It’s a strange idea that people are entirely rational. — praxis

That looks like a false dichotomy. "Everyone is entirely blind or else everyone has 20/20 vision."

You don’t think that blind trust or faith has any value? — praxis

If someone is starving and they decide to eat a mushroom, knowing that it might be poisonous, then I can see how the act has value and reason. I wouldn't describe it as, "Blind trust," or, "Blind faith."

The question then for me for Janus would be — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think those are good questions too. I have asked some of them myself. Most recently we saw Janus effectively claim that the racist is not illogical, even if he lacks evidence for his claims.

That is an issue related to my thread ("Beyond the Pale"), namely that the skeptical philosophies people espouse on TPF are entirely inconsistent with their behavior in real life. At bottom this has to do with cases of expedience. Skepticism is useful for supporting liberalism and especially libertarianism ("Do not impose your obligations on me!"), whereas social justice moral positions are useful for supporting social cohesion and one's passions. But if you are consistent you can't pay obeisance to skepticism and then get all worked up about racism.

It looks like the crux of this thread is the issue of first principles of knowledge. This is a live issue for anyone who believes that knowledge exists and that it requires reasons or grounds. It is also something that tends to be neglected on TPF, which is strongly influenced by Analytic philosophy.

So anyone who believes that knowledge exists and that it requires reasons or grounds will have an interest in wrestling with these issues. That includes most everyone, although @Janus and @J are interesting cases. Janus seems to think that some knowledge does not require reasons or grounds, and therefore he has a premade category into which to shoehorn difficult cases, such as first principles or "intuitions" (a terribly vague term). Still, he must reckon with the idea that his "public knowledge" is derived from "private" "intuitions." Then for @J, who regularly flirts with different forms of skepticism, it is not clear that he believes knowledge really exists. Thus for these two people there is less at stake, and there is less interest in wrestling with these issues. It's not as clear that their worldview has skin in the game when it comes to first principles of knowledge.

The foil here would be someone like Bob Ross, who both clearly believes that knowledge exists and that it requires reasons or grounds. When Bob Ross criticizes an account of first principles, he is left with a vacuum. He is moved to provide an alternative account. When J criticizes an account of first principles, he is confirming his a priori skeptical stance. He is not left with a vacuum and is not moved to provide an alternative account. Thus the motivations at play are significantly different in different cases.

I’ll let AI take care of the uninteresting questions. — praxis

Is it against the forum rules to substitute AI responses for your own?

I addressed the strange idea of "blind trust" earlier, specifically <here> and <here>.

"The question, therefore, is whether man, horse, and other names of natural classes, correspond with anything which all men, or all horses, really have in common, independently of our thought, or whether these classes are constituted simply by a likeness in the way in which our minds are affected by individual objects which have in themselves no resemblance or relationship whatsoever."

Peirce thought this was a false dichotomy. Act follows on being. The way things interact with us reveal something determinant about their being. They cause us to think "this" and not anything else. That's enough to ground realism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

Forming a coherent question is half the battle.

So, while I agree that the equivocal overlap in usage can create the sense of synonymy, it’s usually more perspicuous to keep them distinct. — J

I don't see that the issue is 'cause' vs. 'reason'. In many traditions they are used synonymously. I wouldn't agree with @Count Timothy von Icarus's claim that all action is "determined by prior actuality." That looks like a tidy definition of determinism, which I don't think he accepts. See my post <here> on the PSR in Thomism. The idea is that even contingent events have proper explanations.

Truth aptness is just about whether P can be true or false. — frank

Yes, I know. My questions remain.

The above statement is not truth apt because it doesn't make any sense. — frank

So things which do not make sense are not truth apt. Is that the only time you would ever claim that something is not truth apt?

Trust can be earned or given blindly. — praxis

Can it?

In other words:

1. Power accompanies trust
2. Power corrupts
3. Religion involves more trust than non-religion
4. Therefore, at least insofar as trust is concerned, religion is more corrupted or corruptible than non-religion

This is a coherent argument. My issue is with the premise that dynamics of trust are necessarily corrupt, due to power. I have no qualms with the conclusion that religion is more corruptible on account of trust, but I simply don't see that where there is trust there is corruption. Trust is one of the most important and beneficial dynamics in human life. It is not straightforwardly connected with corruption.

Religion, as with all high things, results in the best and the worst ("corruptio optimi pessima"). If we strike trust from the record we handicap ourselves in both directions, and some may prefer that.

Martin Buber writes of two types of faith — BitconnectCarlos

I have read Buber on this in part. I tend to think he makes too much of the difference, but it would be worth discussing. Is the text publicly available?

Then I would say that trust is the most abused aspect of life, and that religion is part of life.

It’s painfully obvious that faith is the most abused aspect of religion, isn’t it? — praxis

Tell me what you mean by 'X' and I'll tell you what I think about 'Y'.

