People who think metaphysical truths exist also think metaphysical truths are demonstrable. — Leontiskos

They are obviously not demonstrable to the unbiased, not matter how much the biased might beleive them to be.

This is very close to your failure to justify an anti-slavery position. By all of your own criteria, "Slavery is wrong," is an unfalsifiable metaphysical position. And yet you hold it all the same, without argument or rationale. So you basically hold "metaphysical" positions when you want to, and you object to others holding "metaphysical" positions when you want to, and there is no rational basis in either case. It's just your will. Whatever you want, regardless of arguments. — Leontiskos

Your reading skills are truly woeful if you are writing honestly here. I have said many times I hold some positions which are not demonstrable, just because they seem intuitively right to me. I have also said I think it is fine for others to do the same. I have also said that I see no reason to expect others to agree with me about my intuitively held beliefs. The problem is when people conflate such intuitively held beliefs to be absolute truth.

You argue that metaphysical truths are demonstrable and yet you cannot explain how they could be demonstrated. All you do, over and over, is deflect in order to avoid answering that one very hard question.

So you think phenomenology limits itself to what experiences seem like? Have you read any phenomenology? — Leontiskos

:roll: I was interested in phenomenology for many years and took undergraduate units in Heidegger and Husserl. How about you?

This is typical of your style― cast aspersions by asking leading question instead of addressing your interlocutor in good faith. If you disagree that phenomenology consists in reflecting on human experience in order to discover how it appears to us while bracketing metaphysical inferences, then give your account.

I thought I'd give you another chance to discuss things in good faith but if you don't up your game I'll just go back to ignoring you.

There are differing interpretations vis-á-vis everything. This seems like an appeal to consensus as truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Truth is not a matter of interpretation―if something is true it is simply true. Beliefs are matters of interpretation. Don't conflate belief with truth and much confusion will clear up for you.

I take you to be saying that if things are real we observe them, we don't merely believe in them. If things we believe in are such that we can't know whether they are real or not, why would we need to believe they are real in order to believe in them? I think that is a very good question. It seems to me that the need to believe that metaphysical posits are real is a failure of the imagination, and a failure to give enough value to the creative imagination, and a category error consisting in projecting, overplaying, an empirical understanding of reality.

For many, the divine (deity seems a little anthropomorphic) reveals itself not by supernatural means but through the self organizing processes of nature (pantheism or panentheism depending on particulars).
The seeming striving against entropy, chaos, the void, the deep for novelty, organization, complexity, experience and creative advance. — prothero

Right―seeing nature itself as divine―a purely immanent divinity. It is divine on account of its magnificence and its overwhelmingly complex beauty―that I can certainly relate to. I wonder must there be thought to be a telos, in order to satisfy the sense of the sublime, though? Or is an imagined telos merely an anthropomorphic, indeed anthropocentric, projection?

You are misunderstanding what I said apparently. I said that an unknowable divinity offers no solace or salvation. A personal divinity who reveals itself through revelation is not an unknowable divinity, and is able to promise salvation and thus offer solace.
— Janus
Mea culpa. Due to my personal bias, I did not interpret Faith in Revelation as a viable means of knowing the "unknown god" (Acts 17:23). As you say though, millions of people throughout history and around the world have found such indirect revelation (via human "witnesses" & interpreters)*1 to offer salvation & solace. — Gnomon

I'm not saying that revelation is a viable means of knowing God, I was merely pointing out that if it is believed to be a viable means of knowing God, then it follows that God cannot consistently be said to be unknowable.

Well there's your equivocation. Truth and purported truth are two different things. When you say "truth" and mean "purported truth," you are equivocating in order to try to salvage a bad argument. Everyone knows that purported truths are not the same for all. Nothing notable there. — Leontiskos

You're remarkably good at either failing to see the point or at deliberately changing the subject to avoid dealing with what is problematic for your position The point is that metaphyseal posits cannot be more than purported truths in that they fail to be subject to demonstration. That they cannot be more than purported truths was the reason I wrote "metaphysical "truths". Why harp and carp on it when I had already explained that?

I'd say the study of mystical experience as one aspect of human experience is as much a part of phenomenology as the study of any other aspect of human experience.
— Janus

Okay, but doesn't that mean that the study of mystical experience broadly possesses the same sort of "quasi-empirical" nature that you ascribe to phenomenology? To deny this would seem to require that some parts of phenomenology are not quasi-empirical. — Leontiskos

The phenomenological study of mystical experience would consist in investigating the ways in which those experiences seem, just as the phenomenological study of everyday experience consists investigating the ways in which everyday experience seems. Phenomenology is, or least the cogent parts of it are, all about the seeming.

So what of all the thinkers who took mysticism and/or God quite seriously? It's sort of a whose who list from East and West: Plato, Aristotle, Shankara, Plotinus, Augustine, Ghazzali, Aquinas, Proclus, Avicenna, Hegel, etc.

