Rorty isn't necessarily representative of Pragmatism, as I assume you know. Susan Haack doesn't believe he is one, and I have my doubts as well. Anyone who claims Dewey is a postmodernist may have trouble understanding Pragmatism in general. — Ciceronianus the White

You would have to explain to me how Rorty is not a pragmatist. Dewey a post modernist? But then, what is it to be this? Such terms. Post modernism? Such a wide concept, but what does it mean essentially? A denial that modernism fulfilled its promise to pin things down. Nothing pinnable like this. Certainly not ethics.
Anyway, does Dewey qualify? Why not? Pragmatists do not believe in absolute truths or any theory of truth that is beyond problem solving. Nietzsche is the first post modernist, they say. He was late 19th century, so being postmodern doesn't really have a period, a time limitation. Truth is something other than agreement with reason, and there are things that are more primordial than truth, though nothing is really primordial at all. The problem would be separating the post modern (in philosophy) from existentialism. It is the idea of epistemic indeterminacy that marks the post modern, and Dewey certainly qualifies.
There may be reasons to say Rorty may not be a pragmatist, but I would have to hear them. As far as I see it, pragmatism is the thesis that the most basic account of truth and the world is problem solving, a forward looking process that takes the consummatory event (Dewey) of a problem solved as the essence of truth.

We don't "discover" the world of course, being part of it. But neither do we "make" it--again because we're part of it. We seem inclined to either consider ourselves separate from the rest of the world or consider ourselves creators of the rest of the world. But we're neither. — Ciceronianus the White

It's not a thesis about what we are, but about what it is to know something. Pragmatism will not allow to posit anything about what the world is, for it is bound to a ubiquitous epistemology that does not yield up things and there presence. Such is impossible, like walking on water. All the understanding can ever know is the forward looking end of a problem solved. Anything beyond this is just metaphysical hogwash. And problems and their solutions are manufactured in the process of engagement. See Dewey's Art As Experience: both the aesthetic and the cognitive issue from the consummatory conclusion of a problem solved. To know, in other words, is to put something to use successfully. This is a "made" affair.
dont understand why the world can't be made if we are part of it. The matter goes to knowing, and to know the I of me or you is to encounter it as a problem to solve. Look, there is not way out of this. All apprehension of the world are knowledge claims, and knowledge is pragmatic.

Wittgenstein, it seems, was misled by superficial differences in morality - he failed to consider that there might be an underlying principle that connects an apple's fall and the revolution of the planets. — TheMadFool

Wittgenstein's failing, if you ask me, was that, and this refers to the Tractatus, in ethics and aesthetics, he considered language to be suitable for designating empirical matters, but thought metaethical, metaaesthetic Good and Bad to be nonsense. So, you put the Good in view, music or falling in love, and then note its parts, features, the "states of affairs" then, he says, there is this residual that cannot be spoken: the Good of it. Weird, I grant you, this Good, but: it is no less sewn into the fabric of existence than empirical facts. It CAN be spoken, but speech (logic) is with all things qualitatively different from the actualities of the world (he gets this from Kierkegaard, whom he adored).
Why not talk about the Good and the Bad of ethics? Sure, no one can "see" these, but their presence is undeniable. (What does one actually "see" anyway? We speak here of sensory intuition. But doesn't one intuit the bad of pain with not equal, but more lively sense of it??
W is a bit maddening, for his line drawn between what is and is not nonsense set the stage for analytic philosophy's positivistic outlook. And has become just boring and irrelevant.

Whether or not what we've left behind is a room is another, or rather the same, metaphysical question. People may find it "impossible" because it's hard to see beyond language. As long as "room" is hanging around, it's hard to conceive that the room itself may not be. — T Clark

Then we put aside what is hard to conceive, acknowledge the argument at hand, and admit: once the room is vacated of perceptual presence, the matter turns to metaphysics.
Now, after having said this, I am aware the there is an Other to things around me. I am not a chair or a pen. This is where talk of brains and vats has to end and it gets very weird, for we are in phenomenology's world now, and things are not grounded at all. In my view one has to yield to this conclusion: our finitude is really eternity. "Truth" is really eternal.
Very controversial, of course. I would only go into it if you are disposed to to do so.

Witnessing and apprehending are not immediate or at the very basic level. They are up the ladder of mental processing from the place where objective reality is encountered. Unless there is something more basic, which makes sense to me. — T Clark

Now you're talking. It gets sticky from this astute observation; I mean, what phenomenologists are doing where I find interest is taking the matter of the phenomenological reduction, a reduction of the world to its "barest" phenomenological "presence" (what Derrida calls the metaphysical present. He, like you, insists, rightly, that IN the perceptual act itself, of any kind, any construal possible will never be free of the text, and text is this diffuse gathering of associated ideas. Think of brain storming in creative writing. This is the "text" and there is no genuine, singular, positive affirmation of a thing).
thinkers like Husserl believed (some disagreement here) that at the level of phenomenological apprehension, where one suspends all presuppositions and, well, stares at the object as the "thing itself" to encounter is qualitatively different than ordinary (naturalistic) perception. One is now truly aware of the object in the most primordial way. THIS kind of thing is at the heart of existential thought.
Husserl is criticized for the very reason you posit: nothing is free like this. Impossible.

But one has to wonder, and indeed, just allow the reduction to reach its end: it is true that there is NOTHING in the simple apprehension of an object that is there in an absolute way? How about this spear in my side? Is that pain truly not presented to my cognition in a "presence" of apprehension?

Big issue, fascinating, really.

Not at all transparent, but how is that different from a brain in a skull-vat rather than a glass-vat? — T Clark

Right. Not different. I think, by this physical model of vats and brains, things are the same.

I imagine a baby "thinking" to itself as it holds it toes - "Hey, when I hold these things, I can feel something. Hey...wait a minute - I think they are part of me." So, anyway, I guess that means we learn inside from outside the same way we learn everything else. Why is that a mystery? It seems plausible to me. — T Clark

Actually, I don't think this happens at all. This kind of thing comes much, much later. First there is the unconscious laying down of a foundation for language and its question, assertions, denials, universals and so on. One cannot say anything to oneself when one has not developed the ability to think. the word "I" has to be modelled, contextualized, assimilated, and so on.
No mystery when you put it like this, in a very familiar way of referring to things. But assume, if you like, that there is such a dialog going on inside the infant's head. Toe? How does this term, this recognition "KNOW" that digital extension? It takes in the sensation of the presence which is done in TIme: first there is the sensation, THEN there is the, oh my; what is this? This association between speech and phenomenon is what is in question.