Well I don't want to say that interpretations of mystical or religious experience cannot be correct, but I would say that there is no way of determining whether or not they are correct. — Janus

I know Janus isn't a big fan of formal logic, but he seems committed to saying that the following claim is possible:

<This religious experience interpretation is correct, and there is no way of determining whether this religious experience interpretation is correct>

<C(r) ^ ~D(r)>

The contrary claim is as follows:

<If we are able to say that this religious experience interpretation is correct, then there must be some way of determining that this religious experience interpretation is correct>

<S(C(r)) → D(r)>

But a conjunction is a double-assertion, and therefore the first conjunct, i.e. C(r), is being asserted or said. Ergo: Anyone who says <C(r) ^ ~D(r)> is also saying C(r), and therefore <(C(r) ^ ~D(r)) → S(C(r))>

This means that (1) and (2) cannot both be true:

1. <C(r) ^ ~D(r)>
2. <S(C(r)) → D(r)>

(2) seems sure whereas (1) seems dubious. That is the problem with @Janus's approach to these issues. It flies in the face of the psychological PSR. Specifically, one is not rationally permitted to claim that something is correct if they have no grounds for claiming that something is correct.

Janus sees himself as doing a kindness to religion when he says things like that, and maybe there is a sense in which there is a subjective or short-term kindness, but it looks as if this "kindness" involves straightforward irrationality.

(The only available response seems to be doubling down on (1), "There are some things which are correct and yet can never, even in principle, be determined to be correct." That's a wild claim.)

P's truth aptness isn't determined by whether we know a way to verify P. — frank

Why not? And is "truth-apt" the same as "correct"? @Janus said it could be correct, not that it could be truth-apt.

Well I don't want to say that interpretations of mystical or religious experience cannot be correct, but I would say that there is no way of determining whether or not they are correct. — Janus

Yes, this is a good distinction. I stand by my hunch that those who firmly oppose such interpretations go further than you, and claim that they could not be correct. This moots the question about how we could determine whether they are. — J

More candidly: If there is no way of determining whether something is correct then how could it be said to be correct?

I’m anti-religious and view faith as non-rational, though there are clearly many instances of irrational religious faith. — praxis

The problem with these conversations is that if you can't say what X is, then you are not allowed to say that X is Y. So if you can't say what faith is, then you are not allowed to say that faith is rational or irrational or non-rational. And if you can't say what religion is, then you are not allowed to say that religion is rational or irrational or non-rational. None of the anti-religious in this thread have actually ventured to say what faith is,* and that's an enormous philosophical problem for those who are making claims about faith.

For example, suppose someone says that cars are bad. I ask what they mean by 'car'. Now if they refuse to answer, then their statement is meaningless, and that is the state of this thread. But suppose they answer, "A long-distance transport vehicle with four wheels and an internal combustion engine." I respond, "Are there any electric vehicles that are cars?" They adapt their claim, "Cars are neither good nor bad, but there are many instances of bad cars."

Now if they want to do philosophy they have to specify what makes a car good or bad, and why some cars are bad, and whether this has to do with cars per se or some extraneous factor. So they might say, "Everything which pollutes is bad; Internal combustion engines pollute; Therefore, cars with internal combustion engines are bad." That's what the anti-religious are required to do if they want to engage in philosophy.

* In the sense of a definition

See Tom’s last post above. — praxis

He's changed his view. My point was that there are people who see faith as irrational, such as Tom (before he changed his view) and Bertrand Russell. I suppose if Tom Storm and Bertrand Russell were the only two people who ever thought faith was irrational, then there is no longer anyone who thinks that. :wink:

I’m anti-religious and view faith as non-rational, though there are clearly many instances of irrational religious faith. — praxis

Okay.

Here is a useful distinction:

Some contemporary Thomists, like Gilson, insist it is against the spirit of Thomas to appeal to any general principle of sufficient reason. The reason they give is the danger of confusing it with the rationalist Principle of Sufficient Reason first explicitly introduced into modern philosophy by Leibniz, the great rationalist. But the Principle [as I understand it] is quite different from the Leibnizian rationalist one. The latter interprets the sufficient reason as some reason from which we can deduce by rational necessity the existence of the effect. It looks forward: given an adequate cause we can deduce the effect as flowing necessarily from it. It follows, of course, that no efficient cause can be free, and that God creates the world out of necessity, not freely, i.e., that to be rational God must create the best possible world. Our Thomistic interpretation is quite different. It does not try to deduce anything; it looks backward, i.e., given this effect, it needs such and such a cause to explain it. The cause must be adequate to produce it, be able to explain it once this is there. But in no way does this require that the cause has to produce it; in a word, our world needs an infinite Creator to explain it. But this in no way implies that such a Creator had to create it. It is not, like that of Leibniz, a deductive principle, deducing the effect from the cause, but as St. Thomas expresses it [sic!], like most other metaphysical explanations, it is a "reductive explanation," tracing a given effect back to its sufficient reason in an adequate cause. — W. Norris Clarke

But saying that just because there were some unheeded liberal voices against colonial expansion across North America, into India, into almost all of Africa, into China (attempted but partly repelled), and the Middle East, or say, opening Japan to trade with artillery fire, etc., that this isn't "real liberalism" would be a bit like saying collectivization wasn't "real communism" because a handful of communists opposed it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Strong points. :up:
It looks like we would have to engage in "extreme cherry picking" to try to construe the effects as unrelated to liberalism. On that view "liberalism" tends to shrink into nothing at all, with no efficacy or effects or dynasty.

"Belief without evidence" and "We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence" seem like pretty standard claims of irrationality.

If you don't see faith as irrational that's great, but anti-religious folks tend to view faith as irrational.

I don’t think anyone would say it’s inherently irrational. — praxis

See for example and the claims that began this part of the thread.