Were they all affected by bias and a lack of intellectual honesty? — Count Timothy von Icarus

They all have their different interpretations, which rather supports my point―the interpretation is not the experience. I take mystical experiences very seriously myself, having had quite a few of them and I think it is evident that they may be life-altering―I just don't believe they can be used to rationally justify any particular metaphysics or set of religious beliefs.

Logical, mathematical and empirical truths are "one for all", not so much metaphysical "truths".
— Janus

That's nonsense, and evidence for this is the fact that you put 'truths' in scare quotes. You yourself know that you are not talking about truths when you talk about things that are not true for all. — Leontiskos

"Truths" as I intended it translates to "purported truths". That people may imagine metaphysical conjectures to be truths does not mean they are. Some Buddhists believe we will all be reborn, and some Christians believe we will be resurrected―they can't both be true. Some Buddhists say there is no individual soul, some Vedantists say there is an individual soul, and most Christians believe there is an immortal individual soul―they can't all be true.

That's right. I was feeling for the point at which dogma etc. becomes a problem that needs to be addressed by social action. Which is a delicate but important matter. — Ludwig V

I agree it is an important matter. I think religious or political indoctrination of children is immoral and should be illegal. But this is also a delicate matter, and its implementation would be difficult or even impossible in any way that would be generally acceptable.

This seems right to me. I suppose some people might argue that there are intersubjective agreements about metaphysical truths, such as the existence of God or the idea that human beings have a soul. — Tom Storm

While it's true that people may of course agree about metaphysical posits I can't see how those agreements could be well-founded as agreements about empirical and logical posits can be. Even if people agree about metaphysical ideas being true, it is not possible to even accurately compare what they are agreeing about.

What reason would we have to believe in a deity if not believing in revelation? Sure, first cause and all that but that doesn't necessarily entail divinity let alone personal divinity.

Anyway this is somewhat tangential to the point I had been making which had more to do with motivation than justification.

OK. But I interpreted "useless" to mean having no function or value. And "solace or salvation" seems to be the ultimate value for believers. So, the function of Faith is to get us to where our treasure is laid-up*1.

However, if this world of moth & rust & thieves is all we have to look forward to, then investing in "pie-in-the-sky" heaven would be a "white elephant" of no practical value. :smile: — Gnomon

You are misunderstanding what I said apparently. I said that an unknowable divinity offers no solace or salvation. A personal divinity who reveals itself through revelation is not an unknowable divinity, and is able to promise salvation and thus offer solace.

All that said, it comes down to what one believes. If one truly believes there is a divinity but that the divinity is unknowable, then it would seem to follow logically that one would not expect salvation and feel solace. (In a way it is a performative contradiction even to believe in an unknowable divinity because there could be nothing to determine such a belief except perhaps wishful thinking. But then why wish for an unknowable divinity who can be of no help to us?).

If one believes in the Abrahamic God one cannot say one believes in an unknowable divinity, because the bible is purportedly a work of revelation, and a God who reveals himself cannot count as an unknowable divinity.

A well-constructed, nicely written essay, which for me, however, only showed that older concepts of reason incorporated what we would today class as the creative imagination. The notion of 'intellectus' or intellectual intuition, basically conjectures that the creative imagination is a reliable source of metaphysical and ontological insight. That is what is denied, or at least questioned, by the modern secular mind. The idea of intellectus cannot stand on its own it seems―it requires the belief in God, the human-inspiring Divine intellect, to support it.

From what I’ve seen, the experience is often all about ‘one truth for all' so how could we expect restraint? Intellectual honesty seems to me to be a separate project. Are we really expecting those touched by the divine to say, ‘I encountered a higher power and I know we are all one, but I’ll keep it in perspective because intellectually this is the right thing to do?' — Tom Storm

It's not that the experience is all about "one truth for all", but that the interpretation of it may be, indeed usually are. The interpretations are generally culturally mediated, and so vary greatly cross-culturally, even though there are also, admittedly, commonalities. So, they are not absolute truths, but are culturally relative.

Those who are reputedly "touched by the divine" are usually the saints and the sages and they would seem to be the least likely to be ideologues, dogmatists or fundamentalists.

Putting it crudely, it is not dogma, ideology and fundamentalism in themselves that are the problem. It is the bad behaviour that those things lead to - no, sorry, correction - often lead to. — Ludwig V

I think those are problems in themselves. And they are behind most of the culture wars, genocides, and brainwashing of children and the gullible. Also given that they are intellectually dishonest, in that they claim to know more than can justifiably be claimed to be known, I believe they should be disavowed and even disparaged. Of course I'm not suggesting that people should be punished merely for being ideologues. dogmatists or fundamentalists, though.

