FWIW, I'd suggest that you cut-back on your intake of Headline News. William Randall Hearst, magnate of the nation's largest media company, insightfully observed about the criteria for news publishing : "if it bleeds, it leads". Another version is "bad news sells". — Gnomon

You may not have intended it this way, but that comes across as both dismissive and tangential. I’m not generally a consumer of news, and this perspective is shaped by direct experience. My professional work brings me into daily contact with refugees, asylum seekers, survivors of abuse and trauma, former prisoners, the homeless, and those who are sick or dying. My father was in a Nazi camp during WW2 and some of my mother's family and friends starved to death in the Dutch hunger winter of 1944. My views are not based on some tabloid journalism of confected horror. I could take a cue from your tone and say back to you - why not get out into the real world and look around?

That said, I raised the point as a plausible interpretation of a world that appears deliberately built to produce suffering. I don't actually hold this view myself, but it's a useful counterpoint to those who see evidence of divine design in nature.

Our modern cultures are far safer from the ancient threats of tooth & claw, but now imperiled mostly by imaginary evils brought into your habitat by the Pandora's Box of high-tech news media. Maybe we all need a Pollyanna Umbrella defense-mechanism from pollution of the mind. — Gnomon

How is this relevant to my point? I'm said on here several times that I think this is the best time to be alive.

My argument is not so much against a commitment to materialism, but rather to any all-encompassing metaphysical system. It does seem to me that most people on the forum see one particular metaphysical system as right and all the rest as wrong. Do you disagree with that. — T Clark

Yes, that's hwo I read you as well. Agree.

Don't tell anyone else I said this, but I wonder if there are really no true ontological positions, only methodological ones. — T Clark

It's an intriguing idea.

My own tentative view is that we do not access reality directly, nor can we claim any definitive knowledge of what reality ultimately is. What we encounter instead are multiple realities, each intelligible through particular conceptual frameworks or perspectives. The pursuit of a single, foundational, unifying reality strikes me as superfluous in that it overlooks the plural and interpretive nature of our engagement with the world.

I would have thought "the limits of what we know how to investigate". — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's an improvement. I'm not attached to my wording. I quite like this as an approach and it seems to avoid scientism.

While they don’t yet have a mind, they do know things, they do have knowledge, how ever simple. — Punshhh

Indeed. Part of me believes that the animal is in a superior position to the human. They have what they need. They require no gadgets, no psychotherapies, no fictional narratives through which to interpret their existence. They act, they live, and that is enough. In contrast, we are burdened by self-consciousness- forever constructing and deconstructing meaning, seeking justification, and struggling to feel at home in the world and often being dreadful to all an sundry while we go about it.

reality is food, tools, homes, and people. Everything else we encounter can be seen as developing out of and connected with those basic elements. How can something be considered real if it doesn't affect our human lives? I think that's materialism of a sort and I think it represents a humanizing force in our thinking rather than an alienating one. — T Clark

One metaphysical position does not, can not, address all of reality. We need to use different ones in different situations. With electrons we talk about mass and velocity. With our brothers we talk about history and personality. — T Clark

I like what you say here. I believe it was the philosopher Simon Blackburn who said that even the idealist philosophy professor adopts realism the moment they leave home in the morning.

I'm not sure anyone on this site actually defends materialism as a full-blown worldview, though they may draw from some of its strands and influences. What seems more prevalent today is a commitment to methodological naturalism - the stance that scientific inquiry should proceed without invoking supernatural explanations - rather than metaphysical naturalism, which asserts that only natural, physical entities and processes exist. The former reflects a pragmatic stance, informed by an awareness of the limits of what can be known, the latter is a stronger ontological claim, one that is itself subject to philosophical scrutiny.

Therefore, something is going on here that smacks of Teleology*3 — Gnomon

Well that's your conclusion, not mine.

If pushed, and speaking from a human perspective, you might say the world appears designed and calibrated for dysfunction and suffering: children with cancer, mass starvation, natural disasters, a clusterfuck of disease and disorder wherever you look. Not to mention the defective psychology of humans. But I don't believe this theory either. Things may appear a certain way to us because we want to believe. We are sense-making creatures compelled to find or impose an overarching narrative on everything.

OK. I imagine meaning includes both: creation and intrinsic.