- :100:
You are enunciating the actual idea (as opposed to the common strawman). Good to see that happening. :up:

- Generally love would be seen as non-rational, not irrational; independent of reason but not contrary to reason.

Yes, good stuff. :up:

When claims that Wittgenstein and the "time-honored view" both dismiss the question at a bedrock level, it seems that he is plainly mistaken. Or else he has a very strange notion of the "time-honored view," one which begs to be revealed. The Aristotelian tradition is the elephant standing quietly in the room when it is pronounced that no spade has broken beneath the surface. Your quotes from primary sources are helpful in revealing gardeners who do more with their spades.

- Okay thanks, that helps me make better sense of the OP.

Dogs don't know things? A bit harsh on the pup? — Banno

Harsh? Is that supposed to be an argument? Try reading again:

[The dog] has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings — Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism

Yes, very good. That was an impressive connection. :up:

And the sensory analogue is salutary. What @Janus wrestles with with intuition is more clearly seen and understood in the case of sense data or sense knowledge (i.e. sense knowledge is truth-apt without being publicly shared or discursive).

I should read more Maritain. He would be a good interlocutor for TPF.

Human knowledge is shared. Which is why private intellectus on its own is inadequate. — Banno

This applies again:

I'm not sure that qualifies as an answer, even generously. — J

The basic starting point here is that human knowledge is both public/shared and private. The idea that because some human knowledge is shared therefore there is no private aspect or part of human knowledge is simply non sequitur. You're not even entertaining the problem that is being discussed.

Without intellectus, reason seems to become mere contentless rule following, with no intelligible content. There are perhaps two distinct issues here. The first is the absence of intelligible content re discursive knowledge if it is all ratio (rule following) no understanding. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, but I think you were on the right track when you pointed out to Janus that he is taking the LNC as read. The same thing happens whenever one tries to exclude intellectus/understanding. There is no rule following without understanding; there is no modus ponens without understanding; there is no <PV~P> without understanding, etc.

If ratio pertains to "movement" then intellectus pertains to "location." There simply is no such thing as movement without location. Terms, inferences, and rules must all be understood before they can be used or manipulated.

To illustrate, we could train a dog to lick the consequent whenever he sees a modus ponens syllogism. He is arguably following a rule, but he is certainly not doing logic or carrying out a modus ponens. This is "contentless rule following." His rule is a quasi or pseudo instance of ratio, but without intellectus it can never rise to the true level of ratio at all. Rearranging symbols is not yet reasoning. Ratio without intellectus is not ratio.

You're attempting to ground logic itself in a notion of what is "logically compatible." This is circular without intuition. This is just an appeal to LNC as being intuitive. This seems like: "no intuition is required because the LNC is self-evident." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. :up:

but that's precisely the issue. The claim about intuitions is that we do know. And the debate is about whether such self-credentialing knowledge, absent either self-evidence or rational argument, is possible. — J

What do you mean by "self-evident" and what do you mean by "intuition," and how do they differ?

(p v ~p) appears to fit -- to "be the key" -- to two types of phenomena. It appears to be a law of thought, perhaps normative, perhaps transcendentally descriptive, perhaps psychological, depending on how we rate Frege. It also appears to describe necessary facts about objects in the world, all things being equal. My puzzle is: How is it that these are two phenomena, which resemble each other so closely yet have such different objects? Or am I wrong about that? Must I simply accept that the "key" of logic fits the "lock" of the world? — J

I think you need to try to figure out what you are referring to with the term, "different objects," or the term, "two phenomena."

Is a law of thought a phenomenon? Is a description of necessary facts about objects in the world a phenomenon?

What is the object of a law of thought? What is the object of a description of necessary facts about objects in the world?

The characteristically modern error is to posit two substances, such as the mind and the body, and then wonder how two "simples" could ever interact. In order to throw that approach into relief one must begin to query their categorizations, such as their "phenomena" and their "objects." One needs to abandon the mechanistic paradigm at its root, and to stop presuming that everything is of a level.

It's interesting that both the time-honored view of mind as reflecting the structure of reality -- a "unique fit" if there ever was one -- and the contemporary Witt-based view that questions about the relation of mind and reality are defective, aim at resolving the same question, the question I'm posing. I don't find either view persuasive on the merits. — J

I'm not convinced that you are posing a question of sufficient clarity.

Are you asking about the relation between logic and world? But what do you mean by "logic"? It will help if you get more specific. Is "logic" something different than, "the human capacity to understand the world"? If so, what is it?

That is all my point is. We define when we speak. If we are to speak, we must define. Once we define, once we have communicated a concept, a definition exists, in the word, out in the world among human beings, written in stone.

We dance around the elephant we keep inviting into the room when we think we are not defining things as we speak about things. — Fire Ologist

Well, this isn't quite so simple. Usually, when people talk about defining something, I think they have in mind more like a dictionary definition, an agreed-upon use of a word which makes it correct. But you've said, and I agree, that "stipulating a definition for the purposes of discussion" isn't like that. It's more like drawing a temporary distinction in terms so that two people can converse intelligently. I'm not sure what's elephantine here. — J

I think @Fire Ologist is correct in claiming that the issue is not stipulation:

What I'm calling the "wrangle" begins when someone tries to claim that the stipulation is correct. — J

I would clarify that the wrangle as we are now wrangling here, begins when someone tries to claim there are stipulations at all. — Fire Ologist

Word meaning is not actually stipulated, in the sense that meaning is determined by the speaker. What is necessary in terminological disagreements are not stipulative definitions, but rather provisional definitions or semantic narrowing or nominal definitions.