I think the relationship between the organism (a human, in this case) and the environment it which it lives is far too close and interrelated to come to such a conclusion. The "boundary" between the two is far more permeable than this conclusion would require--it would require it to be fixed and impermeable. We have no reason to believe that the rest of the world is so different from what we interact with every moment of our lives as to be inconceivable. — Ciceronianus the White

But philosophy is open, because everything in the world is open at basic questions. You have EVERY reason to believe the rest of the world is so different, for everything, when followed to basic assumptions, falls apart. I mean what do you do with this condition that is laid before you? One thing I do know, and it is that yielding to pragmatic phenomenological ontology takes an existential revolution, I refer to putting down the text and letting its re-interpretation of affairs to take hold. Rorty though Heidegger, Wittgenstein Kuhn and Dewey were the most important thinkers (See his Irony, Contingency and Solidarity where is most transparent), all phenomenologists of sorts. There are many great things he says, but there is one principle one that leaps to mind (which, of course, is constructed out of Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, and on and on): We MAKE the world; we do not discover it (note how this demonstrates the logical reasoning of a pragmatist's view). An act of perception is an act of apperception, and when I see my cat, there is no "mirror" in my head simply taking in the world, as if the world were simply giving itself to me, as if the cat just impossibly entered my head. Note that even on the simple materialist's model, it makes no sense at all not to acknowledge this.

As Rorty famously put it, on this very familiar model of the materialist/physicalist (regardless of how this is construed), how does anything out there get in here? Trace it: there is my cat, here is my brain thing. Proceed. You will find a reductio ad absurdum in your very first substantive premise. Put aside what SEEMS to be the case. Nothing is this.

Thanks! It's always nice to find I'm at least wandering down a path others see as well. I do intend on at least reading over the lecture on the ethics. What little I've gleamed is he seems like a secular phenomenologist. I read a stack of paper produced by Hegel and could only tell you he wants to see what God sees in order to make sense of things to humans. I think Einstein's approach of accounting for what things look like from the subjective and then explaining it from the objective was the reconciliation phenomenology required. Thanks again for the references; I'll look forward to seeing what the developed form of my objection entails. — Cheshire

I am reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit fully for the first time now. Always put this off because he requires work and time. The reason why he is important to me is because I want to understand Derrida, and this brings phenomenology into play, for one has to altogether stop thinking as an empirical scientist, and regard the thing before you as an "eidetic construct". Intuitively, one has to turn affairs around completely, and there is little desire to do this when analytic philosophers are so dominant and adamant in their rejection of existential thinking.
The extraordinary result of getting immersed in all this is one can read with understanding interpretations of the world that have foundational insights.
Einstein read Kant when he was 13, so he was no niave realist. But phenomenology has only one conclusion, and that is deconstruction. Soo interesting, Derrida is.
that Lecture on Ethics needs the Tractatus to see where gets his insistence on the division between sense and nonsense.

No. Familiar perceptions do not reveal the world as it is. "Perceiving the world as it is" is a contradiction in terms. But, they do reveal mappings from the real world onto perceptual planes. — hypericin

Begs the question: Real world??

That is the difference between brain-in-a-skull and brain-in-a-vat. BiaS can still count on its perceptual machinery being functions on reality of some sort: given the output of these functions, things about the input can be deduced. But with BiaV that link is severed completely: perception tells us nothing about reality whatsoever, where reality is the world beyond the vat. — hypericin

You are steeped in murky waters on this. To defend it, you would have explain how it is that anything out there gets in here, AT ALL, such talk about reality independent of perceptual machinery can make sense. A tall order; an impossible one, really. As to complete severance, it only makes sense if you can delineate what is being severed from what, and you can't, because all of you talk is necessarily confined to phenomena.

The true course to reality is within, where the world begins, that is, where generative springs produce emerging phenomena.

Skepticism is not contradictory - "...defend both sides..." All it states is given a proposition p, it can't be known whether p or ~p. In other words, the doubt (p/~p) can't be cleared. It definitely doesn't claim p and ~p which would be to "...defend both sides..." I can't stress this enough. — TheMadFool

I will grant you that in the end what becomes evident is a kind of skepticism, but the philosophical thrust of it all depends on the arguments and how they work out in a positive thesis. Scientific materialism, assumptions about what is there independently of cognitive, affective, pragmatic systems, make no sense at all. Such a strong statement carries the matter far beyond the wishy washy skepticism of doubt as a deterrent to belief. Demonstrate that p is nonsense, then one does not simply become skeptical of p. One dismisses p altogether.

That's only true if you're certain that there's no objective reality. That is a luxury we can't afford. — TheMadFool

But then what do you mean by objective reality? This is the rub. Phenomenologists do not deny objective reality, they simply redefine it, for this is a philosophical concept, and is at issue at this level of analysis.

I believe that some philosophers were of the opinion that sensible propositions are those that can be verified by which I suppose they meant the proposition should be amenable to testing. — TheMadFool

But then, what is it to test? This is a philosophical question. Consider that one tests what stands before one, some thing of event. What are these at the level of basic assumptions? This is not a scientist's question, but one of science's presuppositions. Neil Degrasse Tyson has no insights to offer as a physicist, and the standard scientist's assumptions are out the window. they don't (typically) step outside their world to discuss questions like, What does it mean to call an object real at all? The ones that do end up speaking nonsense. (Keep in mind that someone like Daniel Dennett is not a naive realist. He simply doesn't read phenomenology, and in this he IS naive).
So, when it comes to brains in vats and the epistemic issues it raises, the matter turns decidedly against naïve realism, and does not preserve its standing at all, standing that would allow, well, doxastic resistance at all. It is relegated to the bin of moribund terminology, like a flat earth or cranial phrenology.

As I said, once a proposition is formulated, it's either true/false. Not nonsense! — TheMadFool

Not propositions and logical validity. Looking for a way to epistemically connect P to S is nonsense if P is not analyzable as a singular entity. P's ontological status is bound to justification, that is, what it is cannot be removed from what it means to know it.

There's your problem: "out there" vs "in here". — Banno

How so?

So that's what Pragmatists think!

I was under the impression that Dewey generally wasn't inclined to accept that there's an "out there" and an "in here." So, I think it's inappropriate even to refer to an "external world" in his view. We (including our minds) are parts of the same world, and our experience the result of our existing as a living organism in an environment and interacting with it. He's neither a realist nor an anti-realist as I understand him. I don't think he ever denied the existence of other components of the world. The "out there" and the "in here" merge as part of the manner in which we live in the same world, to put it very simply. There's no question of not knowing what's "out there" as a general proposition, i.e. it doesn't arise in general, though it may in particular.