So even if it's true, as some argue, that meaning is “created by conscious beings,” we ought to recognize that this act of creation is not simply a matter of conscious intention. It arises from a much deeper orientation—one that begins, however humbly, with life itself. That, I think, is the current framework for the debate. — Wayfarer

But meaning may not arise from any deep metaphysical structure, rather from the ordinary, improvisational practices that help us stay oriented in a world we can’t help but attempt to interpret. In that light, its apparent importance may have less to do with ultimate truth or a foundational 'cosmic consciousness' and more to do with pragmatic survival. Why woudl making meaning not be like another sense?

Since I don't find the Judeo-Christian Bible or Islamic Koran plausible as the revealed word of God, I've been forced to create my own mythical story to establish the meaning of my own worthless life. — Gnomon

Human beings are endlessly creative.

yet it does conclude that the evolution of Life & Mind from a mysterious Big Bang was not "accidental", — Gnomon

Random thought: It's interesting how often Christian apologists seek to contrast "accidental' life from divinely planned life.

The idea of life being “accidental” seems to be a stumbling block for many who struggle to emotionally accept that life might not have an inherent human centric purpose. Many people fear and even loathe the idea of a purposeless universe. But it’s important to distinguish this from notions like randomness or accident. The absence of inherent purpose doesn’t necessarily imply arbitrariness; it simply means that meaning is not built into the fabric of reality, but must be created by conscious beings. This distinction often gets lost in emotional reactions to, shall we call them 'naturalistic' worldviews.

A scientific account doesn’t describe life as an “accident” in any meaningful sense. It simply explains that life arose through natural processes. To call it an “accident” is to impose a value-laden metaphor onto a description that is, at its core, neutral.

You know nicer atheists than I do! :smile: — J

I don’t spend much time with atheists these days, but I used to. Many are, frankly, dull zealots. That said, the more thoughtful ones today typically don’t outright deny the existence of God, after all, that would be a positive claim, and one that can’t be demonstrated.

I don't think this is the heart of the problem. We routinely accept subjective testimony about all sorts of things, if by "testimony" you mean merely "Here is what I saw/heard/tasted/thought." Rather, the problem is the explanatory value, as you say here: — J

I suppose so. For an extraordinary claim like, “I had direct communication with God” an atheist is going to need more than someone's personal testimony. And so do the priests and sisters I know. I'm pretty certain many theists would also be sceptical when someone says that have had a religious experince.

And this leads to the other point that the atheist wants to insist on -- your use of the phrase "naturalistic explanations." I think that, for most atheists, non-naturalistic explanations are ruled out a priori — J

I wouldn't say 'ruled out' but worth of robust skepticism certainly. Is there a non-naturalistic explanation for anything we can definitely identify?

You write this:

I think this is what most of the atheists I know would say: You can't have evidence for unicorns because there aren't any. Those who believe in them nonetheless are, charitably, misguided. — J

I'd say there are many theists for whom you could use the same argument in reverse. They already believe in God, therefore spiritual experiences are real.

.. at least the "God explanation" can join the other contenders and be weighed for its plausibility just like any other. — J

Yes, this is the nub of the issue: is the God explanation really of equal weight to alternative explanations - such as psychological phenomena, mental illness, or substance use? I would say no. That judgment ultimately comes down to a choice we make based on how we interpret and structure the world.

And perhaps it's not worth debating, these discussions rarely shift anyone’s position and too often descend into unproductive or abusive exchanges. Not from you, I hasten to add.

There's a general anti-religious argument that goes something like: "There isn't any personal God, because there's no evidence for such a being. That explains why so few people are 'mystics' and claim to have such direct evidence. They're a little crazy, and are misinterpreting their experiences." The question is, Which way does the reasoning go? Are we saying that the lack of evidence shows the non-existence of God, or are we saying that, because God does not exist, there couldn't be such evidence? If it's the latter, that would commit us to saying that even if everybody had mystical experiences, they'd still be wrong in believing they were evidence for a personal God. I think this is what most of the atheists I know would say: You can't have evidence for unicorns because there aren't any. Those who believe in them nonetheless are, charitably, misguided. — J

Well, atheists I know would not say, as you write, “there isn’t any personal god.” They would say instead that there are no compelling grounds for belief in a personal god, though they remain open in principle to revising that view should persuasive evidence arise.