Logical. mathematical and empirical truths are "one for all", not so much metaphysical "truths". The point is if there are metaphysical truths, we don't and can't know what they are, or even if you want to say they could be known by "enlightened" individuals, it still remains that they cannot be demonstrated.

I have no objection to compassionate sharing. The experience may feel like an encounter with truth, but intellectual honesty should disabuse one of the idea of "one truth for all" when it comes to religious and metaphysical matters.

Right, I haven't been saying that I see a problem with people interpreting their mystical experiences, and entertaining whatever personal beliefs they do. The problem I see is when they conflate their interpretations with knowledge and make absolutist truth claims. In other words dogma, ideology and fundamentalism are the problems...thinking others should believe as they do.

es, I know what you were getting at with empirical evidence. I reacted because I felt you were cracking a nut with a sledge hammer. There are many things about human life and experience which can’t easily be accounted for in this way. — Punshhh

I don't know what you are referring to in saying "cracking a nut with a sledgehammer". Perhaps you could clarify. Also it's not clear just what are the many things which can't be accounted for or in what way they can't be accounted for. All in all, if you want me to respond I need more clarity and detail.

The stumbling block I see repeatedly is that we are blind to the reality, rather like I was saying to Astrophel, we are blind to the reality we are attempting to pass judgement on, we don’t have the eyes to see it. All we have is the testimony of people who have had religious, or mystical experiences. Some who may have seen beyond the veil, but who’s testimony we must set aside, until we have some metric with which to measure it. — Punshhh

Unless we have had experiences of the type usually referred to as mystical then of course we are blind to that kind of experience. How would we know we have had so-called mystical experiences? Because of their extraordinary, uncanny nature I'd say. How do we know others have had such experiences? Because of the extraordinary, uncanny descriptions of their experiences, which we can relate to sympathetically. That's about all we have to go on.

What do we know of the implications for metaphysics of such experiences? Absolutely nothing I would say—although the extraordinary, uncanny nature of such experiences naturally seems to lead people to extraordinary, uncanny speculations. However such speculations have nothing cogent to support them—people simply believe whatever it is they feel moved to believe. And that's all fine—we all believe whatever it is we feel moved to believe, if we are one of those given to believing—or else we suspend judgement, remain skeptical if that is our bent.

Does it matter? I would say no—all that really matters is how we live our lives—how we live this life, the only life we know or can be confident we can really know, the only one we can be confident that we actually have or will have. And even knowing this life is not the easiest or most common achievement.

That’s odd, you seem to be asking for empirical evidence in guiding one in how to live one’s life (governed by self reflection) While excluding evidence of how people lived their life (that was governed by self reflection). — Punshhh

That's not really what I've been saying. Firstly I was saying that phenomenological investigation is carried out via reflection on human experience. Great novels, biographies and autobiographies are examples of phenomenological inquiries into what it is to be human. I haven't touched on the question as to whether human lives are lived self-reflectively. It seems most likely that some are and some are not.

So we have some textual evidence of how people lived their lives or at least how their lives seemed to them on reflection, that we can probably safely assume to be trustworthy. But assuming it is trustworthy it is not evidence for anything other than that the described events happened, and that the persons or people described reacted to the events in the ways described.

Surely what you are asking for here is evidence which can be used as a guide, while excluding all evidence of evidence being used as a guide in all previous lives.

Not to mention that how one might live a life would also include an enquiry of the results of a previous life lived to glean an idea of where such a life course might lead. — Punshhh

So, I'm not excluding evidence that others lived their lives according to what they considered to be, for themselves, the evidence that they took to support whatever worldview they lived their lives in accordance with. I agree that we all do that. I'm questioning the idea that such "evidence", which although not being strictly empirical, it is nonetheless reasonable to think of it as evidence for anyone other than the person for whom it "feels right". I'm saying it is only strictly empirical evidence that should be expected to unfailingly convince the unbiased of whatever it is evidence for.

So this:

There is clearly empirical evidence of the results of lives lead guided by self reflection. Just take a previous life lead this way and see where it lead.

Now I feel pendantic.

No need to feel pedantic (or did you mean you were wearing a pendant? :wink: ) When we examine lives, whether those of others or our own I think we do accept the reports as true and accurate (so "quasi-empirical"). When it comes to evaluating them we do so in terms of value judgements, and those are not empirical judgements.

On the other hand, I agree that there can be no empirical evidence of a divine realm.

I agree with you and think this is amply obvious but many will disagree while apparently being unable to explain their disagreement.

I'm out of time so I'll have to come back to respond to your posts. Hopefully what I've written above may clarify some of my ideas on these questions.

I'd say the study of mystical experience as one aspect of human experience is as much a part of phenomenology as the study of any other aspect of human experience.