That is in any case my interpretation of Dewey.

We interact with the rest of the world as we all do and have always done regardless of metaphysical concerns we claim to have. — Ciceronianus the White

Pragmatist epistemology is, well, pragmatic, so my "knowledge" relationship with the world is pragmatic. What is it that I know? I know pragmatics, not objects and there outer presence, but the pragmatics binds me to them. I don't "know" in any other way but the forward looking nature of the relationship. Walking down the street, my knowing all things around me is reduced to a pragmatic familiarity as to what they DO, like the sidewalk giving required support for each step and everything else duly anticipated. Pragmatism is a temporal epistemic theory about what things do when encountered. No metaphysics regarding some occult knowledge of things themselves.
Referring to an external world is perfectly fine. It is only at the level of basic questions that the nature of one's knowledge relationship is revealed. The world doesn't change in its natural relationships. One still walks and talks very naturally about the world out there, but ask philosophical question about what underlies all this, and there is no "out" or "in" at all. These are merely pragmatic terms that work. they have no import beyond this.
So I think this agrees with what you are saying. the real and the anti-real yield to this final reduction: everything is known by it forward looking effects. What is nitro? Well, take some, throw it against a wall with a certain force, observe. That is "what" it is. The "what" is thus no more than the "what it does".

This may seem innocuous enough, but then, consider: when you leave a room, and take all possible experience generating faculties with you, what is left behind is by no means a room, or anything else you think of. Most find such thinking impossible.

Well, you have a point but the error in judgment you commit is that now you've swung to the other extreme - to believing in subjectivity. This is not the intent/aim/goal of skepticism (Cartesian & Harmanian). What Descartes and Harman want to accomplish is to only, I repeat only, sow the seed of doubt in the garden of epistemology. This seed of uncertainty has germinated and is now a healthy (dose of skepticism) plant in full bloom but...it in no way diminshes the value of the other flowers (knowledge) that it grows alongside. If it does anything, it makes us unsure as to whether the flowers present are real or fake. That's not a bad thing if you take the time to realize artificial flowers are so well-made that it's impossible to distinguish them from real ones. If so, does it matter subjective or objective? They're identical insofar as our ability to tell which. — TheMadFool

Well, planting seeds of doubt is a far cry from what is being defended here. Look, if it were a seed of doubt "merely" then you would have recourse to to defend both sides with some margin of credibility. But there is none here. Phenomenology is the only wheel that rolls. That is, unless you can make the case for its opposition. But this simply isn't possible, and there is not an analytic philosopher worth his/her ink that will even try. Kant was never refuted only ignored, after a century of post Kantian fixation. they just gave up, took Wittgenstein seriously when he drew the line between sensible and nonsensible propositions, and proceeded with the assumption that empirical science is the best we can do, and epistemic issues can go hang. Just look at those absurd Gettier problems: they care nothing for P being a nonsense term, and simply proceed as if all were well.
As to subjectivity: all apparent dichotomies sustain and are not challenged, as long as the analysis doesn't attempt to make a claim about basic questions. At this level, subjective and objective lose their meanings, though talk sometimes suggests otherwise.

It gets complicated, and phenomenologists vary. I read, lately, the French theological post moderns like Michel Henry and Jean luc Marion, and Levinas, and others. Massively interesting stuff, but the old vocabulary of subjective/objective is replaced by other terms altogether.

The pain itself probably is not guessing since we seem to experience it. The guessing seems to come into it when we are trying to explain how contact with the sharp glass translates itself into the sensation of pain, who or what it is that perceives and interprets it and why, etc.

As the way we perceive things tends to change from one individual to another, and from situation to situation, at least some of it seems to be subjective. — Apollodorus

I would remove "probably" above, agree with the idea that the "guessing" lies with the explaining, but then to say "some of it" seems to be subjective cancels the progress made in the statement. the explaining is interpretative, and it is here, when we talk, we complicate what is simple. Pain is simple as pain, but open your mouth about it, and you have to explain the context in which the event is thereby placed, and what is immediate and unquestioned now becomes bound to language and context. The pain that is there speaks very clearly as an injunction NOT to bring this into the world. This I argue, is a nonlinguistic phenomenon that "speaks".

Not sure what "epistemically opaque" means. How is that different from our brains? — T Clark

Take, say, a Hubble mirror as a model for perfect transparency (just a model of something "passing through" with near perfect accuracy. Then there is opacity: a piece of granite? A brick? Anyway. Now ask, regarding an object's "passing through" to meet and inquiring brain-thing, how opaque or transparent is the brain as a receiver of the object as it is, unmodified, undistorted; how epistemically transparent of opaque is this brain? Of course, it is absolutely opaque, and one has no more "knowledge" of the object than a dented car fender has of the offending guard rail.

This doesn't seem right to me. What's the big mystery about getting stuff from out there in here? We are wired to the outside. Signals come down the wires. Our nervous and other systems process the signals. That processing is called "the mind." We send signals back. — T Clark

the big mystery is this: outside?? Talk about an outside implies one has the means to affirm what is not inside. Take a typical physicalist reductive position and say thought is reducible to brain activity. But how is it that "brain activity" is itself anything but brain activity? The "real" brain is supposed to be the truly real, yet one never gets "out" of the perceptual matrix to affirm it. One is always, already in that which is supposed to be reduced to something else.
I know, we witness things as if we know, but this knowledge's outside/insideness can never be anything but inside; therefore, there is no inside/outside at this level of analysis.

I agree with this. The idea of objective reality can be really useful, but it's not true. Or false for that matter. That's how metaphysics works. — T Clark

Unless the idea of objectivity is also turned on its head: What does this mean if not agreement, and what gives itself to agreement better than the immediacy of what is directly apprehended. As an empirical scientist, I agree that the sun has a greater mass than our moon, this is an evolved, historical idea, a thing of "parts," that is, analyzable. Prior to it becoming a scientific term, it is a phenomenological one, reductive to sensate intuitions, thoughts and a long history of scientific "revolutions" (Kuhn), and, as Kuhn tells us further, there is no reason to think these present theories along these lines will continue as they are, after all, nothing ever has.
What is objective, then? The matter turns to certainty, and degrees thereof. Let us now say the sun is best defined as a phenomenological aggregate of predicatively formed affairs (Husserl) which are witnessed, at the very basic level, as phenomena, first, logically prior to anything being taken up in an empirical theory. Science, of course, continues its course, but at the level of basic questions and assumptions, the entire business is turned on its head.