Are we saying that the lack of evidence shows the non-existence of God, or are we saying that, because God does not exist, there couldn't be such evidence? If it's the latter, that would commit us to saying that even if everybody had mystical experiences, they'd still be wrong in believing they were evidence for a personal God. — J

Well, I think many atheists would more likely start with: there are no good reasons for belief in a personal God and one reason sometimes offered is mystical or personal experience of God. However, this is not a compelling justification, since such experiences rely on subjective testimony, which is inherently problematic.

The difference between some theists and atheists lies in the willingness to accept a subjective psychological experience, experiences that, while meaningful to the individual, could have multiple naturalistic explanations and thus can't meaningfully serve as reliable evidence for the existence of a divine being.

That said, I've known a number of number of Catholic clergy who also have little confidence in people's accounts of spiritual experiences. When discussing such cases with me, they tend to describe the person as likely to be mistaken or undergoing a psychological episode. Given their starting point is that God exists, I think this is interesting. Possibly it's the most appropriate default starting point whether you're a theist or an atheist.

And Sister Mary put her arms around him, held him and (I’m sure) wept with him. And that, I felt, was ‘how it would look in practice’. — Wayfarer

I've known a lot of those sisters and priests through my work and watched them closely. I'll have to mull this over, since I don't immediately recognize it as the answer to my question. Nicely written, by the way — a concentrated little jewel of description.

The simple answer is that one knows God via the body, rather than the mind. — Punshhh

I'm not sure I understand this either. What does 'know by the body' mean? You feel it rather than think it?

I also believe many atheists have more faith than they like to admit (or else they would not speak of “God” at all). Just as most theists have more doubt than they like to admit. — Fire Ologist

I susepct most atheists rarely talk about God. The ones who do are likely also to be activists who see religion as the enemy of reason and human progress (I don't share this view myself).

f I make my meaning all by myself, and no one agrees or shares my meaning, I, personally, would not find this meaningful to me, and cannot see how this could be meaningful for anyone. — Fire Ologist

I have a stronger sense of meaning in the world when I'm alone than when I'm with others. I think the lack of distraction helps. We're all different.

Regardless, it is just as arbitrary to believe in God, as it is to see the human condition as the experience of meaninglessness. It is even more arbitrary perhaps to believe in Jesus or Allah or Vishnu or Yaweh. I do agree that having faith is receiving a gift. — Fire Ologist

Is it arbitrary? Isn't it, in the end, unsurprising when someone either believes or doesn’t? After all, most people follow their culture or families into faith or secularism. Here in Australia, the subject of God rarely comes up - atheism seems to be the default setting. In other countries, God comes up at every dinner...

I was not always a believer in God. But when I thought there was no God, I thought everything I said and all that everyone ever said, and so all that could be thought, was like everything else - a whisper that remains ultimately unheard, misunderstood, empty, and as meaningful as the difference between two grains of sand. — Fire Ologist

For me, meaning seems to be evanescent and contingent, something we create and nurture in the moment, which, rather than being empty, gives it a unique kind of beauty and urgency.

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. — Janus

It does seem odd that a god understood as a nonspecific intuition, let's say, could be presented as a meaningful relationship with the divine/ultimate concern. By definition, there is no relationship. 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.

I am trying to translate Universal Truth... please help me as I Die to understand I am not crazy... please.. anyone? — Ian James Hillyard

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking or hoping for, but if life is beginning to slow down and cease, it might be helpful to focus on finding comfort and moments of peace in simpler, less stressful paths. Whatever brings you calm or peace now may be worth leaning into.

It is hard to understand western history, music, art, literature or architecture without understanding the religious impulse that lay behind much of it. Likewise for other cultures. So being familiar with the worlds religions is essential to understanding the societies we live in. — prothero

True. But equally, it's hard to understand Western history, music, art, and architecture without understanding slavery, autocracy, colonization, religious violence, patriarchy, and economic exploitation. The historic underpinnings of our culture don't have to be virtuous to be of significance. But I agree with you that comparative religion (that antediluvian term) is a vital part of anyone's education. :up:

I still cannot bring myself to believe it is all an accidental, purposeless, mindless creation the result of mere time and chance. I think there is something larger at work although traditional religion does not seem to provide an answer for me but certain philosophical conceptions do seem attractive to me. — prothero

I think a lot of people share this intuition. I personally don’t and I don’t encounter any transcendent meaning in life or the universe as I understand it. What I do see is humans telling stories - stories that offer solace, meaning, and guidance for how to live.