Firstly there is the evidence of the lives lived of earlier people of self reflection.
Secondly, implicit in living a life of faith one has faith in the guidance of whom one has faith in. — Punshhh

Neither of those count as empirical evidence. I'm not being pedantic, or trying to dismiss religion as an evil or even a problem on account of its lacking empirical evidence to support it. I just think it's important to maintain consistent and coherent epistemological distinctions between different spheres of knowledge and belief.

Would it follow, then, that if most people had mystical experiences, we'd consider them also to be "quasi-empirical" and possible evidence for general conclusions? How many would we need? What would be the threshold beyond which the experiences gained evidentiary status? — J

As I understand it phenomenology aims to reflect on and characterize the general nature of human experience. I have always been skeptical about attempts to make inferences from human experience to metaphysical claims.

There are poetic commonalities between the writings of mystics from all cultures, which should not be surprising given the cross-cultural everyday commonalities of human experience. In patriarchal cultures―which have predominated at least in historical times―it is not surprising to find that the figures of worship―the gods, buddhas, gurus, saints and deities ―have been predominately male.

What exactly are mystical experiences? It seems they mostly consist in feelings of being a part of something much greater than oneself, of something that one might naturally think of as infinite and eternal, in that it feels radically different than our finite, temporal experience. One might feel "saved" in that visionary moment, and feel a personal presence, as of a loving parent. Or not...

I think the salient question is as to just what is the content of a mystical experience, and just what comes after in the attempt to articulate, interpret, understand the meaning inherent in that experience and what its implications are.

The interpretation of mystical experiences seems to me to be a very personal matter. For me interpretation is more of a feeling, a sense of something, more like poetry than anything which can be couched in definite terms. The descriptions by others of their mystical experiences can only resonate with me insofar as they embody a poetic feeling which seems to me akin to my own sense of the experience.

So, the shared intersubjective descriptions, definitions and explanations here seem to be stretched very thin. It seems that there is a cross-cultural commonality of mystical human experience―but what does that point to? Who can say? Does it even matter?

I meant useful in the sense of offering solace or salvation.

I'd be interested in seeing someone try to crystallize what this looks like in practice. Whenever I read Tillich or others, the reasoning seems diffuse and it's difficult for me to get any traction on it. — Tom Storm

I read The Courage to Be about 40 years ago and i remember getting something out of it. As you probably know I am an atheist (in the soft sense of lacking belief in God as traditionally understood; i.e. the 3 Omni divinity). Anyway with all the theological discussion lately I thought I'd return to Tillich to see if I can glean any new understanding.

I'm just beginning on the project, so I can't say anything much as yet, except to say that it seems Tillich thinks of God as being inextricably bound up with mystical and religious human experience. I'm not sure if he thinks any definitive claim about the nature of God can be justified on the basis of human reports of religious and mystical experiences. I mean how would we know whether it was not rather an aspect of the nature of the human that is being revealed in such experiences?

This post seems to highlight the various ways of "understanding" the world : a> Science, in terms of objective matter, and b> Theology, in terms of unknowable divinity, and c> Secular Philosophy, in terms of direct human experience. — Gnomon

An unknowable divinity would seem to be useless to us. I don't believe religious folk are looking for an unknowable divinity―that would indeed be a performative contradiction. It seems to me the only place God is to be found is within. What 'God' means in this context is totally ambiguous―it depends on the person as to what 'God' means to them.

I find this passage from the introduction to Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology Volume 1 quite apt:

Attempts to elaborate a theology as an empirical-inductive or a meta physical deductive "science," or as a combination of both, have given ample evidence that no such an attempt can succeed. In every assumedly scientific theology there is a point where individual experience, traditional valuation, and personal commitment must decide the issue.

This point, often hidden to the authors of such theologies, is obvious to those who look at them with other experiences and other commitments. If an inductive approach is employed, one must ask in what direction the writer looks for his material. And if the answer is that he looks in every direction and toward every experience, one must ask what characteristic of reality or experience is the empirical basis of his theology. Whatever the answer may be, an a priori of experience and valuation is implied.

The same is true of a deductive approach, as developed in classical idealism. The ultimate principles in idealist theology are rational expressions of an ultimate concern; like all metaphysical ultimates, they are religious ultimates at the same time. A theology derived from them is determined
by the hidden theology implied in them. In both the empirical and the metaphysical approaches, as well as in the much more numerous cases of their mixture, it can be observed that the a priori which directs the induction and the deduction is a type of mystical experience. Whether it is "being-itself" (Scholastics) or the "universal substance" (Spinoza), whether it is "beyond subjectivity and objectivity" (James) or the "identity of spirit and nature" (Schelling), whether it is "universe" (Schleiermacher) or "cosmic whole" (Hocking), whether it is "value creating process" (Whitehead) or "progressive integration" (Wieman), whether it is "absolute spirit" (Hegel) or "cosmic person" (Brightman)-each of these concepts is based on an immediate experience of something ultimate in value and being of which one can become intuitively aware.