Suffering is the challenge we as a species need to go through to weed out the weak and make sure only the strongest survive. The purpose evolution. — SteveMinjares

No, rather emphatically. Evolution is not a purposive theory, and there is no guiding hand in nature pushing for the survival of the fittest. Random mutation of genes has no purpose.

So we don’t have to do the dirty task ourselves nature does it herself and goes through the process of elimination. This is not by societies choice but by design by evolution and nature to give the human race the greatest chance of survival. — SteveMinjares

Nature has no such design. You should stop thinking like this. It is an anthropomorphizing of nature.

Is the ego of humans to believe we don’t abide by the same rules that of the other creatures of this Earth.

Yes it hurts, and yes it sucks but it been working for millions of years so who are we to question it.

Yes people will suffer others will experience the heartache of witnessing such things but by each passing event that happen the next Generation becomes better, stronger and wiser.

Is the individual that disapproves this cause they desire a easier alternative. — SteveMinjares

This is all too familiar and beneath the level of inquiry presented here.

Oh, they've been given far more than their due, I would think. For good or ill, we're part of the world just like everything else--even that little homunculus in our head some people assume exists. — Ciceronianus the White

But this ignores that issue at hand altogether. If you hold a materialist of physicalist view (or some convoluted compromise about these), then pray tell, how does anything out there get in here? this is a simple question, and certainly not one that invokes scientific responses. It is a prescience question that goes to the presuppositions of science, not science itself.
And keep in mind, if you are a pragmatist, then you do not hold the metaphysical view that there is some knowable stuff out there.
It seems such a thing has been given more than its due because it remains an issue after all the theoretical smoke has cleared. Analytic philosophers typically don't take it seriously as they don't read phenomenology. As a result, they go no where, but very slowly. It is a burned out approach.

I think that the 'out there' being 'in there' in the brain is probably captured in the idea, which goes back to Plato, of the microcosm and the macroscosm. The brain is so complex as the neuroscientists show, and if there are deficits, it affects the whole wiring, and psychedelics can create transformations, as suggested by Huxley's 'Doors of Perception'. But, we cannot step outside of our brains to perceive true objective reality, as suggested by Nagel in 'The View From Nowhere'. — Jack Cummins

How does one ever affirm a "true objective reality" is has not encountered such a thing to even talk about? this becomes an entirely metaphysical affair, and the only direction there to address inquiry that remains open when doors are closed to some "exterior" affirmation, is toward interiority. This "outwardness" is now not even speakable, a nonsense term, say some (Rorty, e.g.) It is not nowhere at all, but being somewhere has undergone a dramatic shift on the order of a Copernican revolution.

I see no difference between what you say here and what Descartes and Gilbert Harman are implying with their thought experiments. The idea is to rattle the cage of dogmatists (?) - grasp them by their arms firmly and shake them hard till the come to their senses or simply slap them across their faces until they come to the realization that certainty is the aporia in the sense that it's impossible.

Am I sure? you might ask. Exactly, I would reply! The answer is the question! — TheMadFool

But Descartes escaped uncertainty with God. And it is not the rattling of a cage, as I see it. It is a revolution of the way we see the world. Science's assumptions about an independent and knowable exterior world is now completely untenable. Phenomena are now the true epistemic foundation, and so inquiring eyes turn here. The subjective world, largely ignored by empirical science, is now front and center, and meaning becomes first philosophy.

Maybe it's time to change the vat. Or its contents, as the case may be — Apollodorus

Genetic engineering?

Or then, maybe it's time to realize it is not a vat or a brain at all. And in doing so, an awareness of existence as such creeps forward, not knowing what to affirm anymore, but clear that talk about brains in vats is itself a constructed idea, and the more language is given authority to give the world to paragraphs and theses, the deeper fall into the same error that our common categories that inform s about what it means to be here are the closest we can get to understanding the world.

After all, it is the proposition that holds reality in place, that fixates one's gaze.

Correct. When it comes to things like consciousness, how it operates, and how it produces cognition, perception, experience, etc. it is all guess work. — Apollodorus

It is guesswork? A bare phenomenological encounter is not this. Step barefooted on sharp glass, this is not guessing there is pain (putting aside Derrida, unless you don't want to. I mean, deconstruction has its limitation in metaethics). The "how" of things is never forthcoming at the level of basic assumptions as one comes face to face with the "what" of things, the "givenness" of things.
Anyway, it is at the level of acknowledging the world, the phenemenological level, where indeterminacy narrows and qualitative experience steps forward, that the guesswork becomes, not more pronounced, but less so, for the phenomenon is closer, perhaps even absolute.

The brain in a vat is simply Descartes' deus deceptor given a modern sci-fi makeover. The point seems to be everything could be an illusion. In Descartes' gedanken experiment, the only certain knowledge is the self as a thinker, thinking thoughts. In the brain in a vat scenario, the "self as a thinker" is the brain. Come to think of, Gilbert Harman (the originator of the brain in a vat thought experiment) must've wanted to convey that such a horrific possibility remains alive even if physicalism were true. — TheMadFool

Not quite. Not that everything could be an illusion at all, not even in the running, not withstanding what analytic theorists say. Talk about illusions implies talk about what is not an illusion, for there can only be the one with the other. So from where comes the basis for something Other than what is there, in experience? Well, there is no basis, for anything you can imagine is purely phenomenological. It's not as if one can reach beyond phenomena into a "real" world, affirm what it is, then return with a thesis about illusions and reality.
Descartes opened to door to aporia, but did not walk through, cheated, as it were, his way out of the very doubt he posited. But here, we are more genuine to the assumption, and it is not merely doubt anymore; it is a theoretical impossibility to establish foundational knowledge of something outside the phenomenological world.

Morality is a form of social survival, humans depend on people to survive. And morality is a set of rules you need to follow to benefit from the community protection and care. You don’t follow the social rules you get exiled and you will have to find another community that thinks like you. Hopefully, you can benefit from there protection and care.

These moral rules is to prevent chaos, distress or presenting a threat to a community. Both physically and emotionally.

People tend to forget that the origin of morality comes from evolution and it serves an almost technical purpose also. Is not just all religious or political and such.

Morality was meant to be a set of rules to help the group corporate together to fend off threats and predators. Maximizing the greatest chance for survival.

But as we evolved as a civilization it became more complex. That emotional transgression coming from our peers became the predator.