To me, the idea that life is accidental or mindless isn’t necessary either. It doesn’t have to be a choice between God and Meaninglessness or theism versus nihilism. There’s perhaps a middle ground: a world where meaning is made, not given.

Yes, I think that’s a fairly well-worn framework. The contrast, if not a kind of competition, between a hoary enchanted world and the Enlightenment is currently in vogue, and even a cursory glance at popular podcasts and books reveals a widespread appetite for anti-modernism in various forms, from Jordan Peterson to John Vervaeke.

This conception of religious faith, gives us a philosophy of religion, and a philosophy of the nature of God, that is more attuned to the experiences of mystics and prophets, rather than the belief systems of the average religious person. We should remember that almost all religions claim to be based in the revelations provided by God to some mystic or prophet. So even if the attitude towards God and faith that Tillich is describing is one shared by a comparative minority of religious believers, it is nevertheless at the root of the nature of religion itself. So I think from a philosophical point of view it is crucial to try to understand this. — FirecrystalScribe

What do you think is the best reason for trying to understand this?

I think Victor Frankel is right, man seeks meaning and purpose. Some find it in other pursuits but many find it in religion. I personally have a religious inclination but the traditional theologies are just not compatible with the rest of my understanding about how the world works. — prothero

I think it's fair to say that humans are sense-making creatures, we interpret everything we see, often incorrectly or through a messy web of interwoven preconceptions and biases. But the fact that we seek meaning and purpose doesn't necessarily indicate that we're on the right track, or that this is even what we ought to be doing. Possibly not needing to make sense of things may be a more sophisticated impulse.

It has often struck me that a tendency toward spirituality or theism is more like a preference, you either have it or you don’t, a bit like a sexual orientation. You can't help what you're drawn to. The theist is pulled toward the idea of God; the atheist sees no explanatory power or use for it. The more sophisticated the individual, the more sophisticated their theology or their atheism.

I think there are far more answered questions in science than unanswered ones. And expecting science to answer "ultimate" questions seems to be unreasonable. — Janus

Yes, and I think science's inability to answer these will have many of us reaching for our gods and our Platonic forms until the end of time... (or thereabouts).

That’s not quite what I’m trying to get at. It’s more that the answer to our origin, the reasons why there is a world like this etc, — Punshhh

I think much of this comes down to temperament. I've never really found myself wondering why there is something rather than nothing, or even why we’re here. To me, those questions feel like they are from the land of cliché. It’s not that I have any answers. It’s just that the questions themselves have never struck me as urgent or necessary. I'm not sure what you mean by 'ascended beings', they're not part of the framework I know.

The world as it appears to us is obviously understandable — Janus

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?

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. — Janus

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.

When we say that the world is understandable, we should ask what kind of understanding we mean. Predictive success in mathematics and the physical sciences is impressive, but is it sufficient? Does it capture the essence of reality, or merely model some patterns?

We claim to understand the physical world, yet it's unclear whether we truly grasp the nature of physicalism itself. The concept is often assumed rather than examined. Likewise, our self-understanding seems limited. We remain confused about consciousness, morality, even how meaning works. These sorts of quesions seem central to any claim of understanding reality.

You are alive.

If you weren’t, you couldn’t ask questions. You couldn’t value anything. You couldn’t think, speak, or care.

Life isn’t a value. It’s the condition for value. That’s not opinion. It’s structure. If you deny that life is good, you use life to make the denial. That’s self-defeating.

You are standing on a platform while sawing through it. — Moliere

Standing on a platform while sawing though it may well be an appropriate action. Your metaphor is poetic but an act of high risk defiance or nihilism is not ipso facto wrong.

This argument (life is good axiom) was recently raised by another member here (I forget who).

The fact that life is a precondition for valuing does not mean life is good. It only means life is necessary to make judgments, whether positive or negative.

Therefore I don’t see any clear reason why one couldn’t argue that life is bad using the same logic. After all, life is the source of disappointment, conflict, pain, suffering, regret, and misery (have I left anything out?). Why would you settle on the good and not on the bad?

Furthermore, we are sort of assuming that we are in a world that makes rational, or logical sense. Follows the laws of nature for example. How do we know this? — Punshhh

I personally don't know that the world makes sense, but I accept that humans have some pragmatic relationship that allows us to get certain things done.

