaphysician Undercover

We can readily see though, that we can differentiate two distinct categories of conventions relevant to this discussion:

(1) conventions that are established across cultural and societal bounds, such as those we invoke when we judge the truth or falsity of math and logic and science and everyday empirical claims and ...

(2) conventions that are situated historically and culturally, such as those we invoke when we judge the morality or immorality of a given behavior.

Which is nonsense, but okay, so you're not just arguing that many people are intellectually lazy, you're saying that you are, too. — Terrapin Station

To insist pedantically that the paramount issue is the technical invalidity of the conclusion that Bannon is a racist is to ignore the evidence consistent with the conclusion, and to be blind to the political context in which the distinction without a difference is a pragmatic value judgment, not a matter of being intellectually lazy. Given the evidence, it is not intellectually lazy to judge that Bannon's either being a racist or actively enabling racists renders him unfit for such high national office.

The New Trump Reality TV Show continues.

Though, somewhat compromised about certain aspects of that reality thingy.

Sorry, not interested in developing the analogy.

The Bannon issue is a pragmatic political judgment, and as I noted, the distinction between whether he is a racist or just worked to enable racists is a distinction without a difference. People don't want somebody who made money enabling racists any more than they want a racist in such an influential position. Besides we have no reason to believe that he is not a racist, and much reason to infer that he is, including testimony from his wife.