Morality became almost like a filter to weed the undesirables out.

Morality is not just about character. Is a biological evolutionary mechanism to help humanity survive challenges we may face. — SteveMinjares

Perhaps all this is true. But why should one do what is part of an evolutionary mechanism? Preservation of the species? Is this what you tell someone regarding the meaning of their suffering? As the plague blackens the finger tips and boils cover the body, we say, well, alas, this suffering is conducive to survival and reproduction! There, you have it?
You see the absurdity of explanations like this? The real questions in ethics go to more fundamental level, as with Why are we born to suffer and die at all? why does existence throw us into suffering at all as a condition for survival at all?

How does he account for these statements if he can't say anything? I suppose that comes up at some point. Observing a deficit is something if I can speak about it. I used to have the same intuitive opinion concerning ethics, but I've been talking about it for a week, so something is clearly there; strange we would hold something in such high regard and not manage to attach words to it. I might wait and see if the world produces a genius that writes more readable books. Thank you for the recommendations. — Cheshire

Right at the outset, he makes that cryptic statement about passing over in silence that which cannot be spoken. There is a lot written about your objection, and I mean a lot! Recently, I have been reaading Michel Henry and Jean luc Marion, and Jean luc Nanci and the theological turn of phenomenology, putting a great deal of emphasis on Husserl. Husserl's phenomenological reduction suspends judgment to allow the world to become phenomenologically clear. Was Wittgenstein a phenomenologist? Maybe.

I'm going to have to reread this section several times to understand exactly what information you intend for me to possess. I haven't spent enough time reading Wittgenstein, so his communication style which is often adopted is very difficult for me. I do intend on rereading and editing this bit, but any clarifications or simplifications that could be made even tentatively would aid in my understanding of your position on the matter. I believe you are saying that ethical matters are often matters of reality even though they are subject to entanglement with less well grounded notions. — Cheshire

you may want to read his short Lecture on Ethics, which is I think available online. Then the Tractatus. He typically would refuse to talk about ethical foundations because he was convinced it was nonsense to do so, and this was because language and logic are simply not able to speak about it, for value is there, like qualia, like a pure phenomenon, a presence, and there is nothing one can say, because, reading the Tractatus, there is nothing observable about the "Good". The ethical Good is likely the weirdest thing that can be understood: Just ask yourself as you apply the lighted match to your finger, What IS it that makes this pain Bad?? It is not like a fact of the world, though there are many factuall things to say about it. After all facts have been exhaustively accounted for (see the Lecture on ethics' Big Book of omniscience) there is something unaccounted, which is the badness of the pain. We don't really observe the pain's badness, yet it is by parsecs that most salient feature of the event.
This Good Wittgenstein called divinity. Unspeakable, though; and the implications of the Good issuing from the "fabric of the world" are staggering. The world IS ethical, more so than any fact.

The idea that value and that suffering is a type of assault on value is becoming significant to my current working model. If this isn't the case then I'll have to rethink quite a bit to account for the error. — Cheshire

Not that suffering is an assault on value. Rather, suffering a simply a general notion that refers to kinds of value: I value not having double pneumonia. Why? Because it is a painful affair. Whatever model you have in mind regarding moral objectivity, this idea of objectivity is meaningful weighed against whatever subjectivity is, and so you have to look to both. Subjectivity in ethical theory attempts show that there is nothing in ethical prepositions that is like unproblematic cases of objectivity, like the density of iron being greater than that of mica, or the moon being closer to Earth than the sun. What makes these objective statements? Their truth is verifiable consistently by competent observers in a system of thought and experience. The scientific method, where verification or falsification rest with assumptions about the world and its facts or states of affairs. Note that science does not care for philosophical questions regarding the validity of these assumptions. Ask Neil Degrasse Tyson where the object called the sun gets its verification as an object at all, and he will simple dismiss such a thing. But it is here that ethics has its most salient presence, that is, at the level of inquiry beneath where science has its interests, and here is where phenomenology asserts itself: the level of presence as such, and all "naturalistic" knowledge is suspended and attention is put firmly upon the "given" only. Value as the palpable encounter with pain or pleasure "observed" as phenomena and not as interpretatively processed meaning reveals something Cartesian, that is, undoubtable, absolute.

Once here, the matter turns toward the nature of presence, rather than constructed propositions. This is where things get very interesting.

The observation that harm came to a store of value. It does seem to suggest that we can act on the world in a way that carries some objective element apart from the variance that arises. And that an act can be judged apart from the measure of suffering entailed. The paintings did not suffer. Which isolates a major common thread in known moral theories. The scientific approach asks if there is a better test or way to realize more informative results. You say it's "coercive", but I'm not sure in which direction you mean. — Cheshire

An act can be judged apart from the measure of suffering involved, but I certainly don't think this is an ethical judgment. A pragmatic judgment works like this, the kind that ignores suffering for some higher end, that is, utility. But even here in this contingent world of utility, attention must come to rest on actual value as the point of it all, whatever one has in mind.
I think it is absurd to think about things having value at all apart from what is attributed to them in a conscious act.
As to the scientist, well, all science begins with what is there, at hand. A geologist first has the object to be analyzed, then there is the classificatory work, techniques for measurement are called in, more classificatory work, etc., but it all begins with observation. So: observe an ethical case and give it its classificatory due: judgment is there, contradiction in principles, the rational end of assessing matters; then there is the actuality: the phenomenon of some pain or pleasure, some experience that feels good or bad in a palpable way, not discursively arrived at, but considered as an intuitive apprehension of the world.
the former rational end is itself ethically arbitrary. As Hume put it, reason would just as soon eradicate humankind altogether, for it is just an empty vessel. The ethical nature of ethics comes from the world. Forget about inner and outer conditions, for here we are looking exclusively at the phenomenon of suffering and joy and it doesn't matter if it is a brain "doing" this. It is there, period, like a typhoon is there, or a stone or this cup on the table. It's "thereness" is not at issue and it is not a thoughtful construct or an interpretatively fluid event. Its is absolute, its presence. AND, it carries by virtue of its own nature the the entire weight of the ethical import of the matter at hand. It doesn't matter if it is a trivial matter or one deeply important, the decisive presence of palpable value make ethics what it is foundationally.
Coercive because one is forced to acknowledge pain and pleasure for what they are. Of course, again, once this distributed in the world of entanglements, that are ethically arbitrary, then judgment gets confused, but our understanding of how value is coercive comes through in cases where entanglements do not obscure occlude: radical affairs, like having someone put a lighted match to your finger. The good sceintist asks, what IS this? as a phenomenon, as a phenomenologically reduced event (see Hsserl's epoche). It classification is not IN the interpretative constructs we could bring to bear. It is outside these. this is why Wittgenstein refused to talk about value, for as concepts, ethical ideas are nonsense as they do not tell what things ARE.