The difference lies in imposition. To stipulate a word's meaning to an interlocutor is to impose that sense of the word upon them. Instead we must seek our interlocutor's agreement, especially in the case of word-meaning. Specifying the sense of a word with a provisional definition or a narrowing of the semantic range provides this necessary room for agreement from the interlocutor. If two people are using a word in entirely different ways, then they are not successfully communicating, and the word should be dropped altogether (and replaced by the two different compositional definitions).

When you give an argument in an OP you have a responsibility to convey your meaning. You are free to use definitions which are idiosyncratic, but that will naturally lead to less engagement with the OP (because others will be less likely to agree/consent to idiosyncratic word use). It will also lead to the critique that you are using words wrongly, and this would be a just critique. A philosophy forum cannot function at all if the participants do not use words carefully and correctly.

In any case, @Fire Ologist is correct when he implies that each time we use a word we leverage a definition. A definition is what a word means, and every instance of every word has a meaning. At the abstraction of the language-group the meaning of a word is best captured by lexicography and dictionaries. At the level of the individual who speaks a sentence, the meaning of the word derives from her. This doesn't mean that her sentence is unrelated to lexicography or dictionaries or the language group, but the primary meaning comes from her and her appropriation of such linguistic realities. If we really want to know what she means by a word, then we ask her. If we cannot ask her then we will make do with more abstract approaches. But words do not exist primarily in some Platonic realm, or in dictionaries. They exist foremost on the tongues of speakers, and it is the speaker who must be queried in the first place. They may answer the query with idiosyncratic usage, and we may walk away after deciding that communication with such a person would be unduly burdensome, but it nevertheless remains the fact that the meaning of a word is found in the person who speaks it.

(The person who stipulates an idiosyncratic meaning is transgressing a convention, and it is burdensome to constantly distinguish the idiosyncratic meaning of their phonemes from the conventional phoneme meanings. All the same, in this case their meaning is not accessible via the conventions, and it still comes from the speaker. The normal and proper case occurs when there is a speaker who uses the language correctly, i.e. according to convention, and yet at the same time we understand the semantic shape to be completed and colored by their own personality and intellect—which is why familiarity with a speaker aids one in understanding their meaning, even when that meaning is not idiosyncratic.)

Humans are capable of both rationality and irrationality. Does that fact imply something about Evolution? Presumably you are saying that it does imply something about Evolution.

Spot on. I appreciate you weighing in. I guess not everything I said is muddled-headed to everyone. — Fire Ologist

I think your posts are very much on point.

The other bait-and-switch that usually happens in these contexts is that, when you ask someone what they mean by some word they are using, they go on a long diatribe about the complexities of lexicography and linguistic meaning. Lexicography is complex, but we don't need to plumb its depths in order to give an account of what we intend a word within one of our own sentences to mean. Indeed, in response to the lexicography questions earlier in the thread I pointed to Josef Pieper's studies on the words faith and belief, but it turns out no one was genuinely interested in lexicography at all. It's too hard. Better to query ChatGPT and call it a day.

It is fairly miraculous how all the “muddle” never reflects on him or his methods or his “uses of words.” It’s also quite amazing to me how little self-awareness of his condescension he has, and more importantly, how little awareness of how contradictory he is, like when he “refuses to tell you what [he] means by a word but yet continues to pretend to use it.” Pretend. Like gaming. Spot on. — Fire Ologist

:up:

I made that point with Galileo. When Galileo was arrested, he was obstinate in his beliefs under strain and duress. So, was he being a man of faith, starting a new religion? Banno dismissively said Galileo recanted. Totally missed the point. That only means Gallileo lost faith then (according to Banno’s use/definition of “faith”). Didn’t address my point, at all, as usual, which was simply that there must be something else, something more specific to faith if we are to distinguish what Gallileo held versus what a faithful person holds. — Fire Ologist

Yes, your point was clear and salutary. Obstinacy is an accidental property of faith, and certainly not a necessary feature. A case like Galileo shows this.

Sometimes when people utterly fail to provide arguments for their claims, it is because they view the issue as moot or unworthy of serious effort. That is likely what is happening in this thread with respect to the anti-religious posters. "Religion is irrational. Everyone knows it. Arguments are unnecessary." Of course these posters tend to do the same thing in other threads as well, but the problem is especially pronounced here.

This is unfortunate given the fact that our age is more faith-based than any previous age, and if our age does not figure out how to navigate the issue of faith/belief/testimony our societies will collapse. Most of the central disagreements in our age have only to do with the question of which authority is trustworthy. Such disagreements include things like politics, religion, medicine, history, ethics, etc. Ironically, the issue of faith in artificial intelligence and LLMs like ChatGPT is perhaps the most acute case. The most recent blowup due to different trusted authorities took place around the Covid-19 pandemic.

Another observation is that “being at cross purposes” seems to play a fairly significant role in dismissal. — Leontiskos

One thing I am interested in understanding are the cross-purposes involved in more minor dismissals. When people aren’t engaging rationally, what exactly is it that they are doing instead? What is their purpose or telos? (I have noticed that the number of people who restrict themselves to rational inquiry is incredibly small, even on a philosophy forum.)