Idealism and naturalism differ very little in their starting point when they develop theological concepts. Both are dependent on a point of identity between the experiencing subject and the ultimate which appears in religious experience or in the experience of the world as "religious." The theological concepts of both idealists and naturalists are rooted in a "mystical a priori," an awareness of something that transcends the cleavage between subject and object. And if in the course of a "scientific" procedure this a priori is discovered, its discovery is possible only because it was present from the very beginning.
This is the circle which no religious philosopher can escape. And it is by no means a vicious one. Every understanding of spiritual things (Geisteswissenschaft) is circular.

But perhaps we can agree that it neatly explains why science and religion cannot conflict, doesn't it? I'm happy with that conclusion, and it seems that many people feel the same way, because they are both believers in a religion (ideology) and pursue science. — Ludwig V

Yes, I see no reason why science and religion must conflict. The important point for me is intellectual honesty on both sides. Science cannot answer all questions about human life because many of the questions most important to us cannot avail themselves of strictly empirical means to drive knowledge.

I have referred to phenomenology, analytic philosophy and philosophy of language as "quasi-empirical" in that they reflect, within their specific spheres of interest, on human experience in general and attempt to abstract its most general and necessary characteristics. The results cannot be as rigorously intersubjectively corroborated as the results of the natural sciences can.

It seems to me that when it comes to metaphysical speculation and mystical or religious experience it becomes an even more personal matter. I have my own metaphysical and mystical leanings, but I see them as matters of taste just as aesthetic judgements are. Many religionists and religious philosophers do not seem to be satisfied with this conclusion and yet they seem to be unable to argue cogently for their objections.

I doubt that there could be strictly empirical evidence to guide us in answering these questions, because the decisions in question will affect how we interpret our experiences. But there is a common denominator - whether we can make our way through ordinary life without causing undue mayhem or causing our own misery and death. — Ludwig V

Right, it comes down to the old maxim "you cannot derive an ought from an is". Empirical evidence shows us in ways that cannot be unbiasedly denied how things are (and I mean here how they are as they present to us, not in any fabulous absolute sense), but it cannot show us how they ought to be.

Well, I don’t understand it, so there’s that. :razz: Logical fallacies aside, I suppose my intuition is that we understand some things. We’ve learned to make things work; we’ve developed remarkably effective models, tools, and narratives to account for what we observe. But does that amount to genuine understanding? — Tom Storm

I'm making a modest claim that events make sense to us―that they are intelligible within the general frame of causation. What more could we expect? The question as to why things are the way they appear seems to be either a scientific question to be investigated under the scientific rubric of causes and conditions or else unanswerable, unless you count flights of imaginative intuition answers. And even in the latter case such answers can be in turn questioned as to why the conditions they paint are the way they are.

I hear you. There are still many unanswered questions that I’m unsure how certain we can really be about what we call scientific knowledge. We don’t know precisely what consciousness is, why there is something rather than nothing, or what the ultimate nature of reality is. We also don’t fully understand how life first began, or what dark matter and dark energy actually are. Science has achieved a lot, but it still leaves many of the deepest questions unresolved. That makes me cautious about treating scientific knowledge as the final word on reality. — Tom Storm

I think there are far more answered questions in science than unanswered ones. And expecting science to answer "ultimate" questions seems to be unreasonable. There are no definitive answers to such questions, and it even appears likely that there could be no definitive answers to such questions. Maybe such questions are the result of "language on holiday".

As to so-called "dark matter" and "dark energy" science may be able to say what they are at some time in the future, who knows? Or the theoretical need for them may be dissolved.

Science would seem to be the only game in town when it comes to understanding how things work. "The final word on reality" may simply be a malformed, misplaced idea.

Are there many serious people who would make such a claim? The main conceit of science seems to be the idea that the world is understandable, which is a metaphysical position. — Tom Storm

The world as it appears to us is obviously understandable. That is not so much a conceit of science as a fact of human life and science. When it comes to the understanding of the world based on observations in physics and chemistry (and forgetting about unanswerable questions such as, for example, why the elements combine invariantly in the ways they do as formulated as the Periodic Table) does it really seem plausible that all that could somehow turn out to be wrong?

Scientific theories may turn out to be wrong, but observations? Take evolution―it seems unarguable that evolution has occurred, so it would seem that what might be revisable are only the particular details―descriptions and explanations of the processes of evolution.

People often say that the history of science shows that all our current scientific theories will most likely turn out to be wrong. Counter to that, it is a well-accepted fact that past events are not a good guide to future events, from which it follows that that is an underdetermined conjecture.

I wonder whether anyone can come up with a good example of a past understanding which has been completely overturned. The idea of a flat earth that is the centre of the cosmos would seem to be the paradigm example, but that view was based on inadequate capacity for observation, and was later corrected by more sophisticated observations, which were themselves enabled by technological advances based on science.