I agree with the implications. There would technically never be a case of doing the right thing when no one is watching and instant karma might have some basis. — Cheshire

Instant karma? Someone watching? These are metaphysical I cannot support because I don't understand where they get their basis for belief. I try to deal only with what appear there, before me, in my midst, and what this means. Pain and suffering, pleasure and joy: these are very real, more real, I would argue, than any ontological theory that attempts to reduce what is real to something familiar, like a physicist's theory. In fact, this latter has no basis at all at the level of basic questions, while aesthetic/ethical value events taken phenomenologically are absolutes (though calling them absolutes places them squarely in language and then we have to deal with Derrida).
If, as I claim, all ethical matters are grounded in the Real, issuing from the fabric of the universe (as Moses' tablets issued from God's hand), then our ethical acts are absolutely coercive. Alas, given the embeddedness of ethics in ethically arbitrary conditions, our acts will never be perfectly right, whatever that means. But we are bound, as Mill put it, to do no harm and to pursue the good of others, notwithstanding the difficulty in conceiving what this is.

No. Moral realism, for it to be consequent moral realism, needs to be held a priori, in an axiomatic manner. The moment one ventures into finding justifications, one has left the zone of certainty. — baker

Justification here in intrinsic to the value affair. It is non contingently determined and apriori, but the apriority is not logical, but is apodictic all the same. It is, to use Hegel's vocabulary, borrowed by Sartre, where essence and existence are the same, beyond inquiry, meaning to ask where the foundational prima facie authority comes from in the injunction not to make a turn on the rack or apply a flame to living flesh is to make an appeal to the nature of the pain itself. Of course, it CAN be spoken, conceptualized, contextualized to no end, but this brings conditions of contingency that are ethically arbitrary, as justifying the rack in the deterrence of criminal behavior.

The idea was to establish objective morality. If the answers are different, then morality is not from the act but rather a subjective notion of the observer. The same willful act of destruction of the same object should in theory produce the same moral judgement. Or not. An attempt at an inquiry. — Cheshire

No, this "same moral judgment" is not requited at all, and indeed, such an agreement between is never a real agreement (this is a Quine/Derrida position). All that needs to be demonstrated is that there is a noncontingent part of the essential ethical affair. Just this. You're not going to get people to agree on the radically diverging and different entanglements ! These are impossible to pin down and are, in themselves, ethically arbitrary "facts" of a particular case. Such facts are massively entangled in unique particularities of each person, each case, each culture or community. This lack of agreement is inevitable and it is foolish to think otherwise. However, what is agreed upon is the phenomenological analysis: put aside all factual entanglements and the residual value is not disputed, is cognitively coercive.

It is not about judgments' differences at all. it is rather that disagreements arise out of ethically arbitrary conditions, like the fact that I borrowed the ax, I feel the obligation to return it and this conflicts with my suspicion that were I to do so it could lead to a terrible crime. One can ask further into such an affair, get more facts, find where justification for belief is grounded or not, examine the many, many possible relevant facts, psychological or otherwise, and it is HERE where disagreement emerges: in the indistinctness of the way the case is to interpreted. But logically beneath this, there is the assumption that the crime itself would be BAD, and it would be bad because there is some value at risk, in play, to be won or lost, and it is this value that is beyond inquiry.

I don't really disagree. Rather I think yours is incomplete. Lacking is an account of judgment. The nervous system may itself recoil, but it recoils from the experience itself. And even if judgment judges an experience, that alone doesn't qualify future action.
It's as if you had discovered reaction. But ethics is about choices of action. How do you bridge the two? — tim wood

It is not a theory of judgment, though there would be no ethical judgment without ethics, and there is no ethics without value experiences. Moral realism simply says that there is in the heart of ethics something that is not constructed out of language, something that is not exhaustively accounted for the in meanings that history has brought forth which we find ourselves always already IN when we raise a question at all. IF it can be established that there is in the essence of ethics that which is not conceptually produced, as ideas being concepts are, but is first there, prior to the logicality, and to the taking up the world AS an eidetic phenomenon, something that is done by the world rather than constructed INTO the world, then we have a single basis for the claim of moral realism. Of course again, if moral realism, in the qualified way I defend it, is true, then our moral judgments, all of them, are qualifiedly "real", or absolute. This does not at all mean that judgments are no longer relative; it simply means that when a relative judgment, like seeing an elongated neck in certain tribal conditions in Thailand as Good, is made, it is foundationally part and parcel of the real itself, an absolute, if you will (though this is a sticky wicket, for when we actually SAY this, we are certainly bound to language's contingency as the saying is a construct. The Real is assumed to be Other than this; assumed to be an Other than what language can say.).

"Insofar as Da-sein temporalizes itself with regard to its being it is the world... The world is neither objectively present nor at hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality.. If no Da-sein exists, no world is 'there' either." Heidegger, 1927 — Gregory

It is a powerful position, but, speaking of Heidegger, is it defensible?: Is there no grounding for dasein that is not dasein? That is, in t he phenomenological landscape of my Being, there is the reduction that allows for H's phenomenological ontology. The question is, What do we find in the world after the reduction has done its job entirely? Is there no residual "presence" (Derrida called it the transcendental signifier)?
I think phenomenological reduction leads to the impossible, while the impossible is "embedded" in the world. To use Heidegger's critical words against Husserl: An examination of a reduced world reveals that we all "walk on water"; that the foundation of Being is metaphysics that literally paradoxically manifest, literally manifest, and even mysteriously and palpably manifest.

1. Is it Morally wrong to destroy a beautiful painting?
2. What if no one would have ever seen it?
3. What if you painted it? — Cheshire

Well......if no one has ever seen it, there is no beauty. We observers are not passive receivers of some beauty that is "out there". What, did you actually think this to be the case? Not only does beauty vanish in an unobserved world (an impossible thing to even imagine, really), but reason and meaning vanishes as well.