In the U.S. Trump provides a good example. He dominates political discourse, and there are lots of people who say they want to discuss politics, but what they actually want to do is beat the anti-Trump drum. Rational discussion of a political issue strikes them as a distraction, and sooner or later they find their way back to their telos of beating the anti-Trump drum. One is then presented with the simple choice of either providing the person with the anti-Trump catharsis that they desire, or else finding an interlocutor who is able to engage in more interesting activities.

That sort of thing is a type for what happens in so many pseudo-intellectual dialogues. There is a feigned interest in X while the true interest lies in Y (and it is precisely the dissimulation which is frustrating). Soon enough focus is lost and the person falls back into the rut of their pet thesis or their pet modus operandi.* That shift is most readily apparent when one is faced with one’s own cognitive dissonance, and thus flees into safe, familiar platitudes. In severe cases the person’s whole approach becomes bound up with justifying that flight from genuine philosophical discourse.

In these more minor cases we should try to work through the problems, but how is that done? One way is by enforcing <standard Socratic principles of dialogue>. Another is by becoming painfully clear about what thesis the person is arguing for and what arguments they are relying on to support it (i.e. a move towards formalized argumentation).

Yet the root problem is a bit deeper, and regards a rectification of the sub-philosophical telos. This is where Socrates really shines, and he usually preempts the whole issue by asking his interlocutor if they want to engage in dialogue at the outset. The general idea is to somehow persuade or encourage one’s interlocutor to engage in real philosophy instead of simply regurgitating the half-baked thoughts that have been floating around their heads for the last 15 years.


* This is precisely the age-old problem of <rationalization> or subordinating reason to the passions.

- :up:

How can you speak about anything of substance on this forum without delineating distinctions? How is any delineation not some form of definition? And now, once you admit to defining, why persist in raising "cannot set out the necessary and sufficient conditions" as if you aren't defining your terms all of the time anyway?

I know you think a person of faith, acting on their faith qua faith, is not being rational, and that faith qua faith can be used to support heinous evil. All of that may be true, but then, why would you think you have not defined something of the "rational" and given some border and color to "evil"? If one challenges your commentary, you resort to "you shouldn't define terms". — Fire Ologist

There are a few posters who engage in a pretty wild form of definition sophistry, and this is how they manage to get away with irrational posts. When someone uses a word, either they know what they mean by the word or they don’t. If they know what they mean by it then they will be able to tell you what they mean by it. If they don’t know what they mean by it then they are talking nonsense by literally saying meaningless things. If they refuse to tell you what they mean by a word but yet continue to pretend to use it, then they lack good faith and will not provide meaningful engagement.

The anti-religious in this thread hold something like the following: <Religious persons are irrational; their irrationality has something to do with ‘faith’; and I don’t have any real sense of what I mean by the word ‘faith’>. So what they are really saying is that religious beliefs are irrational. We may as well just drop the word “faith” since it is a meaningless pejorative in the mouth of the anti-religious. Hence the claim is: <Religious persons are irrational and I can’t say why>, or equivalently, <Religious persons are irrational because faith is irrational, and I can’t say what faith is beyond associating it with irrationality>.

For me that level of muddle and bias is not worth engaging. But suppose we take pity on the anti-religious and give them a lesson in philosophical argumentation. In my thread <here> I point out the difference between an assertion and an argument. “Faith is irrational,” is an assertion, not an argument (and it is by no means a definition). Note too that the inference the anti-religious has in mind is actually this, whether or not they are willing to admit it:

3. Faith is irrational
4. Anything which is based on the irrational is bad
5. Religion is based on faith
6. Therefore, religion is bad

If the anti-religious wants to do philosophy then they have to turn 3 into a conclusion. At present it is an assertion or an unsupported (and controversial) premise. So they at least need a middle term, and one way of doing that would be the following:

1e. All X is irrational
2e. All faith is X
3. Therefore, all faith is irrational

Here is the middle term that Tom was groping at earlier in the thread:

1a. Believing in the absence of sufficient justification is irrational
2a. Faith involves believing in the absence of sufficient justification
3. Therefore, faith is irrational

(See The Oxford Handbook of Religious Epistemology, linked <here>.)

Banno has at long last stumbled upon his own rationale:

1b. Obstinacy is irrational
2b. (Religious) faith involves obstinacy
3. Therefore, (Religious) faith is irrational

-

Hopefully this highlights what is actually going on in the thread. It has nothing to do with definitions; it has to do with arguments, namely arguments that the anti-religious prefer to leave unarticulated given their weaknesses. This is what is often at play when someone refuses to say what they mean by a word (and here I am thinking especially of @J, who uses this tactic gratuitously). It is, “If I say what I mean by the term then my argument will be shown weak; therefore I refuse to say what I mean.” Ergo, my first thread: Argument as Transparency.

(The answer to Banno is to <make a distinction with respect to the second premise>.)