I came across this interesting passage regarding the nature of faith, in a Wikipedia entry about Paul Tillich:

Faith as ultimate concern
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Tillich believes the essence of religious attitudes is what he calls "ultimate concern". Separate from all profane and ordinary realities, the object of the concern is understood as sacred, numinous or holy. The perception of its reality is felt as so overwhelming and valuable that all else seems insignificant, and for this reason requires total surrender.[80] In 1957, Tillich defined his conception of faith more explicitly in his work, Dynamics of Faith.

Man, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those which condition his very existence … If [a situation or concern] claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of him who accepts this claim … it demands that all other concerns … be sacrificed.[81]

Tillich further refined his conception of faith by stating that, "Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It is the most centered act of the human mind ... it participates in the dynamics of personal life."[82]

An arguably central component of Tillich's concept of faith is his notion that faith is "ecstatic". That is to say:

It transcends both the drives of the nonrational unconsciousness and the structures of the rational conscious … the ecstatic character of faith does not exclude its rational character although it is not identical with it, and it includes nonrational strivings without being identical with them. 'Ecstasy' means 'standing outside of oneself' – without ceasing to be oneself – with all the elements which are united in the personal center.[83]

In short, for Tillich, faith does not stand opposed to rational or nonrational elements (reason and emotion respectively), as some philosophers would maintain. Rather, it transcends them in an ecstatic passion for the ultimate.[84]

It should also be noted that Tillich does not exclude atheists in his exposition of faith. Everyone has an ultimate concern, and this concern can be in an act of faith, "even if the act of faith includes the denial of God. Where there is ultimate concern, God can be denied only in the name of God"[85]

It seems to me that the "ultimate concern" of any life governed by self-reflection is the basic ethical question "how should I Iive?" Could there be strictly empirical evidence available to guide me in answering that question?

It seems obvious that there is a difference between a person who can act on their knowledge and the person who cannot. The salient question would seem to be whether the difference is on account of some external constraint or not. What other kind of constraint could there be on a person who knew something and yet was unable to act on that knowledge?

Personal experience and cultural mediation are the basis for all beliefs, aren't they? So why do you distinguish between false religious beliefs and true beliefs, as, for example, in science. There must be an additional element that isn't taken account of in this model. — Ludwig V

Science begins with everyday observations about which we could all agree. Observations can be accurate or inaccurate, so science is correctable. Religious beliefs are not like this―because their correctness or incorrectness cannot be demonstrated.

Science begins by examining things as they present to us. The basic appearance of things in our environments is not culturally mediated, and they are present to all in a shared context so it is not a matter of merely personal experience, as it is with religious experiences.

Well, I would debate some of that, but the outline is clear. The relevant question is what do you mean by saying that induction "works" and "successful"? I would be inclined to take that as some kind of pragmatism. (?) — Ludwig V

Science which is based on inductive reasoning has evolved into an immensely complex and coherent body of understanding, a cohesive picture of the nature of the world which has produced a great many effective technologies.

What can be said is a start. What can be shown might be more important. That's part of what is problematic about mysticism. If it is showing stuff rather than saying stuff, it's not actually false. But when it says stuff, it is almost invariably false. — Banno

When it says stuff is it false or merely inapt?

I still prefer "How do we use the word real?" — Banno

The word is used in many ways obviously. Usage presumably cannot determine whether something is real, but rather whether it should be counted as real. A theist might say "God is real", does it follow that God might be counted as real, as opposed to, say, imaginary?

If the whole ambit of philosophy is human experience and judgement then is it not always a matter of "what can (coherently and consistently) be said? So, the Op question reframed would be not "how do we know what is real?" but "how do we decide what counts as real?"

I see you are taking the epistemological actuality of our predictive limitations as a guide for your disbelief in determinism. I, on the other hand, take those limitations to be, given what we do think we know about things, inevitable.

But since the truth or falsity of determinism is epistemically unobtainable I prefer to reserve judgement, while noting that most things in the world of physical processes are very successfully modeled in deterministically causal terms. Which means I lean towards determinism, and tend to view the idea of libertarian freedom as a fantasy.

That said, disagreement is not a negative in my view, and I can understand why you think as you do, without feeling inclined to follow that path of thought myself.

To my mind that begins to look like a ghost -- we can explain it, but we can't say it's certainly the case.

For instance -- Spinoza has an explanation for determinism, but another explanation for thinking we are free is we're born free and so know it as well as we know our bodies, and we can't predict everything because some events are connected by chance rather than necessity. — Moliere

Insofar as we are able to understand them events on the macro-level do not seem to be connected by chance. Events on the micro-level may be or it m ay just be that we cannot grok them in our coarse-grained macro outlook.

To be sure we can't know whether one or the other explanation is certainly the case, but in the final analysis that seems to be the case with most everything in human life.