We are rather like(an analogy I like to use) an ant walking across a mobile phone that happens to be placed across his trail. — Punshhh

A nice image.

And yet, a bold ant might stand there and claim “I am the pinnacle of evolution, I know everything about how the world works. — Punshhh

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.

Perhaps the best thing we can say about God, or referring to God, is the one about which nothing can be said. — Punshhh

A legitimate answer. But given what you've said about our ant-like limitations, one could also argue (using this frame) that God is our own creation; a comforting teddy bear to help us face the unknown.

Shouldn’t we also consider the evolutionary function of love? — Jeremy Murray

If you want. Humans are a social species who organise and flourish in family units. Not hard to see how love has survival pay offs. But what do we do with this frame?

I appreciate the sentiment and remember that it's never personal. — Martijn

Indeed. And we all come to different conclusions. :up:

Is the ability to feel love something you are born with?
In the example with the gangsters they were not given love growing up, they started with the ability to feel love, but their ability to love was not 'developed/nurtured'. (Words that do not quite fit)
Does the lack of love kill the sense of it? Or is it just dormant like a seed during winter? — Red Sky

Don't know. I was just reporting what I have seen. I suspect the ability to give and receive love is innate in most people. It takes many forms and does not always look the same across individuals, cultures or time periods. It's an emotion that has been hijacked by storytellers and marketing people who describe and promote specific and often commercial indicators of love.

There are people who are abused from infancy, and the way their understanding and behavior is shaped by this may preclude them from experiencing love. I have certainly met people who claim never to have experienced it.

Or if you're like me, you are out, then none of this is very interesting, for it all rests on a foundation of indeterminacy. — Astrophel

I hear you.

People become so overwhelmed by problems and the fashionable "everything's fucked' thinking that they are oblivious to what's actually better. But I understand that people see things differently. That's part of the fun of being a human being.

Who cares that cars are better when all cars do is make us slower, tired, and ravage nature? — Martijn

Well, I do care, they are safer, more reliable and less polluting. But I don't own a car. I have access to good public transport now, whereas 60 years ago there was none in many areas I can now travel in comfort. Another improvement.

Human progress is a delusion. — Martijn

The word progress is obviously a context-dependent, imprecise term, it refers to improvement, but not to some kind of transcendent force driving us toward a Platonic form of perfection. In my own life, I’ve seen a lot of progress, so I can’t really agree with your view. Cars are better, TVs are better, food is better, the status of women is better. Healthcare has improved, communication is faster and more accessible, education is more widespread, and social attitudes toward things like race, gender, and mental health have become more inclusive and informed. I would rather be alive today than 85 years ago or 200 years ago. My dad, who died a few years ago near the age of 100, said that the greatest joy he had experienced was the progress he'd witnessed - despite the wars, pollution, political and corporate corruption.

I agree there is something there, yes. What is" the move to reduce God to its defensible core" all about, do you think? What defensible core? — Astrophel

I'd say it is about setting aside big claims and just looking at what shows up in human experience, for instance feelings of awe, moral responsibility, love, the numinous, meaning. The “defensible core” is the part of that experience that still cuts through and remains with us even if we don’t assume God is a 'real' being. Meaning that God isn’t seen as a thing out there, but more like a deep sense of meaning that arrives through experience and gives shape to how we understand life.

:up:

My only comment is the glib observation that in my experince Marxists are less interesting than anarchists. I am not someone who believes in utopias or the perfectibility of human beings and I usually find people who see the world as a rigid expression of theory to be dull monomaniacs. But in the current world of plutocracy, I hear my Marxist voices calling.

But most of what is thought about God is a lot of medieval drivel, so that much can be dismissed summarily. The question really is about, after the reduction, the move to reduce God to its defensible core ---minus the endless omni this and that, and Christendom, and the Halls of Valhalla, and so on--- what is it that cannot not be removed because it constitutes something real in the world that religions were responding to? The imagination has been busy through the millennia, and I don't think we want to take such things seriously, regardless of how seriously they are taken by so many. It is not a consensus that that we are looking for. It is an evidential ground for acceptance, and since God is not an empirical concept but a metaphysical one, one is going to have to look elsewhere than microscopes and telescopes.