For example, if I'm a Satanist, it might be that my evil ways are dictated by my ideology, and so you could rightly criticize Satanism. But if I'm a Christian and my evil ways are not dictated by my ideology, you can't rightly criticize my Christianity. If you can show, however, that Christians are disproportionately evil (even though there's nothing in their ideology that entails that evil (as there is with Satanism)), then I'd be interested in knowing what that is. — Hanover

Anti-religious bigotry has now taken on a life of its own, but the underlying tradition here is Enlightenment Rationalism. It was the Enlightenment's "Sapere Aude" which attempted to sideline faith—religious or otherwise. That tradition targeted faith itself, not Christianity per se. The anti-religious in this thread are mostly just involved in begging the question. Although some Enlightenment thinkers managed more than simply begging the question, there were nevertheless 18th century figures who already saw the folly, such as J. G. Hamann. Namely, they saw that "rationalism" possessed no foundation—historical or otherwise—upon which to stand. It is little more than borrowed capital pretending to assert itself as sovereign.

Enlightenment Rationalism was an interesting idea, but nowadays Hamann's critique has become common knowledge, namely that the project was a failure and a conceited naivete. Even many of the Enlightenment thinkers themselves quickly recognized how unstable and flighty their so-called "rationalism" was.* Logical Positivism was the last real gasp of air from that tradition, and so it's not surprising that the descendants of Russell are still sporting Enlightenment bumper stickers.

But the whole "faith is bad" propaganda campaign is an unkempt grandchild of that tradition.

(Curiously, Anglophone moral anti-realism flows out of Enlightenment thinking, and this is the place where Banno is perhaps most schizophrenic: affirming moral realism without having any substantial foundation or rationale for that stance. That's a clear symptom of Enlightenment-style thinking. Interlocutors of such moral realists are inevitably tempted to call that form of moral realism "faith-based" (in the anti-religious, pejorative sense).)


* Enlightenment Rationalism crashed and burned so hard that we are now left with the opposite extreme: strong reactions against the idea that reason has any efficacy whatsoever as a political force.

What is meant by Christian faith as being a virtue I suppose is a commitment to the truth of the teachings of Jesus Christ, which might just be a statement that the highest virtue is to believe in what is right and just and true. — Hanover

Yes. When Christians talk about the virtue of faith they are not talking about generic faith. They are not saying, for example, that every act of faith-assent is virtuous. They are saying that faith in the true God is virtuous.

Aquinas says this explicitly, "The faith of which [Aristotle] speaks is based on human reasoning in a conclusion which does not follow, of necessity, from its premisses; and which is subject to be false: hence such like faith is not a virtue" (ST II-II.4.5.ad2). Faith in a guarantor who is capable of falsehood is not a virtue, but God is the First Truth (i.e. it is God's "truthfulness" that causes divine faith to be virtuous).

Classically, none of the theological virtues (viz. faith, hope, and love) are natural virtues. That is, none attain to virtue in Aristotle's strict sense unless their object is God.

Or else Pieper:

Is it "good" to believe?—In human intercourse belief is not simply a "virtue". What belief in revelation means for man's goodness becomes apparent only when the content of rev­elation is considered: God himself communicates. — Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, and Love (Treatise on Faith)

I believe that the problem with this discussion is that its scope is becoming too large... — boundless

Let me give my diagnosis, which is more general.

When we draw a conclusion we require premises. In this conversation we have to be mindful of where the premises are coming from. So if someone says, "Eternal punishment is unjust," we need to ask about where their premises about justice are coming from. And if someone says, "Eternal punishment is incompatible with God," then we have to ask where their premises about God are coming from. And if someone says, "Eternal punishment is incompatible with Christianity," then we need to ask where their premises about Christianity are coming from.

The difficult thing in this conversation is that you keep claiming to make arguments from "logical possibility." The problem is that there simply is no such thing as an inference to an empirical state of affairs from logical possibility. We cannot infer a particular fact about reality from "logical possibility." Granted, one can say, "Hopeful universalism is justified on logical possibility," but this is merely to claim that hopeful universalism does not contain within itself a logical contradiction, and as I've said, most things do not contain within themselves logical contradictions.

So as soon as the conversation moves from, "My position is not logically impossible," to some stronger and more substantive claim, the discussion naturally becomes enormously more complicated. At the beginning of the thread I was the one claiming that eternal punishment is not logically impossible, or else that it is not impossible given certain minimal premises, and it is obviously very hard for opponents to argue that eternal punishment is impossible. In order to do that, they have to supply premises, but since there is some unfamiliarity with philosophical argumentation, therefore many have no clear sense of what sort of premises they are drawing upon to try to justify their claim that eternal punishment is impossible. Strictly speaking what is needed is a formal argument for the conclusion.

First, about repentance. It seemed to me that we did agree that the possibility to commit mortal sins, orienting the will to sin, alone is not enough to explain the thesis that it is at a certain point it's simply impossible to repent. — boundless

Right: if we hold to the single premise about the possibility of mortal sin, then we have excluded hopeful universalism. Note though that "mortal sin" may not be the best term for this, given its orientation towards death (as a definite reality and state).

(Incidentally, I believe that the dogma that during this life it's assumed that it's always possible to repent lends support for this conclusion. it's interesting that you seem to say that experience here suggests to us that in some cases even during this life repentance is not possible... to me this would contradict the dogma.) — boundless

This is a matter of two different premises, which I tried to explain earlier. The idea is that the dogma does not bear on metaphysics, but rather on hope. We are not to give up hope while someone is still alive.

Whether that is a true dogma would be interesting to investigate. At the very least it is a strong doctrine.