Pain & suffering, their antipodes, joy & happiness, are the core elements of some moral theories. They constitute the grounds, I now realize, for the feeling/thought that something's wrong! (with the world) - either the mere fact that there's suffering or the disproportionate amount of suffering prompts us to feel/think that way. It ought to be different - this single sentence encapsulates the moral universe! — TheMadFool

Not that these are merely core elements of some theories. These are essential elements to any possible ethical theory. No such elements, then no ethics. The moral realism here arises out of the nature of the ethical condition itself; it is self realizing, and not a derivative of some other purpose or point. It is presupposed by all purposes one can imagine. Good at this level of analysis is Good simpliciter. A bad is bad simpliciter. The pain from the spear issues as a generative foundation for ethical possibility.

I don't mind agreeing that folks don't want to be stabbed in the kidney with a spear. How does that then arise to anything ethical? — tim wood

Well, what makes something ethical at all? It is the possibility of hedonic consequences (hedonic here making no distinction between, say, music and macaroni, the former being perhaps ethereal, sublime, while the latter appetitive. Good is good). Look, no hedonic effect, no ethics. It doesn't have to as dramatic as a spear in the kidney; it can be anything, really, an interest, a vague sensitivity, whatever. This is the engine that drives ethics: that which is at stake, at risk, in the balance which someone (some animal?) cares about.
So all attention goes to this PRIOR to any analysis of, say, competing obligations, puzzling conditions, etc. Prior because this is a METAethical analysis, an attempt to determine what the infamous good is, and well as the bad.

All I have to say about metaethics, something that's close to my heart, is the feeling, ,something's wrong! - nature, life, people are like this but they should be like that! You get the idea. — TheMadFool

The issue, then, goes to what it is that runs the argument, "it shouldn't be like that." Why not? The answer then goes to an experience that is perceived in some way to be uncomfortable, distasteful, horrible, and the rest. Here, we have arrived: no need to argue about whether this can be universalized. It already is, for we should not ask if the matter is relativized to one, single agency of suffering, just wht the matter IS upon analysis. We are not here concerned with how one should behave as a matter of rule and principle, for such things are entangled with morally arbitrary conditions, facts.

We are only concerned with a phenomenological analysis of the pain there, at hand, occurrent. What IS that? is the question. It is not constructed, like a concept that fits ONTO the world; it IS the world doing, if you will, this to me: this thirst, hunger, this misery, joy, thrill, adn so on.

It's not possible to justify moral realism while being a consequent moral realist. — baker

Enigmatic thing to say. Actions have consequences and the argument here goes to an analysis of that which is at stake in the consequence. Therein, in the anticipated gratification or affliction, lies the real.

Perhaps the intersection of concrete and abstract. You are attuning yourself to hear the concrete. Which is impossible because neither concrete nor abstract exist purely in themselves but must be somehow a mixture.

We both see the same tree - or so we're persuaded. But never ever do we perceive the same tree. Only in the abstract and by agreement can we come to that conclusion. Even pain, it would seem, requires an I to say, "I hurt."

But there seems no reasonable argument against the proposition that it's the same tree we're both admiring, on which we agree. And so it seems there are equally well-founded ethical imperatives. But they would seem to require at least that same level agreement. Thus never anything quite pure in itself, and subject to those who will not or cannot agree. The argument can go on from here. — tim wood

I would not defend the idea according to the way you frame it. It is not a matter of concreteness versus abstractness. In every ethical affair there is in the balance some object of care. An emotional state, a deprivation or gratification of some kind, something measured on the hedonic scales such that "hedonic" simply refers to some valuation of something. Getting caught up in the object characterization of what feeling good or bad is not the point.
Then, as to agreement, there is no issue made of it here, that is, the power to infer that others experience what we do. The assumption is in place that we do sufficiently well enough that we can talk about an affair with the confidence that we are talking about roughly the same thing; a spear in the kidney, for example. Painful. Of course, it is clear that we have altogether private experiences, I argue, given that there is simply no way at all that one can be privy to another's world as one is aware of one's own. Not possible (unless you think we are "connected" spiritually??) Our agreement rests with the way language works so well in our correspondences given the assumption that things are roughly the same, with obvious differences (e.g., Einstein and I may agree on our arthritis symptoms, but I cannot "know" his world of mathematical and intuitive genius).
No, here the issue lies with whether language's independence from its objects makes it so the no matter what we say about trees and clouds and anything else, we can never leave the "play" of vocabulary. The big crisis of deconstruction is about this inability of language to make any essential connection with what is NOT language. My position is that in ethics, there is an injunction to do or not to do that precedes language: that spear in my kidney tells me, "this hurts. Don't bring this into the world." You see, the suffering itself makes this injunction, though language gets carried away interpretatively. I "say" it hurts, I put this into propositional form and my words carry no import beyond the signifiers, the words, spoken or written. And if this were something value-neutral (if there is such a thing) like the color red, then I would be in Derrida's world that never apprehends the "present". Ethical matters ARE immediate in their value-at-stake as the value is immediately and absolutely intuited.

If you are going to relativize to individual historical agencies then the hedonism

As you can see, this is a translation of a descriptive declarative sentence structure that is describing the way reality is in an objective way, into a descriptive declarative sentence structure that is describing the way reality is perceived and evaluated in a subjective way. It is nonetheless a factual statement about the psychological states of the individual subject the statement is indexed to. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

But is this not merely dismissive of the evaluative dimension? As if it presented no qualitatively distinct feature?

The problem is whether or not the grammatical subject of the statement accurately represents the philosophical subject that is indexed to grammatical predicate. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Isn't the same true for "the grass is green"? The moment you lift a predicative finger you are already "misrepresenting" the actuality for predication is not "out there" in the grass nor in the moral agent. But once you think like this, you "relativize" all predication to a language event, and the philosophical subject is always already (to borrow a term) a grammatical subject.
This is why I claim the only way to deal with metaethics is phenomenologically. Then the grammatical or, eidetic subject (putting aside transcendental egos and the like), is deemed part of the existential actuality of the philosophical subject.

This is because the philosophical subject does not maintain fixed physiological or psychological states between phenomenological frames of reference which means that the identity of the philosophical subject must necessarily change between phenomenological frames of reference over the philosophical subjects composite history. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Of course. This is Heraclitus' world, not Parmenides'. Phenomenological frames of reference are dynamic temporal unities, but then, this makes drawing boundaries arbitrary: what is the measure of a unity in a moral regard for something? I already alluded to this earlier in my calling the world unpinnable. But it seems to be a real problem: You hold that metaethical actualities are found in the determinate moment of thought, feeling, attitude, this is not sustainable in any definite way. Right now in my occurrent frame of dispositions to make moral judgments, I don't think I should return an ax I borrowed to its owner because he is having a mental collapse. But this occurrent state is conflicted, unresolved, and my judgment is fluctuating. This is a metaethical foundation of the ethical good?