Meister Eckhart prayed to God to be rid of God. I think it begins here, with a purifying of the question (that piety of thought) so one can be rid of the presuppositions of the familiar, the way when one "thinks" of God, one is already in possession assumptions that determine inquiry. It is, as with the Buddhists and the Hindus and Meister Eckhart and Dionysius the Areopogite and other spiritualists and mystics, an apophatic method: delivering thought, well, from itself. then realizing you had all the questions wrong. Not the answers, but the questions.

And what is a question, but an openness to truth, and what is truth, but a revealing, a disclosure (not some logical function in the truth table of anglo american philosophy). The Greeks had it right with their term alethea. One has to withdraw from the clutter of implicit assumptions (Heidegger's gelassenheit. See his Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking) to ALLOW the world to be what it is so one can witness this. Otherwise, it is simply the same old tired pointless thinking, repeating itself. — Astrophel

This is extremely well written and interesting and I think I agree.

Well, the obvious answer to this is that you can't have issues with things you don't follow, right?

I'm not a philosopher, and I don't have anxieties or burning questions about truth or reality. Metaphysics doesn't particularly capture my imagination. I'm content. I've read enough (and about) Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, not to mention some Evan Thompson and Dan Zahavi, to have a sense of the discourse. But I'm mainly here to understand what others believe and why. Hence my interest in more sophisticated accounts of theism.

But the instructive thing is the depth with which he (and my sister, by way of osmosis) hated Malcolm Turnbull. Far more than anyone on the actual Left, so far as I could tell. And I think Turnbull was the last actual Liberal (as distinct from Conservative) to lead the Liberal Party. — Wayfarer

Lots of conservatives hated him for his advocacy of a republic which made him anathema to Liberal tradition. And they also hated him for his popularity with Labor voters. He was too urbane and sophisticated.

I wonder how much more rain will be needed until the Nats and their supporters realise there is a climate problem. — Banno

Climate change is unlikely to have any impact upon them. Many will come to accept the position that change has come but that it is a natural cycle which humans can't influence.

See, this is where things go stupidly fuzzy. And if one is dead set on not reading anything written in Germany or France during the early to mid twentieth century, things will stay that way. — Astrophel

What makes you think fuzzy is a bad place? I don't read much philosophy, regardless of the country. But if you're advocating for continental philsophy over analytic, sure. I have no issues with this.

Isn't this a fancy way of saying that we created the idea of God to manage our anxiety?

↪Tom Storm seems to be thinking along similar lines. Thanks, Tom. I wonder who else agrees? — Banno

I come to this largely from outside philosophy, with unsystematic reading and a lot of quiet festering, so naturally I would assume my ideas are probably not fully coherent.

I guess I probably wouldn't agree with the ideas behind this, so that might be a difference. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Indeed. And that's what this site is all about, civil disagreement. Hey, and I might be 'wrong'. Or you.

I think if one believes that the buck stops somewhere definative - god, the transcendental - then my view would seem messy and unsatisfying.

In a relativism based on anti-realism (which I'm aware no one in this thread has suggested) there is simply no fact of the matter about these criteria you've mentioned. Nothing "works better" than anything else. So, we can debate in terms of "what works," or "is good," but, per the old emotivist maxim, "this is good" just means "hoorah for this!" That seems to me to still reduce to power relations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not convinced this the right take, but I agree for many it's unsatisifying.

When someone says “this is good,” it doesn’t merely mean “hoorah for this” as a purely subjective exhortation, but rather that the community endorses this judgment because it coheres with shared experiences and serves as a reliable guide in practice. When you think about it, history is full of such social practices that have eventually been accepted then superseded, often abandoned, and sometimes even regretted. My view would be that we fumble in the darkness, trying to find ways of coping together, and since most humans seek to avoid suffering, certain patterns emerge in our practices.

Are power relations involved in this? Yes, and even power relations are contingent and unfixed. They are woven into most discussions about what is real and how we should live. I think Banno is right:

And this is an excellent reason to keep a close eye on those power relations, and to foster the sort of society in which "might makes right" is counterbalanced by other voices, by compassion, humility, and fallibilism. — Banno

Maybe this is inadequate, let me know. Sometimes I think that all of this resembles the functioning of road rules. They are somewhat arbitrary, but they work if applied consistently and are understood by the community of road users. They change over time, as situations change. They are an ongoing conversation. We seek to avoid accidents and death and aim to get to places efficiently and the road rules facilitate this, but none of this means the road rules have a transcendent origin. Nor can they be explained away as subjective and therefore lacking in a comprehensive utility.