This leads, in my opinion, to the conclusion that something else is needed to explain the hopelessness about the fate of the damned, — boundless

Sure, but this pertains to the burden of proof. I don't see that I have the burden of proof regarding the idea that death presents an endpoint for human activities, particularly activities of change. When you phrase it in such a way one is led to believe that the a priori or assumptive position is hopeful universalism, and anyone who wants to challenge that position has the burden of proof.

Or in other words, you want to draw the conclusion of hopeful universalism, and yet that conclusion is not in any way secured by the claim, <If we assume the mere premise of the possibility of mortal sin, then hopeful universalism is not excluded>. This is very similar to what you did with Augustine and Chrysostom. The argument would look like this:

1. If we assume the mere premise of the possibility of mortal sin, then hopeful universalism is not excluded
2. We assume and agree to the premise of the possibility of mortal sin
3. Therefore, hopeful universalism is not yet excluded
4. Therefore, hopeful universalism is true

(4) does not follow. Put differently, no one has claimed that the hopelessness of the damned follows from the mere premise of "mortal sin" (or the ability to place one's end in something other than God).

When I say that "mortal sin" does not exclude universalism (or hopeful universalism), this is a very minimal claim (because I do not actually limit myself to the premise of "mortal sin"). This part of the discussion goes back to Aquinas' response to the first objection. What he is doing there is responding to an objection; not giving a sufficient argument for Hell.

(Incidentally, I think Hart's conclusion is disproportionately reliant on the premise of Platonic metaphysics, namely the ineluctability of the Good. I've covered this in my exchange with @Count Timothy von Icarus. Similarly, I think the intuitions of the West now oppose Hell, for all sorts of reasons. So I am not surprised that Westerners are intuitively opposed to Hell and thus believe the burden of proof lies elsewhere.)

A problem with classical theism, however, is that God is assumed to be omniscent and, if I recall correctly, God already knows how everything will end. So, in this case, it is weird to me to think that God would desire that everybody if He already knows that some will never be saved*. So, probably, this means that what God wants is just to offer salvation to everybody, rather than to save everybody — boundless

Again, this is either the topic of foreknowledge and future contingents or else the topic of predestination and future contingents, both of which are very large topics with lots of different ideas, solutions, objections, etc. It's actually a much larger topic than universalism.

But the general idea of a free will defense is quite simple: God is free and humans are free, and whenever one free being desires or wills that something happen for another free being, as long as that effect is contingent upon the patient's freedom it is not necessary or inevitable. The idea of willing something contingent is a basic notion between free beings. So on Christianity God wants all free beings to be saved but he does not force them, and their fate is not necessary/inevitable.

Regarding the 'cohercion' part, well, I am not sure that this is coercion. — boundless

We have a situation where everyone will do something no matter what. There is no possibility for them to do anything else. If that isn't coercion then I'm not sure what is. As far as I know, the only theologians who would not see that as coercion are, ironically, Calvinists. Most theologians would say that if an agent necessitates an outcome vis-a-vis agents, then the agents are being coerced. Only Calvinists explicitly reject the idea that necessitation is sufficient for coercion.

Anyway, even if you were correct, it would not exclude the hope in universal salvation. — boundless

If God coerces everyone to be saved then universalism is true. No need to hope.

FInally, regarding the evangelization, you continue to think that the traditional view of hell is essential for it. It might be. I don't know. — boundless

Rather, I've pointed out that universalism is incompatible with rational motivation towards evangelization, not that Hell is the only possibility. The problem is that on universalism the end is inevitable, and it is irrational to deploy contingent means in order to achieve an inevitable end. Evangelization is only rationally motivated if the end is contingent.

Anyway, I want to thank you for this discussion. It is has been an interesting discussion for me. Possibly, you are right that it's time to stop the conversation for now at least. — boundless

Sounds good. I'm glad it has been helpful. I think it was fruitful and I appreciate your candor and thoughtfulness. I think this was a good summary post that you wrote. I am happy to give you the last word unless you actually want me to respond to something further.

Yes, sometimes it's just seem hard to change direction even in this life. I can agree with that. But sometimes, religious literature itself make some incredible examples of redemption in cases of people that seemed beyond any hope for that (both inside Christian traditions and outside... if you read the case of Angulimala, in the Pali Canon of Buddhist scriptures, you find an incredible case of 'change of mind' of a criminal that occurred during the encounter with the Buddha). — boundless

Yes, there are definitely those cases, which is part of why we don't give up hope for the living.

In any case, I believe that experience is indecisive here. — boundless

What is decisive, if not experience?

Given these extreme cases, I would say, however, that we have good ground to believe that the 'change' can always happen — boundless

What evidence do we have that change takes place after death?

Well, I don't think that if there is a future life, it will be like this one. — boundless

But don't you think we will be able to repent in the afterlife, as we can in earthly life? Isn't that precisely what you are claiming?

God's salvific will is universal (God loves and wills the best for everyone)
If a sinner sincerely repents, then God will show mercy
Having committed a mortal sin by itself doesn't imply that sincere repentance is not possible

If one accepts these propositions, the simple logical conclusion (whether or not one thinks that God's salvific will will inevitably be realized) is that repentance will always be possible — boundless

No, that's simply not the logical conclusion. Maybe try to write an argument with inference rules if you think that is a valid conclusion.

The additional premise you need is <We can repent in the afterlife just as we can repent in this life>, and I've pointed out how implausible that premise is.