But it wasn't intended as an empirical theory. It was intended as principle which was to be used to identify what was or was not in principle an empirical theory. — Wayfarer

And the same can be said of the verification principle. Anyway you failed to notice my point that reflection on and analysis of human experience and our ways of knowing and judging are quasi-empirical investigations, as with phenomenology.

You also failed to notice the point that it is not all about theory it is also about observation. Observation reports are both verifiable and falsifiable. The thesis "there are no black swans" is not verifiable, obviously, but it is falsifiable. On the other hand the thesis "there are black swans" is verifiable but not falsifiable.

And if Hume is right, while true that it's paradigmatic, it's also just a habit unjustified by logic. — Moliere

Yes, not strictly justified by logic, since there is no logical necessity that events must have causes, or that particular causes or conditions must of logical necessity give rise to particular effects.

So, it's not a matter of pure reason supporting the idea of causation, but of practical reason giving us good reason (it almost always works) to think causally. In fact it seems arguable that there is no other way to understand physical phenomena. The whole of science is based on the idea of energy doing work, and causation is understood not merely as Humean "constant conjunction" but as 'energy exchange'.

I'm more tempted to inverse this -- How can we believe in universal causation (determinism) when we know we are free and can't predict everything? — Moliere

Sure you can invert it. I think we believe in universal causation because that seems to be what we observe everywhere, and we also have coherent understandings of why we think we are free (because we cannot be aware of all the forces acting on us, as Spinoza noted) and why we cannot predict everything (because very slight variations in initial conditions amplify to create great differences in outcomes when it comes to the complex systems whose behavior we are not so good at predicting).

That is, if you can show how psychological or economic models (for example) fail to offer consistently, predictable results, then that counts for me as a substantive blow against positivism as opposed to just an analytic attack on the self consistency of the theory. — Hanover

The thing is that the positivist conclusion comes form reflection on human experience, knowledge and judgement, so it is , like phenomenology, not strictly empirical.

So, claiming it is a performative contradiction is lacking a bit of nuance. By the same strict argument Popper's idea of falsifiability eliminates itself, since it is not itself strictly falsifiable.

Reflecting on our experience, though, we can see that there is much in human life in the way of simple claims about what is the case that are indeed verifiable by observation. It is more relevant to theories than it is to basic observations, to say that they cannot be definitively verified. It is also arguable as to whether theories can be definitively falsified.

Sometimes. And sometimes it's given "the shrug" -- "Idk, because there are too many possible causes" — Moliere

Right―too many possible causes. Don't anomalies that are not understood invite investigation in terms of causal thinking? I'm finding it hard to think of examples of such anomalies.

But every once and again they are discoveries, so unexpected consequences that teach us something. — Moliere

That seems right. So we investigate the causes of anomalies, and once they are understood they are no longer anomalies, and we go back to finding predictable results, until the next set of unforeseen unusual conditions comes along.

It seems that, except when it comes to human and some animal behavior, causation is the paradigmatic mode of thought. With animals and humans thinking in terms of causality may be supplanted by thinking in terms of intentionality.

The puzzle there is how intentions which are themselves understood to be the outcome of brain processes, and which are themselves outside of the animal or human ambit of awareness, can really be free of causation.

Much of the time they do -- but not always always. That's why it's still a science. We get it wrong sometimes, in the details. — Moliere

When they do not behave in the way we have predicted is it not due to unforeseen conditions which when discovered causally explain the anomaly?

So if I flip a quarter then 50% Heads 50% Tails. — Moliere

Over a very long series of throws we will tend to get a 50/50 distribution of outcomes, but i see that as an observation not a causal explanation. A causal explanation might tell us why we get that 50/50 distribution.

Can you give an example of a stochastic cause?

Maybe it's a professional hazard, but "invariance" is not what I see in chemistry or electrical explanation. — Moliere

So chemical elements do not always combine in predictable ways? In the absence of understandable faults and unusual conditions electrical and electronic components don't always function as predicted?

What reason? — Moliere

The observed invariance of chemical and electrical processes, which are what constitute everything we observe.

I'm still thinking that if we accept determinism then the PSR is easy to establish, but cuz of stochastic events the reverse does not hold cuz we can explain events stochastically. — Moliere

We explain events causally not stochasitically.

Genes and the pachinko machine appear stochastic, as does the coin toss, but I think we have reason to believe they are not really stochastic, and merely appear so to us due to our inability to model all the conditions in play.

Actually the question in the OP was whether the idea of the PSR is inextricably bound to the idea of determinism . The OP specifically stated that the concern is not with the truth of the PSR and determinism.

It depends what you mean by observation. I don't want to over-generalize, but many religious people do claim that their faith is based on experience. Some of it is mystical, some not. Religions are a way of life, a practice based on a way of looking at - interpreting - the world. So they govern how experience is interpreted. That's partly why arguing as if the questions were simply empirical is a waste of time. — Ludwig V

Right, religious faith is based on personal experience and culturally mediated interpretation of that experience. My whole argument is that personal experience and cultural mediation are relativistic and so do not constitute good evidence for the truth of propositional beliefs, although of course they do motivate and condition beliefs.