And these are true measures of usefulness, or only "useful" measures for usefulness? The problem is that this seems to head towards an infinite regress. Something is "useful" according to some "pragmatic metric," which is itself only a "good metric" for determining "usefulness" according to some other pragmatically selected metric. It has to stop somewhere, generally in power, popularity contests, tradition, or sheer "IDK, I just prefer it." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, this is a familiar criticism, and the usual response is that infinite regress is probably unavoidable since we don’t have any ultimate grounding. There is no non-circular grounding for us to cling to, try as we might. We settle, at least for a while, on what works, and over time this changes. In that sense, our version of reality or truth functions similarly to how language works; it doesn’t have a grounding outside of our shared conventions and practices.

Bear in mind that I am sympathetic to these views, but I hold them tentatively.

what we can point to is broad agreement,

So popularity makes something true? Truth is like democracy?

shared standards

Tradition makes something true?

and better or worse outcomes within a community or set of practices.

Better or worse according to who? Truly better or worse?

I hope you can see why I don't think this gets us past "everything is politics and power relations." I think Nietzsche was spot on as a diagnostician for where this sort of thing heads. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not quite. The position isn’t that truth is mere popularity, but that truth is built through ongoing conversation and agreement. What counts as true is what survives criticism, investigation, and revision within a community over time. So instead of certainty, we have a fallible and evolving consensus. Tradition, in such a context, is something that should be investigated and revised if necessary.

Humans work to create better ways to live together, but these are contingent matters. It’s still meaningful, it just isn’t definitive, permanent, or grounded in some ultimate truth. This doesn’t inevitably reduce everything to power and politics; as Rorty might argue, it can also lead us toward solidarity. The lack of a foundation doesn’t prevent us from having conversations about improvement, you might even say it invites them.

It also seems to me that even if you believe in foundationalism or some transcendent notion of the Good, there is still no universal agreement about what it actually is. So, in practice, we’re all engaged in an act of creative invention and ongoing conversation. I think everyone is in the same boat.

I’ve not pursued his work, but would you say he was one of the first in the more recent wave of anti-modernists who'd like us to return to a more enchanted world of Greek thought and classical theism?

But there are either facts about what is "truly more useful" or there aren't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Subject to certain purposes, you might say. But there aren’t facts about usefulness in the transcendent or metaphysical sense. What we can point to is broad agreement, shared standards, and better or worse outcomes within a community or set of practices. Context and intersubjectivity.

Id say further: In the context of "What is really real?" (the context in which Banno said what he said), there is no truth, because the terms are hopelessly vague. Maybe the right way to say it is, There is no Truly True answer to the question of what is Really Real! Different philosophers and traditions will use "real" to occupy different positions in their metaphysics. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this; we often need some sort of bedrock or stipulated term to hold down a conceptual place, and "real" is a time-honored one. The mistake comes when we think we've consulted the Philosophical Dictionary in the Sky and discovered what is Really Real. — J

Nicely put.

So if "One Truth" (I guess I will start capitalizing it too) is "unhelpful," does that mean we affirm mutually contradictory truths based on what is "useful" at the time? — Count Timothy von Icarus

What I got from @Banno seems to be that pluralistic or context-based truths don’t mean that every contradiction is true. Instead, truths depend on the situation, purpose, or point of view. When contradictions happen, it usually means they come from different ways of looking at things -not that truth doesn’t exist.

Beyond this, I don’t have a significant interest in the true nature of reality. I imagine you’re unlikely to be a Rorty fan, but didn’t he say that truth is not about getting closer to some metaphysical reality; it’s about what vocabularies and beliefs serve us best at a given time? I'm sympathetic to this, but my interest is superficial.

As I mentioned earlier, a difficulty with social "usefulness" being the ground of truth is that usefulness is itself shaped by current power relations. It is not "useful" to contradict the Party in 1984 (the same being true in Stalin's Soviet Union or North Korea). Does this mean "Big Brother is always right,' because everyone in society has been engineered towards agreeing? Because this has become useful to affirm? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well it may well be useful for one's survival to accept that Big Brother is right, so at one level (that of ruthless pragmatism) sure. But being compelled to believe something out of fear of jail or death is a different matter altogether, isn't it?