I'm not sure that it is possible to do so on this logic. I am afraid that such is not a requisite capability and that the truth may be that we cannot. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Pain? So morality is reducible to a hedonistic unit representing negative utility? But, pain is also subjective. Some people associate the same stimuli that others report as pain, but as pleasure. Think of the masochist. Pain seems to be just as arbitrary and mind-dependent as any other psychological state. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

You have arrived at what I would call the radically qualified locus of ethical, or any, judgment. But where is the "ought" in this account? I mean, talk about attitudes and beliefs obviously does not simply bear upon but constitute ethical judgment, granted, but this is not foundational for it lacks the elusive ethical oughts and shoulds, apparently assuming that these have no reality to consider, and that a person's dispositions to have a moral regard for some possibility exhausts the ontology of ethics.

But what of value? That is, in an occurrent ethical disposition toward X, how is this a distinctly ethical affair? A passionate regard for doing or not doing something needs its counterpart in the object of what is being decided, and this goes to the thousand natural shocks the flesh and the mind is heir to, as well as its various and sundry blisses, interests, fascinations and so forth. The "real time" ouches and thrills, from the searing pains to the glorious love affairs: without these, no ethics, without that-which-is-the-object-of-my-desire, no desire, no caring. Not hedonics, but meta-hedonics, as once an affair is stripped of its incidentals, there remains the (awkwardly put) ethical "badness" of a finger exposed to flame; a non natural quality unaccounted for once the mereological parts you underscore are suspended, analytically set aside, that is.

Some people care a lot. If you don't, then I don't understand where you're coming from. I may be misunderstanding you entirely. — fishfry

The question is what is real about religion, rather than what is just some cultural inheritance, constructed, invented, like Christmas or Hanukkah. What people care about is not the point because mostly you will find instantiations of something more basic. We have our institutions and we pretend they are real, but Genera Motors is not real, nor is the seat of the presidency. What I mean by real is primordial, originary: something there antecedent to these things that gave rise to their existence. We form governments to organize our social and economic affairs, you could say. But even here one can ask, What are economic affairs? and then more basic questions would follow. Relgion has this underpinning and if we are to answer the question about religious belief we first have to understand it at the level of basic questions.

Yes ok. Not following your point though. I acknowledge the power of religious and spiritual belief in the history of humanity. That doesn't prove God exists, only that religious belief does. God is neither and answer nor not an answer to the question of suffering. — fishfry

But when we say 'God' is this religious concept really just reducible to the metaphysical concept churches and their theologies invented? Omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence? The creator of all things, who conceives, designs, thinks, anticipates, intends, etc. just like we do? Or is that just a bunch of hooey? I think the latter. People pretty much put this all together as a kind of best guess, or a defense mechanism, or an attempt to hold power (as Foucault would have it). I dismiss this as just bad metaphysics and move on.
Suffering is at the foundation of the essence of religion; it is a foundational cause that figures into the human situation that compels us to behold the world and ask questions. We are thrown into this world to suffer. Why? Once we become a bit savvy about the matter, we allow our cultural heritage to be silent and allow the world to speak plainly, and the world tells us that the aesthetic, ethical dimension of our existence demands resolution and consummation. Of course, you can disagree with this, but it IS where meaningful talk about God begins.

Ok. I said I'm agnostic, and you call that position vacuous. I don't understand your reasoning. How could I know or not know if God exists? — fishfry

What does the question even mean if God has not been properly explored as a meaningful term? Are you agnostic about a historical contrivance?

I'm agnostic on the entire matter. I don't understand why you find this position vacuous. Am I compelled to choose a side between the Pope and Richard Dawkins? The Pope seems like a nicer guy, I'll give him that. — fishfry

Richard Dawkins is a scientist. He is not concerned about philosophy, regardless of what he or others might say, for he does not deal in basic questions. Basic questions are those that are presupposed by science.

You could substitute a house cat if you prefer. Cats most definitely have sophisticated mental states. They have dreams, for one thing. That I assume must indicate a fairly high order of mentation.

I knew my reference to Darwin was a mistake. And I immediately qualified it by saying I have some interest in and perhaps sympathy for the position of the Darwin skeptics. I name-checked a couple. No use, the rhetorical damage was done.

I wrote an entire post explaining my position that since Newton combined great science with deep belief in God, that I found no contradiction in doing science and then saying, "It's amazing that God created all these interesting natural laws, as well as the world." I'm perfectly ok with that.

I would ask you to go back and re-read what I actually wrote, and don't be triggered by the word Darwin. Be honest with me. Would a hard-core scientism type name-drop Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer? The fact that I know who they are should tell you that I have a more open mind and broader interests than you think I do. — fishfry

But Meyer is a scientist/philosopher and talk about intelligent design and the like is talk about science. But then, no matter, for it is not science, the scientific method that is, that is in question, and that would be impossble (for to think at all is a performance of just this method), but what is being singled out for "observation". Writing up a proof for the existence of God based on observations of the complexity and functions of affairs in the natural world is not going to yield a proof of God, for ideas like designer and creator are non essential features, do not belong to the essence, if you will, of the idea of God.
One has to be clear at the outset what it is that one is trying to confirm, and it is certainly not God the creator. This is not what an proper analytic of God gives us.

Take God like any other object for analysis and look to its parts. and here we find a vast body of historical, scriptural, mythical narratives. We also find metaphysics. The former are incidental, I would say simply. Maybe Jesus rose from the dead, maybe not, but who cares. Such things come to us so embedded in naivete, suspicious motives that we can put aside "scripture" altogether. But then what IS there in this idea of God that is grounded in the actualities we encounter in the world? This goes to the metaphysics. Specifically, metaethics. Why are born to suffer and die? Then, what IS suffering, and bliss and pleasure and pain and so on? There are no answers to these questions, yet they go to foundational issues of meaning, importance, value: the question about God is a metaethical question, and the grounding is direct, in the world, palpable; it's in the falling in love and listening to music, being speared in the kidney; in the pleasure/pain, joy/suffering dimension of our existence.

Agnosticism and atheism is a reticence to affirm an anthropomorphic deity, the latter being an outright denial, but I think such a position is vacuous simply because the reticence and denying is obvious, like denying the moon is really a goddess named Luna. What one really is trying to affirm is an irreducible moral foundation to our world, that is, affirming a redemption and deliverance from suffering and a consummation of happiness. How is this affirmed? That takes more further discussion.