The cognitive content of emotions is fundamental to all emotion, not just religious emotion. — Ludwig V

Of course it would be foolish to disagree with that.

In one way, of course, you are right. But there are descriptions and images of hell in plenty, and they are drawn from experience. As for God, the ideas about God do seem to me to be drawn from experience. God as Lord and Master, God as Father (or Mother). Your criterion of coherence seems to me to be unduly restrictive. The idea of a unicorn or dragon, or even of heaven and hell may nor may not be coherent in some sense. But there is sufficient coherence to enable people to react to them emotionally. — Ludwig V

Right, all our descriptions and images of hell and gods are drawn for experience in the sense that they are cobbled together from images and associations gleaned form everyday experience. When I say they are no coherent or cogent I mean that they are fictions, since we can have no idea whet the real hell or god looks like, even assuming that they existed.

To be sure, authority can be, often is, wrong. But much, or most, of what we know is based on it. I feel a bit like Hume recognizing that induction doesn't provide a sound basis for knowledge and recognizing that we are going to continue to use it anyway. — Ludwig V

I think Hume was merely pointing out that inductive reasoning is not like deductive reasoning in that conclusions necessarily follow from premises in the latter, but not the former. We have good reason to trust inductive reasoning because it works almost all of the time and we have a vast, exceedingly successful and coherent body of knowledge based on it.

The determinism we witness in our macro-world may well be the result of stochastic processes at the quantum level, or what appears stochastic to us may appear so on account of our limited knowledge. Does it really matter?

So why believe it? — Moliere

We live in a world of process, where all kinds of processes seem to invariantly give rise to other processes. We actually don't know of exceptions, so why not believe in it?

Does the Principle of Sufficient Reason imply determinism? — flannel jesus

If the PSR is interpreted to state that every event must have a cause, then it would seem that the PSR does imply determinism. Is that how you are interpreting it?

I'm afraid I was not very clear here. My immediate point was that dialogue between believers and non-believers cannot take place, or cannot take place productively, if each side digs in to its own position and exchanges arguments in the way that has become traditional in modern times. — Ludwig V

I don't know what a productive discussion between religionists and secularists could look like. My only aim is to get a clear idea of what kinds of things we can know we have good reason to believe and what we cannot know we have good reason to believe but may believe simply on the basis of faith.

The difficulty for some religionists is that they don't seem to want to acknowledge the obvious―that there can be no substantive evidence for belief in the existence of what cannot, even in principle, be observed.

So, I have no argument with believing just on the basis of faith (or feeling, or intuition) ―and the best outcome I can imagine in a dialogue between religionists and secularists would be agreement on the
epistemology.

Perhaps the weakest link (although it may seem entirely normal to many philosophers) your move from "without determinable content" through "without conceptual content" to "may have affective content". — Ludwig V

Perhaps I should have said 'without coherent conceptual content". Anyway you haven't explained as to what you think are the weaknesses in the argument. I think what you offer below is something of a strawman.

Fear of COVD, for example, is a reaction to various facts/truths about COVID; it is a combination of cognitive and non-cognitive content (which rests on values or needs). More than that, fear is more than a matter of feelings, but is about certain kinds of behavior - it is about how one reacts to the facts. So I do not see why affective content does not count as determinable content or even as conceptual content? The existence of some god is not just a neutral fact, but requires a reaction. For those reasons, I'm afraid I can't attribute any content to the "feeling of believing". — Ludwig V

Covid is a bad analogy because it is something real that could kill you. Take as example fear of eternal suffering in hell―the content there is based on ideas which cannot be distinguished from fiction, because we have no way of deciding rationally whether hell exists or not. So, to be sure the fear has conceptual content, but there is no coherent concept, in the sense of something drawn from actual experience, of what hell could be. Same obviously applies to God.

The phrase "beliefs determined by faith" sounds as if faith is somethiing separate from belief, but surely what you mean is (roughly) "beliefs not determined by evidence"? I would agree that there is a spectrum there, from conclusive evidence through partial evidence. I think that beliefs based on authority are diffeerent in kind. In a sense, of course, authority can be regarded as a kind of evidence, but it is a rather different kind of evidence - being, as it were, evidence that the source is trustworthy. — Ludwig V

By 'faith" I mean 'feeling'. I can believe something simply because "it feels right" or "it rings true". That is what I think faith is.

I don't think authority is good evidence for the existence of anything unless it is based on sound observations. Scripture and the church tell us that God really exists, but that telling cannot be good evidence because people saying something about something they cannot know cannot count as evidence in the way people saying something about something they can know does.