I believe that the second propositions here would contradict the second proposition in the first series. — boundless

But it's a strawman. No one has said that God decreed an arbitrary time limit. What is being said is that every piece of evidence we have shows death to be definitive. The only organic opposition to this conclusion is found in traditions which hold to reincarnation, which nevertheless does not posit progress in a disembodied state.

And there is also Scriptural evidence for such a view. The first example that comes to mind is Luke 16:19-31.

Right, and as I've said, the logical contradiction is more pronounced than that. The universalist can say that Z is inevitable, that Z cannot occur without Y, and that Y cannot occur unless we do X. But this is a contradiction. — Leontiskos

Out of curiosity, do you believe that being evangelized is a necessary requirement for salvation? What about those who never heard the gospel, are they beyond any hope? — boundless

I think you need to face up to this logical contradiction in your view, as I've been pointing to it for quite awhile now. Do you have any answer to this argument about the fact that something cannot be contingent and inevitable at the same time?

I don't think one can logically hold that evangelization is necessary unless they reject universalism. Regarding evangelization and sacramentality, <here> is a conversation about a helpful historical study, hosted by a Balthsarian.

However, God let us the possibility of rejection, because if there were not such a possibility, we would not be able to freely accept God's grace. — boundless

That's right, and I've explained why your view rejects that possibility. To say that one can reject God for a finite amount of time but not forever is to say that one can never ultimately reject God.

However, if one rejects God, such a person would act against one's own nature, after all, and would experience painful consequences (like, say, deciding to do a substance abuse and experiencing the consequences associated with that). The more one rejects God, the more one deprives himself the highest good for him. The experience of painful consequences of these rejections (whether in the form of remorse, the experience of exclusion and so on) could lead to a 'change of mind', precisely because the sinner here finds no ultimate satisfaction elsewhere and might become aware that his or her rejections were, after all, mistakes and then choose the good (also, if we accept that evil is privation, it would seem that it isn't inexhaustible). — boundless

Ergo: coercion, as I've explained. On this view the makeup of creation coerces humans to eventually accept God. They literally have no other option.

If you don't think that this is compatible with free will — boundless

The idea that no one can ultimately reject God contradicts the idea that God can be rejected in a meaningful sense.

I hope that I clarified thay my difficulty is that I can't seem to able to reconcile the traditional doctrine of unending hopeless torment with other various traditional doctrines (all of them, I suppose can find support in Scripture). It's difficult to me that one can sincerely believe in something that finds incoherent or in a group of ideas that seems difficult to reconcile with each other. So, I don't think that I would be persuaded by an 'exegetical debate' if I am not persuaeded that, indeed, the traditional doctrine of hell is indeed compatible with other traditional doctrines. — boundless

That's fair, but it's worth noting that Christianity has found Hell to be more compatible with Christianity than universalism to be compatible with Christianity, for 2,000 years, to such an extent that the universalist position has been extremely historically rare. The literal logical contradiction with the urgency of evangelization is a great example of why universalism is incompatible with Christianity.

Like so many issues, if one approaches this objectively then I think universalism loses by a long shot. Suppose we take an agnostic who has no "horse in the race" and give them the Bible, or Christian tradition, or arguments from experience, or philosophical deductions. Would they come to the conclusion of universalism if they have no predetermined desire for it to be true or false? I don't think so. I don't think they will come to the conclusion that any of these sources support universalism. Another way to see this is to note how much of Christian tradition and Scripture universalists end up shrugging off. For example, Hart is forced to translate Matthew 25:46 as, "And these will go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age." This is completely nuts, as the text is clearly paralleling two eternal destinies: punishment and life. If Hart wants "the chastening" to be temporary, then he has to admit a temporary Heaven. :grin: I am just not capable of that level of mental gymnastics.

Note too that when I wanted to attend to methodology, presenting one verse at a time and seeing whether the set of pro-universalist or anti-universalist verses looks to possess more force, I was prepared to present a large number of verses that are strongly anti-universalist. You ignored my question about Luke 13:23-28, which was the next piece of evidence I had planned to present. The point is that I have been acting merely defensively in this thread. If I were to go on the "offensive" and start providing all of the Christian evidence for Hell then I believe the scales would tip even further.

Sorry - I am getting tired of this conversation. I feel like I've answered the points you've raised and now I'm just repeating myself. For example, I have explained multiple times the contradiction between a contingent means and a necessary end, and you keep offering long considerations that do not actually help you in avoiding that contradiction.

We could have another 30,000 word exchange on the interview with Lusvardi, but I don't want to do that. As I said, I don't want to spend so much of my free time discussing Hell. I think we've had an interesting and fruitful conversation, but I don't want it to go on forever. Maybe this is a good place to stop. Or at the very least, let's draw it to a close in the next few posts.

Here is Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) speaking to the doctrine more directly than he does in Spe Salvi:

No quibbling helps here: the idea of eternal damnation, which had taken ever clearer shape in the Judaism of the century or two before Christ, has a firm place in the teaching of Jesus, as well as in the apostolic writings. Dogma takes its stand on solid ground when it speaks of the existence of Hell and of the eternity of its punishments. — Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life

True — Bob Ross

I want to say that this is the truer statement:

Faith, unlike ordinary belief or trust, is best can be understood through its persistence under conditions of strain, doubt, or suffering

Faith is always resistant to certain things that direct inference is not resistant to, whether it is religious or not.